Did you say kvas?
sb158 | June 1, 2010
I know it’s been too long. I have been gardening – in the 90+ heat and humidity – which is why I haven’t been blogging. When I’m done for the day, all I want is a shower and a rest! Still house-hunting, too. We’ve seen some nice houses, just not “THE” house yet.
Lots going in in the garden, as you’d expect this time of year.
The volunteer tomatoes keep pumping out fruit; I’ve collected more than 4 3/4 lbs of tomatoes so far. And they taste so good! My under-the-shade lettuce is still hanging in there, but I doubt for much longer. Now that I’ve gotten rid of the stupid little green caterpillars and the snails, we actually get to eat some of it.
BTW, that Sluggo snail and slug stuff works. I’m finding dead snails all over the place.
I have a few cukes almost ready to pick, some zucchini getting there, and even a watermelon, some cantaloupes, and another kind of melon coming along. Would have had some green beans, but bean borers keep getting into them.
Oh, if you’re still wondering…in my previous two posts, I mentioned using Gold Bond medicated powder to dust the cucumber and melon leaves to keep the cucumber beetles from killing them. It sure seems to work. We had a couple of rains, which washed it off. If I forgot to reapply, I had holes in the leaves. This reminded me very quickly, for sure. I kept the plants dusted for about two weeks, then decided to stop and see what happened. They must have migrated to somebody else’s garden, because I haven’t found any new holes in several days.
I planted another succession square of bush beans recently. One day I noticed ants crawling up the stems from under the mulch, and the poor seedling looked nearly sucked dry and dead. Next day, I noticed the ants on the next bean seedling over. I happened to have the powder in my hand, so I just dumped some down around the stems of the affected plants. Figured it would annoy the ants, if nothing else. Let me tell you, they did not like that at all. Acted like I had dumped poison on them. So naturally I dumped some around the stems of the rest of the beans too. No more problems with ants in the beans. Cool, huh? Too late for the first two seedlings, but the rest are okay so far.
I still wander on over to Gardenweb every so often. Popped in on the Organic Gardening forum recently and saw a post titled One of the best recipe 2. I figured any topic that needed two threads had to be interesting, so started reading at the beginning. The Original Poster is a girl in Russia, who uses a traditional Russian drink she calls kvas to water her plants. It’s essentially 6 Tbsp rye flour, 2 Tbsp molasses mixed in a gallon of water from which you have let the nasty stuff evaporate for 24 hrs. You put it in a closed jug, shake it frequently, and do not open for 3 days. The stuff ferments into something that Russians swear is very healthy for you to drink. Apparently plants think so too.
I gave it a try, thinking it surely couldn’t hurt. Go read the thread(s) and decide for yourself, but I gotta tell you, my garden sure seems to love the stuff. I foliar feed it at 1 cup per gallon in my sprayer, sometimes combining with cornmeal tea, baking soda spray, or garlic/pepper tea as necessary, about twice a week so far. Plants looks so much greener, seem more able to handle the heat, and seem to be making more fruit than previously. All in all, the garden is doing much better (knock on wood) than it did last year.
In conjunction with our house-hunting, I’ve been doing lots of garden-related reading to help me decide what kind of a garden I want when we actually do get a house. Yes, I’m still daydreaming about it…
I’ve come across some very interesting ideas, about which I will post soon. Until then…
