Totally OT, but The Beatles Rockband is a blast!

Anyway, things are looking up in the garden. We’ve finally gotten some substantial rain and somewhat cooler temps, and the plants are very appreciative (as is the gardener). The fall tomatoes, cukes, and melons are doing quite well so far, except for eaten leaves. I’m thinking snails or slugs, since I can’t find any other bugs. I mixed up a snail and slug bait I found on the Net, consisting of 1/4 cup of sugar and 1 teaspoon of yeast mixed into a quart of water. Put some out today in individual applesauce cups, so we’ll see what happens.

Got lots of flowers growing in all those lovely containers Hubby bought me a while ago, and more babies sprouting in the house under lights. Time to start the wildflowers pretty soon, too, but I need to make some free-draining soil mix for most of them. Plan to go get the ingredients this weekend, but if the stuff I have here doesn’t dry out, it may have to wait till it does. There’s no doubt it’ll stop raining soon; always does here! Found alot of cool containers on clearance at Dollar General, too. Shopping for that sort of stuff is MUCH cheaper this time of year than in the spring.

So here are a couple pics I took of the garden babies:

More later; I’ll try to be better about this…

Thank goodness for those pics, though, and for garden magazines. They help motivate when thinking about planting seeds and nurturing the babies seems like an exercise in futility. Sooner or later (most likely MUCH later), it will stop being well over 100 degrees every d&*m day, and we will get some rain. Then when other people are shoveling snow, I’ll be picking tomatoes and eating garden suppers.

Gardeners have to be either eternal optimists or masochists. Haven’t decided which yet.

I did pull out the nasty cukes, since they were just infested with God-only knows what. I refreshed the dirt where the tomatoes and cukes were, and found some really big, ugly grubs in there. Threw them out into the lawn to fry in the sun, or be eaten by mockingbirds. Either way works.

Speaking of mockingbirds, I just barely managed to save some baby plants from that bugger the other day. I’d put some baby zinnias and dahlias on the picnic table to start hardening off, and just happened to glance out the window in time to see that bugger light on the table and start eying my babies as if deciding which buffet item to eat first. Ran out the door yelling at it, then set about finding something to protect them. Now I keep them covered when they’re out there, at least until they’re a bit bigger.

I had a bush bean plant starting to blossom the other day, and was getting all excited at the prospect of at least a few green beans. Went out the next day to find the blossoms and a good number of the leaves just gone. I put a cage around them, too, and haven’t seen any new violations. Then there were the lablab beans. They had a few nice blossoms on them one day, next day…nothing. Can’t put them in a cage, so am still trying to figure out what to do about that, aside from shooting me a mockingbird – and going to jail! This is war!

My baby tomatoes are just about ready to be planted in their new homes. I’ve left them out overnight and in direct sun for a couple days, despite the feeling that I’m torturing the poor babies. They’ve survived, so far, so I guess it’s time to plant them. I’ll get started on that tomorrow, I guess.

I mentioned that the green beans were frying; think I may have an idea to help. I’ve got all those nice containers, and some baby sunflower seeds, as well as a blue salvia almost ready to be planted. I decided to plant a few baby sunflowers and the salvia in a container on the windward side of the green bean planter. Maybe they’ll get just tall enough to be a bit of a windbreak and give a bit of shade. At this point, I’m desperate and liable to come up with any number of weird ideas.

Sigh…gardening in TX is not for the faint of heart.

Got all my SWC’s cleaned out and mixed some new dirt, getting ready for Round 2, which should commence shortly. Got tomatoes, peppers, and some broccoli, among other things, big enough to harden off. I put them on Hubby’s picnic table, in the shade, but am slowly exposing them to a bit more sun every day. Really gotta watch ‘em, though; this wind and heat will fry the poor little babies faster than I can blink.

Got some seeds sprouting to fill a couple off my new containers, and just got an idea for another one last nite while I should have been sleeping. I’ll start the seeds in a bit.

A couple weird things, though. I was about to pull my cukes, as they just aren’t fruiting, and are infested with whiteflies, among other things. All of a sudden they have just started growing like gangbusters, so now I’m debating. The watermelons in the SWC’s are doing the same thing. For a while it’s looked like they were barely hanging on, so I was babying them along hoping the melons would ripen before they expired. Now they’ve started growing new vines and blossoms, too. We’ll see what happens.

Later…

So he came home today with 2 half-barrels and a bunch more ceramic pots. Pics and peppers within…

My peppers finally started blooming a while ago, and I finally found some baby peppers today while I was up-close-and-personal spraying off the aphids yet again…those little buggers truly do love my pepper plants. Here are a few pics…(there were more peppers, but it was too darn hot out there to putz around taking more pics).

So besides washing aphids off peppers and taking pics, I pulled all the dead tomatoes, etc, and have been hoping it would cool off enough that I could get out there, empty the SWC’s, and replenish the soil. The babies are growing, and will need to go out in about 2 wks, or so. Emptied a few of them today, but still need to finish. Gonna need a bunch of potting soil to fill all my new containers, too…
Guess it’s time to finish dinner then get out there while it’s not quite as hot…

EDIT: Dang that stupid mockingbird, anyway. I pulled out the tomatoes on which it was snacking, so it decided to snip the tops off a couple of my baby bush beans, instead. I’m sure it was thinking, (big raspberry) NYAH! NYAH! So there!

Here’s my contribution this month…try not to laugh at me too loudly…

On a brighter note, upon which I will expand later, I do have lots of things growing to prepare for Round 2.

Later…

I keep a copy of my blog running on my PC at home, and always try out new stuff there before I screw with the online version. Anything can happen, and I sure don’t want to kill my blog…

Also time to be making some more monster pots. Been putting this off because it makes a giant mess I have to clean…but it’s time to start the flowers I want, so I gotta do it. The pots I made back in April or so are holding up well so far, so it’s time to try again. I need a few 14″ pots, as well as a small trough in which to plant some creeping thyme and other herbs. I’m gonna use the top of a small BBQ grill as the form for that one. Wish me luck!

Later, time for Hubby’s birthday cake.

EDIT: Well, so far so good. I’ve updated and the blog hasn’t crashed. Now I’m trying a new toy, a video player… just a little e-card for Hubby.

[See post to watch Flash video]

By the time Garden Blog Death Day rolls around, I’ll have plenty to share. All the Roma tomatoes have ripened, not that there were all that many. The plants are just hanging around until I pull them out. Got some replacement stuff growing now, but it’ll be a few weeks until it’s ready to plant. I let the sickly zucchini expire, too, so that’ll be in the Death Day post.

The Heatwave tomato plants look awful, too, but they at least have a bunch of tomatoes ripening, if I can get them before the mockingbirds decide they’re ready to eat. The only thing that doesn’t seem bothered at all by the heat is the Lablab bean I planted. It just keeps growing taller, and has finally reached the top of the arbor thingy. Getting some side shoots now too, so maybe the arbor will finally start serving it’s intended purpose by the time I plant Round Two in early September.

The biggest thing I’ve accomplished is finishing the Excel seed-starting chart I got at I Wet My Plants.com. It was fine for Canada, but, boy, did it need a lot of work for South TX. Took me quite some time, and lots of tedium, to enter all my seeds, correlate the planting dates to the Texas Gardener magazine Planning Calender, and get it all set up for my area. Now, however, it is tailored to my garden, and it is really cool. Just print and plant…eliminates alot of the mind-breaking co-ordination two (well, really, 3) garden seasons requires.

That’s about it for now. Got dinner cooking and gotta get back to it…