A growing cantaloupe

Can’t wait to eat this!
And some cukes



More tomato & cuke salad in the very near future.

The laundry hamper volunteer tomatoes keep chugging along. I’ve gotten more than 7 lbs. of tomatoes from these guys so far. Picked all of the almost ripe ones yesterday, as I knew it might rain and didn’t want the tomatoes to split.



And the tomatoes to go with the cukes…

This is a chile pequin (wild bird pepper) bush. These are really hot little buggers; you can see a ripe one if you look hard enough.



Hot stuff
This bush has quite a story. DH’s dad had a bush in front of his house that he babied for years. He used the peppers to make some wicked salsa, among other things. When he died, we dug up his bush and put it in a 5 gal bucket that we hauled around for years! I knew the bush would die when we moved back up north, so we gave it to hubby’s brother. He’s not what you’d call a gardener; he killed the poor thing!

Hubby’s been looking for a replacement ever since we moved back down here. A few months ago, we went to a family birthday in Hebbronville, and hubby found a bush in the yard. He says “We’re taking this home” as he grabs it and just yanks the poor thing out of the ground. He hands it to me and says “You can plant this, right?” I’m like “WTH am I supposed to do now?” So I wrapped it up in damp paper towels, put it in a baggie, and took it home. I cut it way back, put it in a gritty soil mix in a gallon pot, and covered the pot with a plastic bag. Kept it under my florescent lights and babied that sucker along. Much to my surprise, it didn’t die, and eventually started growing. Uncovered it gradually, and put it outside when it got warm. This spring I put it in the container, and it has done quite well, so far. It’s going to need a bigger container come fall, I think. Fascinating, right? LOL!

Had enough yet, or should I go on? Okay, you asked for it. This is my pitiful-looking Side-of-the-Stairs container garden. Looking pretty sad, aren’t they? The annual blanketflowers have just about had it, as have the bachelor’s buttons. I’m letting both go to seed so I can save some for next year. The jasmine is dropping leaves in self-defense (normal, I’m told), but there are still things growing.

Getting too hot for the Side-of the-Stairs flowers, I think.

These are cinnamon basil and a Mini-Rose morning glory I think I got from Johnny’s Selected Seeds. It’s supposed to trail to about 3′; I like the variegated leaves, too. Very pretty little plant.

Cinnamon basil and MG

This has gotten long enough. I’ll leave the butterfly garden and hanging baskets for another time. TTYL…

Pics within:

Speaking of hot, can you believe this temperature? It comes straight off my local TV station’s Desktop weather thingy, so I ain’t lying…

Finally seeing pepper blossoms. This one is Lilac Bell.

My lone surviving Sesame plant is blossoming. Isn’t it pretty? I thought it would look nice against the purple basil in the background.

A garden overview

The container with Blackie, lavender, and lantana is looking good.

Lastly, my inside-under-lights lettuce, since it’s too hot outside. It’s growing better since I added a jury-rigged drip waterer, made of a water bottle with a hole poked in it, and fish tank valves and tubing. Working so far. The bigger plants were planted a while ago, the smaller ones shortly before I went to CoSpr, and last night I just planted some more seeds.

I had a bunch of things I wanted to do outside today, but with this heat, not happening. Not quite ready to die of heatstroke just yet…
I need to lift up most of the landscape fabric and put plastic underneath the seams, then tack it down better. Didn’t have time before I went to CoSpr to do it right. After that’s all fixed, I need to get some edging to go around the garden area, to hold in the mulch that should be there.
Hubby brought me a big blue pvc barrel, to which I want to hook a makeshift drip irrigation system for the raised bed, after which I can finally mulch that, too.
And we need to do some cleanup and rearranging in the yard, so that we can move Hubby’s picnic table to a better place, closer to the grill and out of the middle of the yard…LOL! Sigh…how long till winter?

Oh yeah, forgot to mention. While I was out trimming the runaway cucumber vine, I found 2 ripe cukes that had grown down behind the back wall of the garden. My first official harvest! As hubby said, nothing like $500 cucumbers…

EDIT: Hot or not, I went out and bathed the garden with Murphy’s Oil Soap, baking soda, and a wee little bit of my puppy’s flea shampoo. Hopefully washed off and/or killed all those nasty buggies I hadn’t noticed before. Garden looks happier, though it could just be from getting a nice cool shower after a REALLY hot day. Always makes me happier, anyway…

So I finished my two Monster Pots, as I mentioned. Here’s a pic of the jasmine pot:

The other Monster Pot is for my rosemary. Here’s a pic of the finished pot and the rosemary for which I made it:

Here’s a pic of the baby peppers and basils sitting in their eventual garden homes, getting used to the sun. It took about an hour and a half, again, before they started looking wilty and I moved them back.

I went to HD to buy some electrical conduit pipe and some more ugly orange buckets to make more SWCs, plus some more of the stuff I need to make the potting mix I wanted to use. Well, guess what? HD, the only place where I could find anything even remotely similar to what I needed, has decided not to carry the stuff any more. So now what do I do? I just hope I can find something somewhere that will work.

On top of that, hubby broke the coffeepot, so I had to go buy a new one before I went into caffeine withdrawal! Yea, very bad thing to have a dead coffeepot.

As if all that wasn’t bad enough, our AC broke YET AGAIN, and it got up to 97 degrees in most of the house. My poor little window AC in the bedroom just could not cope, so it got close to 90 in there. Can you say YUCK? Left a message with the manager’s office, and I sincerely hope they send the guy to fix it pronto. Be nice if they just replaced it with a new, more energy-efficient AC unit instead of patching the old one all the time. Yea, right, like that’s gonna happen.

I had intended to make my SWC’s today, on my kitchen table…yea, I know, but it’s too hot outside to be messing with stuff like that. Hard to be building stuff when the sweat’s running down your face and dripping in your eyes, or running down your glasses making sweat trails you can’t see through. Hate it when that happens. Didn’t do it, though, as the same thing would have happened in the kitchen.

So all in all, almost wasted garden weekend. I did finish my two Monster Pots, and transplanted the night-blooming jasmine and some filler stuff into the styrofoam beer cooler pot.. We’ll see how it holds up. Was too generally pissy to think about taking pics. Will have to remember to do that tomorrow, maybe.

The 36 baby basils are growing nicely. Spent a few minutes trying to sort the “flavors” today. Found at least one lemon basil, and a couple cinnamon, I think. Kinda hard to tell when you’re sniffing 36 basils…lol. I started moving the babies I want in the garden to spend an hour or so, in their peat post, in the garden spots I have for them. Figured it’s best to get them used to the full sun and heat they’ll have to grow in, unless I want them to fry soon as I plant them. They lasted about an hour and a half before they started looking a bit wilty. It’s a start.

I should probably start doing that with the baby peppers, too. They’re not as close to ready to plant as the basil, but might as well get started anyway. I’m impatient. Besides, I need to get that stuff in the garden, get the irrigation thing done, and mulch. Hopefully all before I leave on the 14th for Colorado. Uh, huh…doubt that!

Sigh. Like I said, not a great weekend. Hope yours was better…

Here’s a couple pics of the baby basils and peppers…

This is 2/3 of the baby basils, and a couple of creeping sedum. When I went to Lowe’s the other day, they had the almost-dead plants on clearance for $2. I picked up a 4″ pot of the creeping sedum that looked like it just needed some TLC, and repotted it into two pots. I think it’ll make it. Hope so; it’s cute! I also got a gal. pot with 3 penta for the same price. One of them was obviously dead, but the other two looked like they could make it. I threw the dead one in the compost pile, and potted the other two into separate pots. I trimmed the foliage back by like half; though it pained me greatly, I cut off every single flower bud, too. I want them to make roots and start growing before they bloom. It was for their own good, much as it hurt.



Here are the rest of the basil and the peppers.

And here are the bush beans just sprouting. The green mini-milk crates are rabbit and bird protection until they get too big for it; I’ll make one of Mel’s cages in the next few days. Pardon the toes…

Oh, yea, the night-blooming jasmine…it started to bloom last night, and again tonight. I wish there was some way to transmit that heavenly aroma across cyber-space so you could smell it, too. The fragrance is every bit as heavenly as I’d heard.

Gotta go; got some flower seeds I soaked overnight to get planted, then I’m going to bed…

This is the leaves and some blooms. The black stuff that looks like tar is part of the bloom. It’s a really cool-looking flower, and I’d really like to learn more about it.



This is a close-up of the bloom, which is my current desktop wallpaper.

Now on to the “Etc…” I hauled the transplanted basils and chamomile babies outside into the shade today, but I had to move them to the other side of the stairs. The sun is high enough now that it peeks into the back of the holding bed about 5pm or so. The chamomile seemed okay, but the basil didn’t seem to like it much at all. Fortunately, the other side of the stairs still has some shade. Once I moved them, the basil perked right back up again.

Built a small planting box, about 2′ long x 1′ wide, under my hose faucet today. I have some lemon balm babies, too, and that seems like the perfect place for them. They won’t get too invasive, because aside from some damp from the faucet, the rest of the area is full HOT sun and concrete clay. That ought to hold them in check!

Made about 20 gal of Al’s 5-1-1 mix today, to fill the lettuce window box and the lemon balm box.

Oh, and Annie’s Granny said she planted some nasturtium seeds outside in the ground at the same time she sowed some indoors. Like me, she hasn’t had much luck with the indoors seeds. I soaked a few overnight, and sowed them right in the container with the moonflower and other plants. We’ll see if they sprout any better.

That’s it for tonight, as I had to actually do some housecleaning today, and I still have alot of baby basils to transplant. Not to mention the rest of my ever-expanding Garden To-Do List…

Working out there in this heat is killing me; at least most of the heavy work is done. Still have odds & ends to do, and growing babies to tend, but no more heavy lifting, thank God. It got up to 90-something today, and it’s still 80 degrees out there, at this hour. Okay, done whining.

Got a bunch of lettuce sprouted and growing. I’m going to try to grow them inside, in a window-box type planter under lights, to see what happens. It’s way to hot for lettuce outside, but tomatoes and cukes get pretty boring without lettuce after while. Need to go find out how day length relates to lettuce bolting, so I give them the best chance. I figure I can cover them at night, so they think it’s dark out. If it doesn’t work, all I’ve lost are some seeds and some time. No big. They need to get a bit bigger (and I need to mix up some soil mix) before they can go in the window box, though.

My to-do list is still a mile long, so I’m quitting for tonight to get some sleep.