Frustratedearthmother's Journaling Journey

[Denim Deb]

That's one smiley we don't have.

 

[hqueen13]

I hope your garden pulls through! Too much of anything is a bad thing! :-/
How the Fed room isn't too much of a mess. Glad everything was in trash cans!

 

[frustratedearthmother]

As bad as it is right now - I've seen it much, much worse. Just part of the territory around here... "Concrete clay" one day and boot-sucking calf deep mud the next!

I haven't even been out to look at the garden yet today. I'm hoping that it'll come back around - if not I rip out the dead stuff and start again. My fear is that if this is some kind of bacterial wilt that I'm done for the season with a lot of my favorites - like tomatoes... I'll look at planting more stuff that is water resistant, lol.

 

[Denim Deb]

When you lose a crop like that, it's tough.

 

[hqueen13]

Hope it isn't all a lost cause! That can be so depressing!

 

[Britesea]

We had threats of thunderstorms the last 2 days and I've been really worried about hail. My plants are too small and tender right now to be able to weather it. So far the luck has been with me

 

[SSDreamin]

In the 12 years I spent in TX, I never managed to grow a garden. As you say - this rain is so needed to 'refill' the aquifer's that have gotten scary low in recent years, but stinks for gardens and farm animals I'll too for a non existent hurricane season this year for you!

 

[frustratedearthmother]

There seems to be no in-between around here, lol. It's all or nuttin'.. I think I've lost the biggest majority of peppers, sweet and hot. One planting of green beans is gone, and another planting seems to be fine. Probably lost more than half of the tomato plants...probably closer to 3/4. They are horribly wilted... wonder if cutting them back would help or hurt? The potatoes that I hadn't dug have rotted in the ground, but the onions in the next two rows seem to be fine. Cucumbers are ok too even though they're right next to the dying peppers. I don't get it. Zucchini, yellow crookneck and all but one of the white scallop squash are dead. One butternut squash is dead but the one next to it is thriving....same with the watermelon. The only thing that seems to be happy, happy, happy is the corn and the okra. That makes no sense to me as okra thrives in hot, dry weather! But, I'm not complaining because we love us some "cokra" around here! (Salted, dehydrated okra)


AND - joy of joys - with all the rain we have a nice bumper crop of mosquitos now!

But the aquifers and surface lakes are full almost all over the state - certainly in our part - so I can't complain about that!

 

[Denim Deb]

At least you have some good news.

 

[frustratedearthmother]

True...Every cloud has a silver lining - or so they say! It could be worse. The best thing about this climate is that I can start all over. But it's so humid right now that I think I'll just scale down and try to salvage what I've got and get everything ready for a fall planting. Believe it or not I've already dehydrated probably 30 lbs of various squashes! Figs will start to ripen in another couple weeks and the blackberries are doing well. I don't have to worry about preserving any of 'em because they rarely make it as far as the house! Even with the tomato devastation we're eating tomatoes every day. The eight or so plants I had in a raised bed in the back yard are doing well. They are the only tomato plants that are totally unscathed. It's the plants in the big garden that are suffering.

I decided that I wanted silkies to do the chicken raising around here so I got on ebay and won a couple auctions. Guess what.... now that the silkie eggs are in the incubator I've got broody hens all over the place, lol. Probably a good thing because out of two dozen silkie eggs there's probably only about 6 that are growing. Such is life...