Looks like we have been graced with the gardeners blessing of a gentle rain and a little thunder and lightning.
I don't remember the last time it rained here but it is coming down pretty good now. Maybe our water and electric bills will go down to usual again.
Peeked out at the garden and the cantaloupes seem to have gotten bigger overnight and the tomatoes are blooming again. Haven't looked out front yet but I would bet that the pear tree is perking up and Our Lady's flowers are too. Rain in August in Texas is a true blessing for gardeners.
I guess Ma Nature thought I was trying to one-up her . I started watering a couple of weeks ago and we're back in the pattern of rain every 3 or 4 days again . Okra and cukes are going great guns , 'maters have a lot of fruit on them but none ripe yet . Got a few of what I think are butternut squash on the vines but no pumpkins or acorns yet . And one lonely little straight neck summer squash ...
Too much rain here in DE at times. I have not had to water lawn once this summer. Guy that grows and sells tomatoes up the road said it was ruining his plants and splitting too many tomatoes.
Then as luck would have it, my next door neighbor's well was running dry and he needed a new one. Only 20 ft away but now new well is fine.
We have some sort of tiny wasp here that plant their eggs in squash bugs and vine borers eggs and the adults too. Doesn't mean the bad bugs don't wreck havoc but the little wasps sure do a good job.
There's probably 30,000 homes around us but we still have some areas of wilderness here and there. There's a pine forest behind us about two hundred feet and our area for catching flood water is just behind our house.
We have loads of Mocking birds and they peck a few tomatoes but they also eat a lot of insects. Then there's the house sparrows, and, at night the barn swallows and other such birds are circling eating mosquitoes and anything else of bug nature.
It would really be nice if the state wasn't putting in two more traffic lanes to the already four lanes three blocks from here. I hear traffic most of the day and night but I thank the drivers for mushing bugs as they go by.
Just took apart a 20 year old office chair and turned the bottom part into a roll around plant stand for the boss lady. She did let me buy another chair too. I guess it's because I keep the household accounts keep things clean.
Took a peek at the cantaloupes on the vine, seems the rain has helped them get bigger and more juicier.
Wife likes cantaloupe but I'm not really fond of them. Grew up eating watermelons and don't care much for them anymore either. Tree fruit of any kind is my favorite. The trick to growing cantaloupe is lots of water. The more water cantaloupe and watermelon get the bigger and sweeter they get.
Still raining off and on, weather folks say for the next week will rain.
Still 'rassling with that pot stand, seems I will have to go to Lowe's tomorrow to get some nuts to fit to do what I want. Probably going to need some other things too. Got tons of nuts, bolts, screws, etc. from when I was a gunsmith and a lot of stuff that I took apart to dump and kept the nuts, bolts, and screws. All neatly labeled in a cabinet but none fit what I need.
We've had a great year for cantaloupe; the first one weighted 10#11oz, with lots more ripening every few days. I think it's all the rain we've been getting lately.
i'm thinking that if you start the plants indoors early enough you can get a better start on them and perhaps the stems can be more resistant to the bugs then...
Come January or February I get the bug to start plants, and we have a small greenhouse, too, but it's not finished, yet. I have lots of intentions of doing all sorts of things, but then way-layed by real life!
My wife takes care of the small lawn and the small raised bed gardens and also, her churches "Poor" garden, which is much more prolific then our garden. She harvested a bushel of Longhorn okra yesterday and we had fried okra for dinner, the rest went to the Poor Pantry. Seems the folks that go there for food like okra too.
The church garden has been operating over thirty years now and all the refuse going back into the soil makes it really rich soil. The church has a state of the art composter and the whole place gets mowed every week plus all the detritus from the poor pantry.
We get three newspapers a week and they get shredded after reading and go into our composter along with the kitchen cleanings so we're slowly turning our raised beds into fertile soil. Funny thing, one cantaloupe was growing in a corner of the bed, it had two flat sides and one round side but was still edible. I'm thinking of making a square box for another fruit to grow in. The great grands would get a kick out of a square cantaloupe.
I had a friend, now deceased, who put a six inch wide plastic pipe over a watermelon and let it grow in the pipe. Was a very strange melon but it was tasty and he cut it in rounds so it was also funny.
I suspect that many "strange" gardeners have done those things just for the helluva it.
He cut the pipe down the length on two sides and popped it out. I didn't see the part where he got it out but I did see the melon and actually ate some of it. I don't think he did it again though. He was a quirky kind of guy who, unfortunately, died sooner than he should have. I still have good memories of some of the things he tried with his vegetable garden.
I was thinking of cutting the pipe into two sections, lengthwise, and using large hose clamps to hold it together during growing season. It could then be disassembled without risking damage to the melon.
He obviously didn't think of that, nor did I. Your version will be much easier to get the melon out without destroying it. Do it and post a picture here and we will all get a good laugh. Most gardeners do quirky things from time to time. Like the lemon tree I grew years ago and wrapped it around a six inch diameter post to get it started. I grew well and gave us fruit for several years until a hurricane blew a lot of stuff away but we still had the house. This was in Louisiana and everyone there knew how to protect a house but not so much for fruit trees in a bucket.
In our long marriage we have had a rabbitry, both for eating the meat but also showing around Texas. We had milk goats, a milk cow, lots of chickens, ducks, pigeons, if it was edible we would grow it and eat it. At our age now we don't miss the ten acres back then. We also have strict restrictions here or I would build a pigeon coop and have some nice bird meat occasionally. Pigeon's and Muscovy ducks fly wild around here plus the Aztec dove, a critter out of Mexico and is open season on all three.
For some reason all these people here just want to go to work, come home in the evening and don't want anything going on. In addition the HOA President is a Damned Yankee from up state New York. If the boss lady would let me I would move us a little further out in the country side here in Harris County, Texas. We senior citizens, maybe a half a dozen, have no say so in what is good or not. Most of these folks worry more about losing the value of their homes. We old people bought our house outright and can sell them outright if needed. Folks come and go here like folks go to the grocery. Seems every other week we get an email about selling furniture, cars, etc. I suspect there are a lot of divorces going on. There are several old couples like us and another amount of widows.
HomeOwnersHub website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here.
All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.