working on the north garden getting the weeds out and regenerating the strawberry patch:
i'm about 10ft further to the left now...
and a pic of the thyme and squash in the horseshoe garden:
much to do this time of the year, picking cucumbers every 4-5 days, fresh beans coming in, weeding, watering, and enjoying the weather.
won't be too long before we start getting some tomatoes, peppers and beets.
cheers!
songbird
I'm thinking "Clash of the Titans."
In my case, the sage and thyme are duking it out with some poor rosemary in the DMZ. The sage was winning until I evened the odds with a machete!
the squash being an annual loses eventually.
i have a much lower growing thyme that doesn't smother or keep out weeds as well, but i like it for a change of texture/color (it has deeper purple colored flowers).
i have two edges of it that need some weeding badly to give it a better chance again, but that won't happen for a while yet at the rate i'm going.
did your seed gathering go well?
songbird
Yes; brought home a new to me Chard, plants sprouting in the greenhouse to go outdoors soon, and lots of information. I promise a proper report and pictures Real Soon Now.
Last year we had a bumper crop of rainbow chard, they were pretty enough that I was allowed to plant in the "sacred flower beds" planted the remaining seeds this year and had a few miserly plants. My guess is I failed to store the seeds well enough and to add insult to injury I haven't seen any seeds available when I have remembered to look.
Mike
That's a wonderful garden!
I keep my seeds in the bottom section of the fridge in a sealed plastic container. Many of the seed packets are several years old and will still grow but not like new seeds. In addition we put this years dried on the plant seeds in paper envelopes for next year. Eventually they all go out due to old age but have had some heirloom seeds up to ten years.
In addition I put desiccant packages in the container.
Had a nice rain this morning and there may be more. Free water for the gardens, lawn, and fruit trees is always welcome.
George
Muggles wrote: ...
thank you. :) if you want to check out from the top, bunch of things are at
songbird
Wow ... My garden is a handful of raised beds. lol I've neglected it, too, because it just got so hot.
I'm thinking next year I'm not going to do as much as I did this year. The husband always starts out like gangbusters wanting to plant everything under the sun, but then he doesn't follow through with taking care of what he planted.
We also get over run with bushes and cane that keeps coming in from the neighbors yard behind us. I have plenty of dried cane poles every year, though!
Muggles wrote: ...
yeah, it gets hot here too at times, i just try to get out in the morning while it is still cool enough and work until it gets too hot. lately that has been right about noon. today i was able to get out again later on as the breeze kicked up and there were some clouds. nice day when i can get two shifts in.
i know that feeling... :) i expect i'll be done with the current garden project in another week or two depending upon the weather. then i'll redo my other strawberry patch (which i hope will take only a few days) and then get out to another big project out back which should take another month at the rate things are going. and that will also mean it will be getting cooler out. i can get a lot more done then...
it's good exercise for me so i'm fine with all of it.
i would get a good barrier dug in down deep to block that stuff. i have some pretty invasive grasses that do the same thing. a lot of work to keep them from getting worse. :)
songbird
Don't feel alone: I think a few others in the ng are using raised beds, too.. I keep nine of them (±3'x8'), sitting atop ninety feet of Florida sand, plus four elevated containers filled with from no less than twenty?five, to forty?five gallons of soil mix. Since I'm in a climate that allows year-'round gardening, most of the beds produce _something_ year-'round. Mid-January to mid-February, July, and August are the least productive months but right now, along with a smattering of relatively heat-tolerant herbs, I have "southern" peas, okra, eggplant, peppers (emerald giant, california wonder, It. pepperoncini, two kinds of japs, Tabasco), yellow squash, strawberries. The squash and strawberries aren't liking the summer sun at all. As a rule, yellow squash is a spring and a fall crop down here, not a summer crop, and the strawberries are simply ground cover right now. They're usually grown as cool-season annuals. Hot? Yep. And where I am, the high humidity is a summertime constant. Installed dripline irrigation in beds and containers in 2011-2012. Driplines in containers proved impractical: More expedient just to draw a few gallons of water and dump them in than to fiddle with irrigation fittings.
Is this the first time you've thought that? ...thought so.
Yeah, but it's always over pretty quickly. So divert his enthusiasm to something productive: Vacuum cleaning, dishwashing, laundry, etc.
What is "cane"? We have a stand of bamboo along a fenceline that has waxed and waned for forty years, to my certain knowledge. I use bamboo poles in the garden for trellis supports, vining plant supports, predator insect perches. Had a major bamboo die-off four or five years past. Dunno whether due to absence of water, life cycle, or what but it has rebounded with new daughters at layered joints. We layered some joints eight or nine years ago but I've never checked to see whether any of those "took" but a substantial proportion of the "new generation" is easily twenty feet tall.
Cane in Texas is close to bamboo but is actually a swamp reed that can get about an inch in diameter and, when dried a good bit does the same thing as bamboo but is free. Don't have any here but in my home area there were lots of creeks and ponds surrounded by the stuff. I made bows with some of it until I found out that Osage Orange limbs were much better and I found that the smaller reeds, when dried properly, made wonderful arrows.
I tried growing "barrel" bamboo once but it was a bust. No hurricane yet and the weather folk are saying we might get some rain starting tomorrow but no high winds this far north of the Gulf. I hope they're right.
River cane, found around most creeks, swamps, any wet spot in the south. Around here we called it Texas Bamboo but it is still just common river cane.
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