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The Old Guy's Garden Record
Clicking through one of our banner ads or some of our text links and making a purchase will produce a small commission for us from the sale. I tried to mow our lawn yesterday. I went out early in the afternoon about two hours before a rain was predicted to arrive. After about ten minutes, I came in totally soaked with sweat and rainwater. But after cleaning up the mower, I was able to mow our lawn today, leaving the field next to us for tomorrow. While on the riding mower, I was able to knock down some of the weeds growing in our main garden bed. Getting the lawn tractor into the raised bed takes a trick or two, but I got it done. And has been the history of this season, we got another heavy rain again this evening.
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Speaking of delicious, a bunch of squirrels have found the birdseed we spread around our shallow well cover to their liking. One bold squirrel remained on the cover while I took today's splashshot of our garden. Sometimes, four or five squirrels hit the bird seed. It's getting too late to plant sweet corn this year, but I hope to get some Eclipse peas, JLP cucumbers, carrots, and lima beans planted. If I ever get our East Garden plot turned over, it will go to a cover crop of buckwheat.
I'm just gearing up for the day. But I took the time this morning to write both of our Indiana senators suggesting that they not support rescinding funding for public broadcasting. I hope you'll similarly contact your senators: U.S. Senate website.
We started today with, what else, more rain. I do hope to get outside later and do a little gardening.
Besides the gloxinias on our dining room table, I have ten very healthy gloxinias on a bookshelf inside our sunroom. The plants weren't doing well under our plant lights in the basement, so I moved them to the sunroom. I wondered if the heat in the sunroom would hurt the plants. But despite some high temperatures above 100°F, the plants are thriving! Besides the frequent rains and very high temperatures, an old neck injury has pretty much brought my outdoor gardening to a halt. I did try a little weeding yesterday of the bed our tall peas were in. I need to clear that bed to plant cucumbers in it. I also want to till the bed our garlic grew in to make way for a planting of supersweet Eclipse peas. And while most of our main raised bed is covered with grass weeds and our East Garden plot is still untilled, I've decided to just go with what I can do and be happy with that.
Friday, July 4, 2025 - Independence Day Here's wishing you a safe and happy holiday weekend.
Our extended weather forecast from the Weather Underground suggests things may dry out enough to do some serious gardening in the next week or so. I did take out several buckets of compost today. One was kitchen compost (mostly pea pods and coffee grounds) and another was filled with gloxinias that had failed to break dormancy. A third was partially filled with garlic scones I'd trimmed off our garlics when putting them on our drying/curing table in the garage.
Monday, June 30, 2025 - June Wrap-up
So far this season we've had asparagus, peas, and what appears to be a good harvest of garlic. Our onions and tomatoes are doing well. But we have lots of weeds in our gardening beds. And once again, we're getting rain...lots of it! We've received around two inches of precipitation over the last few days. That, and the return of temperatures in the 90s, will make outside work difficult. Our tall pea vines are ready to be pulled and any good seed pods harvested for seed saving. I have Japanese Long Pickling cucumber transplants started in the basement to replace the peas.
An awful lot of our gloxinias never emerged from dormancy. Fortunately, some did, and we have ten plants thriving in the somewhat extreme heat of our sunroom. And while the recent strong winds blew over several of our dill plants, they're now in bloom. So while I'm really discouraged to come to the end of June without our main bed fully planted and our East Garden untilled, there's still time to get some things going when our ground dries out.
This is about as early as I’ve ever dug garlic. But about half of the garlic stalks had fallen over, Some had separated from their bulbs, making digging a good bit more difficult. Also, despite my mulching, weeds were taking over the bed. I won’t know how good a harvest we got until the garlic cures in the garage for a couple of weeks. Then I’ll trim tops and roots and weigh the garlic. Our how-to, Growing Garlic.
I haven’t been doing much outdoor work of late, staying inside enjoying the air conditioning. First we had way too much rain, Now it’s dangerously hot for an old More out of habit than anything else, I picked a few peas this morning. I think I’m about done with them and need to let the existing vines ripen pods for seed saving.
It appears that our frequent rains are over for now. We have a week of dry, ninety degree days in our extended forecast! But with the break in the rains, maybe I can get some garden plots tilled and planted. While our onion sets came up well, our planting of carrots and beets totally failed. And just a few potato plants emerged. I'm planning on mowing the field next to us this afternoon where our large East Garden plot now sits idle. It's a one plus acre mow, and the grass is really high. But mowing it may clear the site of last year's compost pile for transplanting butternut squash into it. Butternuts really roam when putting out vines, so I grow them outside our East Garden, often on the site of an old compost pile. Later
Each planting hole got a sprinkle of commercial 10-10-10 fertilizer and then filled with Quick Start solution. When the grass I mowed has dried a bit, I'll use our lawn sweeper to gather some to mulch around the plants. I'll also need to spray them with something for insect control. I got a lot of ant bites while doing the transplanting. Some liquid Sevin should slow them down, although I prefer using Captain Jack's Deadbug Brew, as it seems to prevent squash bugs from laying viable eggs.
Thursday, June 19, 2025 - Juneteenth From Elizabeth Warren on Facebook: "On #Juneteenth, we celebrate the end of slavery in the United States. Today, we also recommit to fighting for racial justice." I picked peas twice this morning. When picking, I noticed some tan to brown pods I’d missed, so I went back out and started saving peas for planting next season. Our good picked peas made enough to freeze another pint of them. I generally take a day off after mowing, as it leaves my shoulders pretty sore. Instead of any gardening today, I uppotted a bunch of tomato plants I'd left in their deep sixpack inserts way too long. The Quinte, Earlirouge, and Crimson Sprinter plants went into a variety of shapes and sizes of larger quarters. If I ever get our East Garden turned, and the plants aren't stunted from my ill treatment, they should supply us with some nice, late tomatoes.
A2 Hosting is now Hosting.com I got our lawn mowed today. With all the rain we've had, I'd let the lawn go too long. When I came in from parking the mower in the garage, thunder began. We had strong storms come through, but haven't noticed any new storm damage. More rain is predicted for tonight. I got another good picking of peas this morning. By tomorrow, I should have enough to freeze another pint of them.
And as happens, our pea vines are beginning to age and brown. There are still some blooms on the vines, but our season for tall, early peas is about over. I'll pick a few more times and then let the vines mature peas for seed saving.
We’re enjoying seeing a multitude of hummingbirds at our feeders. There are obviously more than we’ve had in the past at this time of the season. But the little birds were wearing me out refilling their feeders. So… I filled and hung a 32 ounce feeder we call “the jug.” I was up to filling the birds’ favorite ten ounce feeder twice a day plus another sixteen ounce feeder once a day. The birds didn't seem to mind the switch. I'd brought in a sirloin tip roast yesterday and slow cooked it. When done, I split the roast saving half of it for today. The other half became a delicious beef barbecue. Today, I cooked carrots, potatoes, mushrooms, onion, and garlic for the beef. I started to use garlic that hangs in a bag in our kitchen when I realized I had fresh garlic I could use. So I brought in three garlics from the garage drying table. But when I went to split cloves out of them, I found the wrappers to be as tough as leather! That made splitting out some cloves tough, but also hints that our garlic may not have any spoilage of the cloves.
Not really thrilled with the production of our tall early peas, I fertilized them with some Quick Start liquid fertilizer to encourage more blooms. We'll see if that causes the vines to put on more blooms. And seeing the browning of the leaves on some of our garlic plants, I did a test dig of nine or ten garlics today. The softneck garlics were rather small. Of course, softnecks usually produce smaller garlic bulbs. There was one regular garlic of good size and an elephant garlic at okay size. What I didn't find was any rot on the bulbs, a good thing in this wet spring. And despite their smaller size, all of the garlic are usable. And freshly dug garlic has incredible flavor.
It appears that I left our melon and squash seedlings over our soil heating mat a day too long. All of the pots have germinated, but the plants are a bit tall. Getting the plants off the heat mat and from under the somewhat clear humidome would have prevented the legginess. We got a rather light picking of peas this morning. That made me think to bring in our Eclipse pea seed. Eclipses are a supersweet variety that don't germinate well in cool soil. But the peas stay sweet when grown in warm weather.
We didn’t get all that many peas in this morning’s picking. But with some previously picked and shelled peas, it was enough to freeze a pint of our early peas. It was time to empty out our Pyrex container of shelled peas, as some of them may have been there for several days. I haven’t found a good way to rotate the peas in it. Blocked from gardening in our beds, I weeded one side of the patches on either side of our front steps. There were more hostas in the one side than I remember planting. Several of them will need to be moved to where they'll receive more light. When my knees and calves said to stop weeding on my hands and knees, I did. It's cool to begin freezing produce from our garden. When I put the peas in our big freezer, I had to move several bags of frozen asparagus out of the way. Supper tonight will be grilled pork chops, baked potatoes, and the next to our last bag of frozen corn from last season.
Something not normal is the dearth of white egrets on the Turtle Creek Reservoir. The water there is usually lousy with the birds, but I haven't seen even one so far this season. I did see a Blue Heron yesterday when driving across the causeway of the reservoir. The oregano in our herb bed is doing its usual trick of trying to take over the bed, if not the world. I sort of let it go, and it's now in bloom. For best flavor, one wants to harvest oregano before it blooms. So, it was time today to cut it back.
Our how-to: Another Garden Delicacy: Homegrown Peas I brought in last year's Japanese Long Pickling cucumber saved seed today and started two deep sixpack inserts of the variety. JLPs, as we call them, produce long thin cucumbers. They're ideal for making bread and butter or dill pickle slices. We also use them to make some incredible sweet pickle relish. The JLP plants will replace our tall early peas when the pea vines play out. Feature story: A Cucumber of Distinction This evening in a light sprinkle, I moved three Cora Cascade vincas into a large hanging basket pot. This is the second such pot I've started. With it, I will pretty well fill our main hooks under our back porch. I'm going to need to hang a second hummingbird feeder from our back porch tomorrow. The tiny birds just about emptied a twelve ounce feeder in one day. This usually happens a little later in the season, but we seem to have some thirsty birds this year.
While I watched the Pacers/Thunder game last night, I started some melons and squash. For watermelon, I seeded Ali Baba, Blacktail Mountain, Crimson Sweet Virginia Select, and Kalahari triploid. For cantaloupe, it was Athena and Sugar Cube. The squash started was a Slick Pik. Other than the Kalahari, all of the varieties planted are old favorites that have done well in the past for us. Triploid watermelon varieties come and go. Our previous favorite is no longer available, so we're trying a new one.
Things are still really wet out from our recent rains, with more coming tonight and tomorrow. I did get out this morning and picked enough peas to justify shelling them. They shelled out for enough for supper and possibly enough more to freeze a pint.
Every picture tells a story, don't it. While the Rod Stewart classic song doesn't have anything to do with gardening, the song title came to mind as I looked at our main raised garden bed with standing water in it.
After emptying the rain gauge, I was in for a couple of pleasant surprises. There were a lot of mature pea pods to pick. There's probably not enough there to yet make a meal, but it's a start. Besides the peas, each of our Moira tomato plants had put on a small tomato. Based on a Google AI search, we should be picking tomatoes by early July.
With any serious outside work out of the question, I sterilized some more potting soil to start some cucumbers, melons, and squash.
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Marking the rows, shoveling a furrow down each row, watering with a mix of Serenade biofungicide and Quick Start fertilizer, and spacing the potato sets about a foot apart and covering them with soil took an hour or so. I beat the rain by an hour. The potato sets went in about three inches deep, about two inches shallower than is usually recommended. The long eyes on some of the sets got totally covered, so we'll see how that works out. I don't have a how-to on growing potatoes, as I'm not very good at it, I'll give you a link to a Seed Savers article on the subject. I started some more gloxinias from seed yesterday. I also transplanted a Cora Cascade Vinca into a small hanging basket and three more in a large hanging basket.
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My big gardening treat for yesterday was finding our first ripe pod of peas. There was just one pod ready to be picked, and I didn't find any more this morning. Realizing that I'm going to want to start using last year's compost pile, I started a new one yesterday. The new pile is at the east edge of the field, just outside our East Garden plot. When doing so, I pulled a bunch of volunteer tomato plants from the old pile. They could carry disease that might infect the tomato plants I want to put in the East Garden plot.
And looking ahead, I have lots of healthy lettuce, broccoli, and cauliflower transplants under our cold frame ready to go into our main raised bed. And there's a bag of seed potatoes in the basement that I need to rescue from a mesh bag. I'll have to sacrifice the bag to not harm the sprouts the potatoes have put out.
Later I got out and direct seeded a double row of carrots and beets. The carrot varieties seeded were Mokum, Napoli, Naval, Scarlet Nantes, and Yaya. The beets were Red Ace and Burpee Golden. I haven't grown golden beets for years, so this planting should be interesting.
Later The green bean casserole with some "improvements" wasn't all that great. I'll stay with the tried and true Campbell's recipe next time around.
Contact Steve Wood, the at Senior Gardening |
I did see several people out mowing their lawns today. Their mowers must go through standing water better than ours does.
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