pictures: garden tour late june 2019

Harvested two gallons of leaf lettuce, which was beginning to bolt. I'm having big salads for the next four days!

I have lots of tomato flowers. Here are two flower bunches on cherry tomatoes--I hope they all make tomatoes before it gets too hot here:

And here are some baby tomatoes still some weeks from being ripe: Austin Red Pear, tiny currant tomatoes (about the size of a cuff button on a man's shirt or even smaller) and a large tomato that ripens to green: Green Zebra tomato:

Rainbow chard and bush bean plants:

Carrots and green onions:

Ground cherries (related to tomatillos). They're starting to form little fruit but I'm not sure that the rabbits, squirrels, and chipmunks won't get them all before I do.  And there's a sprawling weed there I need to pull up (We had six straight days of rain, so weeding had to be delayed).

The flower garden. Yarrow. Day lilies with petunias in the foreground grown from that 25-cent Dollar Tree seed. Also the large sunflowers are quite a bit over the fence now! If you drive down that street about 1/4 mile, you see the Mississippi River (you see it well over the River Road right now--can't get out that way, and haven't been able to for over a month.)

Really hot this next week, so I need to be done with gardening before 8 a.m. Mowing is going to be a pure misery from now until cooler weather.

A number of things I tried to grow didn't work--it might have been the wet spring, or that some of the organic matter I'd put over one bed hadn't decayed enough, or in a couple of cases, my BIL who grew up on a farm said "nobody grows those here in spring, just in fall," and there may be a good reason for that! So beets and turnips were a bust. And I could not stop spinach from bolting. I hope I can grow it over winter, under my low tunnel. If not, I might just grow it indoors in winter.

finally, some good rain

Watering is boring. So I like it to rain an inch or two every week, even if it makes fitting in mowing more difficult. The last 24 hours we've had steady rain, more than 2 inches now. Flooded areas are cursing. I'm okay.

Last year I posted one of these when there was an intense storm, about as intense as you want to live with. This year's looks the same, but it was a pleasant thunderstorm, actually. No big gusts, lightning and thunder and very dark skies, but I kept electricity and didn't hear tornado sirens, so I'm just grateful for the rain.

(Also, 24 hours of rain keeps the noisy trashy neighbors indoors. I'd pray for a 40-day Deluge for that to happen.)

I went out between waves of storms this morning and tied up tomatoes better and pinched out a few suckers--the easy ones. I can tell I'm never going to be perfect about getting rid of the suckers, but last year it didn't hurt tomato production, so I'm hoping it doesn't this year either!

Property tax bill came (ouch) and house insurance bill. I've been here a year, so that makes sense, but it doesn't make me happy. I don't know how long I'll last as a homeowner here. I don't like the mentality or many of the people here, and the house feels like a drain money keeps swirling down, despite my best efforts. For the property tax plus insurance, I could have paid for a year's worth of RV park rent and electricity--and had free water, trash, and internet to boot! So I may just end up living in an RV in Arizona again next year or the year after. I reconnected with relatives and met some I'd never known (the ones in their teens and twenties). I was surprised how I now liked some of the relatives I didn't used to particularly like and felt so-so on some I once liked. (Some of that is being inured to grumpy old people since being around a lot of them for 15 years and becoming one myself.) But I got away from here once, and in general, interesting people do escape beginnings like this, so to me, this feels a backward move. Also, it's just plain backwards here, in general. The funerals alone--geez, you'd think it was 1952 the way they do it here. They bury people, of all silly things, after pumping the bodies full of water-table-poisoning chemicals. Crazy stuff. And women worry too much about looks here and they even walk differently, like every step is an apology for existing. If a group of people go out, men only talk to men and women only to women. Silliness. It wasn't just moving to a place when I came here, it was moving back at least a generation in time in social attitudes. Not regretting trying this out...but it's not an unqualified success.

So, yeah...don't think I'm long for the Midwest. While I was just living life and not paying attention, I became a Westerner. A Western woman, in fact, independent and strong and successful, and not ashamed of or being willing to apologize for being an adult.

But before I think about putting the house on the market, I get tomatoes from fertile land in a place where it actually rains from out of the sky occasionally. (One terrible thing about much of the Western US is that it doesn't do that often enough.) I'm really looking forward to them.

the rain gives me time to post

The best news is that I have tiny green tomatoes on the plants--yea! I just this morning tore out my snow peas, tired of them, and harvested two head lettuces that were starting to bolt. I planted cucumbers where the peas were. Will plant beans later where the lettuces were.

In the front, flowers are/were pretty. Irises for about 4 days in May, then Asiatic lilies in June. And petunias from my 25-cent seed packets going strong still.

I'm frustrated because of a renter across the way who has four-wheelers and dirt bikes for his teenaged boys, and between that and them letting their pit bull roam the neighborhood (yes, it is against the law), I really am not happy with them being over there. And did I mention the domestic violence police visits? Sigh. If that house ends up on fire, expect to hear of my being arrested for tackling firefighters and refusing to let them do their jobs of putting it out. The only positive is the bad neighbors don't party until the wee hours. And they're friendly enough--just terribly trashy people who don't really belong in this tidy village neighborhood of careful gardens and quiet oldsters.

So I sit around with earplugs in nearly all the time. I miss my RV. Bad neighbors? You drive it away from them. I'm tellin' you; that's the life.

But back to the garden. I finally got ahead of the weeds and now 10 minutes per day is all the weeding I need to do. It'll get hot now, and the next 2 months of mowing will be what I whine about instead of the weeds. ha!

I've preserved some peas (both snow- and English). I don't think I'll grow them again next year. I didn't love the taste of the snowpeas (not in this soil/climate) and the shelling of the regular peas was work, and not so much better than frozen packages at Walmart that the work seemed worth it. The bonus of nitrogen-fixing in that bed is nice, but not enough of a selling point.

On the other hand, preserving tomatoes is 100% worth it, both for the vastly superior taste and for the saving of money. Leaf lettuce is great--it worked well here until just this week when a few started to show signs of a flower stalk, and the delicate and sweet leaves aren't available at the store. If they were available, it'd be $10 a pound or more, so growing it myself is definitely worth the tiny effort (toss seeds down, water if it doesn't rain, eat. Not much effort!) Sweet peppers are expensive here, so they are worth doing, though the taste isn't a lot better than store-bought peppers. Also, peppers are easy to preserve--freezing, canned in salsa, or dehydrating. They're resistant to pests, so I'll keep growing them.

Chard works well here. I have pumpkins, winter squash, spaghetti squash, and summer squash going, but three kinds of bugs will attack it, so I'll reserve judgment on if they are worth doing after this year. Next year, I may only grow lettuces and green onions in spring, and chard, cukes, tomatoes, and peppers in summer. That's a lot fewer veg than I tried this year so far. I tried everything I even slightly like, and what didn't work, or made me think "more trouble than it's worth," I've crossed off my list.

Next time, pix of veg.