Thank you everyone, for taking a gardening break and joining us here today. All are welcome to participate! We love garden chat, plant photos, questions and comments. Please share. We are here every Saturday, year round, at 9 AM EST.
Let’s begin with the Baader-Meinhof effect. When suddenly, a topic you gave little thought to pops up everywhere in a short period of time, as though a message is being sent. Recency illusion getting personal.
Short story time. So Thursday, on another gardening forum (yes, I am in an open forum relationship), there was a short discussion about what bit my toes in the garden. Spider? Ant? Someone even mentioned ticks. Next day, Friday morning, I am pondering plant things during a garden walk and something bites the side of my foot. Maybe it was a sticker. I don’t know but it hurts and is swelling a bit. I trot inside and take benedryl and some pain killers. I go back outside to sit at the patio table, tap-dancing over the hot concrete to get to the safety of the shaded area. Settle into my ice tea and some mindless web surfing, itching my foot on the concrete. Get an alert, TIME Magazine would like to inform me Walking Barefoot has Health Risks.
Not ten minutes after whatever got my foot.
Seems walking in the garden barefoot is generally considered a stupid idea.
So anyway…
This has been a very busy USDA Zone 4/5 week! Got the tomato trellis up, a hybrid single stake and Florida weave contraption. I discovered a few more volunteer tomatoes that are located where I can keep them, so now I am up to a 105 tomato plants, growing 86 varieties. Everything is mapped out and planned on graph paper in my Gardening Notebook and labeled; so when it’s time to do taste tests, I am confident my varieties are correct.
Sully Project tomatoes are doing very well. A few have flowers now, on the plum varieties. I am beginning to see differences between the individual plants; I am extraordinarily excited to see what surprises DHM and I grow!
Been hand watering a ton. Just not getting the rain we need. The drought is getting worse here. There will still be the June Doubling of the tomato plants, but I’ll have to help with the water.
Noticed holes in the leaves of the beans, dahlias and peppers. Applied Diatomaceous Earth heavily, it helped to varying degrees. Particularly for the beans, they look fantastic as of mid-week. Peppers being hit by the Colorado Potato Beetle, HARD. I pulled out all of some weed birds have been leaving along my fence-line. The plant has purple flowers and makes red berries. Noticed many little clusters of CPB eggs. I’ve seen no sign of the wasps that help with that problem, so I took care of it.
Also noticed the my roses have brown edges and something still getting to my dahlias and chewing them up. Sprayed Capt. Jacks Dead Bug and added a weak Neem solution to the sprayer. Hoping that fixes the issue, I suspect thrips.
Blessings
Yay to knowledge sharing! Most recently, Thanks to jayden. I now know the difference between Verbena and Lantana. Turns out I purchased both! Tomatoes, peppers and other veggies are solid in my wheelhouse, but flowers? I need some help.
A HUGE Thank You to everyone who has shared seeds, plants, knowledge, support and kindness with me. I did a little gift tour! Video is three minutes long. No names used. Y’all know who you are. I might have said some nice things though.
Other blessings.
Obligatory Herb Spiral pic.
I garden because I want to taste delicious things. I garden because I want every excuse to walk barefoot in the grass with the sun blessing down on me, and end the day sweaty with a dirt smudged face and filthy knees. I garden because I like sitting in the tomato cave I made, same as I played house in the trees when I was five. I garden because one of my favorite memories, one I will be replaying in my mind as I review my last moments in this world, is digging potatoes with my grandfather.
Why do you grow plants?
The End