Garden Update
Posted at 4:40 AM on June 26, 2009
by Dale Connelly
(24 Comments)
This week we've been reminded that fame and power offer no protection against time, illness and poor judgment.
No surprise there.
So I could ask you about your favorite Michael Jackson song, your opinion of Farrah Fawcett's hair in the '70's, whether you thought any of Ed McMahon's belly laughs or product endorsements were sincere, or if you think South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford can really dance a smoldering tango, but why dwell on the struggles of human celebrities when there's a much more pressing question right outside your door?
How's your garden growing?
I've got a pepper that looks almost big enough to eat. When I go to put this one on the plate, I'll take a moment to remember how sweet it is to pick and enjoy something from your own garden, and how important it is to relish these small moments rather than dwell too much on the decline and disgrace that may come to visit the exalted and the ordinary alike.
Anyone working on State Fair ribbon-sized produce?
Comments (24)
Oh Dale! A pepper! Mine are not even close...I am unworthy. I'm eating spinach and lettuce though...an I have mint. Did I mention I have mint?
good idea, Dale - garden talk is still positive this time of year - mostly. up here, colder, dryer, north-er - the gardens look surprisingly good. our potatoes a doing nicely, the tomatoes are blossoming, cukes, melons, winter squash are all about 2 inches out of the ground, onions thriving, peppers have blossoms but no peppers. greens are doing well. just picked the last asparagus yesterday.
there are some pretty sad parts of the gardens also: in the cold and extreme dry weather i have about 10% germination of carrots (even watering and covering with boards). and the blueberries have been ruthlessly chewed the last few days by a predator that i can't just pick off and put in soapy water - because he weighs about 140 pounds - so i bought more fence posts yesterday and the blueberries will get a bigger, taller, stronger fence. oh well.
Good morning,
I call my garden "Free Range Quack Grass" -- but I have four heritage tomato plants in front of the chicken coop that seem to be doing okay...finally warm enough up here to put them out just last week.
Grapes are flourishing, however. The apple and crab apple trees were total blossoms this spring and I see the branches are already being weighted down with the young apples.
Asparagus is past harvest and building for next year. Rhubarb also. Bees are doing great, but will I get honey?
How about adding a Bok, Trickett and Muir "Living on the River" to the summer list...you know, fishing the summer away. (And now you are playing Bok...you guys re so SO cool!")
Mornin', everyone -
As a first-time veggie gardener, I'm doing OK but am coming up with some questions. How do I know when the beets are "done"? How many lettuce leaves can I cut off before the plant dies?
I have 3 tomatos, with more blossoms!! The beans and peas are cllmbing. They are all reaching the height of my protective netting. Should I now build a fence so the plants can grow higher?
On the flower front, my lilies are starting to go to town, so I'm enjoying that. And the little wrens have fledged, so it's noisy out there with them testing their wings and bragging about it.
Good weekend everyone!
Note for Gail - you can keep pick1ng lettuce leaves as long as the plant continues to produce as long as you don't pick the growing point. The plants will eventually bolt or die due to too much hot weather. Beets are good to eat at any stage. The tops of beets are very good as cooked greens and the young roots on early harvested beets can be cooked with the tops.
My garden has altredy produced plenty of salad greens and some peas. I ate the scapes from the garlic for the first time this year. Scapes are the shoots that develope at the top of some kinds of garlic. I didn't know that you could eat them, but now I do and they are tastey.
That's a good looking pepper, Dale.
Good Morning! It's Friday!
My 5 year old is quite excited about his two large pots of mixed wild flowers that are just beginning to give a variety of flower types.
Please, I would love to hear Smokey Robinson's amazing song "Who's Loving You" performed by the Jackson Five this morning!
Good Morning RH,
I didn't plant anything other than pots of mixed flowers and herbs. However, yesterday I noticed I have a couple volunteer tomato plants in the spot where my romas were last year. Does anyone know if they will produce?
That Indigo Girls song about the airplane was so good, and quirky too!
Wow Dale, impressive pepper! Considering we got a late start our garden is certainly growing, but we're only harvesting lettuce so far. On the bright side, the 'mater plants no longer look scrawny in their huge cages (I laughed at my husbands optimism when he picked the tallest ones!). They're nearly out the tops!
We did score both strawberries and the first delicious tomatoes at the Saint Paul Farmers Market last Saturday and have been enjoying them all week. Yum! We're off to pick strawberries with the grandkids this weekend.
Unless you are a wild rabbit or a caterpillar, we have nothing consumable in the garden this year (though the neighborhood bunnies are pleased with some of our choices). The one thing that might have produced something was a sunflower planted by Daughter at preschool - and a local chipmunk (or squirrel - we have plenty of both) dug up the seedling before it could get transplanted from its little pot. I will not repeat the language I used when I saw the hole where the seedling had been.
That said, the sweat pea I had given up on last year as not thriving clearly needed to have a winter to think on things. It's huge and starting to bloom. It's lovely. Though, I don't think edible.
Happy weekend all.
I'm trying the Native American "3 sisters" this year, corn beans & squash growing together. Only about half the corn germinated on the first round, but I planted twice. The squash isn't germinating very well either (don't know why). The awesome rain yesterday tipped the corn & tomatoes over, so I straightened them up and built a bunker around them last evening. I'm trying all heirloom tomatoes this year, should they be staked or allowed to tip over to lay on the ground?
By the way, if you live in Rogers come on over & pick up some cilantro, I have boat loads.........
Kathy
Hi Donna,
I've had volunteers produce small tomatoes, but if it was a hybrid they won't be the same.
Hi Dale
Your show helps set a pleasant tone for the rest of our days.
My brother Bill is visiting us from Seattle. I was wondering if it's too late to request a song for his 62 birthday today. He loves White Castle hamburgers (which they don't have in Seattle). The custom is for him to get off the plane, load-up with large boxes of the burgers, and feed us all on these tasty morsels. This stemmed from our childhood (about 1953) when our frugal father's idea of generosity was to take us to get these 12 cent hamburgers in Blue Island, IL. When he got promoted in his job he told us we could order as many as we can eat. Needless to say we got sick. Now I'm cautious about celebrations.
Larry
Kathy, I think any kind of tomato needs some support to keep it off the ground and hierlooms often grow very tall and need good support
Thanks for the updates, everyone. I didn't realize my pepper was so advanced. Keep the information coming.
Sorry, Elinor, our Jackson 5 collection is rather thin and doesn't include the Smokey Robinson song you mentioned.
And Larry from Hillsdale, I have a song with cheesburgers in it that might do the trick for your brother's birthday.
We're gong to have a nice crop of strawberries in the coming weeks, the raspberries are promising, and my husband is growing something called dinosaur kale. I don't know if I'll eat it, but there sure is a lot of it out there.
Dale, nice pepper. The self propelled tennis balls (the name my dog Sam gave to rabbits) have topped almost all my peppers. Now they are fenced. Can beets be planted to close together? Lots of greens but so far no edible roots.
We've had lots of herbs so far, especially the lovage (which is actually taking over the garden), but not much in the way of produce.We do have about 7 tomatoes on one of our plants and lots of blossoms, as well as blossoms on the pepper plants (which are doing much better now that we added some fish fertilizer!) Some of those heirloom tomatoes can get very large! We have one in a pot that it already taller than the tree rose in front of it! There are also the cutest little baby cukes on our bush cucumbers. The green beans aren't doing as well as in years past....some trouble with germinating in this dry weather. We had to get a new blueberry bush as the rabbits ate our other one down to the ground over the winter. The new one is full of baby blueberries, I so have high hopes for that (as well as a new rabbit fence. The raspberries, unfortunately, look to ripen while we are out of town. Ah the joys of walking out in your yard and grabbing lunch!
Hello everyone,
We call our yard "the jungle" because we never seem to cut enough weeds to keep it clean. There are little trees sprouting up in every corner, in the cracks between bricks, any little spot they can find. Even the small sprouts are resilient. There must be a giant virus tree growing under the house and these little saplings are really just part of an enormous network of roots. I can imagine, like in "Little Shop of Horror," that this underground network of tree is waiting for it's moment to launch out of the ground and eat our house.
Have an excellent morning!
Jungle. That's exactly what I was thinking about our yard/garden after being gone for a week! Half the yard is mowed, will tackle the rest this a.m. before it gets too hot. The strawberries were yielding quite well prior to vacation a week ago, but the dog sitters forgot to pick and now we have rotting strawbs I need to dispose of. And see if we have any survivors. During last night's mowing I noticed we have a few raspberries that will be ready within a couple days, the rest won't be too far behind. The cherries on the tree are getting larger (but still green) and the purple beans are growing well. The tomato and pepper plants are large and wild looking, but I cannot see if we have anything besides greenery going on. Will check that today. Sunflowers are growing nicely (sorry Anna! S. can come see our sunflowers when they grow up!). The chocolate mint plant is doing well and the flowers are still alive, as are the blueberry bushes. We'll see if they yield anything-- the asparagus didn't do too much this year. All in all, so far, so good!
lots of strawberries, not big like you see at the coop but very sweet and plentiful; also pea pods, one pepper, lots of tomato blossoms
blackberries are numerous, lots and lots of fruit but not ready to eat yet, next week
i'm happy i have these cuz among the cutworms, the aphids, the bunnies and the worms that eat the leaves i was afraid i'd get nothing much
Dale and Mike,
I can't seem to find the link to listen to previous days' Dale Connelly Show. Can only find the playlist.
Can you help?
I am little relieved that people are making more garden comments than Michael/Farrah/Ed/Sanford comments.
My poor pitiful vegetable "garden" has 2 tomato plants, a basil plant, a rhubarb plant and a lot of weeds. A friend gave me the rhubarb early in the season, but, of course it won't produce until next summer. I got the tomatoes and the basil from someone in the neighborhood who is selling the plants from his home. I do keep the weeds away from them, but I am quite sure that the day I stuck them in there they looked around and remembered the beautiful garden they (or their parent plant)came from and felt pretty sad that they didn't get better accomodations. And yet, both tomato plants have pretty little yellow blossoms, so I guess they are forgiving.
I turned the sprinkler on my little "garden" yesterday around 4:30 as I headed out for a short walk with my dogs. At that time,I only knew of Farrah Fawcett's death. I had given her some thought yesterday and I don't think she was a bad person, and I don't blame this on her, but that poster of her did a lot of damage to my teenage body image. Shortly before the morning walk today, I remembered the sprinkler. By that time, I had been inundated with Michael Jackson news. Well, Michael and I are the same age. Bless his tortured soul. He was such a cute kid and I remember when I was a cute kid thinking how cool he was. I had the single of "ABC" (I think my brother gave it to me for my 8th or 9th birthday) and played it over and over again. I didn't follow him much after that...at least not on purpose, but he was hard to ignore.
Anyway, it feels odd for the world to have lost those two 70's icons in one day. Makes me feel a little old. Makes me feel like I should do some more weeding. Eh, maybe when it cools down.
Mark and I had enough lettuce for both of us to have salads yesterday (previously we were on the every-other-day plan, with one getting greens and the other eyeing his/her bowl and drooling like a mastif).
Our cilantro is bolting already (who knew it likes cool temps?), but have we got a basil plant...this is our first summer gardening and I feel a bit extravagant picking basil and just flinging it about the kitchen at will. I'm too used to overpaying for a plastic-entombed wilted sprig from the local grocery store and coaxing it into a bit of pesto....
As for the Creeping Charlie...saute it with a bit of onion???
My veg are growing, my herbs are great.... but the flowers are suffering... not from heat or drought, or lack of tender care... they are suffering from the loss of our cat, Squeaky. She, a master huntress, kept all manner of vermin away. TWO days after Squeaks died we were visited by maurading moles and chipmunks. Ooftah what a mess!
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