First Rain in Nearly 4 Months

We are just so grateful and happy over the rain that soaked our cracked and dried out land all day yesterday. Ponds here have dried up and it has been a major struggle just to try and keep the little bit of garden we have left going.

I went out the day before we were to get all the rain and took a load of pictures and am heading out in a few minutes to take some now that we have had a good soaking. I imagine to see a great change starting to take place in our beds. While we do continue to water our beds when there is no rain one just could not imagine that rain water would make such a difference.

As our grandson so nicely pointed out to me, when God sends us water it is good for the garden because God has the best water. Boy oh boy for a 5 year old he is smarter than many adults I know.

So stop by and check it out I should have the pics up this weekend but I do have 2 cases of cucumbers that need to be made into pickles today and a garage sale to get ready for next weekend. Should have the pics up by Monday evening at the latest oh and surprise surprise I now have pictures of Loofah Gourds that have finally started to grow. I fear it is to late in the season for them to mature before the first frost but will keep our fingers crossed and see. Irregardless if that happens or not I have the pictures so if you try to grow your own you will be able to identify when they start to grow.

July 3, 2012 Catching up on picture posts

 

You might wonder what the fish has to do with this blog, but really the fish is quite important. Every time we go fishing we go and buy a box of worms. Once the worms are gone we take the left over “dirt” and pour it into our houseplant pots. It is making a huge difference, they love it.

 

Then once we catch fish that qualify as a keeper we take them home and hubby cleans them for us. What is left over goes out to our compost bin and is therefore recycled and ends up in our garden. No part of the fish is thrown away, we use it all.

Aside from all the uses of the fish we absolutely enjoy going fishing. We go as a family and enjoy our time together. Often times we have a hard time leaving to go home and have been caught walking back to the car in the dark, staying until we have no choice but to go home.

Going fishing started out as hubby’s hobby. Our daughter and I have learned a lot from him about fishing and have worked hard to be good fishing partners for him so that he can enjoy himself instead of always having to take care of our stuff for us.

We even learned to put the worms on our hooks. Mind you we do not like doing that but again we want to be good fishing partners and not be little sissy’s about putting the worm on the hook. LOL

Before we left I got these pictures taken. These are our Radish’s. They really came up good and strong. We tried to thin them out and they didn’t do well. Since the soil/compost mixture is so loose we are just leaving them, we think they will be able to make the room they need to grow.

This is the 3rd bed of green beans that we have started. These are Blue Lake Bush Green Beans. We were so excited about them, but as you will see in the following post’s I’ll be making they are not doing near as well as they started out.

They started out so well and had such huge leaves on them. They did get planted right before the triple digit heat hit and that could be why they are having such a hard time now despite the fact that we are diligent about keeping them watered and taken care of.

This is one of the first beds of green beans we started out with. We thought they were Blue Lakes but we now know they are not. They no where resemble the above pictures. Not sure how we got them all mixed up.

The Tomatoes continue to go crazy. We had one plant that had a tomato on it that got so heavy that it actually broke the branch it was on.

As you can see here the plants are just loaded. In this small space there are 7 Tomatoes.

It’s a bit hard to see in this picture, I’ll try to get a better one. The Strawberry Patch is really doing well. The plants have been sending out lots of runners and really are spreading the plants. I’m hoping by the end of summer this bed will be full and we will need to start another.

The number of Strawberries that these plants are putting out this year is by far our best year ever. It may not sound like a lot but we are getting around 20 per day on average, and they are much larger this year than they were last year.

Our grandson just loves checking on the Strawberry Patch. At 4 yr. old he can tell me if they are new/babies, if they are big and not ready and if they are ready to be picked. He has a sincere love and fascination for the garden’s and their produce. It brings me such joy to watch him and our daughter learn so much about the plants and how to care for them.

This is one branch of a Cherry Tomato Plant. As you can see on this one branch there are 9 Tomatoes showing. Each plant in total has on average about 40 per plant.

We are still averaging about 2 Asparagus coming up each day. Normally they are done by this time of year. Since we changed the way we are watering them and the amount of water we are giving them they have done very well. They continue to produce, it’s impressive. I always like to mention that if you are going to start a patch you must salt the ground.

My sister was telling me yesterday that she loves White Asparagus. I had not seen that before so now I have to see if I can find seeds for those and start a patch of them.

You will always want to maintain your patch. In case you are not aware they will continue to come up each year. Normally you will get your first plants that are big enough to eat in about 3 years time.

The Loofah plants are still doing well. They have continued to climb quite well. We have not seen any blooms yet, I’m starting to get concerned that we may not get any Loofah’s this year. I certainly hope I’m wrong. They are so useful and I have no more left from the last time we grew them.

The Cucumbers are doing quite well also. They are climbing well and really starting to put on the cucumbers. However, due to our heat some of the cucumber starts have dried up on the vine before they could get started well.

This is a side shot of the Cucumbers. Not only are they growing in height but they are nice full plants. That is helpful as they are loaded with blooms and soon we should have more cucumbers than we know what to do with them.

This is another shot of one of the Tomato Plants, as you can see there are so many tomatoes on this plant. They are hard to even count anymore, I gave up trying to figure out how many were on a plant.

This is a picture of our small garden bed, it is located under our Hummingbird feeder. These plants really attract the birds to the area. When we started this bed, in case you didn’t see the pictures of it, it looked terrible. We started with about 15 small plants. It looked so empty but in just a few short weeks it really starting filling out.

Now we are taking advantage of the seed pods that each of the flowers make. We have collected so many seeds from the different flower varieties that we will not have to purchase plants next year. We can plant from the seeds we have.

This is a new rose from our Double Knot Knock Out Rose Bush. I really enjoy this rose bush, it is so pretty and it blooms fantastic. At any given time it will have many blooms at the same time.

This is a group of three Roses on the same plant pictured above.

 

I’m in great hopes that I will soon have very nice pictures of Roses to share with you. We happened to be at Wal-Mart when they had a huge sale going on. We got 2 each of Red, Pink and White Rose Bushes and paid a grand total of $1.25 for each of them.

That put us at a grand total of 6 large Rose Bushes and 4 additional Double Knot Knock Out Bushes that we had pictured a few days before. We took the 10 Rose Bushes and have planted them along our driveway. I think it will end up looking very nice. I’ll get pictures of them tonight so you can see what I’m talking about. They are just about naked though, after I cut off all the dead leaves from them not taking proper care of them. They should spring back quickly.

Loofah Plants in a Raised Bed Garden

Loofah plants are by far one of my favorite summer plants. If you have never tried these out you really should.

Once they vine and start producing you leave the gourds on the vine, in fact you will leave them there as long as you possibly can. What will happen is as they grow you will be able to feel the weight of them. The longer they are left on the vine they will start to dry out and the weight difference will be amazing, they will become very light. Once they reach that point you remove them from the vine, peel them, shake all the seeds out and keep those. There is no sense in buying seeds again the following year. If you have a good crop of Loofah you will have more seeds than you know what to do with.

There is also a very neat trick with this plant. It will produce both male and female blooms, and the females of course must be pollenated. If you are lacking on bees in your area to do this job you can actually take the male and female blooms and lightly tap them against one another and pollenate them that way.

It has been two years since I've been able to grow any Loofah's so I will have to do a little research to remember which bloom is which, once my starts blooming then I will take pictures of them and post them for your reference.

I am amazed by them though, once they start shooting out runners (I like to call them little arms) they are ready to start climbing. This plant always seems to grow so slow to me until the runners come out and they get attached to something to climb on, then they seem to go crazy.

Here is a little tip on those runners. They will attach to anything trying to hold on and start their climb. That means they could wrap around each other, a weed, anything they can get a hold of.

I watch very closley for these runners and if you are very gentle with them you can uncurl them and get them wrapped around whatever you have that you want them to climb on.

In our case since we are number 1 cheap and number 2 both of us were raised on farms, we look for the inexpensive way to fix things and get the job done. Several years ago when we started the Loofah's and the cucumbers my dad gave us some cattle panels. By building a two raised beds and inserting some stability poles we flexed the panel and made our own arches out of them. Weather will not ruin them and the Loofah's and cucumbers can not produce enough weight to destroy them. In fact they are strong enough that if you were willing you could vine some pumpkin types on them as well.

If you don't have access to cattle panels you might want to check at a farm store in your area. I believe them to be a bit costly, in this area I think they run about thirty dollars but for something you would never have to replace that just isn't bad. Also, which is our next project, they are perfect for those beautiful vining Roses!

Nearly forgot, before I add pictures on here, what do we use Loofah's for. Well the most common know use for them is in the shower/bath. I love these home grown ones as they are not near as hard as the kind you buy in the store, though they are the same thing. It must be something in the way they process them for commercial sale. We have also found they are wonderful for scrubbing as well. Instead of buying those green scratchy pads or brillo pads we use the Loofah's. If you use them for scrubbing and sometimes even in the shower use they can get kind of dirty, as anything can. I have found that putting them on the top rack of my dishwasher is a wonderful way to get them spotless again. They will have some color variation to them when you peel them. If this is bothersome to you, you can dip them in bleach and get all the color out. I'm not sure of the method on that as far as how much bleach for how long. If you are interested leave me a comment and I will look it up for you. The color variation never really mattered to me enough to worry about it.

Below are pictures of the arches and some close up shots of the Loofah's.

When we set up our cattle panels for arches we did several in a row as you can see. By doing it this way we can plant things on each side of the box and have it vine up the panels. Our initial idea for this was for the Loofah's but we soon discovered this was an amazing way to do another one of our crops. Since bending over is very painful for me my husband suggested the next crop to vine on the arches would be cucumbers, and wow does it ever work wonders. If you have ever dug through a hill of cucumber plants trying to find produce you can really appreciate this next photo.

Young cucumber plants starting to climb the arches. Just look at all the blooms, it appears they are going to be very productive this year which will be great for getting pickles made.

I hope you find the suggestion of the arches helpful, they have been a blessing to me and I'm suprised at the number of things that we could do this way. It would also be great for  pole beans or peas. If you have never given Loofah's a try, do it, if nothing else it is an amazing process to watch and you end up with durable goods to use when they are done.

Also if you haven't ever had a garden or if you have been thinking of having one this is such a great way to go. The Raised Garden Beds have much better soil for your plants since it is such a mixture of compost and other materials. There are a very small amount if any weeds in them since the bottom side of the box is covered in a weed barrier cloth. For extra protection we put two layers across the bottom and use a staple gun to attach it. As you can see in the close up of the cucumbers in the last picture there are no weeds. Those boxes were set up three years ago and still doing great. The only thing we have to watch with these since they are not stacked two high is when we are mowing the yard not to shoot the grass in the box when we go by. For that purpose we do not use the riding lawn mower around the garden boxes rather we use the push mower with a bagger on it. That works out as a double benefit because we dump that grass clippings in selected area and let it dry, it then becomes more material for the compost bin.