PNW: 2015 June

You guys sound like my husband.  A good shirt is one that hasn't encountered a permanent food stain!  My husband was a jet mechanic for most of his working life with a few years as general contractor,  After we got married, he rose to the suit and tie positions (must have been me, right?) and it was strange to go tie shopping.    I called them disposable bibs.

Until yellow pear, I squirted more cherry juice than I want to remember. If I tried to cut them in half, they skittered across the table.

LOL

I googled for a word that meant 'fear of bow ties', but couldn't find one.  Shoot...it seems there's  a word for 'fear of anything' these days, but not ties.

You all make me laugh!

speaking of tomatoes....hubby and I shared our first one of the season....its a 4th of July....a tad bit bigger than a cherry tomato....good flavor...not super sweet like most cherry tomatoes are....had a bit more tangy flavor but low acid....so far its a keeper and it stayed true to its name.....one red ripe tomato before the 4th of July!

our sugar snap peas are done.....they do not appreciate this hot weather we are having ......blah....our air conditioning needs service too both car and home....eek!

happy gardening
rose who cant sleep due to a large fan making too much noise

boffer wrote:LOL

I googled for a word that meant 'fear of bow ties', but couldn't find one.  Shoot...it seems there's  a word for 'fear of anything' these days, but not ties.

bowtiephobia?

Wow 10:30 a.m. and the cloud cover still hasn't disappeared. It's warm, but actually comfortable. Very very strange weather. Still on track to be a scorching two weeks. I'm watering every day, especially the containers and the newly sprouting seedlings. Hasn't gotten to the point where I have to water twice a day though.

Yesterday's heat worked wonders on my germinating bean seedlings. They weren't even showing above the ground yesterday, not even a peep of bent green stem, and now some are an inch high. Wow, that's quick progress!

Most of my bean seedlings are up. And the maturing Speedy and Royal Burgundy and Dragon Tongue bean plants look anywhere from good to great. The scarlet runner beans are starting to send out long snaky tendrils. Tomatoes are still dropping all or almost all their blossoms, but around here they can do that for the entirety of July and much of August. My Black Krim tomato has gotten bushier but for whatever reason, in great soil, refuses to grow any taller. It's stuck at a bit over a foot at best. The 8 for a dollar discount peppers look like they will survive, but I have my doubts they'll be very productive. Too much hot sun too soon, and they had been kept in their tiny seedling containers too long to develop the root structure they needed at the time.

Flower-wise, the only one out of four seeds I sowed finally threw out the tiny tip of its first true leaf. I'm going transplant it as soon as that leaf comes out, because they like to send out a taproot and I've got to get them out of their container if they're going to do that. Marigolds going nicely, viola coming and going in the heat but mostly not liking it much, dark purple salvia looking healthy but staying quite short and putting out only a single flower stem, veronica plants ... the one from last year is only producing leaves and the new one I bought has several stalks with flowers on a low plant. The flowers on the cone-like base unfortunately bloom in sections so you never get the full effect of a big bloom. But the bees still love them. Lobelia in different shades of blue look alternately wonderful and decimated by the sun. Mums just sit there frozen in time now that they bloomed and the flowers wilted away.

I've been making bouquets a lot, from random wildflowers like sweet peas and flowers whose identity I couldn't guess, as well as roses, marigolds, lobelia, dandelions, and wild shasta daisies. I read that if you put them in ice water for an hour, roses and many other flowers can last an extra three days, so I've been doing that.

Four days ago, I used a tiny white egg cup for a vase and inside it I peppered a base layer of bi-colored red and yellow marigolds with sprigs of blue lobelia and a single deep purple viola. I put it in the middle of a big round table and it looked kinda zen, being such a small focus. It looks hardly the worse for wear today, only the viola just starting to lose a bit of its firmness. The marigolds look as if they'd never been plucked and were growing in the garden right this minute. I love how tough those little flowers are!

Out in the back behind the garden, I have strange bits of greenery coming up out of the compost pile. I sure hope they're from the packet of bee-friendly mixed wildflowers I sprinkled over the soil a while back. That would be a great place for bees to feed, and for me to get the occasional cut flower from.

Gotta find the camera charging cord lost after a big reorganization, to put up some pictures.

Marc, can you cut those peppers down to their first set of true leaves? that way the roots will have a chance to develop without worrying about maintaining so much top growth. I did that with some of mine as an experiment and they started growing on both sides. They will be bushier than the ones I did not lop off.

Do they send up a stalk to regain their height? Otherwise, the first true leaves(the ones that haven't dropped off anyway) are only a few inches above the ground.

Find that plug and show us your flowers and garden(s).

I'm enjoying this overcast weather for a break from the hot sun. Maybe cut the peppers to the second true leaves if you don't want to cut to the first leaves. The new stems will be strong by the time the peppers start showing.

I'm enjoying the brief respite too. We were only in the mid-90's today. Supposed to be over 110 soon, I got told today. I spent the day weed-whacking up and down some hills at the home of one of the ladies I guardian/conserve for. I figure her house has a better chance of selling for a good price if it doesn't look crummy. Still exhausting, but I tried yesterday and could hardly do anything; it was well over 100 and just way too hot. Even sitting outside in the shade was dehydrating and really wearing. Today I came in and it took hours for my hands to stop trembling, but at least it was all doable if unpleasant.

Supposedly one more day in the 90's and then we're up into the 100's. Tomorrow morning I have to clean out our pond. I'm draining it and there is a very thick layer of algae and other gunk on the bottom to shovel out. Like most small residential ponds I've seen, it is an ugly smelly mess, but ponds used to be one of the vanity features that aspiring people liked, so of course we had to get one. I'd rather fill it in and use it as a planter.

I'll really be glad when all the nonsense about having a green lawn and a yard just so and being competitive with the neighbors about it is finally over and done. I probably won't live to see it, though. I've grown to appreciate the no-water lawns in California that just have woodchips or stone and a few planters or edgings as highlights to take care of rather than something that needs staff or on the other hand turns you into unpaid staff in your own home. Staff for a plant. Staff for your vanity. Ugh. Whatever.

Marc, A couple expensive homes in north Fresno have installed artificial grass in their designer front yards and it looks so weird. Too green. I think it would have looked better if they had just reduced the size of the real lawn and filled the rest with wood chips and flowers/flowering shrubs with drip lines.

I have become a fan of woodchips or stone with some planters for highlights, sanderson. Maybe you're right and that would be much better than whatever weird choice those guys made.

You know what else I recall seeing -- "lawns" that come in a variety of unnatural colors, but on purpose. Pink, yellow, blue, etc. It sounds so odd now, but I can see it becoming a wave of the future. Not sure how I feel about that. But once we've broken our addiction to the water-hungry, ever-fussy, chemically-regulated "natural" green lawn, I suppose we can open up the design prospects to pretty much anything we want.

Anyone near Wenatchee / Sleepy Hollow, or affected by the fire? The air quality must be awful.

Marc, I saw a brief snippet on the news where someone was spray painting their dead grass green. When we lived in Vallejo in 1976-78, there was a drought and there was water rationing. Someone had a cement front yard painted green. Yuck. All the rain water just flowed into the street gutters. I would rather have it be soaked up in site as much as possible with chips, or brick and sand. All of our brick work is on sand.

That was a trend with walkways for a while when I was a teenager. Weird looking and the paint was always peeling away, eventually leaving things looking like hell for years at a time.

sanderson wrote:Anyone near Wenatchee / Sleepy Hollow, or affected by the fire?  The air quality must be awful...

We've had members in the past from that area, but nobody current.   It's about 100 miles east of me on the other side of the Cascade Mtns.  When we have an extended period of bad weather, sometimes I'll head to Wenatchee looking for a dose of sunshine.  It's a big agricultural area, that produces a lot of stone fruit and warm season crops.

This early heat is something else.

The old adage of corn being "knee high by the Fourth of July" is irrelevant this year.  My corn is already over 4 feet!

In the past week,  my squashes have just exploded in size.  

It's a great year to be a veggie gardener in the PNW rainy zones.

boffer wrote:

sanderson wrote:Anyone near Wenatchee / Sleepy Hollow, or affected by the fire?  The air quality must be awful...

We've had members in the past from that area, but nobody current.   It's a big agricultural area, that produces a lot of stone fruit and warm season crops.

Home the orchards and fields aren't damaged.

[quote="sanderson"]

boffer wrote:

sanderson wrote:Anyone near Wenatchee / Sleepy Hollow, or affected by the fire?  The air quality must be awful...

We've had members in the past from that area, but nobody current.   It's a big agricultural area, that produces a lot of stone fruit and warm season crops.

Home the orchards and fields aren't damaged. Migrant workers move between CA, OR and WA as the crops ripen. They have already been sucker punched here, they don't need it up there.

Good point; I hadn't thought of that. I heard that some of the orchard warehouses have burned, but not anything about the orchards.

Those warehouses are almost as important as the orchards/fields. Roll in coolers, prepping machines, pallets, boxes, and bathrooms!

Grats on the good progress, boffer.

The heat seems to be getting my beans going nicely, both germination percentage and regular growing. A bunch in the garden I keep back home are getting oddly-shaped, discolored leaves, though. I hope that crop doesn't have too many problems. That's where I planted most of my dragon tongue beans, which are the ones I'm looking forward to the most.

My scarlet runner beans are growing well. One of them appeared to have thrown out a tendril that looks to have grown half a foot in a single night. I'm sure I'm mistaken, but that was a heck of a tendril from out of nowhere. I know they're big, and I was hoping they could help keep my other beans, planted all around them, from getting leaf scorch. They get that a lot around here.