Garden and Yard Updates 7-20-14

Here are pictures of what is happening in my garden and yard.

The Champion radishes I planted Thursday are starting to germinate.

Little Freckles Lettuce planted the same day is starting to germinate also.

The strawberry plants are are going to survive the transplant are growing now.

This group has a lot of runners.  I am happy to see them.  On some of the runners I put dirt over the stem, just behind the new plant, so the runner will stay in place and the new plant will root.

I didn't put cages around my tomatoes, so you have to look around in the plants.  I found a few Sun Sugar tomatoes today.  Sun Sugar are the sweetest tomatoes I have ever eaten.

More are in the tomato plant jungle.

Even more hiding.

More on the last side.  It is too bad that Sun Sugar tomatoes are a hybrid.

 This fatty is heading to his summer home.

Under this giant grapevine is the summer home.  It is cool, big, and comes with food.  The baby quail have a hard time getting up over the cement block.

Lots of orange bell peppers in the making.  I picked off all of the flowers until the plants got bigger this year.

Here they are from the other side of the plant.

These are Red Hot Cherry.  One of Hubby's choices.  He likes hot peppers.  There are a few round green balls in there.

Another hot pepper he chose.  These are Mucho Nacho Jalapeno peppers.  These are hard to see too.  Mostly they are in the center.

My Soapwort is starting to bloom.  I will have to make some soap from it.  I looked on-line for directions and it looks easy enough to do.

This is the bed where the squirrel ate all of the Grape Hyacinthe.  All of the Morning Glories growing here are seeds that dropped last year.

If the middle of the Morning Glories is a We Be Little pumpkin plant.  I didn't know flowers would be coming up when I planted the pumpkin there.

This is the view out of my kitchen window.  I enjoy doing dishes when I can look out at my view.  This is slightly to the left.

Looking almost straight out the kitchen window.

Looking slightly to the right out the kitchen window.

Lettuce Core and Basil Start Update

This is the lettuce core 7-20-14.  This is 5 1/2 days after it was cut and put into water.

Another view up closer 7-20-14

This was 7-16-14.  This was a little less than 48 hours after putting it in water.  I threw the other core into the compost bucket the next morning.  I finally remembered that lettuce grows from the center and the little core was missing the top of it, so it would never grow.

It was cut an put into water the evening of 7-14-14

This was the basil on 7-15-14

Finally got it planted on 7-18-14.  I forgot to take a picture of the roots, but they had grow quite a bit more.

Planted Vegetables Today

I felt like planting in my garden today since I didn't plant in the spring like I should have.  I looked at The Old Farmer's Almanac and it said that today was a good day for planting root crops.  I planted beets, turnips, and radishes.
Then I decided what-the-heck, I going to plant some above ground crops too.  I planted lettuce, spinach, zucchini, and some greens from Bangladesh.  I think everything will be fine if we don't have an early frost.
The average first frost is September 10 and nothing I planted needs over 60 days to germinate and harvest.

Garden Update 7-11 through 7-15-14

 The Yukon Gold potato plants are dying fast.

The front potatoes are Russet Norkadah and the back potatoes are All Blue.  Just the right side of this bed has dying potatoes.

Peaches are starting to ripen.

More peaches.
I haven't seen many birds around I wonder if the "B Gon" products are keeping them away or if it is just too hot.

The wind we had a few days ago blew a lot more apples off of the tree.  Here is one a squirrel brought next to the nice damp soil under the faucet and ate. I found it there yesterday morning.  This morning it is completely gone.

These are Moon Flower plants at my front door at 8:30 p.m on 7/11.  They are starting to open.

Here they are at 8:30 a.m. on 7/12 before they close for the day.  Sometimes a bee will go inside the flower and it will close.  The bee is stuck there until it gets dark.  The flowers are so thin that you can see the bee buzzing around inside.

Our honey bees died last year, so Hubby cleaned out the hive and found out that moths were the problem.  He stacked the hive pieces up in the corner where our junk is and this year bees made themselves a new home in there.

 He is taking everything apart to find the queen and the sections the bees are using.

Here he is moving them to a new location.

My darling little helper decided to help her grandpa, she got snow overalls, coat, and gloves that would protect her so she could be a beekeeper too.  She went to where she could see the bees and grandpa around the side of the house and got scared, because she had nothing to cover her face.  How sweet of her to give it a try even though she looks like she is going to die of heat.

I have bought fresh basil from the store and tried to root a piece of it many times in the past and it hasn't worked.  Last week I bought fresh basil and the package wasn't cold like it usually it.  The store I went to had the herbs hanging above the produce.  I put one of the pieces in a vase and as you can see it has rooted.  I am now thinking that the other one I tried were refrigerated and that made them not grow. 7-14-14

The roots have grown a lot in one day.  7-15-14

 Here it is in the vase.  I currently sits in the kitchen window.  I will get it into soil soon. 7-14-14

We made salad last night and decided to experiment with two of the lettuce bunches.  We cut off the bottom pieces and put them in water to see if they would root.

 Here is the side view.  I let you know what happens.

Update:  I am amazed at how fast this is growing.  It was cut and put in water 7-14 and this is it in less than 48 hours later.

I saw on Pinterest a watermelon cut into sticks, so I decided to try it.  This is our third watermelon now cut this way.  It gets eaten a lot faster cut into sticks.

These sticks are very kid friendly.  You still get wedges on the outside edge, but they are easier for the kids to eat too.  I don't think I will ever cut a watermelon any other way now.  This is not from my garden.  This is a personal sized watermelon from the 99 cent only store.  So is the lettuce.

More Yard and Garden Pictures

The carrot seeds are all formed now and ready to bag.

A close up of the largest bunch of seeds.

As I was putting the bag around the seeds the stocks broke off.  There are a lot of ants in the ground at the stock.  They must have been eating the carrots.  There are some garlic stalks that are brown next to the carrots.  These were ones I didn't see last year and they grew.  One got caught in the clip when bagging the carrot seeds so decided it was time to pull them all up.

This is what the carrot stocks looked like where they broke off.  There are 3 ants on there, but you probably can't see them.

Here is the garlic that was growing next to the carrots.

This bed of garlic I planted in the spring never flowered and they are dying.  This is the first time I have planted garlic in the spring, but I wanted the garlic and you can only buy it at nurseries in the spring, so I gave it a try.

Here is what I pulled up.  It is single round balls.  Cloves didn't form.  I will use some and save some to plant the end of next month and see what happens.

What strawberries survived are growing good.  My little Easter Bunny helper is so good at watering now that she turns on the water, waters, and turns off the water without me going out to help her.

Here are 4 tomato plants growing as volunteers.  I planted the rhubarb plant there and  tomato seeds from 2 years ago have taken over.

Only one yellow leaf from the rhubarb plant is left in the center of the tomatoes.

Several Elderberry plant are growing after we pulled what we saw out of the ground earlier this year.

Here is the other one that didn't get dug out yet.  It has lots of flowers and the birds will soon have food.

The few peaches we have are looking good.  To bad they are at the top of the tree.  We will net them soon and hopefully the birds don't get them all.

A few more peaches.

The grapes are growing good.

These cups are working great for trapping the aphids.  They are so thickly covered that I need to make new ones.  It was nice looking for grapes and not getting a million aphids in my face this year.

These three Yukon Gold potato plants have not grown very well.  They just don't grow as all well as all the others do.  We will be digging them up in another week or two.

I am standing just in front of the peach tree.  This is where the raspberries used to be until it became too shady in the afternoon.  I moved the raspberries and have been working on putting down plastic and gravel to eliminate another cat bathroom area.  One yard of gravel down and I need about 1/2 yard more and I will be done.