Tennessee 2021 Garden

[applestar]

The sunflower, face planted in the mud somehow made me chuckle. I think it’s channeling your feelings, @Gary350

[Gary350]

After 2 days in the kitchen this sweet bell pepper is 99% Red color, its is time to eat it so I made & egg cheese sausage omelet with ½ of a Tabasco pepper sliced & diced for breakfast. I have enough red pepper for about 5 days then I hope to have another red pepper from the garden by then. 65° this morning I hope it is windy mud will dry up faster in 20 mph wind if it warms up to 80° or warmer. This new camera SUCKs it does not take good pics like the other camera did.

[Gary350]

We had 15 to 20 mph wind all day that was helpful to dry up mud. Before dark I planted 1 row of cauliflower & 1 row of Pak Choy both claim to be a 60 day crop. I was not careful with random seed spacing 4" to 7" apart & not careful with # of seeds in each hole 1 to 5. I know broccoli is no 60 day crop so I planted no broccoli but would like to plant broccoli more that the other plants. Wait & see what happens. Next year I stick to what I know I can grow.

No ripe Big Beef tomatoes yet. There are several ripe cherry tomatoes I am letting them fall off on the ground. I tied up the sweet bell peppers plants today & found 1 pepper starting to turn Red so I put it in the kitchen.

[Gary350]

This morning I planted 3 more rows. Romaine Lettuce & Broccoli about 70 plants in each 34 ft row. Also a 34 ft row of red swiss chard, red ace cabbage, savoy cabbage, mammoth red cabbage, green cabbage about 70 plants in this row. Seeds are too close together but maybe some won't germinate. Some holes have 2 to 3 seeds each. I would rather have too many too close than dead spaces in the garden.

This evening I moved the garlic bed to a different location where it will get more sun. I moved most of the Florida beach sand soil to the new location. Soil is 3" high this should keep garlic out of the winter swamp. We had record rain fall last winter/spring 43". We have enough of last years garlic left to plant 95 garlic cloves with the pointed end down. We still have a 6 month supply of garlic. A lot of garlic in the pantry dries up to nothing maybe I should be keeping it in the refrigerator.

I left all my tools in the garden, that is something I never do. Tomorrow I cover garlic cloves with soil.

[Gary350]

I picked 3 lbs 11 oz of good tomatoes before dark. Also picked about 5 lbs of bad tomatoes. I sprayed plants with copper sulfate & baking soda before dark. Plants still have lots of bugs.

[Gary350]

I am using a level to make sure sides are level so soil in the bed is flat and level 2" above spring rain water so onions don't set in water and rot.

May, I planted some bad grocery store yellow onions for seeds. Onions had rotted places so I planted them and they grew seed tops in 95° hot weather. A few months later was seed harvest.

I bought 2 pack of seeds, 100 walla walla & 100 yellow onion seeds. I planted about 1000 saved seeds in a spot 15" x 32"spot. 100 walla walla seeds in a 6"x32" spot. 100 yellow onions seeds in a 6"x32" spot. We will probably eat most of these as green onions.

I still need to shovel 2" of soil into the onion bed.

[Gary350]

I was in the garden 30 minutes after the sun came up trying to finish up a few things & pick up tools before storms arrive, it is already raining in Nashville TN. Moles have already tunneled under the garlic bed they made a 2" hump in the soil that I had to push down. I stood up the fallen sunflower and tied it to a metal pole 2 days ago it looks good I think it will live. Caster beans = mole beans are doing nothing to keep moles out of the garden, moles tunnel around the caster bean plants, LOL. I will have a very good harvest of caster beans to plant next year but from looking at moles tunnels I think if I circle the entire garden with caster beans 2 ft apart moles won't enter but caster beans grow 10 ft tall that is not good too much shade, moles win. Moles are not much of a problem I just don't like onions & garlic disappearing into mole tunnels. I put up my temporary fence dog is already making a path through 5 rows of seeds. I pushed garlic cloves deeper into the soil before rain gets here I don't want cloves floating to the top then getting upside down or in their side. I put wire screen on the garlic to keep cat from digging. This 65° weather is nicer than 95°. After thinking about it I think I did good to plant, lettuce, broccoli, cauliflower, 4 kinds of cabbage, we typically have 65° temperatures during the day until about Jan 1st so plants have 4 months to grow. First frost will kill bugs about Nov 1st. Bugs might eat all the plants before frost kills bugs. Wait & see. I need garden safe bug kill but not sure what that could be?

[Gary350]

We made the best ever garden pizza for dinner, each slice was slightly different, I got the slice with most of the red bell peppers. We used a whole Big Bertha RED sweet bell pepper, 2 Tabasco peppers, tomatoes, garlic, onion, Mexican cheese, Italian cheese, Dollar store Italian herbs, pepperonis & sausage. Red Bell peppers are getting ripe too slow next year I need to plant 8 Big Bertha sweet bell pepper plants so we will have a ripe RED pepper every day. RED has a much better flavor than Green. Tabasco peppers have the best flavor, yellow, orange, red color, RED is less spicy & much better flavor. Last year I planted Habanero peppers I ate a RED 1 with dinner it was not as hot as I expected and the flavor was very different. Next year I plant, 8 Big Bertha, 4 Tabasco, 4 Habanaro & extra space for 2 more different type peppers. Picture is what we have left of pizza. Me son came & got 8 lbs of tomatoes.

[Gary350]

We put all the red bell pepper on pizza yesterday so I have none to put in a breakfast omelet. I had pizza, coffee, & 1/4 of a 1 week old stale donut for breakfast. I went to the garden most of the tomatoes are rotten, I picked a few tomatoes that might make good pizza sauce in a few days if they don't rot in the kitchen first. Tomatoes need to set in the kitchen 3 days to get very ripe to have the correct flavor to make good, pizza sauce & good spaghetti sauce.

There were several rotten green bell peppers on the plants & nothing large enough to pick yet. I picked several multi color Tabasco peppers maybe some of these will turn red in the house quick as bell peppers do.

We are having very heavy dew every morning water is dripping off the plants like it rained. I continue to give plants calcium about every 3 days all this wet causes rot & BER. We usually have this very noticeable weather change every year about Aug 15 it is 10 days early this year, 62° this morning. Weather could still get dry as desert it sometimes does, dryer will be more gooder & less worser for the garden.

[Gary350]

What are these lines in the garden soil? 1000s of lines everywhere. I looks like something crawled the whole garden after dark, what ever it was is gone now?

Onion bed is finished. As much as I dislike beds this is the only way to plant onions March 1st with the garden covered with water. Candy onion & Walla Walla onions are $2.50 for a 1 lb bag = about 80 onion sets per lb. I hope planting earlier next year will produce larger onions. Bed is 24 ft long = 72 rows with 7 onions per row or 57 rows with 6 onions per row. 300 golf ball size onions will be good.

A limb broke off the sweet bell pepper plant, I picked up the green pepper & took it to the kitchen.

[applestar]

Oh now I’m intrigued! What ARE those lines? How wide are they?

My current guess is a small animal that is using some of the straight tracks as main runs and head in different directions at those junctions where multiple lines fan out. The critter cries-crosses in a pattern, looking for something.

Maybe these were shallow tunnels and they collapsed due to the heavy dew/moisture?

[greenstubbs]

What are these lines in the garden soil? 1000s of lines everywhere. I looks like something crawled the whole garden after dark, what ever it was is gone now?

Time for a game/trail cam or 2!

[Gary350]

I made sure the whole garden was raked smooth before dark. This morning I find the whole garden has many wiggly lines, some long an curved, some short, some big road maps, some little road maps. I did google search for wiggly lines in garden soil the only thing that comes up is Leaf miners on plant leaves. All these wiggly lines are not connected to other lines. The most interesting thing is how the lines come to a dead end, it looks like if a bug did this it returns in its own line to make more lines in different places. There are no other marks in the soil, no bird foot prints either. No holes in the soil where bugs or worms came out then returned. The only way a bug could make these lines with no other marks in the soil, bugs must have wings. Wiggly lines in the soil are not in the same location as yesterdays lines. What ever this is does not appear to be causing damage to plants. If it is a flying bug it seems to be only interested in the soil none of the lines go to plants. You can see a 43' string marking a potato row in some of the pictures. Width & depth of the lines appears to all be very near the same size.

I wish caster beans would hurry up and make seeds so I can cut them down. I grew caster beans 30 years ago I did not remember them being a 4 or 5 month crop.

[applestar]

Ah! These are much narrower than I thought. I see you are focused on them being made by some kind of bugs.

I’m seeing holes here and there, it seems like they might have dug out of the ground, then crawled for a bit, then like you said, they flew off.

What about Red Velvet Ant wasps? You said you have a lot of them, and they nest underground don’t they?

Other predatory wasps that lay eggs in grove might be another candidate. Do you ever see dark metallic blue wasps about 1 inch long or so?

[applestar]

I’ve an idea — put some of your aquariums over where they might come out tonight and see if you can capture them

[TomatoNut95]

I grew a castor bean plant years ago. Such a huge but beautiful plant!

Speaking of critters in the dirt, I found holes in my pea patch that lead to long tunnels. I thought mice or rats were digging these tunnels and plotted revenge. But one evening I saw the culprit, a massive female Cicada Killer wasp. Which is a coincidence because earlier that same day, I found a live cicada on my back porch. I relocated it to one of my basil plants and later I found the cicada dead. I suspect either the wasp got it, or, the cicada was already dying. Perhaps it got into the Ortho barrier on the backporch. I wish there were such thing as a reptile eliminator. I am so sick of skinks crawling on my porches and leaving poop on everything. It's disgusting.

[Gary350]

Cicada Killer wasp & red velvet ants have been gone about 2 weeks. They are hear about 4 weeks, I only saw 2 red velvet ants this year & several Cicada Killer wasp. Fish aquarium is in the garden but with tracks being random in several places & fish aquarium being chance of catching something might be low. Wait at see it might take several weeks to finally catch something.

I spent several hours digging up a flower bed it was full of broken, bricks, rocks, cement pieces. It was very hard to dig with all this trash in the soil. I am almost finished but I am tired & it will be dark in about 30 minutes. I am going to plant 150 Egyptian onion sets here.

Equinox is only 14 days away, days start getting shorter faster now. I hate it when it gets dark at 5pm.

[applestar]

Do you think it could be Southern Short-tailed Shrew?

…burrows occupy two different zone levels. One level being several centimetres beneath the ground or sometimes upon the ground, the other level somewhat deeper at around 40 – 60 centimetres below the surface. The two levels are joined at irregular intervals.

[Gary350]

Humidity has been so high every morning tomato plants were wet like it rained. I threw a hand full of baking soda at the tomato plants 1 by 1 each time a white cloud settled on the plants the plants turned white like it snowed. Apparently bugs did not like this they are gone. LOL..

It has not rained in about 3 days tomato plants are finally drying out. Today I cut off all the dead limbs & dead leaves that look like blight. I can't remember what rainbow called this infection TN plants get. I have trimmed tomato plants like this in the past it never seen to hurt them they continue to grow more tomatoes with very few leaves.

Tomato plants are loaded with green tomatoes. I picked about 2 or 3 lbs or ripe tomatoes. I also picked 2 sweet bell peppers and several 100 caster bean seeds.

[Gary350]

We are enjoying these sweet red bell peppers, I am making another omelet for breakfast, I wish I could grow red bell peppers all winter. Next year garden needs 20 Big Bertha sweet bell pepper plants we will save diced red peppers in the freezer for a whole year.

This morning garden has more of the strange lines in the soil this yellow pencil shows the size of the lines are about same diameter as the yellow pencil. This morning I found a line that goes in a long oval circle shape first one I have seen where a line returns back to itself. What ever is making these weird lines does not seem to be a problem for plants.

Tomato plants look strange with almost no leaves. No rain in the forecast for 7 days. This evening I will spray tomato plants with copper sulfate & baking soda again.

[Gary350]

I picked another lb or so of tomatoes today. Tomatoes I picked yesterday & day before that are rotting before they get ripe in the kitchen. Tomorrow I will put about 6 lbs of tomatoes outside to rot while we are gone camping for 3 days I don't want them rotting in the kitchen with no one here. 1000s of volunteer tomato plants are coming up in the garden they are almost as bad as weeds & grass. I need to stop dropping bad tomatoes on the ground each tomato has about 100 seeds

My 150 Egyptian walking onion sets arrived today. I pulled the set clusters apart and counted 417 sets. No time to plant these until Monday.

[Gary350]

Nothing much going on in the garden. There appears to be about 10 lbs of tomatoes that need to be picked. Cold weather plants are starting to come up. Ants work so had to build a home I am being very careful not to disturb them.

[Gary350]

Today's tomato harvest is 9 lbs 10 oz of cherry tomatoes & 12 lbs 9 oz of Big Bertha tomatoes. Big Bertha are picked early and several are split from too much rain a week ago. Bugs are not totally gone yet or maybe new bugs have hatched. Cherry tomatoes are having NO bug problems like Big Bertha & not many split tomatoes anymore.

[Gary350]

2 sweet peppers had to be diced today they are starting to shrivel up like a raisin. 1 pepper was almost totally red the other was still green.

Some of the yellow Tabasco peppers setting in the kitchen for 4 days turned red. I will diced & save seeds from the red color peppers.

[TomatoNut95]

Gary, where did you get those big bags of baking soda, I've never seem any that big! I wonder if baking soda would deter the nasty miner flies that are getting into the pea leaves. Also the fire ants that are sucking out the okra buds.

[Gary350]

Gary, where did you get those big bags of baking soda, I've never seem any that big! I wonder if baking soda would deter the nasty miner flies that are getting into the pea leaves. Also the fire ants that are sucking out the okra buds.

Wife bought 3 bags of baking soda online from Walmart free shipping. Each bag is 5 lbs, total price was $12 and it arrived at our house in 3 days. Wife buys everything she can online it always costs less than driving to the store & buying it there. Only thing you can't buy online is food that needs to be refrigerated.

[TomatoNut95]

Gary, where did you get those big bags of baking soda, I've never seem any that big! I wonder if baking soda would deter the nasty miner flies that are getting into the pea leaves. Also the fire ants that are sucking out the okra buds.

Wife bought 3 bags of baking soda online from Walmart free shipping. Each bag is 5 lbs, total price was $12 and it arrived at our house in 3 days. Wife buys everything she can online it always costs less than driving to the store & buying it there. Only thing you can't buy online is food that needs to be refrigerated.

My Wal-Mart lies a lot and claims stuff is out of stock online. Then family member finds it no problem in store. Many items on my Wal-Mart says pick up only and won't mail it. Stuff they used to mail changed and won't mail anymore. Chips, I think is one of the items they stopped shipping.

[Gary350]

I needed to water the winter crops, broccoli, lettuce, cauliflower, cabbage, mother nature is no help I don't think it has rained since the 15" flash flood. I have a forest of volunteer tomato plants coming up in several places, I need to stop dropping bad tomatoes in the garden. Chick weed is coming up everywhere so far plants are small. I planted 5 bean seeds to see if they all grow & all 5 hatched. Bugs ate 3½ bean plants, the ½ plants it still trying to grow. I like hatched better than germinate + it is easier to type. I finished planting the 417 Egyptian Walking onions today & someone how it was a exact fit for the bed I made near the windows. I found a group of corn plants growing in 1 spot so I dug them up, an ear of corn too small to keep grew, that is quick easy way to grow 100 corn plants. I picked 2 more lbs of tomatoes.

[Gary350]

Husband & Wife from India drove 30 miles to get another 29 lbs of tomatoes. They said, we tried other peoples tomatoes, your tomatoes taste best, message us when you have more. I gave them about 50 Tabasco peppers. I also gave them a white sweet potato so they can make their own slips to plant next year. I gave them several leaves from the sweet potato plants to cook like spinach.

Garden is very dry and tomatoes are splitting at the top. Not sure what is causing this?

I picked 1 sweet bell pepper today.

[Gary350]

Today I bottled Raspberry wine it is 2 months old. Wow it tastes so good already I am going to start drinking it tonight. Wine usually needs to age for 1 year or more but not this. I have 32 bottles of good wine. This is a very full body wine nothing like $6 wine you buy at the store this is more like $25 to $30 per bottle if you buy factory made wine. I picked 15 gallons of Raspberries from my own plants to make this wine. I have been improving this recipe for 25 years this is the best so far. I added enough extra sugar to get 13% alcohol. This yeast will ferment down to .990 on the hydrometer but this year I stopped fermentation early at 1.000 SG. This is Cabernet Sauvignon recipe but 13% alcohol makes it Bosso style wine.

[Gary350]

Today I removed all the split tomatoes from the tomato plants & threw them away. I picked most of the other tomatoes early before they split. 12 lbs of tomatoes should be ripe in several more days. No blossoms on the plants so this may be the end of tomatoes. There are about 15 tomatoes still on the plant that were still mostly green color.

I planted white color sweet potatoes in 3 large 10 gallon pots on the patio about May just for the nice looking plants. Tomorrow I move pots to a sunny place leaves are excellent to eat like spinach & lettuce. We still might have big sweet potatoes I can feel several small potatoes in the potting soil. Even if we only get small potatoes we will have seed potatoes to plant next year.

[Gary350]

Boc Choy is doing best maybe I should have planted 2 rows. There should be 75 plants in this row if all the seeds grow. Broccoli & cauliflower are coming up. Lettuce & cabbage are slow.

Dog killed a big mouse or small rat not sure which? I wish dog would leave animals alone I don't think they a problem in the garden or the yard.

Garlic is not growing I forgot to keep it in the refrigerator 3 months before planting it.

[Gary350]

All morning weather report keeps says, we are going to get an unreal 3.5" of rain very quick. I keep thinking, yea right, I believe it when it happens. Here it is, it rain so hard & it is so loud, wife said it is too loud it hurts my ears, I had to remove my hearing aids it is too loud. Tomatoes don't stand a change now they were just starting to get better and stop splitting open with too much water. No lightning.

[Gary350]

My volunteer winter potato crop has already started there are volunteer plants coming up in several places. Soon as mud is gone I can transplant to the potato row I already have laid out.

There is new mole activity in several places yard & garden, I don't know how moles do not drown when the entire yards & garden are under several inches of water.

[Gary350]

Its not easy doing anything is quick sand type mud, I put down 2 long boards to walk on to pick 2 sweet bell peppers. Wife wants peppers for dinner. Only 1 plant has 4 peppers, the other 3 plants have nothing but 1 plant has blossoms so maybe it will have peppers in another month. Pepper plants do much better in Oct cooler weather but maybe not if we keep getting all this rain.

I see 10 lbs of tomatoes floating in a bucket of water, after tossing out rotten tomatoes it looks like there might be 5 lbs of tomatoes left.

I want to move the 10 gallon sweet potato pots to the south side of garden to get full sun but 10 gallons of water & soil is 10 x 8 = 80 lbs, too heavy to move, maybe in a few more days it will weigh less.

[Vanisle_BC]

Hey Gary you're lucky. Up here a pot of 10 real gallons weighs 100 pounds.

[imafan26]

Nice peppers Gary. It looks like a pepper weevil made a hole in one of them.

[Gary350]

Hey Gary you're lucky. Up here a pot of 10 real gallons weighs 100 pounds.

Your right, Imperial gallons are larger than US gallons. The pots were marked 10 gallons when we bought them but who knows what country they were made, I don't often look to see where it was made. When we bought these pots I told wife they look larger than 10 gallons, look see if there is a tag on the display shelf for 12 or 15 gallons. Cash register rang up as 10 gallons. I have about 20 empty 5 gallon buckets that are 3 different sizes, the larger size bucket measure 5½ US gallons when filled up to the very top. Part of the reason for leaving air space in a closed container is, a closed container will bust open when dropped on the floor but air space allows air to compress so it is much harder to split the container open when dropped. Now you make me wonder what size these 10 gallon pots really are I might measure them to see.

We had a very good garden dinner this evening, fried onions, fried red sweet bell peppers, fried sausage, corn and enough left over for breakfast. This type sausage is very good.

I like corn better than potatoes, wife likes potatoes better than corn. Corn is easier to grow than potatoes but getting ride of old corn stalks is more work than digging up potatoes.

[Gary350]

Soil is soft mud nothing stands up on its own now. It rained all night & it is still raining. Weather is strange last week 61° felt like 70° but today 63° feels like 50°. I put on my jacket & hat. I think plants will be ok laying on their side. There is no way I can walked in deep mud to prop plants up with, boards, stakes, & ropes. I hope trees don't start falling over that happens sometimes.

[Gary350]

It is good caster bean plants have fallen over now I can reach the seeds. Several plants were too tall to reach seeds standing on a step ladder. Cucklebur type seeds are wet and mushy I know for a fact seeds will not germinate wet but too much wet too long will sometimes kill the seeds. 35 years ago I learned caster bean seeds will not germinate in unnatural conditions. They will not germinate in flower pots. They will not germinate if soil gets too much shade. They will not germinate if it is not 80° full sun all day. Seeds germinate easy in 7 days in warm full sun weather in yard & garden. When we lived at the other house about 1983 I tilled soil on both sides of the driveway then planted caster beans 170 ft all the way to the house, wow those were beautiful plants. When plants were tall it was like driving through a forest when I came home from work. If I can harvest enough seeds Sept & Oct I can plant our driveway with caster bean plants next year maybe about June 1st will be warm enough for seeds to germ.