jennycatar's Blog

Rain finally
Aug 18, 2007 | 7:38 PM PST
Tags: rain , heat

About 20 minutes or so after I hung sheets and towels out on the clothes line it started rumbling. Of course lol, because normally we're at my in-laws all day on Saturdays and Sundays, so normally I wouldn't be hanging laundry out on a weekend. So in came the still wet stuff to go in the dryer. And just in time too. About 10 minutes or so after I got them in it started raining. Lightly at first, but it turned into a hard downpour, lots of thunder and lightning, which used to scare the bejeezus out me. Thankfully as long as I don't see the lightning, it doesn't scare me. 

It rained for a good couple hours, tapering off at the last half hour or so to a nice gentle rain. Enough to leave a nice reserve in the pool, so I didn't have to water the tomatoes this evening! Hooray!

Unfortunately it did NOTHING to cool things off. If anything it added to the humidity levels after the rain was done making it feel hotter. Thankfully though it's finally dropped from the 106 temps we averaged last week to the high 90s. Hopefully the first couple weeks of September it'll drop to the mid 80s and I'll actually be able to deal with being outside for more than 5 minutes at a time. 

Hello Me
Aug 16, 2007 | 11:23 AM PST

Well, I’m a little late in starting a gardening blog, especially since this recent heat wave has pretty much decimated most of my plants. The only things really thriving are my tomato plants, which have put out another set of blossoms. My hyacinth bean vine is putting up a brave front, trying to survive but what the grasshoppers from hell haven’t destroyed already the heat is trying very hard to kill. My tarragon is doing ok too.

This is my first year doing veggies in Arkansas. I’ve only lived here for just over 2 years now. My first summer here I was so overwhelmed by the heat that I didn’t plant a single thing. My second year I planted a flower pot variety sunflower, which did well, my mother-in-law bought me a clematis, which didn’t bloom, but did ok until the worst of the heat. Later on when plants went on clearance I bought a white vinca with a pretty hot pink center. Turns out that vinca was food for the hummingbirds I didn’t know were visiting lol.

This year I decided to start veggies. I went small, since I’m in a small apartment and everything was going to have to be in containers. I got a bunch of 2-5 gallon frosting buckets for free from the WalMart bakery, washed them up well and filled them with potting mix. Bought a small kid’s wading pool to put the buckets in to help prevent water loss, and planted tomatoes, green beans and lemon cucumbers. The ‘regular’ cucumbers I planted came from saved seed and didn’t sprout. Later I planted lettuce and radishes in window box planters, and dill, tarragon, cilantro, parsley and chives in smaller flower pots. I’ve also got another vinca, a geranium and a petunia plant I put in sand buckets, the hyacinth bean vine and a coreopsis that a neighbor gave me. Everything did really well until the heat.

The other day I was walking past the ‘pool’ garden on my way back from hanging laundry out and found three huge ugly green caterpillars on my grape tomato. I scraped them off (icky) and stomped them, but they’d eaten the top foot or so off the plant. Hopefully they’ll still do ok, but this was a plant sprouted from the seeds of a tomato I used in a pasta salad back on Mother’s Day. My boyfriend’s grandmother decided to see if it would grow. I didn’t much expect it to do anything, but it’s got blossoms on it, so I may see a few little fruits.

My plan is to pull up the dead cucumbers and green beans and move those buckets out of the pool for now. I figure this will give the tomato plants more access to the water in the pool. I’m also going to plant peas when it starts to cool down again.

I’m not sure what next year will bring for me, we’re hoping to move out of this tiny one bedroom apartment into either a two-four bedroom house or a larger apartment. I’m not sure exactly how much space I”ll have. But my mother-in-law is planning to put in a raised garden bed for veggies, and since she can’t touch the fuzzy leaved plants (they make her break out big time) I’m going to be helping her over there. We’re also going to build some self watering containers … sort of home-made Earth Boxes … and we’re getting a couple trash cans to start compost piles in. Plenty of access to both fresh and aged cow manure, as the people who live in back of her raise cows, so we should have a good garden next year too.