(08-30-2023, 02:31 PM)Chiefsmom Wrote: I did get lucky last week, and one of our customers invited me to pick blueberries for free, and he only lives a few miles from our house. Hubby got bored with that quick, but I still froze up about 5 quarts. And, the man is wanting to sell some of his plants! I will have to "fix" the dirt in a few spots for them, as we are mostly clay.
When I tried to sprout some pampas grass this year, none of it sprouted in the container I was trying to sprout it in, but something else did. I thought "huh. I thought they sterilized this dirt, so where did that come from?" I decided to let it grow, since the pampas grass was a bust, and I wanted to find out what it is.
A couple of weeks ago, when my son and his family were in for a visit, he saw it and said "when did you start growing blueberries?" I've never seen a blueberry bush, and had no idea that's what it was - if that's what it is. My son said it looks an awful lot like a blueberry bush he has on his place, but I reckon only time will tell.
We're pretty clay-ey around here, too, and I have no idea what kind of dirt to pop it into in the ground, so it's still living in a container. Don't know what kind of light it want's, either, so I don't even know where to try to prep some ground for it.
Nearly all of the tomatoes are out of the garden now. I think there are just 4 left out there, either green or still turning. Nearly all if the beans are out, too, and there wasn't enough of them to make a single meal. Corn is ridiculous - I'll post some pictures if I ever get over the shame of it all.
Peppers are doing a bit better, but not a lot. The bell peppers look like real peppers, and have the right size to them, but so far there are only two - and a couple more developing. The Dragon Cayennes are fairing better. There are 7 or 8 to a plant, two have ripened so far and a couple more are turning now. They're about 5 inches long, as big around as a pinky finger, and hot as the dickens.
Roofers came by last week, and removed the gutter guards and tossed them to the ground. In the process, they broke the top out of one of my basil plants, but I reckon it'll branch out more now, so nothing lost. Sage is doing well - might have a bush or two in a tear or two. It grows slow, and grows long - lives 30 years or so. Same for the rosemary. It's not as bushed out as the last plant was by this time, but it still has time, as it lives 30 years or so, too.
The tobacco is doing better than last year, but still needs to be staked up to avoid falling over. Never knew any kind of tobacco that was a creeper, viney plant, but this seems to be.It's pushing out seed like nobody's business. One plant, that I'[ve harvested all the seed pods from, got pissed off and is blooming all over again - it's like it's trying to tell me "take that! You'll never get all the seeds... NEVER!". Curing is going better than last year, too. I'm learning what it takes to make it brown instead of curing out green. Humidity seems to have a lot to do with it, which I guess is why none of the tobacco barns around here were ever sealed tight, but had gaps between all of the boards in the walls to allow humid air to circulate among the curing tobacco. I'll not know how it effects the taste until a few months from now. Just curing the dirt leaves at the moment, not hanging whole plants to cure yet.
The outdoor hemp is starting to bloom. it started about a month early according to my calculations. It probably needed a sunnier place to grow - that walnut tree is throwing too much shade on it I think. The most developed on is a male, so I'm eyeballing it for twine production - won't be getting any seed off of it. The other three are still too young to sex out yet.
Onions died out this spring - so I thought. One of them bloomed, but never went to seed. I popped 3 into the dirt last year, 8 came back this year, then all died long before harvest time. Much to my surprise, one of them seems to have been pretty game, as it's sending up new blades now.
That's it for this update. Time to go make a tomato sandwich out of what's left of the tomatoes. They're so tiny that it takes a whole tomato to make one sandwich. I probably need to work that dirt over this winter to get it into shape for growing stuff. It didn't do it's job this year.
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