Category: Problems

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12/21/2022 solstice chill

My Persian friends celebrate Yaldā today, a holiday for the longest, darkest night of the year. Appropriately, tonight the temperature is plunging from the 40s F into the teens and single digits and we won’t unfreeze until probably Sunday!

No insulating blanket of snow is forecast (maybe just a few light flurries), so I moved a bunch of leaves from the patio onto the herb bed to especially protect my oregano and chives, which had a very rough time last winter. I put extra greenhouse plastic over it.
The finished covering.
I tucked the extra plastic around our cactus planter with more leaves, and piled some leaves on the containers with native plant seedlings in them. I suspect they will be fine but containers are not as protected as they would naturally be on the ground.
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12/13/2022 greenhouse survives a little storm!

We got 2.5” rain in our gauge yesterday from an overnight thunderstorm! Mesonet had 1.8” at airport in Norman and maximum wind of 35 mph. so we were very pleased to see the greenhouse plastic and clothespins survived intact! Briar stands next to it. Waiting for her walkies.
When we tucked in the trimmed plastic, we poked the corners in so water could drain into the bed. This is the corner Briar was standing by.
The next corner drain looks good too.
The corner back by other beds (behind where Briar stood in first picture) also has no standing water.
And the view from that back corner again looks great! No clothespins lost, the plastic sheeting tidy and crisp over the metal hoops, and minimal puddling of water on the sheeting edges!
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10/24/2022 greens survived one night

We were worried the front yard earwigs would eat them all up, but the various greens we transplanted from backyard pots survived the night and seem happy with an inch of rain overnight into this morning! the metal raised bed is surrounded by scattered leaves and individual plant species and varieties are marked by small white metal signs. There’s some bluish bok choy in the front, a more yellow green lettuce in the middle, and frilly scotch blue curled kale in the back next to a tall Fordham giant Swiss chard. Smaller plants are scattered nearby but I’ve forgottten which ones.
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09/22/2022 afternoon after work

The backyard sunflowers are quite magnificent at this point.
I don’t see any in this picture, but I saw several bumblebees up on the flowers.
The Salvia azurea are really doing well.
I have a new bunch of Indiangrass sprouting and blooming!
The little bluestem is blooming too. This clump has gotten quite happy in its second or third year now.
Jeanne, Abby, and Mom have been kindly helping me over text to confirm my accidental imports of non native and invasive King Ranch bluestem or “KR grass”. As they bloom and get identified, I have been pulling them.
I’m also continuing to work on pulling the annual, invasive Commelina communis. Unlike the native perennial dayflower, its roots are very shallow.
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09/06/2022

The rainbow garden in the morning. Only orange not blooming.
Dinner with garden onions in the quiche and up in the corner, a watermelon salad.
Here’s a close up of the watermelon salad. The feta cheese and balsamic vinegar really helps the bland watermelon. I really hope the next moon and stars actually gets riper.
Tragedy strikes. The scurf-pea got chopped off at the stem. I assume it is too small yet to come back from that.
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08/20/2022 fruit tree check-in and pruning

I was going to trim the granny Smith back carefully to see if any life remained in the tree, but it broke right off at the base, completely dry, in my hands. So that one’s a goner. I’m not sure if it was too much water or too much heat. I don’t think it was too little water, as the soaker hose leaks prodigiously near here.
The north star pie cherry died this year and I checked the trunk- no green left. I think it was irregular watering (boo, me) and heat.
The surecrop pie cherry lost all its leaves a bit later, but I found a bit of green as I pruned back its branches. I think this winter we will move it to where the Granny Smith apple was, and then replace the soil in the corten planters and do native calcareous barrens flowers there instead.
Paula found a magnificent preying mantis and it helped us look at clouds in hope of rain.
We pruned the remaining apple and pear trees back. The first summer ones are supposed to be down to three short branches, so it’s especially sparse looking. This is supposed to help them stay small. The two remaining second-summer ones are trimmed back but more branches left in place. They’ll all get pruned again in the winter for structure and shape.
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08/13/2022 harsh sun

Paula noticed some of the baby Coryphantha sulcata were possibly getting sunscald, because they were turning a bit brown on the tips. She has cleverly shaded them with thin coffee filters that let some light in. They seem to be happier now. Presumably this better imitates where a baby cactus might grow up in the wild.
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08/14/2022 fermenting slimy seeds

I did some reading and it seems like we should actually be fermenting the canteloupe seeds, so I threw out the others (which were crunchy with dried goo/slime). Here’s the seeds from today’s snack.
White currant tomato seeds looked pretty fermenty in the cupboard today so I rinsed them in the strainer and plopped them onto a paper towel. We set the paper towel by an air vent. This has worked for these seeds in the past, as this year’s plant is from harvested seeds.
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08/14/2022 straw bale potatoes

We lifted and sorted through our two straw bales of potatoes since the leaves were all eaten off by blister beetles. Upon moving the bales, we found eight bess beetles…
One fast isopod…
A second fast isopod…
Three baby house mice…
And one click beetle. This brings us to a total of 14 photographed animals plus a whole nest of ants and a small earwig that got away.
Compare this to our glorious harvest: ten potatoes from two bales. Paula is researching where we went wrong. I feel like maybe we should just go back to growing them in soil. (These experiments were my idea so I’m not blaming anyone else.). At least this year’s harvest is safer than last year’s crop of black widow spiders??