Cotton update

You may recall that I'm experimenting with cotton this year. I ordered an envelope of Mississippi Brown cotton seeds and in that envelope was one seed that was more of a greenish hue. I planted it separate from the brown seeds and it sprouted first. Now it's taken the lead again, even though all 4 of the plants are the same size, and produced not one but TWO cotton bolls. I'm the proudest Momma ever and anxious to see how long it takes before I get beautiful puffs of naturally colored cotton. {sigh}

Aren't they lovely?

Saving seeds - calendula officinalis

A basic right we all have as humans is to save seeds from the plants we grow in order to plant and reproduce, whether it be flowers, vegetables, fruits - whatever. Some big greedy companies would like to take those rights away, patenting seeds that God created as their own. I think it's BS and would like to post some pictures to help others learn how to save their own seeds. I have alot to learn about seed saving and look to others for assistance, so in return I want to post what I have learned in hopes that these blogs help others learn as well.

Calendula officinalis is also know as Pot Marigold, not to be mistaken with the Marigold of the Tagetes genus that most of us are familiar with. Commonly called Calendula, mine started out looking like this:

Here is what my flowers look like as they start to dry. The out shell that protects the seeds and holds them in is starting to dry but the interior seeds are still green. I left this flower on the stalk longer so the seeds can dry naturally, taking in all of the nutrients they need from the plant before they are brown and ready for harvesting.

These seeds are ready - see how the outer shell is opening up to release the seeds?

Parts of the flower after you cut it off and bring it over for harvesting seeds. The outer shell parts stay a lighter brown than the seeds so you can tell them apart. The part doesn't need to be saved. The inside dried stamen parts don't need to be saved either. You can winnow them away if you don't like to save them with your seed. I don't think it hurts if you do, just gives a dirty appearance if you give the seeds away as gifts.

To harvest the seeds, you can crumble the entire flowerhead or run your fingers roughly across the top of the seeds to loosen them. They'll fall off and you will see these seeds are curled up and brown. This is what you want to save.

Here is the outer shell, empty of the seeds and inner portions that previously existed. If some of the outer portions fall off with the seed, you can easily pick them out. Be sure to dry your seeds for another 2 weeks or so to ensure they are completely dry before packaging them. The most critical step is to LABEL your seeds - the name, type, month and year you harvested. You can get free seed envelopes here - just print them, cut them and fold them together with tape or glue.

Saving you're own seeds is rewarding and satisfying. And if you save your own seeds and plant them out each year, after 3 years they are adapted to your specific climate which makes them that much hardier for you. Enjoy!

Tomatoes & yummies

Last Friday I grabbed my harvest basket and went out back to see what tomatoes were ready for pickin'. I found a few Amish Paste, a load of Sungellas, a couple of Costoluto Genovese (1st time growing), and a bunch of Ropreco Paste. The Roprecos plant is so dense that all my tomatoes on that plant grew on the bottom all the way in the back, hidden by heavy foliage. I had to get on my hands and knees, lift the bottom of the plant with one hand and snatch tomatoes with the other, much like I imagine lifting a hen to steal eggs. It was quite amusing. But then again, I amuse easily, so...

Most of my Sausage tomatoes came up with Blossom End Rot. Conflicting reports say it is either lack of magnesium, lack of calcium or inconsistent watering. So to remedy I pulverized eggshells, mixed in epsom salt and put it all in some water to water those two. Oddly, none of my other plants had BER to this extent. In fact, all of my other plants are doing fine except for these two, save one tomato I found on the Amish Paste with BER. The rest of my maters are beautiful.

Recently I found a new recipe that bf actually agreed to try. It's simple and easy and it turned out really, really good so I'll share it here with you. It's called Squash Parmesan.

2 large tomatoes in 1/2" slices

2 crookneck squash in 1/2" round slices

1/2 cup fresh grated parmesan cheese

2 Tablespoons dried oregano

2 Tablespoons melted butter

Layer the first layer of tomato slices and then the first layer of crookneck slices in an 8x8 casserole dish. Sprinkle with half of the cheese and half of the oregano. Make a second layer of tomatoes and crooknecks and top with the rest of the cheese and oregano. Drizzle the butter over the top and bake covered for 30 minutes at 350 degrees. (Note: My tomatoes and squash put off alot of liquid and I would cut the butter by half of eliminate it altogether - maybe just butter the edges to keep it from sticking.)

Garden doings

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This is my first tomatillo. It is finally growing, gathering size and momentum. I bought this tomatillo in a 6 pack at my local OSH. Since I hadn't grown nor cooked with them before, the 6pack was for my bf's mother but I decided to keep two of them for myself. Mine went in the ground, hers went in to pots. Mine grew bushy and green, hers grew leggy. Hers produced tomatillos way before mine, mine liked to stay flowery and pretty, which is nice but hey, not what I wanted. Over the weekend, her tomatillo grew so big it busted out of its paper shell and I'm waiting for mine to fill this one out. I noticed I have several others just now starting their growing process. Patience my dear.... paaaatience!




My pumpkin patch is doing ok. Why just ok when it looks so beautiful and in bloom? I had one female flower and the fruit withered and went yellow before it got bigger than a copper penny. All of these wonderful blooms are male.





My cotton plants. This is how much they've grown since my my update on July 6th.









Costoluto Genovese tomatoes. This is my first year growing them and they are quite yummy. The other day I made a new recipe using my crookneck squash and for my tomatoes, I used half Cost Geno's and half Odoriko's and it was fabulous. Great flavor!








This is the homemade hummingbird feeder ant deterant my bf fabricated for me. The hole goes through the cap and is SEALED (very important) with adhesive or whatever waterproof material you have. The wire was wound at the bottom of the cap to keeping it from tipping too far over and then the cap was filled with water. The hook below the cap (not shown here) is where my hummer feeder goes. The ants won't cross the water to get to the feeder hence my sugarwater is ant free. Note: I don't know about YOUR ants but MY ants are persistant! Some sacrificed their lives and drown in the cap of water while other live ants crossed the floating bodies to get to the other side. You must keep your cap full and dead-ant free as well.

Strange..

Strange weather brings strange emotions. Earlier in the season our summer intern from Minnesota asked me what I hear each summer from those visiting California for the first time: "Is it always brown here?" This year we are down, alot, from our normal rainfall. In fact with raining season over and long gone, we are only at about 60% of where we should be. I informed said intern that rain stopped a few months ago and it doesn't rain in the summertime here. "Never?" she said. "Never, ever, never, wouldn't happen," I replied. Not 6 weeks later the weatherman 60 minutes north of here said to expect thunderstorms that night. The nerve of him - what kind of fool did he take us for? Rain, in Northern California? In JULY?!?! He's crazy. The next morning I looked outside and sure enough my patio was dry as a bone. I left out the front door and there was my car, waterspotted. Flabbergasted, that's what I was.
This morning the weatherman mentioned rain again. I doubted him, though not completely. It's been dry and hot, in the low 80's for 2 weeks straight now. By 12 noon I walked in to bossmans office and saw through his window: the ground outside was dark gray. Not shiny and wet like we'd had actual rain, but dark gray as if drizzle had hit the floor. I walked outside to lunch on the patio and a few very tiny drops landed on my face and then stopped. In true Northern Cali style, I ate outside alone under the overhang as not one person would venture outside in "the rain." (it was completely dry under the wisteria covered patio cover) I swear if their is moisture in the air, these people lose all mental capabilities and fear the water - I've never seen anything like it. They are suddenly unable to drive offensively or defensively and surely you would never see anyone walking in the rain voluntarily, and if they were in the rain they definitely would not enjoy it. Crazy madness, I tell you.
This humidity has brought to me a melancholy mood. It's warm and yet cool in the air. I am quiet, retrospective, peaceful and yet internally troubled.

Garden kitties

In my house lives three little kitties - Booger, Meow, and Pooh. These are naughty kitties, sleeping on the table, crying for food, begging to be freed in to the big wild wild world of the backyard. We feed them, mind you, so they are not abused. We take them outside as well, but only for supervised visits. Meow and Pooh are relatively good kitties in that they stay inside the yard however the old man, Booger, has jumped a fence a time or two in his life. He knows whats on the other side and he's not afraid to go there. Now Meow and Pooh are only considered "relatively" good because even though they do not venture outside of the yard, they still go where they don't belong. Pooh longs to run outside so he can roll in the dirt and then he proceeds to lay between my broccoli plants hunting moths like a big jungle kitty. I tell him "you're not a big jungle cat," but he ignores me and takes a stroll between my other vegetables, knowing that it will irk me and cause me to chase him with my fist in the air. Meow likes to roam to the side of the house. One would think that a gray siamese kitty would stand out in a semi-green yard yet Meow always manages to find the dirt that she blends in with oh-so-perfectly, and then stands there or lays there looking innocent as can be while bf and I nervously hunt for her, calling her name. When we finally see her and scold her, she looks at us with a slow blink as if to say in her Martha Stewart voice, "I was right here all along, doing nothing wrong what-so-ever."



Booger is shameless, is he not? We call him our resident "sun-whore"



















Broccoli Pooh















Blue eyed Meow

Skewwwwwls out...for... summer!
Well not yet, but almost. I turn in my last essay tomorrow and then I'm done with this summer session and due for a 6 week break before the fall session begins...{sigh} again.

I found the varmints responsible for tearing up the leaves on my beautiful sunflower. I had thought, originally, that it was bugs. I searched each leaf individually, over and under, frontways and backways and tops and bottom but found nothing. No slime, no eggs, no bugs, nada - as is, nada damn thing did I find. Saturday as I sat outside waiting for Ladies Work Day to begin, I saw these little finches with yellow breasts, sitting on my sunflower leaves. Ahhh, look how cute they.... HEY! STOP! You're tearing up my leaves, you little rascals! There they sat on the stems and tore little beak-sized sections from my leaves. My bird loving friends think the finches are adorable and say to me, "They need to eat greens too," however, I am not sympathetic to them at all. I ran over and shoo'd them away with all three cats watching me chase the little buggars ,which is a good thing as they are now the defenders of the sunflower plant. They come out after I get home from work and stalk carefully across the lawn to watch, laying in waiting for the little mean finches to come. Which brings me to another sunflower matter.

BF said to me, while sitting on our new patio furniture on Sunday, "What is that stem at the top of the sunflower, the one with no flower on the end?" Geesh, not again. I climbed up the retaining wall and snipped off this lonely stem and looked at the top end. Sure enough, something had ripped off one of my sunflowers, you can see where they tugged and pulled the flower off before it even bloomed. I suspect squirrel, BF suspects a crow he saw earlier in the day.

Friday update

I have two essays due next week - a 3pager and a 5pager. My 3pager was a more difficult topic but I pretty much finished it last night. Now I need to start my 5pager which is longer but more along my lines of topics, ie no book analyzing. :)
Last week one of my redwood stakes snapped at a knot in the wood and one of my tomato plants hit the ground - it was just too heavy. It was still completely intact so I propped it back up and will get a bamboo stake today to replace it this weekend. The ladies are coming over for Women's Workday and we are building a patio table so my bf and I can enjoy eating outside on these hot days.
We've been having a heatwave for the past week. Our weather has been so strange since Spring. Heatwaves in Spring and coldsnaps in Summer, now we finally have heat in the summer but it's too intense. I give the garden a good sprinkle each morning and yesterday watered down the house and the driveway just to cool them off enough to get some cool air coming in the house. It worked, with the fans. I dearly miss the rain, especially knowing that it's not due back here in Cali for at least 4 more months.
And now, for pictures of some of my experimental plants for the season, including my 4 cotton plants and my trashcan potatoes:

Go go gopher...

The last two gophers were easy. Each time on a Thursday afternoon, I found new gopher holes, and on Thursday night I dug them out then laid my trap inside. Each time on Friday morning, I had a dead gopher in my trap and tossed him out in the trash to be taken later that day. It's been weeks now, since my last gopher encounter. I had thought they were gone and done with since it had been so long. Then about a week ago, I saw a small pile of dirt in the front lawn. I presumed it was gopher but it's not always easy to tell - our yards have so many weeds and we pull them all by hand (no chemicals) so you cannot always tell whether that small pile is from a gopher or from a large rooted weed recently pulled. Friday though.... Friday afternoon was obvious. It was definitely a gopher hole in the backyard, right outside my bedroom window. With confidence, I dug out his hole and set my trap, then laid it in the ground. Later that evening, my guy tells me, "Your gopher covered your trap up with more dirt." Sure enough, more gopher dirt was all around my trap and it was not set off. I pulled the trap out, dug out the tunnel again, and set the trap back in the hole for the night. Saturday morning, more dirt - no gopher! Ok, this one seems smarter than the last two. But then again, I think this one had just moved in, locating the old gopher holes below ground and was doing some housecleaning. I got the pitchfork and found where the tunnel went down further. I ended up digging a hole big enough to hold a basketball, just so I could put my trap in further in hopes of catching this little bugger. BF told me, "You won't catch him in that hole," but I went about it anways. Sunday morning, no gopher, no new dirt. Sure enough, he had evacuated that hole. Thinking I had lost him, I wandered over to admire my sunflower and - BANG! - a new little gopher mound. ARGH! I left it for the day and dug it out on Sunday night. It wasn't easy as the hole twisted and headed in the other direction, but a couple of searches with my pitchfork and I could feel where the ground gave out and the tunnel ran. I laid my trap and left it overnight. This morning, after the cats had eaten and I had showered, I headed for the back door. My Siamese was staring outside and I asked her, "What are you looking at, Meow? Tell mother you sense a dead gopher outside." Sure enough, I had caught him. The ants were none-to-happy that he died next to one of their nests though - tough luck, huh?