Earth Day April Week 4
hazelinok
14 days ago
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hazelinok
13 days agoRelated Discussions
HAVE: Seattle 4/18 Earth Day Celebration Plant Exchange!!!
Comments (2)We hope you can make it! We have some awesome raffle prizes as well! I'm the volunteer coordinator for the community center garden, and I've been growing a few flats of edibles -- strawberries, raspberries, various herbs, etc. -- just for this event. :)...See MoreThe EarthTainer 'Farm' Photo Update - April 28
Comments (20)Raybo: I'm ok. Could use a hot tub soak! lol. Regarding my plants, tomatoes have undergone a good bit of stress as of late with the roller coaster weather, but all of them survived fine. They just got a bit ugly. I need to watch out for blight. I probably have a dozen or so tomatoes already growing, some of them only 2-3 weeks away from being ripe & picked. =) I'm a bit worried about my peppers though. They're in my cold frame, but with all this cloudy & rainy weather, they've stayed at about 1-2 inches tall for I swear the last few weeks. I'd take them indoors & put them back under the lights, but my wife would kill me! She's already demanding I clean up my "plant room" so she can have it back...lol. - Steve...See MoreApril 2018, Week 4, Planting and Rain
Comments (63)Kim, If it is any comfort, hilling potatoes is not my favorite thing either. I don't do it. I just plant them 8-10" below ground in the first place, and then, once they have broken through the ground and it is time to hill them, I pile on the mulch instead. Inches and inches of mulch. Instead of hilling up a couple more times, I pile on more mulch. Insane amounts of mulch. If it means I don't have to hill, I'm all for it. I realize this works because my potato patch is small. There's no way at a place your size that you could mulch all those potatoes, which is too bad. I'd give you a 2 a.m. wake-up call except for the fact that I will not be awake at that time. Sorry. Hailey, Zinnias are great in our climate. I've grown them every year for as long as I can remember---dating back to my childhood in the 1960s. They love heat and tolerate drought well---I don't mean that they are xeric and never need water, but just that they don't need as much water as most other flowering plants do. They reseed prolifically. I just redid our zinnia bed this Spring after 15 years of letting it reseed itself because I wanted to add a lot of compost to the soil, and I wanted to start over with fresh seed in certain colors. After 15 years of reseeding, our flowers had gotten too predictable and were mostly the more common colors, so this year I added lemon yellow (a lot brighter than the yellow of other zinnias) and lime green. I think I added purple. Or, at least I added a mix that includes purple---let's hope that some of the plants from that mix actually are purple. Just be sure to give your zinnias good spacing. They need good air flow to avoid powdery mildew, which is about the only problem that I think zinnias have. Butterflies love zinnias too. Rebecca, Whatever you're going to do to the squirrels, we support you. More tomatoes, less squirrels, you know. Good luck with it. Go ahead and plant the cukes. I'd only hold back if powdery mildew is an issue with your peas, because you wouldn't want for PM to start on the peas as they near the end of their lives and then transfer to the cukes as they are sort of just starting out. Most years my peas don't get PM....so it isn't something I worry much about. If I see it starting up I just go ahead and yank out the pea plants to get the PM out of the garden before it can begin to spread. Amy, I'm laughing about Curious George. I loved those books. I probably wouldn't appreciate them as much now as I did when I was a kid. I think the violas will survive under the coleus. I just finished interplanting Lemon Yellow Profusion Zinnias with my pansies and violas today, with the idea being that by the time the now-tiny zinnia plants are taller than the violas, the weather will be heating up and the violas will be about done. My violas either come back every year or they reseed themselves....one way or another, they come back. I just saw seeds on a viola yesterday and was shocked. It seems too early for them to go to seed, but we have had some days with high temps at 88 or 89, so maybe the violas think summer is here and they are done. Yes, I think Elbon rye (or even just plain old winter rye grass like people use to overseed lawns) would crowd out the crabgrass if you plant it in the fall, but I haven't tried to do it. I do know that when we overseed the lawn with annual or perennial rye grass (both are annuals here, by the way) so we have a green lawn in bad wildfire seasons, all the summer grasses are late to appear because the rye grass shades them and keeps them from really getting going in the Spring time. I don't recognize your plant in the photo, but it looks vaguely familiar. Do the plants have square stems like the plants in the mint family? So what kind of gulls scour the Wal-Mart parking lot occasionally looking for food? Do we have a name for those. (grin) I love gulls. Feeding them at the beach was one of our favorite thing to do when Chris was a little kid. I suppose having our kids treat us like we are children is karma for the times we have treated our parents like they are children. Of course, we can look at it in a positive light and say that our children learned their nurturing behavior from us, but it does make me think "oh, he thinks we are getting old....". lol. Well, of course, we are getting older every day---all of us are getting older---us, our parents, our kids, our grandkids....our pets. I still maintain that getting older isn't that bad when you consider the alternative. Jennifer, Getting older is interesting. I don't like all the physical changes that come with it, but I do like the mental/psychological changes that occur over the years. It is funny when I look back at things I worried about in my 20s and 30s and now realize that it was just a waste of time to worry about them. I do think wisdom comes with age, so that's a plus. I know I am a lot more laid back now than ever before, and I think that's a positive. The body changes after menopause suck, but guess what? That's life. At least we're still here, still alive, still kicking and still gardening. I look at some of our older friends who are on the verge of being wheelchair bound and am so grateful that at least we still have our mobility (despite all the aches and pains that come with it). I'll probably color my hair forever. At least that's what I think most days. Then, other days, I look at my cousin who has lovely silver hair and think I wouldn't mind having hair like that. I think the hard part is to go from coloring it to letting it grow out to its now-natural shades of gray and white or whatever it would be. For me, that would be the hard part. Hailey, I agree with Nancy that your flower is an osteospermum. That particular one is Blue Eyed Beauty, sold by Park Seed. Osteopermums are cool-season flowers so generally don't last long here (at least in my part of OK) before the heat burns them up. They were in bloom down here in the Feb-Mar time frame...of course, March was warm, and then April turned back cold, so this year they're probably going to stay in flower longer than usual. Rebecca, Wear whatever is comfortable! Keep in mind that we'll be handling plants and eating, so white probably is not the best color to choose. (grin) Based on that reasoning, I ought to wear brown or black so that all the stains hide. I worked my fingers to the bone in the garden this week and planted, planted, planted. Weeded, weeded, weeded. Mulched, mulched, mulched. Still, in the end, at least it seems like I made progress. I hope to make more either next week or the week after. We'll see what life throws at us and what the weather throws at us as well. The problem is now that it is warming up, everything is growing like weeds----especially the weeds. I have been working hard to get the warm-season flowers in the ground so they can get off to a good start before the weather gets too hot. We still are rain deficient here for April, so probably will end April that way. It looks like May will bring more rain though, and with it, all the thunderstorms and stuff that we don't especially want. See y'all tomorrow. Dawn...See MoreFOTESS APRIL ~ Friends of the Earth ~
Comments (155)Congrats Emily. you did win BINGO this month. it was a fun game! Annie, you better watch out, I have your address :) this is exactly what i do with my sister when we get together. we sing all kinds of songs and just laugh. i also wish i had siblings close by but i don't know if we would break quarantine... my family is all in the same state but they are not getting together. so... i may be sitting and karaoke-ing by myself anyways... they drop things off to each other, and wave from the window! love the story about your grandson Margo. you have a lot of patience. you remind me of my motherinlaw. i call my dad for a few minutes but he doesn't talk to me for too long. he's usually busy watching the news or youtube. lol. he is also not visiting grandchildren! love the lilies jayeanne. they are so pretty. i have a ton of lily seeds but i don't plant them because of my cats but i do love how pretty they are. jeanne, i love your recycled project. the blinds as markers is a good idea. i like the baggies you made. those are cute. i love to sew and worked on some masks, a blanket and me and the little one made a "bed" for the kitties. she pushed the pedal while i guided the fabric. she was happy to tell her father that she made it all by her self with help from mom. also for my recycling project I decided to use my old airline bags as board game piece storage. there are so many little pieces with each game that its best to keep them in bags. i use zip locks but they still seem to open up, so the idea of using these zip up pouches from international flights are great for storage. here are some pics - i think we have a few more days in April, so I will try to post tomorrow. I know that Jeanne was planning on posting early, but she has a lot going on with the tree damage. However as soon as she posts, we can wrap April up! Emily, I will send you your BINGO prize soon!...See Morehazelinok
12 days agohazelinok
12 days agoKim Reiss
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11 days agolast modified: 11 days agoKim Reiss
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11 days agoKim Reiss
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10 days agoAmyinOwasso/zone 6b
10 days agoKim Reiss
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10 days agoLynn Dollar
9 days agoLynn Dollar
9 days agolast modified: 9 days agoKim Reiss
9 days agoLynn Dollar
9 days agoslowpoke_gardener
9 days agoLynn Dollar
9 days agoNancy RW (zone 7)
9 days agohazelinok
9 days agolast modified: 9 days agoslowpoke_gardener
9 days agoKim Reiss
8 days agoHU-422368488
8 days agolast modified: 8 days agoKim Reiss
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8 days agoKim Reiss
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