Category Archives: Kentucky

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Deer, tomatoes and a flower or two

trunk_flowers
I had naively thought that the deer issue last summer had to do with the drought. Not so. Apparently there is at least one deer that has found my garden and enjoys the fruits of my labor on a regular basis. About 4 or 5 of the tomato plants I planted last week have been eaten. Most should recover but one was taken down to about a 2 inch stalk. I know it was a deer as I found his/her tracks in the freshly tilled soil. I decided something was in order if I wanted to have any hopes of having any tomatoes this year. I decided to take some chicken wire and make a god-awful looking cage around the lot of them. I had originally wanted to create individual cages but didn’t have the wire and wasn’t sure it would work the way I wanted it to. In the end I decided to go with this contraption for the existing plants. I still have some more to plant and those will probably get individual cages once I purchase the wire for them (assuming my vehicles stop breaking down and there is any money left in the till).

pink_primrose

The tree trunk is all that is left in the side yard. The landlord cut it down last year after the second time it broke threating the house. The trunk is about 3-4′ tall. I believe he thought it would come back. So far there are a couple of sprouts as there were last year but nothing even slightly resembling a tree. More than likely it will end up rotting in place over time. I decided to dress it up a bit by adding some color. I took long strips of bark and tried to seal off the open areas between the two trunks. I filled the cavity with soil and planted a couple of black eyed susan vines. Hopefully they will spill out over the trunk and bring some life to this dead old thing.

A couple of years ago DB gave me a start of her pink primrose. They are so pretty with their mottled leaves.

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The veggies are in

For the most part the vegetables are in. I had planned on getting more done this weekend but I do tend to plan more than I can accomplish. I had to work with the tiller a bit to get it to start. It had some old gas in it from last year. Last spring some time I tried using it and I couldn’t keep it running. I was about done at the time so I didn’t fool with it then. The plan was to take it in and have it looked at before this season. Well the time got away from me and the cars took all the extra money I had sooooo it was up to me. I ended up emptying out the old gas by removing the line from the carb and draining it from the tank. I put some fresh gas in but as I suspected it didn’t start. There was still some old stuff in the lines. I took the air filter off and put a little bit of new gas in directly in the carb and she fired right up. After a warm up and some wd40 in the linkage we were good to go.

I only tilled half the area I usually do. I just don’t have time to keep up with so much and rather than plant it and let it go I will just keep those areas mowed for this season. Today I planted 16 tomato plants – 6 Mr Stripey, 7 Big Beef and 6 Jetsetter. I still have some more BB and a few Celebrity that will need to go in. I am holding them back to see what the deer leave me. I may need those as replacements. I also planted 4 hills of watermelon, some little round guy not sure of the name, a couple of hills of zucchini and 4 rows of flour corn. I picked it up from the Native Seed Search and it is called Tohono O’odham. It is a 60 day flour corn from the south west. Since June and July tend to be dryer here I decided to plant it now. It is supposed to be more drought tolerant than many other varieties. The plan is to plant some beans with the corn once it gets up a little bit. Since I didn’t plant THAT much I may end up hand pollinating.

Yesterday we mowed the lawn and I mowed over about 200 raspberry plants to get my two beds back in shape. I hated to do it but I had offered them to several people and nobody was interested. They would take over the back half of the property if I didn’t keep them in check.

The image above is an Indigo Doll iris that had fallen over onto the Coreopsis next to it. She is pretty. Can you see the little visitor on the right?

The weather station that I put up last week is now connected to the computer and the data is being transmitted to the net. It took some fiddling but it’s all good now. I was doing the transmission from the outdoor unit to the base unit in the house wirelessly but they would lose each other occasionally which would result in a temp reading of 177F. It has been warm the last couple of days but nowhere near that warm. Once I connected them via some outdoor telephone wire there hasn’t been any bad data. Burying the cable was easy enough. I used an edger to cut the slit and a skinny piece of wood to push the cable down into the ground. It didn’t have to go down far just far enough to be out of the way. If you are interested, the page the station transmits to is located at the Weather Underground.