Thread: In the Garden 2022

My wine caps are finally coming in.

Okra, in one of the high raised beds. Okra is selling for $4.99 in the grocery. ROBBERY!!! We have ate about 5lbs of our own okra so far, and we got a really late start. They will keep bearing until December, though, unless we get an early freeze. They usually survive a light frost as long as it warms up during the day and the sun shines a bit. In Belize I often had okra live two years or longer. The trick is to pick every day. If you let them get woody, the plant will be like, "well, that's enough, I made plenty of seeds and my genetic material will survive, so AMF, lights out, sayonara, hasta la vista baby." As long as you are picking the pods young and tender, the plant will keep trying to make more so some seeds will survive and fall on the ground and grow. Nice thing about okra, it grows anywhere except maybe on a glacier. If you can't grow anything at all, you can probably still grow okra.


I figured out why my tomatoes made such a poor showing. Tobacco Mosaic disease. Probably the proximity to 100 or so tobacco plants wasn't the dealbreaker, but touching a tomato plant after tending tobacco apparently will sicken and eventually kill tomato plants. Seems to affect peppers somewhat, but not so much. I did get a lot of jalapenos and a few plants are getting their second wind, and I expect to get enough that I don't have to buy any until winter. I am getting pretty low, and the ones I got left have almost all turned red already. Obviously, Tobacco Mosaic doesn't affect okra in the least.

I am probably going to need a ladder to pick okra before it is all over. They got almost a two foot head start, the ones in the raised bed. The ones in the ground got ran over by the yard man in his lawnmower. THEY WERE FOUR FEET TALL! Yeah I should have remembered to tell him, "DO NOT MOW THE OKRA, I PLANTED THEM FOR A REASON", but I didn't. Silly me. But the mower blades just beat the leaves off them, skinned and scarred them and smashed them into the ground. Didn't kill them. They were like, "WTF was THAT all about?" and proceeded to keep on growing. When humans go extinct, the cockroach will survive. When the cockroach dies out, okra will inherit the earth. Some day they will become sentient, probably even put an okra on the moon.

So much fun looking from north to south!

Just moved our 6 Cherry Tomato plants, out into the yard, since we have some rain in the forecast, we have a bunch of green tomatoes still hoping they get time to ripen up in the next 20 days..

Overnight temps are getting ready to drop into the 40's the day after Fall begins hehehe I swear seasons change within a few days of what the calendar shows ..

I've got tomatoes coming on--BUT--I don't know if I'll have enough to come ripe to can. So far there's only 2--



At least they'll be enough for sandwiches---------