Larry,

It looks so gorgeous and green. I think it looks just great.

I only have part of my big garden cleaned up and converted into a fall garden, but work on a little bit more of it every chance I get. Maybe by winter, I'll have the whole summer garden cleaned out and the fall garden put in. :)

If you're missing your grasshoppers, they're here at my house where they haven't touched the Packman or Romanesco broccoli plants, but seem to enjoy eating the Purple Sprouting Broccoli. They like the snap peas so much that I have those growing under a floating row cover. The more I use row cover, the more I like it. My only problem with it is that our pet cats think floating row cover is either a rug for them to walk on or a blanket to sleep on. Except for that, I'd have row cover floating over everything.

Dawn

NICE! Is that a bunch of black eyed peas I see?

Ezz, its two bunches of Pinkeye Purple hulls peas. The ones in the background are the ones that the deer trimmed the top third off of. In between are Roma green beans, two close rows of winter onions(some of which I got from George, called Egyptian walking onions of which I have already shared with 3 other gardeners). Then , to small to be seen, are Rape, Collards, Black seeded lettuce, Red salad bowl lettuce, 20 Packman broccoli and some tomato plants. Then behind the last bunch of peas I have 8 Chinese cabbage, Red Detroit beets, Early Wonder beets and something called Beet, Swiss Chard. I assume it is another type of beet, they are all very small, dont even have true leaves yet. I plan on planting something else today. I am also wanting to run am electric wire down the rows because I am seeing rabbit tracks, hoping to train them to eat somewhere else.

Larry

Larry, I am gong to be able to start picking purplehull peas by the end of the week, and I feel like I've been waiting forever. I planted them in July, but they grew slowly when the temperatures were over 100, and often 108-112, for weeks on end. It didn't help that the grasshoppers were feasting on the foliage. Now that it has cooled off, they are doing great. Right now the peas are in that full green and just starting to turn purple stage. I have a friend who gets too excited when the peas are almost ready and picks them too green and then cannot shell them. I am trying to be more patient and wait for them to reach the full purple stage, and it is so hard.

Several years ago I began putting little piles of hen scratch alongside the gravel driveway to attract rabbits away from the garden. It worked really well, and nowadays, as long as I put out the hen scratch the rabbits rarely even nibble the things, like pole beans, that grow on the garden fence. Baby rabbits are the problem. They are so small that they can find their way under the fence sometimes, and then they invite in all the other baby bunnies and they have lettuce, bean plant and pea plant eating parties. Last year I began putting more feed out about 300 feet from the garden in order to attract them further away from the garden.

The drawback to the little piles of hen scratch is that it attracts deer and other animals like possums and coons.

We have used an electric fence to keep a digging dog inside our back yard when we lived in town, but I'd rather not use one here unless it becomes impossible to garden without one.

Dawn

Dawn, I may try the hen scratch, would it work if I put in in the middle of the highway? We have so many critters, I dont want to attract any more.

Larry

I planted cowpeas one other year and they didn't finish before frost, so we didn't get to eat any. This year I planted a big tub of purple hulls while it was still hot, and they produced fine, but it was just a small quantity of plants. Then they just stopped producing, but started again later. I didn't even pick them the second time and decided to just leave the pods to dry for seed. I also planted another one on a trellis, Red Ripper, I think. It has done OK and we have eaten peas several times, but each time I am shelling them, I am asking myself why. I just don't see a lot of difference in taste from the ones I can buy, and shelling them is so time consuming. I told Al yesterday that I might grow them for the benefit of the soil, and chicken feed, because the chickens think the leaves are a salad bar, but if I were growing many for human consumption, I would have to buy a sheller. I saw one that works with an electric drill as the motor, and it was only about $40. I'm not sure the taste difference is enough to justify the work involved without a sheller. The vines were pretty and green when everything else was struggling in the excessive heat, so that's a plus.

I'm not doing well with Fall planting and half of my garden is still covered with summer things. I am getting a little late to plant but since I will cover it, some things should be OK to plant anyway. It's hard to be in the garden with so many mosquitoes and the threat of West Nile Virus.

Carol, I have one of those sheller that run from a drill or electric mixer. It will mash a lot of peas if they are not at just the right stage, we seldom use it. The peas are prettier if shelled by hand. We like the home grown peas better, but they sure a lot of work. We try to save the home grown peas for company and holidays. We will buy quite a few frozen peas through the year. The Kids always brag about how good the homegrown stuff is and often take some home with them. We give more stuff away from the garden than we keep, but we enjoy it.

Larry

Larry, Ouch! Do you really want dead carcasses in the road by the house all the time? The other day we had a dead armadillo in the road and the vultures swarmed around it all morning. Then they came and started circling the garden where I was working. I was wondering if they were trying to tell me that my time was about up, but then I realized they likely were attracted to the bone meal and blood meal I had added to the garden a couple of hours earlier. I often do get circled by vultures after I've used those particular organic fertilizers.

Carol, My summer peas hardly made anything because those plants seemed to be the preferred food of blister beetles and grasshoppers. The fall peas are doing a lot better. I am about starved-to-death for fresh cowpeas from our garden. I really don't mind shelling them. I can buy them fresh and already shelled at Central Market in Southlake, or I even could buy them fresh, shelled or unshelled, by the bushel, from the purplehull pinkeye pea farm in Thackerville. I just prefer to raise my own whenever I can. To me, they taste best when I pick them, shell them, and put them right into the pot on the stove and cook them. While they're cooking, I make homemade cornbread. I can make a meal out of purplehull peas and cornbread.

Progress in my fall garden goes slowly. Parts of it are such an overgrown jungle, and I have to go slowly while clearing it because of the snakes. It never ceases to amaze me how many snakes like to come into the garden and climb the trellised plants. It is such a rude awakening to be looking at a plant and to see those beady snake eyes looking back at you. It is a wonder I haven't had a heart attack and died right there in the garden. I make a little progress every day, but it is such a big garden that I feel like I am not making progress quickly enough. It is still so danged hot that most of my cool-season plants seem stalled and not growing much. I know they'll grow more as time goes on, but these windy, warm days with temps in the 90s aren't the weather that the cool-season plants prefer.

The Seminole winter squash has watermelon vines, Grandpa Ott's morning glory vines, cardinal climber and some bindweed mixed in with it. I've been trying to cut out and pull out the watermelon vines (no melons or flowers on them at this point) and the bindweed vines without destroying the Seminole winter squash, morning glory and cardinal climber vines, all whilewatching for snakes. I could save time by leaving all those bindweed vines in there, but I'm trying to get them out before they set seed.

I am hoping to get out in the garden early, early tomorrow at first light and do some clean-up of the vining areas while it is so cool that the snakes shouldn't be up and moving yet.

Larry, That's the reason I haven't bought a pea sheller--I don't want a bunch of mashed-up summer peas. I went through a period of really wanting one during a good summer when we had oodles and oodles of peas, but talked myself out of it after talking to someone who had one and said it mashed up the green peas a lot. It is a lot of work to shell them by hand, but if you cook them fresh, nothing's better. Some years I get a lot of them put up in the freezer but I doubt this will be one of those years since the nights are already cooling down quite a bit. I'll be happy with a few meals of fresh ones though. I do always do put up one frozen packet of southern peas for New Year's Day. It is like summer in the garden when they're cooking on the stove.

When I was a kid, shelling peas was just something you did in the evenings--that and snapping green beans. We'd just sit out there on the porch with a big pile of purplehull peas or green beans and work out way through them and, before you knew it, they were done.

Dawn

Dawn, I try not to put anything out to attract critters. My sons house is just across the highway and he feeds everything, so I try to encourage every critter to go to his house.

We did not do a second cutting of hay so we could leave the grass to shield the soil from the hot sun and the dry wind. The grass has done well and there is a lot of cover for the rabbits, they think my garden is a salad bar.

The peas above are the third and fourth planting to come off. The roma green beans are the 2nd planting to produce this year. We now dont plant a large amount at one time because it is so ruff on our hands to process a lot at one time, plus the garden sat empty through the worst part of summer.

Larry