The garden this year is going to be huge; we’ve done some clearing and are looking forward to a good gardening year. I know it will be a lot of hard work, but I’m looking forward to it. I hope we don’t have a drought as we typically do. We are on well water, and [...]
Good Friday was April 2 this year, and typically in the south you get your garden in by then. I don’t worry about Good Friday being a “deadline.” I study the weather, expected rain, and current temperatures. We plant differently each year. This year, we chose to start planting the Monday after Easter, which was [...]
Lettuce Varieties If you want to grow lettuce, you first need to decide what types of lettuce varieties you want to plant. Crisphead lettuce forms into a round head and the lettuce is all bunched up together; these are your typical Iceberg types of lettuce such as those at your local grocery and are not [...]
Home canning supplies, tools and equipment are available to make your job easier. First of all, purchase jars that are designed for high heat. The most popular manufacturers of home canning jars are Mason, Ball, and Kerr. Canning jars are purchased in cases or boxes and usually contain metal lids, screw bands, and jar labels. [...]
When people think of preserving peppers, most often they think of freezing them or drying them. Those are fine ways to preserve peppers, but here at the ranch we tend to go a little further with our pepper preservation by making hot pepper vinegar, salsa, piccalilli, chow-chow, hot chili sauce, hot pepper sauce, spicy homemade [...]
Late June. Harvesting plenty of zipper peas, okra, cucumbers, yellow squash, zucchini, peppers, tomatoes, eggplant. We’ve got Sweet 100 tomato plants almost reaching up to the second story and summer is far from over. Lots of melon blooms on the cantaloupe vines. We were fortunate with lots of rain up until now. Every day is [...]
I love the idea of organic gardening. I try as hard as possible to only garden organically. I love using organic fertilizer in my vegetable and flower gardens. I am no saint, and occasionally I find it necessary for some reason or other to use other products, but primarily I believe in using organic fertilizers [...]
Daisy Mae and I have been together a long time. Daisy Mae is “My Mule.” LB’s daddy used a real mule to plow. But times have changed, so I use Daisy Mae. Daisy Mae is the most reliable “mule” I ever used. She is a Yard Machine. Sometimes I get really tuckered out after a [...]
If using a FeedReader you can Print This Post Here. I have one tomato variety, an heirloom known as Mountain Pride, that produces some really nice tomatoes that are crack resistant, disease resistant, and determinate so this is one variety that works well for container gardening. I noticed it was the only variety in my [...]
If using a FeedReader you can Print This Post Here. I noticed something on my tomatoes in the blossom clusters. I have seen this before, yet never had the time to find the cause. I tried to Google a cause and a remedy, but I could not seem to come across the right keywords or [...]
