Ate the first picked corn – incredible. I have to admit, I’ve outdone myself. The variety is Mirai, a super sweet, super tender designer corn. Maybe it’s the freshness but it seems to have no starchiness at all. The corn patch is one of those areas where I see spots with lesser soil quality. There will be eight or ten 7′ tall plants with nice large ears adjacent to eight or ten 4′ tall plants with spindly ears. Luckily for us, the split is 75/25 good to bad areas and those bad areas are easily spotted and fixed. The corn and squash in that area will be finished by the end of July and I’ll have a few yards of compost ready to be tilled in.

The picture is a morning harvest of tomatoes and jalapenos. This is Sunday and I’ll be able to repeat this by Tuesday. The tomatoes are destined for the sauce pot; the jalapenos to the grill as poppers. I would estimate that each of the buckets contains about 10 pounds of tomatoes, mostly San Marzanos this time. Last year I planted 4 San Marzano plants and probably ended up with 4 tomatoes and that could be an overstatement. I can’t begin to keep up with the 4 plant this year. On top of that, I planted a variety called Grenadier which is similar to San Marzano with the thought that if the Marzano’s did a repeat performance, I’d have a shot at another nice paste tomato. Can’t keep up with those either. If you’re wondering why I just didn’t give up on the Marzano’s, they are the primo tomato for Italian sauces. Trust me, you can tell the difference. You can buy cans of San Marzanos but aside from being expensive, they’re not always easy to find and like all canned veggies, are loaded with preservatives. Too bad my friend Lynda from Salt Lake isn’t here to share in the harvest. Lynda made the best salsa and by the gallons. I’d bring her the makin’s and she’d turn out a fine batch to share. And the varieties I’m growing now would have her throwing stones at the old stuff.

Went into Publix the other day with Nancy. I wandered over to the produce department to see what was going on and was totally blown away by the prices. I must be picking $10/day just in tomatoes and would have to take out a bank loan to buy Brussels. And that was just the regular produce department not the “organic” veggies. As much as they charge for organic produce, they should have an armed guard standing by. Two items that it really doesn’t make sense to grow are watermelons and corn. Both are cheap and take up lots of space in the garden so if the objective is to optimize $$/square foot, don’t plant melons or corn. Although after eating the Mirai, I may have to rethink that position. I looked at butternut squash and thought, that’s not too expensive until I realized the price was on a per pound basis. All of a sudden, those went from a maybe crop to a must do crop. They take up lots of space but seem to be worth it.

Big news – picked a few ears of corn. It’s about 2 weeks early relative to the estimated harvest date but it’s starting to ripen nicely. It’s a bi-color variety and they really look good. There are two ears per stalk and probably 50-75 stalks reaching maturity in the next few weeks so we should be overdosing on corn in June.

Converted some Kale and Swiss Chard into Blueberries the other day. Alchemy. Nancy’s bridge partner grows blueberries so she keeps me covered during the season (now) and I reciprocate with the greens and other garden goodies. She’s about 85 and swears that it’s my veggies that keep her so healthy. Up until a few years ago she did her own small garden but it’s really too much for her now and she so appreciates the fresh produce. I do ok with the kale even though I don’t much care for it myself. Barbara makes a tasty Portuguese Kale soup and Wilma does the blueberries so it works out just fine and dresses up the garden.

Thirty two quarts of spaghetti sauce made to date and no sign of a let up in tomato production. I think a dozen tomato plants is over the top – note to me: cut back to eleven next year. I can pick ten pounds a day and the mix is shifting more to the San Marzano’s as the season progresses.

We have a new neighbor. I call him/her/them the Tuba’s. George’s fish ponds have attracted some rather large jumper frogs and they sound like someone is on his back porch playing the tuba. As the crow flies, we’re probably 250′ from his back porch but I can hear them as if they were on my porch. Techies know that low frequency sounds carry farther and this is probably a 20 hz song. George said that the pools are loaded with tad poles and frog eggs so things are only going to get better/worse depending on your perspective. Personally I love it and Nancy’s hearing isn’t what it used to be. I guess the croaking is also calling in some black snakes looking for frog legs, tadpoles, and/or eggs so he’s got a real eco system going on up there. Sure the population of raccoons is up too as evidenced by my second trash can disaster this month. I thought perhaps it was a bear but this time they got hold of one of Nancy’s Downy bottles and the tooth marks were way too small to be a bear. I guess just eating frogs and tadpoles doesn’t do it for them and they need a taste of home cooked garbage now and then.

Did something I’ve never done before and really feel bad about it. Now I know what it means to be clinically depressed. I took two of my surf reels to a shop for cleaning. That’s something I’ve always done myself but I’m facing a combination of the manufacturers using smaller parts and me growing bigger thumbs. Even though I’ve generally lost weight, somehow my fingers are fatter. I just can’t deal with the little springs and gears like I used to. Hell, I can’t even see them let alone figure out which way they go together. For those of you who’ve never dissected a fishing reel, they are full of spring loaded parts that stack together in just the right order. If you screw up taking it apart, the springs pop and parts go flying. Visualize working on a fine watch. Being mechanically challenged, it was always difficult for me, but I was able to make it happen. I even use to customize my reels with special gears, centrifugal weights and other parts to increase the performance beyond the manufacturer’s wildest dreams. Now I’m at the limit of my ability picking up one of these tiny screws and getting it started without cross threading. Handing those reels over was like handing over the keys to the kingdom and abdicating my control over the process. I explained to the guy exactly what I wanted and he just looked at me with that, “if you know so much, why don’t you do it yourself” look. Maybe it would have been better just to pitch them casually on the counter and say, “clean and oil”. Better yet, get Nancy to take them in.

A few posts back I mentioned that I was going to try rooting some sweet potato vines in the house as a way to expand and extend the crop. It works – at least the rooting part. In less than a week, the three cuttings have really nice roots and will be back in the garden by tonight. I think I’ll cut three more and repeat the process. This particular variety, Evangeline, has smallish green to purple leaves and very attractive foliage so even if the potatoes never materialize, they dress up the kitchen window sill nicely – my opinion and not necessarily shared by all the residents here. I guess we won’t know for a few months whether the whole process yields potatoes. Is it possible that all my messing around is endangering the whole crop? Learning that shipment of new starts has been banned by the Dept of Ag has spurred me on to all this experimentation. What if these are the greatest sweet potatoes ever grown/tasted and I can’t get more?

Pulled out the last of the celery, a month past it’s prime, and put a couple of eggplants in the spot. The Swiss Chard is looking a bit worn and just has trouble dealing with the heat so I’m going to pull it and put a Tomato Berry in it’s place. And the Brussels are now in their final resting place – the compost pile. The picture shows them pulled and ready for the final picking. Not sure how much longer they would have kept producing but it was getting really hot in the afternoons and I’m ready for a switch to okra. We had five plants and that seemed adequate for us and George. Next season I’m going to start them a month or two earlier and put in 6 plants. The only winter crop still putting out is the Kale. Sure wish I liked it.

Had a week of hard manual labor. George burns firewood during the winter – lots and lots of firewood. Two substantial trees came down in the storm a week or so back – substantial means 80′ size oaks. Working about 4 hours a day, we cut, split and stacked for two days. We moved on to 2 dead bay trees on my property and 2 dead jack oaks on George’s – another day of cutting, splitting, and stacking. The next two days were spent at Rick’s house shoveling dirt. Rick had a depression in his back yard that had grown substantially since he bought the place and it needed filling. He bought a load of fill dirt, that would be 18 yards of fill. The fill was dumped on the driveway in front of his house, about 100′ from the depression, so the task was to move the mountain of dirt – visualize a pile of dirt 18′ long, 18′ wide and 6′ high. George has a small garden tractor so we attacked the task with two of us filling 25 gallon barrels while the other guy hauled it to the back, dumped and spread it. We worked two four hour days on the job before calling it quits and leaving Rick with about 25% of the dirt remaining. It didn’t make sense to drive back to his house for that small amount that he could knock off in a couple hours over a few days himself. Besides, we wanted to be sure he never, ever bought another load of dirt. On the last day of the week from hell, I cut and chipped a new load of compost clippings. That took the better part of a day and yielded another 3 or 4 cubic yards to start the pile. The surprise to me is that I was fairly sure I would have trouble moving (my body) after all that but just a few aches and no pains. Thank you Bigeloil.

Trying a slightly different technique on the newest compost pile. I started with a 6” layer of shredded oak leaves then a thin layer of wood ash from the burn pile; then a foot thick layer of shredded palmetto fronds with a veneer of wood ash again. Repeated the leaves, palm fronds and wood ash several times and near the top, a layer of old celery plants, well past their prime. From this point on, all garden and kitchen waste will go onto this new pile which I’ll turn twice a week to keep it aerated and cooking. In the mean time, the “old” pile is officially shut down for new material and will just do the slow cook thing for the next couple of months, also turned twice a week. I’m thinking July for spreading that pile. What I’m hoping is that the layering technique will speed the process and that the new pile is ready for use in October for the winter garden. I shaved a month off the process already by clipping off the woody stem of the palm fronds before shredding and then actually double shredding the fronds. I use the stems for training peas in the winter or burn for the ash in the summer. Nothing goes to waste around here.

Thought I’d found a solution to the armadillo problem. I found an expert online who recommended moth balls so I spread a box in the general vicinity of the sweet potatoes where the damage was being done. I think the digging the next day was less intense but no question, the patch was visited overnight. So much for expert advice. My new solution is to clip some of the potato vines and try to root the cuttings to plant in another garden area. I was going to experiment with this approach anyway but now it may be essential. I’m hoping the rooted cuttings do the trick because I wanted to spread the crop over a larger period anyway. I think the plants can deal with the heat so it would be much better if we could harvest on a regular, extended basis rather than all at once. If it works, should be able to go well into November before it gets too cold. Sweets for Thanksgiving from the garden.

Listening to the news of the trial, the defense attorney seems to be making a big deal about the fact that he had a roll of duct tape in the garage and used it on a gas can that had lost it’s vent cap. Is there anyone in the galaxy that doesn’t have a roll of duct tape on hand for instant repairs? A hammer, duct tape, and WD40 – the essential home repair kit.

The corn is now approaching 7′ tall and the ground underneath is loaded with small to medium size butternuts. The first harvesting is scheduled for 7/19 but I think it may happen quite a bit sooner. Either that or there are going to be some real monsters. Somewhere in the maze there may also be spaghetti squash growing but it’s all too thick to really get a good look. And I walked under the bean trellis and found dozens of new green beans about 4” long so they must have formed earlier this week. Like everything else, they grow like wildfire so we’ll be picking for the table in a week or so and that will continue for a couple of months.

As well as the garden is growing, it’s not perfect. I know that’s hard to believe but interestingly, there are some spots that must still have too much of the old soil. Those spots are sure easy to see, I guess partly because they are so few and far between. Last year I had a few good spots; this year a few bad spots. The good news is that these spots will be easily corrected in a couple of months as the plants growing there finish up; the other good news is that I don’t know what we’d do with all the veggies if we were operating at 100%. Forgetting which particular item is coming out of the garden, I estimate at least 10 pounds of goodies are being harvested daily. Daily! And that doesn’t include what George and Barbara are picking. We’ve got all the makin’s for another batch of spaghetti sauce, less than a week after cooking up 16 quarts. I might add, the best sauce ever. About half the tomatoes are San Marzano’s and the difference in the taste and texture is incredible. The next batch cooking project has to be loaves and loaves of zucchini bread. The big difference between summer veggies and winter veggies is that the summer stuff doesn’t keep. You can pick a cabbage and cook it a month later – not true with summer squash, tomatoes, etc.

Had a wasp event the day after Nancy came home. A few days prior to that a wasp came in the house. We reached an agreement that I wouldn’t bother him if he would leave me alone. I figured he would be smart enough to eventually go out when had a door open; if not, he’d starve to death in a few days. Nancy came home and wasn’t ok with the treaty. The wasp was noticeably slower and I decided to sneak up behind him, snatch him by the wings and then release it outside. I’ve done that before so it’s not as stupid as it sounds. Yes it is. I did snatch him and was about halfway to the door when he twisted around somehow and banged me on the finger. I put an ice cube on it quickly to numb the area and then Nancy mixed up a batch of baking soda paste which she said would help. The tip of my finger swelled and went numb; then the whole finger, and then half the hand. I popped a benadryl and just let it throb itself out. I’m hoping this doesn’t end up, as it sometimes does, with me at the doctor’s getting a shot, a prescription for methyl prednisone, and a steroid creme to beat the itching that inevitably follows.

Have a new experiment planned for the garden in a few weeks. I mentioned that the corn is underplanted with butternut squash. That’s nothing original with me and goes back to American Indians hundreds of years ago. The theory behind it is that the corn shades the squash from intense summer sun and the squash leaves shade the roots of the corn to keep them cooler and lessen evaporation. Makes sense to me. So I’m going to try it with Okra and bush beans. Okra is similar to corn in that it grows tall on a stalk. They’re planted about a 12-18” apart leaving plenty of under space for planting some lower growing veggie such as bush beans. I’ve had problems in the past planting bush beans too late in the season where the sun cooks them but underneath okra plants, maybe they’ll do better. Worth a try. And now I understand that if a big storm blows over the okra………………… That’s assuming that the Brussels ever give it up so I can pull them and plant the okra. I can’t believe that in the middle of May, these guys are still thriving and putting out fruit. I planted them last November.

Well the pine needle armadillo repellant doesn’t work. It seemed to have held them off for a week but I guess as they turned from fresh green needles to brown dry needles, the odor or something lessened. They got in and churned up the sweet potatoes again. I went on line to find an armadillo expert and found one who recommended moth balls. So I guess that’s the next method I’ll try, assuming you can still buy moth balls. Despite the rooting around, the sweets seem to be thriving. Enough so that I decided to try trimming a couple of the vines to make new starts. If that works, I should have all the sweet potatoes I will ever need – every now and then clip off a few, root them, and harvest when ready. A virtual perpetual motion machine.

I was right on the verge of ordering 1000 Alabama Jumpers (worms) but with the return of the armored marauders, I decided to hold off and try to solve that problem first. Doesn’t make sense to spend $80 to feed that herd. I have no doubt that the soil is rich enough to support them but have big time reservations about the armadillos. To the best of my knowledge they are ant eaters but they grub around the garden at night big time and if they get a taste for the jumpers, they could be in big trouble. The area they return to is the only area of the garden that I know had a worm population. They weren’t big, juicy earth worms but very small compost worms that somehow developed in the compost pile and were transferred to the garden by me. I think it’s reasonable to assume that’s what attracts the pests.

This is the first/most successful tomato crop I’ve had in Florida. Great looking, great tasting, and lots of them. In the past I’ve gotten a few but nothing ever lived up to expectations. Ditto the summer squash on all counts. I used previous seasons to decide how many to plant so now it’s becoming overwhelming. Nancy just got home from Salt Lake so the conversion of tomato to spaghetti sauce has started. I had enough tomatoes ready to generate two eight quart pots of sauce. Just in time since I was completely out of space – full fridge, full window sills, and half the counter space. The sauce also consumes loads of fresh basil and oregano. I suspect we’ll be able to repeat the sauce making at least 3 times before the tomatoes finally give it up. All of the varieties are indeterminate, which in tomato talk, means they continuously produce fruit. That contrasts to varieties that are determinate – all the fruit ripens at the same time and then the plant gives it up.

The picture provides a look at a typical morning harvest. The tomatoes are a variety called Whopper; the cucumber, Sweet Success; the yellow squash, Cougar; and the light green squash, Cavili. The seeds come from 4 different seed suppliers. Along the way I’ve sifted through many varieties and these have come to the top. What I don’t know is whether the varieties I’ve weeded out would be good performers now that the soil problems have been corrected. I’m thinking that might be the case because I’m having 100% kind of success this year with both new and old varieties and, in the past, there’s always been a few drop outs. One type of squash that I’ve had zero success with and dropped from my “try it” list is Acorn squash. Now I’m sorry I didn’t put in a plant or two. It’s way too late in the season to start any now – even if I had the space.

Other new goings on include picking the first jalapeno, spotting the first baby eggplants and the arrival of copious blossoms on both the green and yellow pole beans. Jack and his beanstalks have nothing on me.

One thing we know for sure – Nancy generates all the trash in this household. When she’s here, I carry out one full bag of trash every day; gone and I haven’t filled even one bag.

Made the first new generation yellow fly trap. The original design worked insofar as nabbing yellow flies but it was a real pain to make and even more troublesome keeping it in place all summer. A few years back, Flagler County was offering free yellow fly trap kits so we gave it a try. The kit consisted of a zip lock baggie full of sticky, gooey, nasty stuff and a set of instructions for use. The instructions were to get a 20” beach ball, paint it black, spread the nasty goop all over the painted ball and then hang the finished product in the infested area. It worked like the old flypaper traps, the yellow flies attracted to anything black. Sounds simple enough but turns out hanging onto a 20” beach ball while spreading the nastiest, stickiest mess you have ever met is not something you want to do. In a few seconds you have the axel grease like glue on your arms, clothes, and on any surface you happen to touch. Then trying to hang the orb is not simple because if you hang it by the air input port, it tends to pull out and deflate the ball. I tried to construct a monofilament harness with some success but after a couple weeks in the environment, more than half of the harnesses let the ball slip out. The good news is that if you got one built and hung, it really did catch the flies. Yellow fly season is only about 3 months but life is better with the traps than without, that’s for sure.

This year I decided to abandon the beach balls with the hope that the round shape had nothing to do with the trap’s effectiveness. I got a few gallon jugs, like milk or soap jugs, filled them about half full of water and painted them black. The jugs have built in handles and flat bottoms so they are much easier to handle than the beach balls. I put the water in so that they would flop around less when hanging. I got one of those ubiquitous plastic shopping bags and used it as a glove to spread the glue. The glue is a commercially available product named Tanglefoot. A 15 oz tub cost $10 delivered and that’s enough to do at least a half dozen traps so there’s not much financial exposure on this. The construction went well and I ended up with no glue anywhere on my clothes or body. I hung it in an area that has been a favorite of yellow flies in past years. So far the only flies I’ve encountered were at my neighbors house but if history serves, I’ll have them soon and keep a close tab on the new trap. Assuming it works, I’ll construct 3 more and hang them down at the dock. Getting a handle on country living.

Check out the cucumber. Is that a beauty or what? I grow lots of varieties but this particular variety, Sweet Success, is consistently the best performer. Even at that size, it is almost seedless and deliciously crisp.

I mentioned that the freak storm we had last week flattened the corn crop. I was all but certain it was history since I have never seen corn growing horizontally. But for some reason I hesitated just yanking it. Believe it or not, four days later it had almost fully restored itself back to vertical; No kidding, after six days it looks like nothing ever happened. I’ve always known that plants track the sunlight but never expected the four foot stalks to be capable of overcoming gravity in such a fashion. It’s not that the tips turned vertical, the entire plants returned to vertical. Amazing. Ears are starting to form, two per stalk, so I remain optimistic that perhaps, for the first time, we’ll get a decent crop.

The other interesting fall out from the storm is a way to ward off the armadillos. For a few weeks prior to the storm, the garden was raided on a nightly basis by a herd of armadillos who focused their attention on the sweet potato patch. Every morning I’d go out and replant what they had rooted up and shake my fist in the direction of the jungle where I know they were watching. The day after the storm I was cleaning up and came across a large branch down from a pine tree loaded with green pine needles. Pine needles are loaded with oil and I wondered if maybe laying these on the ground around the sweets would deter the armored raiders. It seems to have worked – no armadillos since the pine needle protection. Not sure if it’s the texture of the needles or the smell but for now, a fix. They’ll probably lose the green and texture in a couple of weeks so it will be interesting to see if they keep the effectiveness.

I’ve been moaning and groaning for some rain – but not all at once and not as part of a giant storm. One popped up the other night about 6PM that was as fierce as any hurricane I’ve experienced. Two inches of rain, mostly horizontal, in an hour. It took half a day to clean up the aftermath, mostly hauling dead branches, chain saw sized branches, over to the burn pile. And repairing and rehanging the sun shade on the dock. We lost power for a couple of hours but for some strange reason, not until an hour after the storm had passed and the skies had cleared. But the big casualty, just as I expected, was the corn. It’s mostly horizontal now. That’s the best reason yet to underplant it with squash – when the corn blows over, there’s still a crop growing.

The other personal impact is that two large trees were blown over which gets my neighbor salivating about the prospects for firewood. We spent a full day with chain saws and bent backs cutting, splitting and relocating enough firewood to take care of the next couple of years. Glad I have the Bigeloil. Learned something interesting in the process. The trees that fell are Water Oaks. I always thought they were called water oaks because they grew near the water. Wrong, they are full of water internally. When you cut them into logs, water drips out in substantial quantities – water, not sap. That also makes them much heavier than you would ever expect.

Beginning to think I made a big mistake. I downloaded a free Sudoku app from the i-tunes store. I figured I could totally satiate my need to do the puzzles and save the cost of the books. It started out frustrating, learning the mechanics of the program, but after a couple of weeks bulbs starting going off in my head and I started to appreciate the program. I had calibrated myself as a fairly good player since I only bought super hard puzzle books and could manage to do about 75% of those. Some of the puzzles were labeled demonic or maniacal; extremely challenging, nearly impossible. But somehow I managed to maintain my 75% average. This free program has similar rankings but after you complete a puzzle, it gives you a statistical comparison regarding your performance. That’s where the problem comes in. I now have the mechanics down pretty good but still my results are usually that I’m better than 15% of the other people. That means 85% are faster. Not sure if that’s 85% in the world, US, Universe, Barberville or what but it’s still bothersome that I’m in the bottom 15%. When I use the books, I relegate myself to the top 85%. It doesn’t seem to matter if I do puzzles labeled simple or intricate or difficult – I’m still only at 15% with an occasional jump. I hit the top 62% one time. Not sure what the rest of the world was doing on that one but it seemed to me to be about the same as the other puzzles. If there was a way to shut off the comparison, I’d do it. It seems like it’s putting on an extra level of pressure I don’t need. I want to be 100% happy completing a puzzle, not 15% happy/85% bummed out.