Whoa! What's Going On???

Two posts in three days? Dang... something has awakened an interest in life at least for the moment. I think I will share it with you all. Some background...Carol and I bought 4 okra plants last spring rather than planting from seed. Three died and one survived. Needless to say I knew I wouldn't get to pick enough for even a mess of okra for Carol and I so I just let it grow and watched it throughout the summer. I kept watching for the blooms because they are really beautiful, creamy white and look like a hibiscus. Okra likes to bloom early... I like to sleep late. I knew there were flowers that had to be making because they close up and that's where the babies start but my timing has just been off this summer because I haven't spent much time outside. Today I got a wild hair and went out to run the weed eater around the dog fence. I got about 2/3rds done before I had to take a break and I got to looking around at what I need to do for fall put away and clean up and happened to check out my okra to decide if I could make myself pull it up yet. I DO like watching things grow... I DON'T like pulling stuff up at the end of the season because things look so barren.

But I digress... not only was there an open flower on the okra plant, there were also buds, a couple of ready to pick okra and okra pods that were starting to break open and showing the b-b sized okra seeds. I got a couple of pictures to share with you all... Enjoy!

Farm Report... And Thank You...

Tipper at The Blind Pig And The Acorn picked cucumbers for our planting by the signs for 2011'

My first baby cucumber! It's only about an inch and a half and still has it's bloom navel on it. If you haven't found the baby yet it is laying on the leaf under the big leaf on the left, just below the yellow flower that is peeking out.

I know if you can't see it you can hardly claim it's there but I will get a better photo in a couple of days when the baby grows a bit and I read about how to focus in closer on something behind or next to something bigger.


I love these little tendrils that these plants put out to be able to climb towards the sun. They start out in these little spring like coils and then start unfurling and going in search of support to help them in their climb.

They look so very delicate, these little gossamer strands, but they are very strong. If they get attached to something you'd rather they not climb on they are a force to reckon with all on their own.

This is the 'good' day plant that is the largest. The other two 'good' day plants are putting on blossoms.



Like this...

These little plants love our sandy, loamy soil here. That and I've been pouring the water to them. With the 100 F. and higher daily temperatures we've been having if we hadn't watered I'd have no farm reports or flower tours or anything to share with you all... other than my aches and pains.

These three are the 'good' day plants. They are putting on blossoms like crazy and growing by leaps and bounds.

This photo is of the two 'bad' day plants. I'm going to have to quit calling them 'good' and 'bad' day plants because these two 'bad' day cucumbers have almost caught up with the 'good' day plants.

Once again, I need to read the book on how to focus in on what I'm trying to particularly show off. As you can see the leaf that is pointed at us is very clearly in focus... the blossoms are, shall we say, in soft focus... like I would like if some one takes a picture of me to soften the laugh lines and crepe y, turkey neck...


This is one of four okra plants that we bought, the only one of four that survived... It's probably a foot and a half tall and I've been watching for the okra blossoms because they are beautiful and I like to share the pictures with those who can't grow okra where they live or haven't ever seen it grow. This plant was sneaky though... because I found THIS:
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The blossoms only last for a day once they are opened and so the mother of this okra must have done her thing on one of the two rainy days we had that I didn't go out and check the plant.

This pod has got to be a good 6 inches long... It was growing up next to the stalk under the wide leaves on the top and flat snuck by my inspections.

I love surprises like this.

And I love the support you all have given me after my last post. I won't say that I was surprised because I feel like I know each of you and if it weren't for the distances between us I would be comfortable sitting down and having a glass of iced tea and visiting the afternoon away at your home or mine... I will say that I don't have the words to say how much you touched my heart. I hesitate to put my worries out there because we all have problems to deal with and I hate to think I put out my problems to add to your problems. But I must say that I do feel lighter for having written the post. I have always been willing to share my friends problems because I feel I can be unbiased, but I've always had a hard time sharing my problems because of my own insecurities. You know, people won't care about what's going with me... I'm just a listener, not a talker.

Just please, please, accept my most profound thank you for your support. You all will get me through Tuesday and the unknown and I can only say thank you, thank you, thank you. Your support will help me hold my head high and be prepared for the good, bad, or the ugly and report to you on Tuesday evening. Prayers for good results please.... And Thank you all for being you. My Friends. I cherish each and every one of you even if you made me cry... Thank You for being there for me. I feel I don't have to go through these things by myself now and it takes so much of the stress off me. For that... one final THANK YOU to each and every one of you. I hope that I can be the kind of friends to each of you that you have been to me.

You can reach me at Llachi3@aol.com. P.S. I did the link wrong somehow. I'll fix it tomorrow. I've already taken my night meds and am correcting almost as much as I'm writing. Night All.

Off The Walls Of My Mind…

Sometimes I sit around and think too much…  Usually about one thing, but sometimes like today I have random thoughts bouncing around in my head and every now and then a thought will even stop me in my tracks.  The one thought that I’d like to share with you all today…

What costume would Lady GaGa wear for Halloween?  Would she just run around with no make-up, a pair of old jeans and a sweatshirt and normal shoes? 

This is just on example of the wonderful things that trip through my mind when I’m sitting doing something mindless on the computer but I’ll share some of my more normal recent moments now and the photos to back them up…

October 30th I went out to my Cuz’s with the girls and spent the night and had a very good visit with her and my Bro.  The pupsters got to run around outside without leashes on and they, too, had a great visit with Spud and Lucky.  My Cuz and I wandered out to the back garden on a stroll and picked these…

Well, at least the bell peppers part of these.  We went to the front and picked all those jalapeno peppers.

 

Both the bell pepper plants and the jalapeno plant were loaded still with babies and blooms both.  They have been producing like crazy since the weather cooled down. The okra is done for the season but I thought you’d enjoy seeing what the okra looks like when it is dried:

 

These are some that I picked up, two were on the ground and two were dried on the plants.  The seeds rattle in them like a baby rattle and these four will have enough seeds to insure that I have okra seeds enough for a small plot in my yard in Norman. 

If you look real close you can see the two pods on your left have just barely started splitting open, but what I think is so neat is the ribbon look to the pods.

Earlier in the week my cousin had picked these:

Roma tomatoes and more bell peppers.  When we were in the front I checked out the tomato plants and there was a load of green tomatoes even at this late date.

But this is what caught my eye initially and drew me out to the front garden…

My yellow double blooming iris that I had moved from Noble was blooming!

Lordy I love having a touch of spring in the fall.  Whomever was the genius that managed to breed double blooming iris is wonderful.  If I ever meet them I’ll give them a big kiss on the cheek and a big hug.

My black mood that I’ve been trying to deal with was lightened, at least for the afternoon, thanks to my Cuz, my Bro, the dogs and a mystery iris hybridizer.

My Bad…

To use a phrase that I don’t even like because of it’s imbecilic over use but it seems to work in this context. 

To be real honest… I hit the wall.  And then the wall fell on me.  And then I had to cart the left-over garage sale stuff home and I was wiped O.U.T.  On the bright side I did get a bath.  The dogs haven’t yet gotten a bath but that’s good news for them.  They don’t like a bath.  Oh, they put up with it because I’m bigger than they are but they look at me like I’m beating them.  You want to talk hang dawg lookin’.  They love me when it’s over though.

I’ll get back on my family roll next time.  I had to do this special post for my regulars of 4 or 6 people that have heard about and watched (in a manner of speaking) my garden grow… from squash to tomatoes to my infamous okra. This is a guinea photo and an okra report…

Bro got a photos of the new guineas when they stopped by for a visit…

 

The new guineas, in making their rounds every day, like to come to the back porch and stop by for a visit.  They perch up on the railing and preen and visit a bit.  (First Photo)  The second group felt the railing was full so they fluffed and preened on the back steps.  They are so much fun to watch.  You some times think they don’t have a brain between them when they get startled and scatter like Henny Penny except they start yelling ‘chook, chook, chook’ like guineas on speed or what ever they call speed nowadays instead of Henny Penny’s famous spiel “ The sky is falling, the sky is falling!!!”…  And Debbie you don’t need to tease me about nowadays… I do use it often and naturally if the situation warrants.  I sometimes feel as if I’m a dual personalitied person , part higher educated with very good English sliced and diced and mixed in with Okie idioms that can rear their ornery head at any moment… sometimes called up and sometimes they slip in the conversation on their own whim, unannounced.  I surprise my own self sometimes.  Usually it only happens when I’m tired, though.  I know, I know I’ve been tired a lot lately.

Meanwhile, check out this okra… Almost big enough to think about marrying…but not quite.  Okra this large is generally bad, woody and fiberous.  The marrying phrase is just a flip remark but look at the size of these puppies….

The okra has gotten this large in just a week.  Nobody has picked since I was out there last week and the okra up top is so big and heavy that it’s bending the stalks over.

Makes it easy to pick those 8 foot tall stalks without a ladder. This is my redneck crown molding in the process of getting prettified, you know, fancyied up. First I put up 1”X8’  pine boards around the top of the walls, butted against the roof.  I personally like the simplicity of it but Cuz wanted to fancy it up a bit so she and Bro went to Lowe’s and decided on   3/4”  cove molding at the top and underneath the bottom of the board. No step for a stepper.  Got it up and cut and only hit one finger with a hammer hard enough to squirt blood… but not on the new paint job, thank God.

  In this corner you can see the border with trim on the left… unfancied on the right.  It’s  going to look awesome when finished and I need to get it finished to get off Cuz’s list.  She doesn’t like when jobs get drug out.  She one of those intelligent people that like some sense of order in her home.  Cuz, it’s almost over and I love you, even if I am slow. But I don’t want you to ever have to redo anything I fix and paint.  I like doing things as right as I know how and sometimes that takes longer… 

 

The green trim of the baseboard will be white, as will the window sills and the door facings and the crown.And the next time you get a ‘room’ report the floor will be clean.

Okay!  Carol and I are going to the fair tomorrow in OKC and I plan on getting my camera charged up to get photos to use at some point down the road.  So I hope this post has enough interest for you to forgive me for failing and falling outfor a couple of days of my challenge…

The Spoils Of War…

I just thought that since I’d written about the ‘beetle battles’ that have been going on in the garden I should show you some pictures of why it has been worth it…

The peaches behind the tomatoes were bought at the farmer’s market.  The okra and tomatoes are out of our garden. Cuz took this photo so I'd get to see the first okra picked since I was in Ft. Worth when it got picked.

Another batch of tomatoes…

Squash, bell peppers and okra…

Red, or new, potatoes.  We put them on the ground to wash off the dirt after we dig them up.  Saves having to clean the sink so much.

And for all you okra lovers out there, this one’s for you:

Gooooood  eatin’!!!

It’s A Jungle Out There…

A world of heros and villains, pesticides and matricides, guinea temptations and pupster massacres… but then the incredible beauty of growing something that is edible and beautiful.  The circle of life.

First the long overdue garden report that has been sorely neglected of late due to a certain someone… me… running  up and down the road but more about that later.

Walking out of the house the garden looks like a mini jungle. The okra, Rick, is over my head tall and like everything else, thanks  to all the rain we’ve received, is loaded with buds, flowers and okra pods ready to be picked, cooked and eaten.  

I had to throw these two photos in because I walk by them going to take the squash photos and their color just stopped me cold.  Any of you that have read me for any time at all know that, while I love my veggie garden, my true heart of hearts are my flowers.  These are in the south east corner of the big garden.  Had to have a spot of color, don’t ‘cha know…

Let’s talk squash.

We have had a battle royal with first with the Colorado potato beetles, then the squash bugs.  I say we but mostly my Cuz has been on the battlefront.  I put powered pesticide on the squash and potato plants and also the cabbage because the Colorado potato bug likes them all and they are voracious little buggers.  The next thing we knew we were beset by squash bugs.  Cuz was after them with clorox and water mixtue, spraying the bugs and the eggs on the underside of the leafs with that.  It slowed them down some but she ended up having to bring out the heavy artillery… liquid sevin. She is one mean mother when it comes to protecting the squash babies that she was growing.  When I came back yesterday she said she had gotten some squash and shared with one of her church friends.  Turns out the only squash plant survivors of the battle of the beetles were two of the good day squash and the larger of the bad day squash and they are still sitting on flowers and squash.  Yea!!!  for the g.d./b.d. squash.

I was watching “Chopped!” on the Food Channel this weekend and in one of the challenges of food to cook was squash blossoms.  I was so excited to see what the chefs would do with them because I had just learned this year that people often cook and eat them.  The show, while very interesting, didn’t inspire me enough to try to cook them but then nothing very often inspires me to cook… I just enjoy growing the different veggies and sharing photos in various stages of growth with you all.

The news from the bad part of the jungle… It’s kind of Quixotic that a hero can also be a villain.

Yep… the pupster Spud…  The same little guy that grabbed and killed a snake (though it was small it was still a snake to me) when I was working in the pen to make it secure enough for the guinea chicks broke into that same pen while I was out of town and wreaked havoc on the baby guineas…

The wire you see in this photo is now hot.  When I got back from Norman I saw Scott’s truck pulled up by the cage and I just figured that he was working on reinforcing some places that I had noticed before I left.  I had not yet heard of the massacre that occurred while I was gone.   I went in and made a comment about Scott working on the pen and Bro realized I hadn’t heard the story…  While the girls and I were gone, Cuz had let the Spud puppy out to go to the bathroom before bedtime.  When he hadn’t come back in his usual short time she went looking for him.  She found him red-handed or red-footed as it were… I guess without the girls to play with he was bored and had busted a hole in the chicken wire and played chase guineas with unfortunate murderous results.  When Scott and Merri arrived to help Cuz and to begin the reinforcing of the pen they did manage to find and round up two of the original 16 guineas.  We are now on the lookout for other escapees of the tragedy.  Bro met up with the breeder and brought ten more guineas back to the house.  Merri was hot wiring the pen when I got here and after she was finished she came in to tell Cuz that she could let the chicklets out of their respective small pens into the now multi-fortified and hot-wired big pen.

So these will be the closest watched babies until such time as they are big enough to be turned out to run with the other “survivors” that I have posted about previously.  And on that subject another grown guinea has turned up making the rounds with the Cuz’s grown guineas.

The guinea closer to the middle is the new one… it is more brownish colored than the Survivors but is full grown and now enjoying making the rounds of the grounds with the Survivors. No one knows where it came from but Merri said she had seen it up by the silos before but it is now making the rounds around the place helping to eat the bugs before they eat us.

So the circle of life goes on… the good and the bad, the kind and the cruel circles of life.  All go towards making this world that we live in such a strange and wonderful place…

Oh, and yes, the hot wire does work… I found that out today when I went to check out the babies and forgot about the wire and brushed my bare leg on it.  I’m sure it will prove to be an excellent deterrent.

Farm Report… And Bad Hair Day

Yep… I promised the next bad hair I’d show you would be mine and it will but first things first.  Tipper, feel free to use any of these garden photos you’d like on Blind Pig And The Acorn.

This photo was taken on the 28th of June,  the good day squash is on the left and the bad day squash is on the right.  Just to the right of the bad day squash is okra and black eyed peas planted alternately.  The squash is still getting good sun because it gets from mid-day to late afternoon west sun so I don’t worry about it being in too much shade for good growth.

Look at all the squash starting to come on…  this is a good day plant.

Another good day squash plant.  Spud helps me out by checking for mice, gophers and snakes… This is the littlest bad day squash.  It’s hanging in there and it is very healthy, but it is probably a tenth of the size of the good day squash.

This is the other bad day squash.  It’s about half the size of the good day squash and it is setting on a bunch of baby squash.  Four out of five of the good day seeds made and only two of the bad day seeds survived from planting day until now.

Now today’s photos…

Good day on the left, bad day on the right.  The biggest bad day is about 2/3rds the size now of the bad day.

Taken from the other direction the bigger bad day squash is hanging in and producing and has filled out enough to be almost indistinguishable from the good day squash on the right and the okra and black eyed peas plants.

The littlest bad day squash is now producing but is still so small compared even to it’s companion bad day squash but it should be noted that it is a testament to the strength of it’s seed that it has survived and is now producing squash.

There’s squash!  This is the bigger of the bad day squash, the flowers are now going on to baby squash.  Another 3 or 4 days and they will be ready to go into the salad or to bake in a squash casserole or fry up in the skillet with sliced up new potatoes and onions… mmmmm, I’m almost drooling just thinking about these choices.

Good day buds…

Huge amount of babies and another testament again to the organic seeds that were donated for this experiment.

I could go on and on about the fun I’m having with the squash but I did promise bad hair.  I need to set up the scenario first, though.

The front garden from the driveway in front of the house.  Looks kind of like a jungle out there…

Okra!  And some squash and flowers on the right and behind them are the tomato vines that were featured last week. We’ve had a terrible fight with squash bugs and the squash plant there in front that is yellow is succumbing to their onslaught.  The good day/bad day squash have been able, with a little help from us, to fight off the squash bugs and remain healthy.  Very impressive since we lost two other plants besides this one.

Here ya go, folks… My bad hair day.  I was in a lot of hurt today with the storm front coming in and spent most of the day in bed sleeping because I don’t hurt when I take my drugs and sleep.  I had gotten up about ten minutes before this photo was taken and hadn’t even brushed my hair… just came out to take photos before the rain came.

My Cuz came out to do some weeding and I asked her to take photos of me in the okra so Rick could see that, yes, the good Lord willing and the creeks don’t rise, there will be a big crop of okra.  Lucky and Spud help me give you a size reference.

I really don’t have enough hair with my summer cut to look really bad, but a promise is a promise and this is the worst my hair has looked in a while.  I usually at least run a brush through it when I get up but I didn’t even do that because I wanted to get photos for my farm report before it rained.

Okay, okay… that wasn’t really fair since you can’t really see my hair. I guess if I can show y’all my butt I can show you my bad hair day so I snapped these on my web cam on my computer.

WARNING!!!  Put down any food or drink to avoid having to clean off your computer screen.  You may also want to have eye drops handy to help take the pain out of your eyes…

No, that isn’t a halo behind my head… just the sheen from the overhead light in the bedroom.  This shot and the following have not been edited…  You have been officially warned.

 

and even I cant believe that I shared with you all this glory…

Wouldn’t you just love to wake up looking this awesome!!!