Another great start with a low of 67°F and a high of 94°F. There is a high‑pressure system sitting over our Mid‑South Tennessee area, which once again is pushing us near 100 degrees Fahrenheit. With that being said, I took advantage of the cool morning to spray my third maintenance spray that was long overdue.
Friday I did copper fungicide, Saturday was Spinosad, and today was BT. What I love about these is that as long as you are not spraying when bees are flying, you will not kill them, and once dry there is no threat. All are good with beneficial insects like ladybugs and lacewings.
Since I am heading toward being more eco‑focused, I think eco is the word that describes me. I am not truly organic, but I will get there eventually as I continue my soil‑building program each planting season. All I have to say is that it is a lot of hard physical work, but someday when I am old and gray I will have the perfect garden — and then I will die, and my garden, which will be perfect, will go to someone who has never gardened before, and my soil biology will be ruined. That is the way the cookie could crumble unless I have a plan—maybe find someone that wants to learn or is all about soil biology and the eco way.
I separated the spraying as it would take too long to complete each round and I had other daily chores I wanted to get done each day. I call it Nancy’s garden management system, where I put easy and hard chores to finish about 11am or earlier.
I finished spraying in less than an hour and started right in on fertilizing the blueberries after cleaning all the weeds out. I think the weeds were giving them much‑needed shade during that last heat dome, because they look healthy and have more little limbs and leaves. After this fertilizer, I have one last application in mid‑September, and then they will be ready to go into winter. Maybe in season two I will get a few blueberries to taste. Again, another plant that takes time but will eventually give me a bountiful harvest — unless I forget to give them their acid fertilization in a timely manner. You have to give them the acid unless your soil is naturally acidic, and Tennessee is not one of those states.
They are looking better, and I even put some straw around the strawberries. Tomorrow I will add pine needles on the outside of the blueberry cages to help with heat stress and moisture while we have this hot weather. If you are wondering why I have the blueberries caged, it is only so I know where they are and don’t weed‑whack them down or step on them when they were super tiny last year. They have their protection network on.
I have to mention that the White Dutch Clover did not suppress weeds, so I will have to decide what to do next for keeping the weeds down.
Once I finished this, I started on giving the squash, tomatoes, and peppers — the ones I added pine needles around their caging yesterday — their half‑strength Miracle‑Gro drink to help de‑stress them. I noticed that with the heat these plants were struggling to size up, even after watering and fertilizing.
Thinking back to when Rudy was gardening, he heavily mulched with either pine needles or straw around all the plants, and his grew big and produced like crazy. I usually mulched RRR, but I made the mistake of treating them like my Pickle Patch and Back 40, where I have the opposite problem.
Rudy has at least four layers of fabric, and the tomato, squash, and pepper holes are about the size of the cage — roughly 20 inches in diameter — and the peppers are in a bed that is 18 inches wide before it hits fabric. I need to do what Rudy did, because he was making sure the roots and soil stayed cool, and in his fortress the mulch helped retain the much‑needed moisture, which in turn cooled the soil.
I finished and then watered the rest of the gardens and harvested — you guessed it — okra and cucumbers. The last thing before heading out just before 11 a.m. was my second sprinkling of the calendulas and my fall bed. It’s funny: when I took off the cardboard the first time to water, I didn’t see any carrots coming up, and the second time there they were — little carrot sprouts.
I had to take off the cardboard that was cooling them and decided that anything that sprouted needed a light application of straw, as they will dry out too fast having little roots — and I am not out there to water a second or third time. I finally remembered to take a photo of the fall bed.
With the sprouting of seeds, it is only a matter of time until Peter Rabbit comes sniffing around the bed for a tasty treat. I can’t move Fort Knox — the Chinese long beans fence — so I am scouting to see what is in my inventory that will work. I only need to do three sides, as my outer fence is rabbit‑proof.
Keeping it real in the Pickle Patch — that’s the way I do it.