Another sunny day — I wish I could report it is cool. Nope. Everything is rising: humidity, temperature. It looks like next Friday is when the heat dome will finally shift.
For log purposes, today’s low was 76°F and the high was 99°F.
I can really feel the effects as soon as the humidity rises, as yesterday — even though I wasn’t out there that long — the humidity was lower at 78%, and today it was 87%. A significant increase on the muggy meter, as they call it on my weather channel in the Mid-South.
Today I was done with any spraying for about 4–5 days with copper fungicide, so I started with giving the fall bed and calendulas their morning drink of water. A light sprinkle just to get them moist.
After that, I moved on to finally finishing my cage storage area. I have most of the cages up except the ones I am using at the Learning Plot. The ones in the PP and B40 will stay put until I move them to their location for next year, as I like to plan where the new beds are going, and the cover crops are good companions to cages — meaning they don’t give a hoot! For me, I love seeing the beds visually. This way, come spring, all the hard work of measuring where things are going is done.
What I changed: I used two 8′ stakes set 13 feet apart to put 7–8 cages on their sides and stacked four layers, so about 28 or 30 cages. Before, there was professional landscape fabric that did not stop the weeds from growing. I had a jungle of weeds that blooms some pretty orange flowers — a known Tennessee wildflower — and just some weeds.
To stay ECO, I layered several thicknesses of cardboard boxes and then put a thick layer of grass. This should help prevent the weeds, and if down the road I decide I don’t need these extra cages, I have the bed already prepared. I will need to add a new layer of boxes and grass every spring or early summer to keep it weed-free.
If you’d like to leave a comment about the cage setup or share how you store your own garden cages, you can do that at the end of the article.
To finish out the day, I wrapped things up with the usual watering and a small harvest. Even with the heat and humidity climbing, the beds are holding steady, and all the plants appreciated their morning drink.
This post is a little shorter than usual due to the computer problems I had yesterday, but I still wanted to get the update out.
Whether I’m out in the Pickle Patch or here writing my blog, things happen — computers get finicky, weather shifts, plans change — but I always keep it real for my readers.