The good, the bad and the ugly

Well, The rain gave way to a few hours of sunlight a day and my most of my seeds have sprouted. The beans, carrots and brussell sprouts seem to be coming up in there rows, but i guess the peas got moved around during the rains. Hopefully the weather will cooperate and I will get some peas.

The bad news is this little pile of dirt. I am afraid it is wood ants. Normally, we get mounds from the nasty little biting fire ants that pop of every where. This is much worse. These are almost impossible to get rid of and they eat all the plants around the mounds. This could be very bad.

This is my attempt to tie up what is left of our tomatoes. Most people around here seem to have already given up on tomatoes, but I am hanging in till the very end.

Raining at last, of course

We have been waiting for rain for months. Everything here is dry and crunchy, but now finally, the rain has started to fall. This is what I would have expected because the rain started the day after I started my fall planting. I am not sure what will work so I just started with some of what the feed store had in right now. I planted carrots, peas, more beans, lettuce, spinach and brussel sprouts which I am hoping will taste better if I grow them myself. I started up the tiller and took out the dead corn to make room for the carrots and brussel sprouts, the peas went under the fence that we trellised our pickling cucumbers on. Really the soil probably needs more compost, but were doing this on the cheap so I mixed a bag of compost with the remnants of our worm growing colony that Luci had in the old turtle sand box that the girls had out grown. Into this I chucked a little shake and feed fertilizer and a little bit of chicken stuff. If we are going to be serious gardeners we will have to start our own compost pile.


The ground is still warm so if the sun comes out in a few days hopefully most of it will sprout.
The squash and zucchini are really just now starting to produce a significant amount and I am hoping they will keep going until we start to get some of our new planting.

I didn't see this coming

I am not sure which of the following statements I would have believed less, back in my younger days as a California slacker-generation D&D-playing headbanger:

A) I would someday have a hunting license (bought my very first one yesterday).
B) I would be excited about a trip to the feed store (they got fall gardening seeds in).
C) My brother would be a gold miner at the same time I was doing the above (yes, somewhere in California my brother has become a gold miner).

I can't imagine I ever thought I would be asked the question "sir, do you want a duck stamp with that license?" . And although the answer is no, I may try to hunt turkey this year. I do know alot about Wild Turkey.

Hijackers and traders

So I have beeen having a hard time getting anything written lately because a browser hijacker has taken over internet explorer on our computer. I got the goofy thing looking for garden blog directories of all things. If you can't safely look for that what can you look for these days. Everytime I open a link from internet explorer it directs me to a bogus search engine called Toseeka. If I could find the guy who designed the damn thing I would choke the crap out of him. Now it is gonna cost me a hundred bucks to have to some tech from Norton support to tell me how to get rid of it.

Thats my bad news.

The good news is we had a visit from one of our few neighbors out here. After a quick visit they left with some squash, cucumbers and relish. All of which we have been eating a ton of this summer. The next day we found a bag of eggplant, bell peppers, and jalapeno's hanging from our mail box. Good stuff.