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Post by chrysanthemum on May 21, 2021 7:54:56 GMT -6
Do you know how many inches you’ve received?
Do people in your part of Texas refer to those rains as “frog stranglers”? I read that term in reference to strong storms in our area, and I think it’s a pretty apt description.
We got one storm this week, about 1 and 7/16ths inches. The water comes and goes so fast it’s kind of shocking. I need to go water my garden now. At least our rain tanks are full.
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Post by hmoosek on May 21, 2021 11:46:21 GMT -6
In one storm alone we got 4 + inches, then several more in the following days . I don’t know the total. I kept thinking it would surely stop. I pond has risen a good 3 feet. It needed it though.
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Post by chrysanthemum on May 23, 2021 16:23:59 GMT -6
That sounds like what we experienced in September and October of 2018. We had almost our entire annual rainfall (about 30 inches) in just six weeks. There were times that our main road was flooded in both directions, though we could manage to navigate our way to the interstate by using a higher ground sneaky back way if we had to. What shocked me, though, was how quickly all the water disappeared. I had moved just a year earlier from Virginia, the land of heavy red clay, and it was just shocking to me that the land here just doesn’t hold water at all. When we moved to this area we were told that September and May were the rainy months, but we really have had pretty dry Mays up until this year. We aren’t having huge storms and rains, but we are getting rain every week, which has been great for my garden. I think my Rattlesnake pole beans have really enjoyed it. I thought I’d post a picture of them here, figuring it fit with the theme of “not Calypso.”
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Post by heavyhitterokra on May 24, 2021 13:30:20 GMT -6
Those are beautiful photos. Thanks, for posting that report. While living in Spokane, Washington, in the semi-desert mountains, I found that adding organic matter to the soil would really boost its ability to retain moisture. Trouble is, in a dry climate, it's tough to find organic matter. Fortunately, straw bales are a fairly easy way to remedy the lack of plant matter. Straw scattered a couple of inches thick, then sown with short-season grass seed, and watered in, will soon sprout seedlings that act as tiny anchors to keep the straw in place. (I used clover). It's a legume, so it adds nitrogen to the subsoil through the root nodules, plus the canopy of broad clover leaves helps to shade the straw and protect it from evaporation while the wheat straw decomposes. Clover is not very drought tolerant, so it tends to not become a weed potential in your garden later, like ryegrass of fescue often do. There are many types of clover, some of them getting upwards of 2' feet tall, so do your research to find a variety that performs to your liking. An example of this, is Red Clover. The Red Clover I planted as a Winter cover crop reached a height of 25" inches before I plowed it under this Spring. This photo of my 25" inch clover was taken April 18th, 2021. It snowed two days later. This photo was taken two days after plowing my cover crop under. I got a sunburn April 18th, then nearly froze on April 20th. This has been a tough year for getting a garden up and going.
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Post by chrysanthemum on May 25, 2021 22:17:42 GMT -6
I love that photo of your clover. Our raised beds in our garden have been heavily amended with organic matter, so they hold moisture better than the surrounding area. We’ve used a lot from our own land but also purchased aged manure compost by the cubic yard. On certain places on the rest of the property we’ve tried to seed wildflowers, including a perennial called purple prairie clover that I think is not a true clover but still fixes some nitrogen, but so far we haven’t seen great success with that. This spring there is a lot more green on our property, though, thanks to our letting leaves decompose from year to year and the May rains. It’s nice to see it recover a little considering how barren it was when we bought it. hmoosek, are you still getting rain?
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Post by hmoosek on May 26, 2021 21:40:17 GMT -6
chrysanthemumNo rain today, but it returns tomorrow. I’m going to rent an airboat so we can pick our squash. Hahahaa
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Post by chrysanthemum on May 27, 2021 7:00:13 GMT -6
Good luck! How are your beans holding up?
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Post by hmoosek on May 27, 2021 9:25:02 GMT -6
The pintos are toast. The black & white are fair. I think they will pull through.
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Post by chrysanthemum on Jun 10, 2021 6:33:40 GMT -6
hmoosek , how are you and your garden doing? Have you dried out yet?
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Post by hmoosek on Jun 10, 2021 9:57:55 GMT -6
hmoosek , how are you and your garden doing? Have you dried out yet? I got 5 more inches earlier this week. I haven’t been out to the garden lately. I pretty much just gave up. Mom gathers the squash when she can. It’s a jungle out there as we haven’t been able to mow in about 3 weeks.
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Post by chrysanthemum on Jun 11, 2021 13:11:14 GMT -6
Wow. We’re out of drought now, but we’ve entered the hot and dry period, so I wonder how long we’ll stay that way. I’m sorry to hear that you haven’t been able to garden because of the weather. Maybe once you can mow again there will be a chance at beginning a fall season.
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Post by heavyhitterokra on Jun 12, 2021 0:33:22 GMT -6
hmoosek, I feel for ya. My garden has been like that here too. We got rain nearly every day for about a month. The garden was too muddy to plow for several weeks and my weeds were growing, well ... like weeds! They were getting taller than the okra that was planted in 8" inch raised beds adjacent to them. I finally got a chance to till them under between rains last Sunday evening, but by then, they were about a foot tall. It took three passes to get them to lay under with a reverse tine tiller attachment on my tractor. It poured rain the next day and washed most of the dirt off that I had covered them with (very frustrating). The weeds looked like I had hardly harmed them at all by noon that day, green as all get out and soaking up more rainwater. Thankfully, by Tuesday afternoon, our temperatures had sored into the mid-nineties; essentially cooking the weeds in place by week's end. After several days of baking in the hot sun, I now have what looks like an adobe landscape. Hard as a brick on top with mushy, cooking, weed matter trapped below about two inches of sun-baked soil. It feels like I'm walking on a giant sponge cake when I go out there to pull weeds along the row edges. This has been a tough year to get a garden off to any kind of a good start. Don't even get me started about the mowing.
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Post by hmoosek on Jul 9, 2021 18:17:45 GMT -6
I searched through the overgrown garden and found a few pods. The beans did not do well at all. I found about 7 pods, but they were short and the beans did not fill out to a good size. They stayed small like a pea. Some are totally black, some had a small white spot. I’ve got about 20 beans to replant. I feel this bean didn’t have a fair opportunity to do well. We had so much rain, I couldn’t keep the weeds out. I will take those beans I saved and try again.
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Post by chrysanthemum on Jul 10, 2021 6:35:27 GMT -6
I searched through the overgrown garden and found a few pods. The beans did not do well at all. I found about 7 pods, but they were short and the beans did not fill out to a good size. They stayed small like a pea. Some are totally black, some had a small white spot. I’ve got about 20 beans to replant. I feel this bean didn’t have a fair opportunity to do well. We had so much rain, I couldn’t keep the weeds out. I will take those beans I saved and try again. Will you try a fall crop this year?
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Post by rdback on Jul 10, 2021 8:36:39 GMT -6
Sorry to hear about your crop failure HMK. The weather can certainly take it's toll on the garden. Glad you've got more seed and you're gonna give them another try. Hopefully the weather has stabilized a bit and they will explode with production for ya!
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