Mr Ladybug and I love to learn new things. This past Saturday we went to a class on caterpillars learning how to look for them on certain plants, how to attract them to your garden and what butterflies or moths they turn into. This evening we are going to a talk in The midwife on the frontier. Some classes we come out with a new hobby others we just find fun and dont plan on doing much with the info we learned, like being a midwife. My great grandma thought that something that people do as they get older is stop learning new things and she felt that it was very important to soak up all the info you could for as long as you could to keep your mind sharp. It worked for her. She was in her 90's and sharp as a tack. Never stop learning!
Every year we garden we learn something new. Did you know strawberries do really great in the shade? They do fine in the sun too but if you have a shady spot and not sure what to do with it you can grow strawberries. Did you know that your blueberry plants like coffee? We thought we were going to lose ours this year and decided to try the coffee which adds acid to the soil and they sprang back to life. We added the grounds that we had already used. My sister had the same results with a lemon tree she had planted. Never stop trying!
If you are gardening I hope you have starting to reap the benefits of those homegrown veggies. If you wish you had started gardening this year but time got away from you its not too late. By this weekend you need to get tomato, pepper and cabbage seeds in pots to start. Start them indoors and you should be able to get a harvest in late August through October. Here in Kentucky our first frost date is around October 22. Things that you can plant outdoors from seed right now are cucumbers, okra, pumpkins and summer squash with the same harvest dates I mentioned above. Mr Ladybug and I are so hoping to eat a nice homegrown tomato from the vine from our back yard on October 22 or even later if the frost date is later. We are pretty simple people. In fact I am going to have my tomatoes in pots and if they still have tomatoes on them after the frost date they are coming in the house. Things you can still be planting straight into the ground are green beans, radish and lettuce.
Normally I plant peas and green beans in a row but to experiment with growing things in a smaller area i planted them in containers to this year to grow up tomato cages.
Peas in a row. These were planted way back in March and are just about done for the season.
These were planted back April and I was lucky to get a decent harvest. This area gets lots of sun and peas do not like the heat. I will try a container next year in a partial shaded spot to see if they last a little longer in the summer heat.
Somewhere in that green bean vine mess is a tomato cage. I am not really sure if I like this method. I am really going to have to look for all the green beans in all these leaves. I think I will stick with planting them in straight rows. I have two more areas with them around the cages and I have a row of 60 along their usual fence line that should pop out of the ground any day. I have room to plant around 180 beans.
Leaving the caterpillar class there was a lady selling native plants. I was asking about different ones and she offered me a taste of this mint. I tried it. At first it tasted like regular mint but then you really got a burst of flavor and I was hooked. This native variety doesnt spread quite like the mint you buy in the garden centers but it will spread and it gets alot taller. I am really excited to see how it grows.
