Welcome to another update from the Victory Garden!

Just LOOK at these DREAMY limes!!
{I totally did NOT grow these, but a victory gardener can dream, right?!}

These slipped through my New Orleans posts somehow so I had to share them with my garden update. All through the Bywater (and also at the Whitney Plantation) there were lime trees EVERYWHERE! The limbs were aching with the weight of these small, dark green limes. There were plenty of these trees on the sidewalk, so it seemed like fair game for me to pick some. A bunch. I would have picked a five gallon bucket full if my mom hadn’t been so mortified. Y’all, one of my life goals is to have citrus trees. Maybe this will go on the 2018 To-Do List.

The limes are actually Tahitian limes, so far as I can tell. This variety is described as having thin, dark colored skin with orange inside instead of green. Also, this next bit may have more to do with freshness than anything else but these are SO JUICY!!! Like, they have at least as much juice in ONE lime as two store bought one. No exaggeration. Too bad I’m down to my last 2 😦 Seltzer, beer, and tomato salads will be much more boring once they’re gone.

To tell the truth, things haven’t been so great in the victory garden. The tomatoes in buckets experiment has proved to pretty much be a bust. While I am pretty bummed, learning is learning so I’m taking it as it is. Even after moving the pots the plants didn’t really spring back. I guess I let them go too long to recover. Next year I will plant in the ground.

Fortunately, I DO have two very happy brandywine plants that have a fair amount of fruit on them! As you can see from the pic below, I am trying to protect these precious plant from the dreaded jerk birds with netting. Of course the netting is something I had on hand in the Doom Shack, so it’s yellow and green. You can’t really see this from the picture, but after whining about the net blowing off my mom suggested clothes pins strategically placed. Which I did because my mom is a genius.

I am probably going to pull up the plants from the right side of the bed so I can get garlic in the ground in the next little bit. The buckets down that way are pretty much done and just taking up space. I’m planning to work the dirt and add some compost and left over potting soil.

To the left you can see the chocolate cherry tomatoes are about over.
That’s a brandywine in my hand–now if only the birds leave them alone!!!

I’ve also given up on my mustard that was planted well over a month ago. The only thing it will be good for is TINY TUESDAY (how sad!) I have one bit of lettuce left that I’m going to harvest and serve with the potatoes I pulled 2 days ago. YES! More potatoes! That has been a success. The good thing about all those tomato buckets is that I can use them to grow potatoes next year! Stay tuned for a YOUTUBE video of the potato harvest!

LAST LITTLE LETTUCES 😦
{and a few random weeds}

Pretty much everything is done on the deck, too. I’ve still got one pepper plant plugging along with two yellow bells just waiting to mature. I’ve also still got some very happy purple basil and a pitiful scraggley mint. The green buckets on the left (where the potatoes grew) are turning into a little compost area. Instead of throwing my vegetable scraps in the ditch I’m going to layer them in the bins with green and brown material to try to work some more soil.

NOT MY GARDEN!
(This is at Mr. Smith’s mom’s house)

photo credit, C.L.Smith

Just look at how GIANT these plants are! That’s two rows of okra on the left and several tomato plants on the right. At least this is some proof that I have a talent in starting seeds! My mom’s plants look beautiful, too! I should have just put the poor things in the ground.

One thing I HAVE been doing which isn’t exactly a garden thing, but has been a huge success is HUMMINGBIRD FOOD!!! Mr. Smith bought a little feeder for us to try out and we have been going through a feeder-full a week! I’m not sure how many birds we actually have, but there are at least 2. They raise cane, flying and playing (maybe mating, lol), zipping around our porch and front yard. It has been a delight.

How has your garden been doing?

What are you harvesting this week?

What do you have planned for winter?

Do you have hummingbirds?

Holler and let me know!

Hello garden pals!
How adorable is this picture I found while in New Orleans?
You KNOW I love the little girl with her DOLL in the dang garden 🙂
And their hair-dos!
I just HAD to share this in a garden update!

I told y’all I was about to go on vacation–
–here is what the garden looked like right before:

Here is what I harvested!

When I got back from my trip the tomato plants on the deck were looking pitiful and NOT because Mr. Smith wasn’t doing a good job. They were already starting to struggle before I left.

Soooooooo…

After some more research and advice from my horti-pals, I am pretty sure my tomatoes are splitting from not holding enough water in the plants. I water everyday but I think it pretty much just runs through the bottom of the buckets. I started the pots with the hope that I could put them in a (to-be constructed) small green house and keep them through the winter. I still may do this, but at the suggestion of a friend I have moved them to the ground in the hopes that the water holds better and the fruit stops splitting.

HENCE:
Old Location.

New Location.

I left the chocolate cherries on the deck because they seem to be doing just fine where they are. Fingers crossed the move for the rest will help the plants not be so stressed. Stay tuned for updates on that!

ALSO:

The mystery pepper/tomato plants are DEFINITELY tomatoes. While the leaves are looking a little more “tomatoey” they still look more like pepper leaves to me!!! When I was giving away seedlings they looked JUST like peppers. There is a dang tomato on the plant tho so they are brandywine after all!!!

And in other garden news:

Y’all. I finally decided to dig up some of the potatoes. After The Great Horn Worm Incident of 2017 I was worried about what, if anything, was lurking below the dirt’s surface. I was also getting ready to be gone for a week on that vacation so I just went for it. Below are the results!!!! All the potatoes you see came from the pot that had been attacked. I just put the reeeally tiny ones in a tiny bowl to be super cute.

There is actually video footage of me digging up the potatoes and it is SO FUNNY but I’m honestly not sure if I can post it on my youtube channel because it also has a CONSTANT almost panty-shot of me. You never actually *see* anything at all but I’m not having much luck getting it to blur out in editing without it seeming to look even worse than it really is! LESSON LEARNED!!! There IS another pot of potatoes to harvest and the next time I will do better with my clothes. I promise.

How are your plants doing as the temps keep rising?

Have you grown Brandywine tomatoes before?

What are you harvesting this week?

Stay tuned for more!

❤

If you follow me on social media, you have undoubtedly heard about my recent run in with terror. I had no idea that I was afraid of ANYTHING–but I certainly am. Y’all. I am officially full blown TERRIFIED of horn worms. If you do not know what one is, count yourself lucky.

It all started as an innocent enough Saturday morning. I went out on the Victory Deck Garden to check on my plants as I do most mornings. Everything looked normal–nothing was amiss. Around 10:30 am EST I went out on the deck to start the dye bath for my tie dye sheets project (see this post). That was when I realized something was WRONG. One of my potato buckets was practically stripped of ALL HER LEAVES! I immediately began searching for culprits. I found none. I texted two horticulture expert friends and posted on FaceBook…one of them said:

“I’m not positive, but potatoes are in the same family as tomatoes, this could be the work of tomato hornworms…”

The other friend said, “Definitely hornworms- they are green and as thick as your thumb. Look on the undersides of remaining leaves. They are really good at hiding.”

So I LAID DOWN ON MY BACK to look under the leaves…and then I saw it. HOLY JESUS SWEET MOTHER OF MARY MY DEAR LORD. Only that is NOT what I said. Can you picture it?! Me, struck with terror, screaming while flinging myself away from the pots of devil worms, heart pumping out of my chest like Jim Carrey in The Mask?!?! Did I mention I was screaming? I’m sure my friends in Missouri could hear me. I was THAT loud.

I cut the leaf off that held the DREADED SPAWN OF SATAN and flung the leaf and worm with the scissors into a giant dust pan. After searching and finding ANOTHER one, I was satisfied that was all of them and I took the dustpan FULL OF DOOM and flung the contents into my neighbor’s pasture.

Then I had this revelation:

A week later I was left with this withered, traumatized tater.

I thought that was all. I thought I couldn’t be any more grossed out than I already was. “Friends” posted horrorshows of horn worm GIFs on my social media pages. Mr. Smith laughed at me. Even my mother told me I was over the top. And then I received this postcard from one of the previously mentioned horticulture nerds.

“Oh that is so cute and so true,” I thought.
Then I turned the card over.

Leslie, you are a hilarious mean girl if ever there was one.

So ends (I PRAY) my tale of horn worm woe.

Have you experienced a horn worm nightmare? Have you also done battle with Satan’s Magic Eye Devil Spawn Pet?! If so, please do chime in a tell us all about it. I mean, we’re never going to sleep again anyway so we might as well get all the gory details out in the open!

❤ ❤ ❤

Welcome back to the victory garden!!

Here are my latest garden notes:
{Yes I was watching Grav3yardgirl while uploading blog pictures!}

Here’s how things looking on the deck lately!

6/18/2017

Excuse the 1990s comforter in the background in these pictures! One of the cats {ahem, ahem, I’m *pretty* sure it was Patti Smith–BAD KITTY} PEED on poor Chief’s bed! I had to wash his comforter and I put it out to dry in the sun and try to sun bleach more of the STANK out.

6/18/2017 (top) & 6/27/2017 (bottom)

You can a TINY bit of difference in the two pics above. The tomato plants are really starting to get tall and bush out. All of them have fruit on them at this point and 2 plants have fruit that is getting ripe enough to pick. I re-potted my purple basil and it is SO HAPPY now. I really like the pop of color it brings compared to regular sweet basil. I find the flavor pretty similar so I would definitely recommend growing some of the purple stuff too just for the different shade in your salads!

These are some kind of “chocolate” cherry tomatoes that Mom started from seeds she saved from her plants last year! I have two of the these plants.

Picked 6/26/2017

Here are the first tomatoes I’ve gotten to pick this year!! These came off a “yellow pear” cherry/grape tomato plant I bought from Walmart. The fruit matches the marigolds!

I planted two more drawers of radishes. For whatever reason one drawer is growing and the other is not Nature is so weird. Those pitiful pots in the middle have a few carrot seeds in them. They’re not doing much and I really ought to reuse the dang dirt for something else.

There is ONE pepper on the pepper plant you see at the middle of the picture. There were a few more blooms but no more fruit has appeared. I may need to fertilize. It’s supposed to be yellow so I’m going to leave it on the plant a bit longer to see if it turns color.

The raspberry plants are still kicking out a few berries every so often. I’m still trying to figure out where I want to plant them. They *seem* to be doing okay in the buckets so I’m leaving them alone for now.

In the bottom of this picture you see my big beautiful potato pots! Stay tuned for the next garden post in which I tell you a story of pests of pestilence and woe. Lordy Lordy.

Let’s end of happy note!

Look at these BERRIES!!! ❤

picked 8/26/2017

These are some of the wild blackberries I’ve been harvesting. I go out to the ditch along our property about every 2-3 days and can poke around and find about two cups to pick. I’ve been bringing them in and putting them in a gallon bag in the freezer. So far I’ve picked about 10 cups total. I hope to have enough to make some jelly and a few turns of dumplings!

YUM!

WHEW!

How are things going in YOUR garden?

What is working and what isn’t?

But for real, stay turned for my next garden update when you will get to LOL at my new irrational terror…it WILL be entertaining!! XD XD XD