Rain!

We finally got a little bit of rain yesterday and today the sky looks promising for some more of the wet stuff.

It’s been in the high 80’s to mid 90’s around here with full sun for a couple of weeks and now my lettuce has bolted and some of my onions are blooming.

And while in the subject of rain, the people in Colorado are apparently reconsidering their ban on collecting rain water. What!? (you may exclaim). Yep,
it is considered stealing in Colorado, what, with all the water politics out West.
Our own rain barrel maker here in Wichita keeps making it in the news because rain water collecting is taking off like a rocket along with gardening and raising your own food.

Now, I called one of the local soda pop bottlers in town to ask if I could get a couple of 55 gallon drums where the soda syrup comes in and I was informed by a very friendly lady there that the State of Kansas is collecting the drums for a state-wide rain barrel project. Mmmmm… I immediately went to the State’s web site but all my search efforts turned nothing about this. I guess I’ll just have to wait.

Over and out.

May 7th

And the winner for first tomato of the season is…

Jet Star!

Despite all the warnings I got about starting strawberries from seed, I tried it anyway. I successfully germinated 9 Sarian strawberries and 3 Alpine. This is the only plant that survived the transplant outside. It’s a Sarian Strawberry.

Suckers. There is one born every minute, and you can grow them into full tomato plants once you pinch them! I waited too long and these tomato suckers got big. I knew from experience you could plant them and they will root. I planted these about 10 days ago and they are now shooting new leaves. Some people say that these will not produce fruit but I got fruit from planted suckers last year.

And speaking of tomatoes, this is one of my volunteer tomatoes this year. They don’t look like any tomato seedling I’ve seen before. I know they are tomatoes because I actually found one of these growing from a mummified tomato buried in the bed. I have dozens of them growing in my watermelon bed (all my watermelon seedlings died), This is the bed where I grew the alien cherry tomato last year. My sister-in-law swears they are volunteer trees but these are not growing anywhere else in my yard; and how did the tree seed get inside the mummified tomato?

Last, this is the latest entry in what’s fast becoming the largest category in my gardening blog:
LEXIE DAMAGE:
She ate the hose out of one of my rain barrels. Plus, in doing so, she tipped the barrel and all the rain water was spilled.
She also has eaten three branches of my blackberry bush (it’s thornless)
She better be done teething soon, I am tired of fencing everything!

Lots of rain, no rain water

The rain began falling right around 3:00 pm yesterday. Watching the water rush out of the water spouts with some force, a little voice told me to go check my rain barrel, but I did not. The rain continued to fall almost continuously until around 5:00 am today. When I let Lexie out this morning, I checked on the rain barrel and sure enough, the force of the water stream had knocked it over and I collected zero rain water.
The storm that dropped all this water –3 inches reported on the radio, was a strong one but none of my plants received any damage. My area is somewhat protected by many mature trees and there are wooden fences everywhere to baffle the winds. Mercifully, there was no hail.
The tornado sirens kept going off throughout the evening and this had Dominic worried. Ronan of course had to come and sleep in our bed because he is terrified of thunder and lighting. Curiously, Dominic never was.
The tornadoes that touched down did not even come close to our part of the county.
Today I will go look at the rain barrels at Lowe’s again.