Check out the wind map. It looks like a hurricane over Oklahoma City.
After the front passes through this evening, we're supposed to get 3-4 days of lovely, cool weather. Time to get out and attack some weeds that are as tall as I am.
We're on an all-eggplant, all the time diet this week, even after driving around and handing out bags of eggplants to our neighbors. Eggplant is one of the few crops, besides peppers, that do well here in the dog days of summer.
Our garden is finished, and the leaves have begun to turn. Expect some hummingbirds, as they seem to be tanking up for the flight south.
ReplyDeleteIt's funny - this year our tomatoes didn't really take off until I left for St. Louis in September.
ReplyDeleteAnd of course the spousal unit doesn't really like tomatoes all that much.
I've still got 30 or so Romas in the fridge and the plants are loaded (though I don't know how many will ripen now that it's getting colder).
I love Romas. We use them for pico de gallo, which we can make almost wholly from garden plants. We just can't seem to get cilantro to grow here, though.
ReplyDeleteThe appearance of Romas in grocery stores meant that grocery store tomatoes were no longer tasteless hunks of pink goo.
ReplyDeletelovely, cool weather
ReplyDeletePick one. The weather can be lovely, or it can be cool. It cannot be both.
Eric Hines
There speaks someone not raised in the South.
ReplyDeleteThere's a reason I'm from the Midwest.
ReplyDeleteEric Hines
Cool and lovely. Yeah, It can be that. I remember many an Iowa day like that.
ReplyDeleteHm, no 'Oklahoma sucks' comments from the Texas crowd?
ReplyDeleteRomas are great, as is cool, bright weather.
Get ready for 10-30 F changes, between days, in Georgia. In fact, that already happened a few week or so ago.
ReplyDeleteAs for gardens, I don't seem to remember people talking about it a few years ago. What changed, the Zombie Apocalypse?
Not about the Apocalypse for us. On an itsy-bitsy city lot we can only grow enough for supplemental reduce-the-grocery-bill-a-little food. And of course, tomatoes that taste good. If the weather cooperates, which it didn't. A fungus took out the peppers and cucumbers :-(
ReplyDeleteActually, originally the main reasons for gardening were to provide quick snacks (cherry tomatoes, peas, etc) for the kids and make sure they got the connection between working and eating. And flowers for my Better Half.
I did succeed in growing an orange tree branch from seed in my dome in Las Cruces, with a view to having some fresh oranges by my own hand. The branch didn't produce any oranges, though. Maybe I needed two branches. But I didn't get any flowers, either.
ReplyDeleteEric Hines
It's not new, Ymar. Here's a post from ten years ago that mentions fresh tomatoes and jalapenos from the garden. I've had one since I had a wife, or not long before.
ReplyDeleteTom
ReplyDeleteHm, no 'Oklahoma sucks' comments from the Texas crowd?
"Oklahoma sucks" is mostly a football season deal. Similarly, there was a lot of football season ragging between UT and A&M- not so much now that the two teams no longer play each other in football. All the UT jokes about dumb Aggies and all the A&M jokes about pretentious T-sippers didn't mean that the two schools were mortal enemies. Rather those jokes were symptomatic of sibling squabbles.
It is very easy to find families in Texas where one sibling goes to UT and the other goes to A&M. It has long been recognized in Texas that if you are willing to put in the time and effort to get a good education, either UT or A&M will be a good place to get it.
As a snow bird from New England, I found the UT-A&M mutual sniping rather amusing.
I can't speak for all Texans, but for family reasons, "Oklahoma sucks" just doesn't cut it for me. My mother's parents were born and raised in Texas. My mother was born and raised in Oklahoma.
Which doesn't deny the existence of regional identities. When I was growing up in New England, I always rooted for Oklahoma when I saw OU play UT on the television, because of my mother's Okie roots. Even though I have lived for decades in Texas, I still root for OU in football against UT.
As a further example of regional identity, consider my uncle. He was Okie born and bred, but lived in Texas for 15 years due to a job move. In those 15 years, he never got a Texas driver's license nor registered his vehicles in Texas. Pure Okie.
In looking at the wind map today, I notice there is a change from south winds to north winds roughly along the line of I-35 from Dallas to Minneapolis.
(Cass, if you read this in this aging topic, you can cut the tomato plants off at the soil line before it gets too cold for them, and bring them indoors. Hang them upside down somewhere out of the way. The green tomatoes still on the plant will ripen eventually. They may not be quite as good as sun-ripened, but they'll be very pleasant things to eat in November and December.)
ReplyDelete