My Leaves are Rollin'

It's been REALLY hot here. Up to 102 degrees or so occasionally in the last few weeks. So I'm trying to be consistent about watering all my thirsty plants so I don't lose anybody in the heat. My favorite time to water is just after sunset when the moon sparkles the water spray from the hose, and the lightning bugs are playing crazy games in the trees below the garden. There is an area of humongous weeds down there, below the garden, that I'm going to get to some day and clean up, really I am, but for now, it's one huge lighting bug party there every night. And the locusts make an incredible pulsing, throbbing noise, so don't let anyone tell you the country is quiet on a summer night. When it gets too annoying I just turn my hearing aids off! Ha ha.

Even with all this attention, though, the leaves on the tomato plants are curling gently inward. The little yellow blossoms look fine, and little tomato fruit follows the blossom. But the leaves look all curled up and sad. Therefore, I decided they must need EXTRA water every day to survive the heat. Not so much, I guess.



Mr. Fred and Debbie and I were discussing gardens at work last week when we probably should have been doing something at least remotely school related (but I'm the boss, and it's summer!) so I asked about my shrively tomatoes. Mr. Fred told me they're too soggy. Since I'm slow to believe anything anybody tells me, I looked it up. Here's what the Oklahoma State Extention info says:

Physiological leaf roll
Physiological leaf roll begins with an upward curling of older leaflets. Leaf roll may progress until the margins of the rolled leaflets touch or even overlap. Rolled leaves are firm and leathery and most of the foliage may be affected (Figure 5). Aside from the leaf rolling, plants are otherwise normal in size and appearance, unlike virus diseases such as curly top which also cause leaf rolling. Affected plants will continue to grow normally with little or no reduction in yield or quality.
Physiological leaf roll has been associated with tomato varieties having a specific gene that favors this condition, the occurrence of high temperatures, and prolonged periods of wet soil. Leaf roll is often more severe on plants that are staked and pruned.
Control: Aside from planting tomatoes on well-drained soils, there is little that can be done to correct leaf roll.

Hmmm. Guess I'll let them dry out a bit before I drown them again. Tomatoes are SO picky! Everybody else out there cheers when I come around with the water hose.

If you're a non-gardener, and you're still reading this for some rather odd reason, just consider the advantage of laying your head on the pillow at the end of a stress filled day and turning your thoughts to "physiological leaf roll". Now, isn't that better than the fears, worries and accusations that try so hard to take over your brain and mine instead? It's just a suggestion!

Kyron and the Vanilla Dog

My little buddy Kyron brought his parents over tonight so that they could work on the parade float for Journey Fellowship for the Bethany parade. So Ky and I got some quality time together. (It was either that or do some actual WORK on the float! Oops. Did I say that out loud?)

He's good company. I asked if he wanted to walk out to the field with me and he wanted to know what a field was. (Ky's 4.)So we walked all around on the crunchy dry grass discovering grasshoppers, dragon flies, butterflies and various unusual seed heads from spent flowers. He has very sharp eyes and a very capable vocabulary. We also learned about barbed wire, but gladly he took my word for it when I told him it's best to stay away from it!

He wanted to see my 'maters since he remembered picking some last summer. Don't think he saw a connection between my big bushy plants with only small yellow blooms compared to the red ripe fruit he carried home so carefully in his car seat a year ago or more.

We walked the dogs up the road a half mile and back. The "big vanilla one" (Spirit) responded EVERY TIME Ky called out her name, stopping to gaze back at him patiently, making him giggle, EVERY TIME. It was great. I asked if Spyro was the licorice one, which Ky was polite enough to laugh at.

Both dogs showed off to Ky's delight by pooping heartily at their favorite places on the side of the road. (No baggies, folks. This is the country! Just call it fertilizer.) Apparently dogs say "ruff" when they run into a car and get a booboo. Boys say "ouch" under the same circumstances. The cat gave him a booboo on the belly. Their dog poops in the house and dad says one more time and he's an outside dog.

Excellent use of a quiet summer evening.

Tune in tomorrow for a not-so-quiet update on Piedmont America as 7,000 Vietnam veterans on motorcycles escort the Dignity Memorial Vietnam Wall into town for the holiday weekend.

Seriously. If you decide to come see it, call me and I'll meet you somewhere.

BEEBO SAYS: Go Ye Therefore and Pollinate

Man oh man, I just about missed it! Lucky I heard about it yesterday before it was all over. Oklahoma Governor Brad Henry joined other governors nationwide in declaring the week of June 22-28 as National Pollinator Week. That's THIS week! I wonder if our friendly neighborhood birds, bees, butterflies, flies, moths, bats and beetles know this week is special for them. I'll go share with them as soon as I'm finished sharing with you.



I heard Steve Buchmann, the international coordinator of the North American Pollinator Protection Campaign, talk to Melissa Block on All Things Considered (NPR of course) about National Pollinator Week yesterday.

You might not know this important information from the Pollinator Partnership:

"Pollination is vital to our survival and the existence of nearly all ecosystems on earth. 80% of the world's crop plants depend on pollination. Pollinators, almost all of which are insects, are indispensable partners for an estimated 1 out of every 3 mouthfuls of food, spices and condiments we eat, and the beverages we drink. They are essential to the fibers we use, the medicines that keep us healthy, and more than half of the world's diet of fats and oils. Insect pollinators, including honey bees, pollinate products amounting to $20 billion annually in the U.S. alone."

That's awesome. Let's see, since I've been writing "one out of every three mouthfuls of food", would include 1 of the 3 spoonfuls of Snickerdoodle cookie dough from my fridge, 1 of the 3 tall glasses of iced tea, one of the three slices of last night's pizza. Thanks bees. I'm sure that's not what the Pollinator People meant, but I'm appreciative, nonetheless.

To ensure the survival of pollinators for future generations of people and plants, Steve, the save-the-bumble-bees guy from the NPR interview, recommended planting native wildflowers as part of your landscaping.



I actually spend a spectacularly unreasonable amount of my time doing just that. The yellow flowers in the picture are a species of Coreopsis that I yanked from the field behind Elaine's house last summer before developers scraped it bare for the new housing being built there. There are white Yarrow flowers to the right of the photo that I snuck out of the site of the new school just before construction began there last fall.(orange flip flops, rain-soaked hoodie, barbed wire fence... NOW do you remember that story?) I'm excited that these stolen treasures actually survived the transplant and the winter, and are growing like wildflowers should! The Butterfly Milkweed, another variety of Coreopsis, the Sumac, Gaillardia, prickly pear cactus, wild plum, and Black-eyed Susans that I planted last year came up again too. I visit them daily.



Steve also mentioned planting heirloom varieties of vegetables and flowers that need and enjoy lots of pollination. That is, instead of planting highly hybridized varieties, you can look for the ones marked "heirloom", or just go rob your great-granny of the cannas that have been in her yard since before you were born. Those ruffly double knockout roses in my front bed look great, but I haven't noticed many bees, since there probably isn't much pollen present.



Bees do love my lavender plants though.




I have one heirloom variety of tomato, a dark Cherokee, that I love. It has blossoms but not fruit yet.




So, anything pollinatin' at your place?

73 Pounds of Lettuce and 12 Pounds of Peas

My favorite story from my NPR this week on my 9 minute treks back and forth to work in the Mom Mobile was about the Washington school kids harvesting their veggies from the White House garden. On that one afternoon with Mrs. Obama and the White House chef, Sam Kass, they harvested 73 pounds of lettuce and 12 pounds of peas! Wow. I have lettuce and peas in my garden and I'm not sure the whole harvest for the last few weeks would even bump the scale up a pound or two. If my family was depending on me for actual sustenance, it would be pretty sad. Some day I'll get good enough at this to actually feed people regularly. The closest I've come to providing for others, from my garden, is the baggie of fresh peas I had in my purse on the airplane ride to Portland. We passed it around to my sister, my daughters and my niece. I think we all got exactly three peas! And yep, that was it. The peas were done by the time I got home!

I ate probably three whole bowls of salad I picked from the garden. That was it. My tomatoes are looking good.

So I was truly amazed at the amount of veggies that are coming from the White House garden. And while reading about THAT garden I started reading in general about the current emphasis on growing your own food. OK, maybe you haven't noticed that particular emphasis, but I have. Did you know that Queen Elizabeth has approved a new garden on palace grounds?

Kitchen Gardeners International report that...

For the first time since the war, fruit and vegetables are to be found in an allotment-sized plot in the gardens of Buckingham Palace. Called the Yard Bed, Buckingham Palace's 4x10 metre plot is in a challenging, north-facing area to the garden's rear, tight up against the Gardeners' Yard. "Not ideal, but it is the only open space available, because everything is so landscaped," admitted deputy gardens manager Claire Midgley, 32, one of eight gardeners at the palace.

Garden Organic's chief executive, Myles Bremner, said: "The fact that this is the first time that food has been grown at the palace since the second world war will undoubtedly bring about the Dig for Victory analogies, but the challenges for self sufficiency and a need to re-skill a generation in how to feed itself resonate even now. What is important is to put people back in touch with food and how to grow, and hopefully the palace allotment will be a driver getting more people to achieve this."

Interesting.

And then there is the LA Eco-Village, a neighborhood in Los Angeles that is working together to create a sustainable community, including a community garden. If they can convince the LA School District not to build a parking lot on their garden! I loved their video of neighborhood pictures, along with a great video of the White House garden in action.

So where did the idea for a White House garden come from? The folks at "Eat the View" recall the history of their campaign to convince the First Family to provide an example for the nation to eat the "localist" food. Actually, their campaign was conducted before they knew which candidate would be occupying the White House. There is a terrific video of how things got going. It's fascinating to track how this small idea became a big idea through on-line sources and main stream media.

I have green beans and tomatoes coming on. Seriously! I hope I have beans and 'maters to share.

Meet Bertha Wilhelmina

My genius sister found the Bertha Wilhelmina House in Portland, OR for all of us to occupy as a vacation rental. It was comfortable, spacious, charming and perfect for our two families for the week.

I walked around the extensive gardens that surround the house every day at least once discovering new plants I had missed before. One evening Rudy and I browsed and named the ones we knew and wondered at the incredible variety we couldn't name. Just for herbs we found lavender, mint, chives, oregano and rosemary, mixed in with shrubs and flowers.

Walking the neighborhood was also a joy since every yard, it seemed, was overflowing with flowers.















This is how our family enjoyed the Bertha House:

Sleeping. Eating.

Talking.

Making pancakes, bacon, eggs, and lots of pots of coffee in the big kitchen and eating together often! Thanks to little brother and family who showed up our first morning fully loaded with breakfast makings.

Playing cards, playing "Air Command", which Aunt Shari soundly lost to nephew Austin, telling ghost stories that featured the creepy basement and creaky stairs, sharing Cori's computer on the internet.

Reading.

Eating.

Playing the piano.

Sharing coffee and goodies from Stumptown Coffee down the street.

Singing.

Eating.

Taking walks in the neighborhood.

It's good to have a family you can move in with for a week and it's FUN!

My Pick at Powell's

Half hour? One hour? Two days? How long DOES a family of reading nuts need to spend in the largest book store in the world?

As it turns out, I think we spent about an hour and a half on Portland's Powell's City of Books.



The store web site description of Powell's:

STORE DESCRIPTION
"Powell's City of Books is a book lover's paradise, the largest used and new bookstore in the world. Located in downtown Portland, Oregon and occupying an entire city block, the City stocks more than a million new and used books. Nine color coded rooms house over 3,500 different sections, offering something for every interest, including an incredible selection of out-of-print and hard-to-find titles.

A few facts about the City of Books:

68,000 square feet packed with books
we buy 3,000 used books over the counter every day
approximately 3,000 people walk in and buy something every day
another 3,000 people just browse and drink coffee
our parking garage provides space for 40 cars (ok, so there are bigger parking garages)
we stock 122 major subject areas and more than 3,500 subsections
you'll find more than 1,000,000 volumes on our shelves
approximately 80,000 book lovers browse the City's shelves every day, in Portland and via the Internet. So is our mother ship the world's largest bookstore? Heck, it may be bigger than your whole town."

Awesome!

The whole family gathered in the coffee shop with stacks of books:
Cori and Alli: a pile of Orson Scott Card books
Gene: Biography of Jimmy Hendrix
Me: Bloomsbury Grammar Guide: Grammar Made Easy by Gordon Jarvie
and Garden Anywhere: How to Grow Gorgeous Container Gardens, Herb Gardens, Kitchen Gardens, and More-- Without Spending a Fortune by Alys Fowler.

Yes. I bought a gardening book and a grammar book. How fun it that?

I read the whole 192 page gardening book on the VERY long plane ride back from Portland to OKC, by way of Las Vegas and Denver. (Gotta love Southwest Airlines.)There are lots of pretty full page pictures, so even a read-it-slow-and-savor person like me managed to finish it in 5 or 6 hours.

This is definitely not a book about how to create a Better Homes and Gardens, glossy photo ready design of expensive fences, furniture and saucy plant collections. The key words in the title are "without spending a fortune". It is written by a young woman who is a very well educated horticulturist, a citizen of the United Kingdom, who doesn't mind being photographed with her fingernails full of dirt and hair in a frizztastic knot. My favorite photo is Ms. Fowler standing in a dumpster with her dirty Keds and cute cotton summer dress and snazzy movie star sun glasses hunting for throw-away lumber to build a compost box or cold frame.

Her advice is wise, practical, easy to understand, completely do-able by gardeners in apartments or backyards or whole acres and supremely CHEAP!

Tomato Love

Ten days with no internet at home, followed by 6 days of vacation with the extended fam in Portland, but I'm back now! Miss me? So look out 'cause my mind is full of blogginess I've been saving up just for you. For most of us who grow tomatoes here in Okie, our plants are pretty good sized and putting on some blossoms, so the video I'm going to show you isn't exactly timely. But it was when I made it several weeks ago! If you tomato plants are shriveled and dead go get some new ones and try again. This will help.