Cheapskate Rural Dweller: grape

Showing posts with label grape. Show all posts

I'm Gonna Get You Sucka! Keeping the Crepe Myrtle Sucker Free

This Week's Gardening...

Crepe myrtles are great trees. They have gorgeous flowers and, when fully bloomed, look like a giant living cotton candy on a stick. They go deciduous in the winter, protecting themselves from the cold, and can stand extreme heat in the summer. In fact, they thrive on it.

While our other plants wilted and browned during this summer's most intense heat (120 degrees plus), the crepe myrtle just laughed it off and produced some more flowers.

The one drawback to them is that they're a prolific producer of suckers...stems growing from the ground around the bottom of the plant.

If you want yours to be a bush, rather than a tree, no problem. Just leave them be. But, if you're like me and want to train it into a tree, you need to get those suckers.

If left alone, you'd get a tree like this one at our local YMCA, where the suckers grow like a little bush around the bottom of the trunk.

Otherwise, you just need to go out once a week with your pruning shears and snip them off at the base.

It's not a hard job but you need to keep on top of it.

In other gardening news, I found a cluster of grapes on our vine that somehow survived that intense heat and was able to harvest it.

We're blowing out our classic vinyl LP albums at The Musick Channel Garage Sale on Ebay.
Find some bargains on great music today.

Darryl Musick
Copyright 2018 - All Rights Reserved

The Wrath of the Grapes

Now that the backyard roses have been pruned, it's time to move on to the grapevine. The leaves have all fallen off so this makes it a good time to cut.

Basically, I just want to cut all the branches from the level of the bottom of the lower crossbar on the trellis down.

Loppers hit the thicker branches...

...while my clippers hit the old grape clusters that have long turned into raisins.

There, that's better.

A sweep of the patio and this weekend's gardening is done.

Darryl
Copyright 2016 - Darryl Musick
All Rights Reserved

Deacon Blues

"They got a name for the winners in the world, I wanna name when I lose. They call Alabama the Crimson Tide...call me Deacon Blues."
Deacon Blues
Steely Dan

Last week, I showed you some of the winners of the garden. This week, it's the losers' turn. Luckily we didn't have too many. Last year was an almost complete lost season. This year is much, much better.

I'm not complaining at all but let's see what didn't work this year.

At the top of the page is our grape vine, which is always a challenge. One year I got 50 pounds of grapes. The next, all the local animals ate them before they ripened. In the years since, I've tried various methods to keep the animals out and have had limited to no success.

This years, I kept the animals out by wrapping the clusters in nets but the resulting fruit was tiny and cracked. Not nearly as good as the grapes I got at the farmers market for $2 a pound. I'm just going to let the plant alone next year and see what happens.

The zucchini, usually the most prolific plant in the garden, only produced two very small fruit over the season. I'll try a different variety next year.

I believe the corn was a victim of an unnoticed clogged sprinkler at the beginning of the season. It never came back.

The severe drought we're experiencing also hit some of the plants. These roses have no blooms because the deer have been coming down from the dry mountains in search of food. They found a taste for the flowers and eat them up as soon as they bloom.

Maybe next year we'll get that El Nino we keep waiting for and the deer can return home.

This rose just gave up the ghost. I think I'll replace it with a Saint Patrick rose.

The biggest victim is the lawn, which is really a victim of the law. We're mandated not to water it more than two days a week, 15 minutes at a time. With no shade at all, it just couldn't handle that diet so dormancy kicked in and it's just straw now.

I'm hoping we'll get enough water this year that I can overseed with a heat-resistant blend for next year.

Darryl
Copyright 2015 - Darryl Musick
All Rights Reserved

Keeping up Appearances

Checking into the status of the garden. First, in this era a megadroughts, how about a look at water usage? It's raining today, that's good, but we're still under rationing.

Last month's bill was $17 and change. this compared to the same time last year when we paid, well, more (the water company's website is down and I can't look up last year's bill right now). There is also a strange credit on the bill of a couple of bucks, called the "CA: LA Payment Assistance" credit, that I don't know what it's for but in water usage, we used 6,732 gallons this May and 7,480 gallons last May.

My next door neighbor, who has a large green lawn that she only waters once a week, has a bill over $180 for the same period. Yikes!

The tomatoes are busting out all over. Many fruit on our hybrid plant and cherry tomato plant. The heirloom plant is showing lots of flowers but no fruit yet.

Our chiles are doing better this year. I used this Anaheim chile in our eggs this weekend and there's some gorgeous pasilla chiles on another plant. I'll maked stuffed peppers out of them someday.

Got six ears of corn showing so far.

The grapes are showing slight signs of smut so I hit them with some sulfur dust on Sunday.

My wife made me take the cage off of our zucchini, now it's showing signs of animal damage and I still haven't gotten any fruit. I put the cage back on, let's see how it does.

It's June. The vendor at the farmers market who sold us the dragon fruit plants told me to cut back by a third and we should see flowers by May. I did. Got lot's of new growth but no flowers or fruit yet.

Darryl
Copyright 2015 - Darryl Musick
All Rights Reserved

Nothing but Net

It's getting to the time where the grapes are getting too tempting to the local wildlife. We found a squirrel trying to get the the fruit just this morning.

If you follow this blog, you know that this is an ongoing problem each year. We tried netting the entire plant but this just constricted the plant too much and we didn't get any grapes. Last year, we tried using holographic tape and was able to get about half a crop, the other was devoured by critters, so I guess it worked somewhat.

It also gave my wife something to take a picture of.

There's still some tape on the plant but this year, I'm taking the extra step of netting individual bunches. We've been saving the nets that the fruits and vegetables come in from the store.

My plan is to put a net around each bunch, letting then breathe and get sunshine but providing a barrier for the animals.

I was able to net up eight bunches, about a third, before I ran out. We'll see soon how well this works.

Darryl
Copyright 2015 - Darryl Musick
All Rights Reserved

From the Land of Free Flowing Water

...at least for this weekend. We've got a late season storm to help ease our parched land. In fact, so far May is the wettest month of the season. An inch and a half of rain means we can turn off the timers for a few days and enjoy nature's complimentary wetness.

This tomato likes it. It's overflowed its cage but still no flowers. But wait, what is that?

That's right, there are some buds hidden below. Fruit is on its way.

Same with this hanging basket of cherry tomatoes.

This heirloom tomato is not growing as fast but is still looking good.

Zucchini is blooming, too. It should be the first producer.

Our hot red chili plant is also showing flowers.

So far, it's looking good.

The grape vine has many bunches of grapes like this.

Every now and then, though, I see a weakling like this one on the left.

Pluck...and it's gone. We want to channel the plant's strength to the best clusters.

It is just about time to put my little net bags on this fruit to protect it until harvest.

Darryl

This Vine Needs Our Support

It's time to start gardening again in our back patio. I let it go a bit fallow this fall, we had some home improvement projects we needed to get done, and now it's time to get back into the dirt.

While we were successful in keeping the birds away from a good portion of our grape crop this year, the trellis I built for it years ago is straining under the weight of this now mature vine.

It's listing a good 20 degrees and the crossbars have become detached. The wood is still good thanks to the decision to use redwood when I originally constructed it. Redwood is pretty resistant to rot and I use it when I can, especially in a wet gardening environment.

Pretty simple in execution, I just pull the wood out of the ground, trim up the grape vine a bit, and use a mallet to hammer them back in as deep as I can get them. Then, just screw in the crossbars and I'm done.

The plumeria is a great grower but it goes in some directions I don't want it to go. I've trimmed them up and tried to point out the way I do want them to go. We'll see what they look like this summer.

I've already pruned the front yard roses. Easy job as the deer have been keeping them in check for me. I've only got a little room left in the green waste bin so I can only prune one of the backyard roses this week. It'll be Mr. Lincoln.

That's it for this weekend, next week I'll see about tilling in some amendments for this year's vegetable garden.

An Early Harvest

This will probably be my biggest harvest this summer.

While the squirrels decimated my zucchini...I will not get so much as one squash this season...at least the tomatoes and grapes pulled through.

The grapes are usually end-of-summer but this hot, drought parched year made them come in early. Very early. But we did get a good crop. The bunches above represent the last of this year's.

The tomatoes are just starting to come into their own. The rodents attacked them early in the season, even uprooted the vines I have now, but I guess tomatoes aren't to their tastes after all because they've pretty much left them alone since then.

Now the plants are recovering and producing fruit.

Luckily, the dragon fruit grow on spiny cactus stocks, so we can count on a few fruit from time to time from that.

Battling Back for a Harvest

So far, my harvests this year have been pitiful. The drought's taking it's toll...not on the plants directly...but driving animals down from the dry, cooked mountains behind our house.

Deer have been using my rose garden as a diner, picking up dinner whenever the flowers are in bloom. Squirrels have invaded, some even trying to burrow under our water heater, and have decimated my zucchini. Although they can't stand the hot chiles, the leaves are to their taste and our pepper harvest is very minimal.

The pest control guy says to just block their access so we try to fill every rodent-sized hole with bricks. Just when I think I'm making progress, I look out and see another squash or pepper plant laid waste.

We have had limited success with our tomatoes, especially the cherry tomatoes I grow in a hanging basket.

The grapes have been my most successful battleground. Years ago, I put up a rodent-deterring cage around the bottom of the vine. That works for the mammals but the birds still have access to the top.

I've tried netting and, while that worked, the fruit was tiny. My wife thinks it constricted the plant too much.

This year I applied holographic tape to scare the birds away. My wife says she still see mockingbirds eating the fruit but even so, some clusters have made it through (I put fruit nets around some of the clusters but not most of them).

The heat and drought have also had another effect. Our grapes usually ripen at the beginning of September. We're harvesting now...the first week of July...and expect to get around 10 pounds.

At least I've had one success this year. Now, if I can just sneak some veggies past the squirrels, I'd be a happy gardener again.

Darryl
Copyright 2014 - Darryl Musick
All Rights Reserved