The Corray's Home: June 2013

Thursday, June 27, 2013

What's wrong with this picture?

Standing in line waiting for my 3 kids meals and 2 spicy chicken meals I noticed something...... can anyone tell me what's wrong with this picture? I know it's fuzzy but I took it with my phone. This was taken at the new Chick-Fil-A here in town that opened a few months ago.

Stink bugs

I noticed the other day that there were a lot of stink bugs on the tomato plants. Looking online I found a recipe for a nicotine spray to kill stink bugs.

http://www.wikihow.com/Kill-a-Stink-Bug

4
Use a nicotine solution. Soak a pack of shredded cigarettes in 1 gallon (4 liters) of warm water. Strain the solution and mix in 2 Tbsp (30 ml) of dish detergent.

Fill a spray bottle with this solution and thoroughly coat the stink bug with it.
The liquid dish detergent allows the solution to stick to the insect more effectively, and the nicotine poisons the stink bug.
Wear disposable gloves as you work with the nicotine solution to avoid accidentally absorbing the poison through your skin.

As soon as I started spraying there was a swarm of stink bugs flying out of the tomato plants. Apparently they didn't like it much. We'll have to see if they are as bad tomorrow, or if it worked.

6/27/13 garden harvest

Today's harvest, Tomatoes, Cucumbers, 3 green beans, 2 Cowhorn Peppers, 1 green pepper, many Jalapenos, and many Banana Peppers.

Sunday, June 23, 2013

2013 Potato Harvest

All the potato plants died off about a week ago so we decided it was time to pull up the potatoes and get the beds ready for the fall plant. We had planted 2 beds of potatoes, one bed of white and one of red. The beds are 4x8 ft. I believe it was 15 plants each, but my records are horrible (again), better than last year but still not good enough. This was the final harvest.

Red Harvest

White Harvest

Picture of both with a carrot that accidentally got pulled when weeding the carrots.

I'm thinking about planting next year's potatoes in the 20x20 block that I used for corn this year. I'll have to mix in a lot of compost to loosen up the soil enough for that though. They may just go into raised beds again next year, we'll see.

**Update**

Thought I would add the weights

17 pounds of red

13 pounds of white

2013 Corn Harvest

Knee high by the 4th of July??? Not in Georgia. We picked our corn this weekend. Last year the corn only grew 2 feet before it died so it's definitely an improvement. Last fall I left the turkey pen in a corner of the yard until they killed all the grass and "fertilized" the soil well. I then moved their pen forward and repeated the process. We did this for 4 squares which gave us a 20x20 plot to plant the corn in. I used the old wheel plow the neighbor gave me to till it up. The only thing I did after planting it was to throw down some blood meal a few weeks after it germinated. About 3 weeks ago we had a big storm come through that blew about 1/2 of it over. Some I could stake back up and some was just lost. Here are some pics from the harvest.

The kids and I start picking in the 20x20 block.

The harvested ears

What was left after cleaning them and discarding those that were too bug infested, not pollinated well , or just nasty looking. The chickens will eat the ears that we didn't want.

The final score.... 16 bags of corn cut off the cob, ready to go into Danielle's casseroles.

There are still some late arrival ears in the patch so we may get a bit more but I'm not counting on much more this year. At least we found out that it is possible to grow sweet corn here. It just has to happen a LOT earlier than in Illinois.