You Only Have to Buy One Box

Inbox Humor

A salesman goes up to a house and knocks on the front door. It's opened by a little ten year-old boy who has a lighted cigar in one hand, a glass of whiskey in the other and a Penthouse magazine tucked under his arm.

Salesman: "Hello son. Is your mom or dad home?"

Little boy: "What the #$%& do you think?"

Raising Okra

Okra is a decidedly southern-American food. But fans of it can be found in Japan, Thailand, and in all of central Africa as well. IMO, it's the most disgusting vegetable known to man. No matter how you cook it, it creates this slime that is best described as 'snot-like'. If you saute it long enough, the slime goes away, but it's still tough to eat. I mean, you know the slime is still there... it's just hidden. If you batter and then deep fry it, it's pretty good. But if you're going to fry it, why not replace the okra with rings of onion, or a potato? They're both much better than the godawful okra.

Anyway, here's how to grow it. Wait until you are getting days that exceed 80 degrees all of the time. That's in mid to late April down here in Boondocks, Lousiana, but it may be as late as June in the northern states. Far northern states like Montana, the Dakotas, Maine, etc might not be able to grow this plant at all. If anyone up there is adventurous enough to try it, please send me an email. I'd love to hear about it.

Plant the seed about a foot apart. It's a slow grower, and needs constant and vigilant weeding for about 60 days. After that, give it a bit of fertilizer one time (I use 8-8-8, mostly because I don't know what it's asking for), and it will produce abundant amounts of those horrid okra pods, continually, until the first frost. But once again, you have to be vigilant. They grow very fast at this point. You've got to cut them off every other day. Otherwise, they turn into inedible fibrous crud that's sort of like a tree limb. Very woody.




That's about how big they should be. 8" is cutting it close. 2" is overkill. Somewhere in between is ideal.

The Problem with Watermelon

Growing a ~50 foot row of watermelons has a serious drawback. Besides the horrible job of weeding the damned things, you have to figure out what to do with about 40 watermelons. And they all ripen at the same time.

Of course it's impossible to eat so many melons in a one month time frame. So this year, we interspersed regular (charleston grey) watermelons with some tiny (sugar pea) 'icebox' type watermelons so we'd have a mix of big and small to satisfy any family in town. That way, we could give them away to everyone, regardless of family size. A good side-effect was that those tiny watermelons produce, I'm guessing, three melons per vine. We've got well over a hundred watermelons sucking up the sun right now, all within a week of being ripe. Check out the difference in the size of the finished products:


Quite a difference! The little ones are a bit hard to find because of the stupid way I planted them among the regular sized watermelons, but they are exceptionally flavorful, and have just a tiny rind.

So what should you grow? Big ones or little ones? The big ones definitely give more eatable watermelon per square foot, but the little ones are pretty cool. Plus, you can grow the little icebox watermelons in a 10 gallon pot, if you're willing to water them every day. It's up to you!

This is Getting Old

Now it's breaking 100F while being partly cloudy! While friends and family in NJ. MA and Minnesota report ridiculously cool weather, friends in MS, AL, and FL are suffering through equally ridiculous heat... and no rain for over a month. *whine*

Regardless, we've got people showing up in 2 hours to eat some fine barbecued Independence Day brisket, chicken and ribs. It's uncouth to whine at a party, so I'm whining on the internet instead. FWIW, I think we'll all be hanging out inside :).

Happy Fourth!

The Bane of the Southern Gardener

The stink bug. So called because it bears the abhorrent scent of cilantro. They make tomatoes un-give-away-able because their stings mottle the skin and make rock-hard bead-like structures beneath it. They make cucumbers grow misshapen. They make bean and pea pods come in missing half of the beans/peas. They even discolor corn kernels if you aren't fast to harvest them.

There used to be a pesticide that would eradicate them - Thiodan. But the EPA, being a bunch of whiny ^%$#@$es, banned it in America four years ago, simply because it looks a little like DDT chemically. No studies. They just said 'it might cause cancer', as if anyone was eating the stuff. The EPA is nothing but a bunch of hippies, which is doubly sad because it was created by Republicans!

But I digress. I'm writing this to let you know that there is a new (~2 yrs old) product that treats stink bugs like the cilantro smelling scuzzballs they are and knocks them out, and then kills them - for about 5 days, rain or shine. Then, you've got to pick all the veggies and spray again.

Bayer Triple Action Insect Killer. Buy some today. I haven't found a bug that it won't eradicate. Buy some now before the EPA randomly selects it for the chopping block.

Update: It works on azaleas and rhododendrons too.

What Happens?

What happens when you put a city girl on a tractor in the country? You get a really big smile :)



That's my sister, btw. She's awesome.