gardeners?

any gardeners here?
my pole beans are pitiful due to the drought but vines have started growing again after the rains.
reckon they'll still produce?
i had given up on my corn but i think it's gonna produce quite a bit in spite of the drought.
okra, tomatoes, zucchini, and squash are doing pretty good.
would have had a monster crop of taters if it had rained earlier.

I grew bush beans for the first and last time this year, they have produced bushels and bushels but bending over for so long picking just kills my back. During the super hot dry weather I watered every day. All my other stuff has done really well also, been canning and vacuum sealing everything from salsa to three different kinds of pickles to frozen squash and zucchini, corn is coming in fast.
I think your beans will still produce as long as you still have blooms, don't spray for bugs if you can avoid it, still need as many bees around as possible.
I also learned a valuable bit of info several years ago while fishing in southern Mississippi about how to water plants, and you and everyone else may already know this but it went against everything I ever thought I knew about watering plants.
This farmer cropped thousands of acres and I watched the irrigation systems watering all these crop fields in the middle of the scorching hot day. I had always been told "don't water in the bright sun, it will scald your plants because the water droplets will magnify the sun's days.
I asked this very large scale, very successful Mississippi farmer about this and he said the opposite is true. You actually cool the leaves and hydrate at the most dangerous time of the day. The downside is evaporation is greater during this hot part of the day.
Anyway, hope your beans pick up

that's why i quit growing bush beans too.
kills your back and more buggy too.

He had a huge garden with all types of plants. I hated working in the garden as it made my skin itch. It was a lot of work. He had 60 tomato plants in the ground and staked up when he had his stroke. The garden died that year. The only thing we have left is one blueberry bush. I picked all the blueberries I could get and have them in the deep freezer now. We had a 26 cubic foot deep freezer, and it was packed full of vegetables when dad was still around. He grew tomatoes the size of softballs. Early Girls, Big Boy's, and Celebrity. Green Beans, Pea, Sweet Corn, Carrots, Radishes, Lettuce, Squash, Strawberries, Lima Beans, turnips, apples, raspberries, grapes, Boysenberries, and at least 12 Blueberry plants that didn't make it. Only one big blueberry bush survived. Oh yea. He planted some Pear trees too.


He watered the garden during the sizzling summer months when it failed to rain. He watered in the morning so that the water would soak down to the roots before the sun got up too high in the sky. If you water in the evening fungus will start and kill the plants.

I will share one thing that he taught me about gardening. Phosphate Rock. We used to drive 50 miles to Owensboro, KY to buy bags of phosphate rock. He also would have horse manure delivered and spread on the garden every year and tilled that into the soil.

One more tip. He used diatomaceous earth to kill bugs. He would also buy praying mantis eggs and put them into the garden to hatch. They kill a lot of harmful bugs. And he would use Seven Dust at times.

From what I learned watching him was that Soil preparation was key to a good garden. And don't overwater the tomatoes as that will make them split. Use mulch around the plants to keep the soil from drying out.

Note: Limiting nutrients like Phosphorus, and Potassium are needed for plant growth and blooms. He would make me mad when he used RAID on the young plants to keep the rabbits from eating them. And watch out for the ground hogs as they will eat the young plants as they first come up out of the ground.

Before my health went south, I would grow tomatoes, squash, and cucumbers in my small garden. My dad used one-third of an acre to grow his garden and I only had a 20 ft by 12 ft patch of dirt. My soil was full of clay and his was more organic with all the horse manure he put into the soil over 35 years. We would drive out to the East Side of Evansville on North Green River Road to a veterinary office where the vet kept horses and shoveled horse manure into the back of his 1/2-ton pickup truck and take it to his garden and spread it out into the soil. Then he had a horse farmer who had aged horse manure mixed into saw dust and had that farmer deliver it to his garden and store it in big piles. Dad would let it age before putting it into the soil. Amending the soil is a key to a good garden. The horse farm was up in Warrick County, IN. His father had a big garden too. I remember as a child walking through my dad's father's garden and catching toads. ha ha. And the toads eat a lot of harmful insects too so let them live in the garden.

I deeply appreciate all you guys growing efforts as you make more on the shelves at Kroger available fir this old guy. I fully admit to being “ growing impaired “ and vegetatively disabled . Yes Moveon, I admit it. I’m an agriculturally retarded crop buying fertilizer creator. 😂😂😂

[QUOTE=ZoraSpook;584035]I deeply appreciate all you guys growing efforts as you make more on the shelves at Kroger available fir this old guy. I fully admit to being “ growing impaired “ and vegetatively disabled . Yes Moveon, I admit it. I’m an agriculturally retarded crop buying fertilizer creator. [/QUOTE]

I understand.

[QUOTE=ZoraSpook;584035]I deeply appreciate all you guys growing efforts as you make more on the shelves at Kroger available fir this old guy. I fully admit to being “ growing impaired “ and vegetatively disabled . Yes Moveon, I admit it. I’m an agriculturally retarded crop buying fertilizer creator. [/QUOTE]

the only reason i raise gardens is because i'm cursed with a super taster syndrome.
nothing compares to fresh produce or home canned vegetables and few can appreciate the flavors.
most people are just feeders that don't have sensitive taste buds.
i buy aged cow manure, spread table scraps, tree leaves and anything else to build the soil.
i tried horse manure one year but they had sprayed the pasture with weed killer and my tomatoes were sick that year.
just vacuum packed 18 bags of corn today and will have 4 times that much more.
also put up beans, squash, zucchini, okra, and tomatoes.
very lucky to get that much considering the absence of adequate rain this year.
also, gardening is about the only good exercise i get.