okra | Charley's Vegetables And Herbs

Picked Some Veggies Last Night

After being gone a week, we got out in the garden with Charley and picked us some fresh vegetables. The garden looks good and is doing well. The heat has Charley watering a little more than usual. Our pepper plants are a little short because he planted them later than usual but we are still getting a lot of peppers. The squash have done their thing and will be plowed up so the Charley can replant some squash seed.

I have never picked okra until last night. I am not sure I ever will again.

Had some of the cantaloupe for breakfast and Sweet 100 Cherry Tomatoes at lunch. Both were delicious.

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Been A While Since I Posted

It has been a long while since I posted anything here. Last summer’s massive heat wave here made any thing to do with gardening disastrous. Last summer’s stationary high set in on us, and we were dead center of it. Where we live, we in a river valley with the Boston Mountains to our north and the Ouachita Mountains to our south. The high press basically put us in the bottom of a pressure cooker. Out highs would be 5-15 degrees higher than towns 50 miles away from us in any direction. Basically, it was merciless and miserable, and our garden cooked on the plants.

In addition to that, I had to have another surgery on my leg which left me out of commission June and July so all the stuff I planned on doing about gardening and add it here. Now here I am a year later and still on crutches. So I am not sure if any of my gardening will happen again this year. At the very least, I want to build a couple of raised beds. We will see.

As for now, here are some pictures of this year’s Charley’s Vegetables and Herbs from March.

9 Steps To A Successful Garden

Gardening-supplies

A quick list of how to have a successful garden.

Location – all gardens need as much sun as possible. Gardens need a minimum of 6 hours of sunlight per day. 12 hours of sunshine is better.
Tools – you will need tools to prepare the soil and plant your vegetables. Standard items are hoe, garden rake, shovel, hand trowel. If you are more power tool oriented a tiller works well in preparing the soil, but there is not a lot you can’t accomplish in the garden with a hoe and a shovel.
Compost or other organic soil amendments – adding these elements to your garden can help your plants be healthier, resist diseases better and produce larger yields.
Add any fertilizer recommended on the How To Grow pages.
Plants – the top vegetable garden plants are: Tomatoes, Peppers, Cucumbers, Squash and Okra. Watermelons and Cantaloupe are almost tied with Okra.
Water your plants in well after you have planted them then water them as needed until they get established and start growing. After they are established, water them good once a week with a deep slow soaking.
Be sure to follow up with additional fertilizing as recommended on the How To Grow pages and prune and stake your tomatoes.
Pull weeds or hoe early and often.
Harvest as recommended so that your plants will keep producing.
Bonus: stagger your plantings so that you have ripe vegetables all season long.

Top Veggies For Beginning Gardeners

We here at the Charley’s Veggies blog have partnered up with the editors at AOL Home website Gardening page to provide information for gardening articles and pictures to help those who want to learn about gardening.

Helping people learn and be successful in the garden is the main goal of our Charley’s Veggies blog and this partnership will help us bring more information to you.

Click here to check out our first article on AOL Home Gardening.

Lacey’s Garden – Lettuce, Strawberries and Tomatoes

Hello to all! How is everybody enjoying the start of summer, the end of school and hopefully, the first bits of your harvest? Lettuce is in full swing right now and strawberries, too. I actually have tomatoes on the vine slowly ripening in the hot summer sun. This is my favorite time of summer-checking each day to see what’s ripening. It is a joy to call the girls over and say, Look, the first strawberry! They are so excited to eat them. I am posting a few pictures of the garden. Things are still looking kind of puny after nearly drowning, but most seem to be pulling out of it. Hope you have time to sit and swing in the hammock and enjoy your garden.