I got a lot done these last several days, because the weather got so much better, with below average temperature and humidity, which made it bearable to be out there for hours. Yesterday it started getting more humid, and even more today, and warmer, but still not like it had been, with those heat indexes well over 100°. I don't know how those people can deal with that constantly.
I pulled out some "bad plants" - things that just stopped producing, in that heat, but didn't seem to be coming back at all. The bottle gourds must have been northern varieties, as the heat did them in! Several cucumbers also didn't come back, while 2 of the first (from early May) County Fair plants are still producing, and two later planted CFs are starting to produce, and I planted 3 more CFs, and 2 County Fair "Improved", to see what the difference is. I figure I'll get some, starting in mid-Sept. I also started some cabbage and cauliflower seeds, to go into those places I pulled the plants from. Tomorrow I might pull the onions and shallots - I "bent them over" a couple days ago, to speed up the process, and I'll see what they look like.
I was going to cut some male butternut blossoms, while weeding today, but there really weren't that many. Surprisingly, there were a lot of just forming butternuts, however, in addition to those 4 almost mature ones, which they always seem to get one of early, on each plant. I didn't count them, but there were a bunch, which are early.
Something I did, just before I came in, was I set up that rosemary to air layer one of the branches. I scraped the needles, and some of the bark off the stem, brushed with some rooting gel, and set up that tube by moistening the coir/peat mix with some water with a small amount of that Clonex in it. This took about 6 weeks to start seeing roots in rosemary, when I did it before, compared to 7 months with the kaffir lime tree!
Just started to air layer a branch of the rosemary, 8-5 by
pepperhead212, on Flickr