Dear All, thank you very much for your suggestions and tips for growing drought resistant/tolerant vegetables and varieties. I am busy in reading all your posts and simultaneously taking notes on the varieties to order. Its looks i not have all those varieties recommended expect couple of tomatoes. I am going to look at my seed stock filled in 3 big storage boxes before I place order. Jay, Thanks for your suggestion on NuMex chillies. I am going to order couple of varieties, by the way which is your best flavored chilly? I too often see that doughnut hole around our property in radar. I hope growing condition will turn better for this year. I love see my garden looks like jungle! Last year was really bad tomato year, but we have good harvest in the fall from fourth of july and sweet million. I will look for those new tomatoes you and Dwan suggested in seeds catalog and online. I am growing only dixondale this year but I love to hear back from you on your new and drought resistant onions. Thanks for all those points, I still feel a newbie when I read post here, so much to learn! I will keep experimenting with new varieties and note down good performer every year and tally those with climate, I guess may need many year to chose best for my garden... long way to go. Dawn, Wow that is awesome list to try! Growing less water drinking vegetable is to cut down water bill while not sacrificing yield. I also learned that water use efficient (less water drinking) vegetables and/or varieties have more flavor and taste and high nutrient that their counter parts which consume more water. This I also noticed last year with eggplants and chilli. Paula's Mild Jalapeno which was grown under less-frequent-watered-bed has stronger flavor than one that grown in bed which received more water. I try short DTMs and start as early as possible. This is already pushing to start my starts this weekend. I need go thorough each and every variety your suggested. By the way, I have not much success with broccoli and cabbage in the last years. But I am trying again this year with some row cover to check my luck. I will check Willhite and SESE. Yep that is true, most herbs did pretty well last year. Fowler Bush Bean sounds good. Dawn, you are right, I almost forgotten about the wind and hail tolerant variates, you know how much garden trashed by wind and hail last year. Carol and Dorothy, Thank you, I am envy on your rainfall pattern. Even thought you may not be growing drought tolerant varieties, but you always very nice trips and tricks to deal with problems. Dorothy, I am glad to know new salad mix of violets, burnet and swisschard. Carol,I know guys love eggplants, I bought few new types of eggplants from India, please let me know if you want some seeds or I will grow few extra plants for you and share with you later. All these are Indian types (drought resistant), but not sure how they will do here in OK. George, I will try you Fowler Bush Bean as well as Woody Mountain Crazy Bean. How is their flavor of these beans in comparison to blue lake? Yes yard long are must to grow, we had great harvest last year with out much care or watering. Any good recommendation on yard long bean with respect to flavor and production? I glad to know you are belong to SSE We love yard long beans, Priya makes curry and subji with very tender long beans and they also great for still fry. By the way, is there any difference between yard long and asparagus been? By the we not have any problem with large animals but bugs, the only two bugs I am afraid of with are squash bugs and borers. Seedmama, Thanks for offer, if you have extra, I love to have some. Hmm Bean called "Tepary"? you know the meaning my village local slang for "Rough and Tough" Lets grow that one as well. Thanks again for all these wonderful suggestion tips. Cheers -Chandra

You're welcome. Green beans are popular, easy-to-grow and the flavor of fresh snap beans is so superior to that of canned or frozen beans that it isn't even funny. Bush beans would give you a pretty rapid harvest---some of the earlier varieties begin producing a harvest about 50 to 55 days after the seeds were sown. Sugar snap peas are the same way. Pole beans are trickier in terms of getting a harvest early. Some years, our heat here cranks up so high that you find the heat causing blossom drop almost as soon as the plants start flowering. In that sort of situation, there's nothing you can do but keep the plants watered and happy and wait for temperatures to drop in the fall. I usually plant bush beans for a spring and summer harvest and pole beans for a fall harvest. I cannot remember if any of us mentioned summer squash, but those also are relatively easy, at least until the squash bugs and squash vine borers find the plants. I love summer squash, but some people don't care for it. We like to grill zucchini outdoors when we're grilling meat for a meal. A lot of people hesitate to even plant squash because of all the pest issues, but I grew winter squash of all kinds and summer squash as well for a good 5 or 6 years before the squash vine borers and squash bugs even discovered our garden. It is a lot harder to get a good harvest now, but to me it is still worth it. I think my husband would be perpetually happy with the garden if all it ever produced was peppers, tomatoes, onions, melons and lettuce, but he'll eat just about anything I can grow. Once you get used to the superior flavor of vine-ripe food brought in from the garden to the house to eat the same day, you'll find it harder and harder to purchase produce at the grocery store. Once we got used to home-grown melons, we completely stopped buying melons at the store. Now we just eat our own fresh melons in season and rarely eat them the rest of the year. You mind find that y'all develop a taste for veggies that you think you don't like if you give them a chance. So many vegetables are so much better fresh from the garden that some people who don't like veggies suddenly discover they like them after all. I would have suggested sweet corn, but I wasn't sure how much space you have. Sweet corn from the garden is so yummy! I try to grow enough plants to harvest at least 200 ears per year. We eat all the fresh corn we can stand to eat, and freeze the rest the same day it is picked. I grow 3 or 4 varieties every year, choosing varieties with different DTMs so that the harvest is spread over a longer period. If I plan it well, and if Mother Nature cooperates, we have fresh corn for at least 2 months. Potatoes are one vegetable that a lot of people don't grow. Either they don't want to do all the digging involved in harvesting, or they feel like potatoes from the grocery store are so cheap that they'd rather buy them. However, the flavor of fresh potatoes is so incredibly earthy and good that they'll ruin you forever---you'll never want to eat another store-bought tomatoes. You know how much better home-grown tomatoes are than store-bought tomatoes? Well, home-grown potatoes are the same way. The first year I grew potatoes, their fresh flavor knocked our socks off. I think the trick is to try things your wife and daughters might like, and just continue to try something new every year until y'all figure out what it is you like to eat fresh from the garden. Everything I've tried has not been a success. Eggplant is an example. I love growing eggplant, and the fruit are available in so many interesting colors and shapes....but no one in our family (including me) cares for eggplant,so I don't plant it any more. Kohlrabi is another thing I cannot get anyone to eat, although it is easy to grow and looks interesting in the garden. Part of the fun of garden is experimenting and finding what you like. If you've never grown Sungold (or the similar Sun Sugar) cherry tomatoes for your family, I think y'all would like them. Everyone to whom I've ever given a Sungold tomato has just raved about how flavorful they are. Sungold and Sun Sugar have a sort of tropical fruitiness you don't find in any other tomato. Fruit is my favorite thing to grow, but the results can be a lot more erratic than those in the veggie garden. Partly it is that recurring late freezes experienced in our climate often kills the flowers or tiny fruit on fruit trees early in the season. The other issue is pests. Because fruit is so sweet, you really have to fight the pests, birds and varmints some years in order to get a harvest. I generally grow blackberries, plums, peaches and figs. I have citrus trees in pots I carry inside in the worst weather. Right now they're out in the greenhouse just loving these sunny days. Strawberries have been erratic for me. They do great in a cooler year with lots of moisture, but then along comes a hot dry summer like 2011 and kills the strawberry plants. I'm in a part of OK that gets less moisture and more drought than central and northeastern and eastern OK, so strawberries are hit and miss here. When you have the right soil and the right weather, though, they are delightful.

Ken....you are soooo off base. I could just pinch your head off. Willow, this forum is perfect for a discussion about JBs and their habits. Same for those other forums, but this one is probably the most suitable. And it's a good subject, too. People could make their lives a lot easier if they gave some thought to plant selection regarding pest damage. I'm happy to report that we have carefully avoided most of the usual ornamental plants so attractive to these pesky beetles! As a matter of fact, JBs are the reason why we didn't even consider some of the plants on your list. It's the veggies that will become beetle food in my yard. In a bad year, the damage can be terrible. Some years ago, I started to apply 'Surround ', a totally organic product consisting of kaolin clay. A couple of coats does a great job of protecting my veggies from many pests, and from heat and sun scald, too. Looks funny, though. Not ideal for ornamentals because of that. In my yard, here are five plants these pests avoid : 1. All of my conifers 2. Daylilies (all varieties) 3. Angelonia 4. Spirea (we have a dwarf variety, can't recall the cultivar right now) 5. Lantana And many more.....:-) Thanks for the great topic and I hope you'll be back often. This is a slow time of year, but it'll be jumping in a few weeks.

Carol, You are planting Teot Bat Put and Early Blum, which are the green, avocado-shaped C. moschata summer squash that are virtually impervious to squash vine borers. The other one you are planting is Meot Jaeng I Ae, and it is the one shaped like a zucchini, also a summer squash and also virtually impervious to SVBs. Of course, you're only planting them if you want to----I'm not trying to force you into it. (grin) You're on your own with the growing, harvesting, eating and preserving of the harvest. I'm just the person who put together the seed order all those months ago. downplay, DE is notorious for not working when wet, so wetting down the plants and sprinkling with DE seems like a mistake to me since wetting it down kind of ruins the sharp edge of the diatoms. The better solution would be to spray with Surround WP, a microfine kaolin clay product. However, the very light film it leaves on the plants can be difficult to clean off some kinds of produce. For example, you could scrub the film off plums, but not off peaches, so you have to be selective in how you spray it. I would not, for example spray standard beans with it because I doubt you could get it off the bean pods after harvest. The second reason that I would not use DE on plants like that is because the edges of the diatoms also can harm the beneficial insects all of us count upon to help control the pest guys. I don't know if either of the 2 above reasons are why Carol doesn't like the plan. We'll have to wait and see what she says, but I'll warn you that Carol and I are practically sisters, and consider one another long-long sisters "from another mother and, lol, from another father too" so we do often think on the same wavelength. If I wanted to keep caterpillars from eating a plant, I'd spray the endangered plant (but not the whole garden because I love the butterflies and moths almost as much as I love the plants) with Bt 'kurstaki' because it is much more narrow in spectrum in that it only affects lepidoptera. The problem with Bt is that it breaks down quickly in sunlight so you have to respray probably every 3 days to maintain effective control. I generally don't use Bt 'kurstaki' at all because I don't want to harm the desirable lepidoptera, but one year (likely 2010 but it could have been 2012) I had to spray almost my entire garden with it, once a week for three weeks in a row because cutworms were everywhere in the thousands and were eating entire gardens down to the ground repeatedly. You couldn't even find any Bt 'kurstaki' here in this region anywhere for about 2 months because it sold out the day they stocked it on the shelves. I think that was in 2010 but it might have been 2012, and if I had paid attention to the huge population of moths hanging out by the back door porch light at night in February and March, I would have known the cutworm outbreak was coming. I knew there were tons and tons of moths, but didn't realize until midway through the spring that all those moths were the originators of all the cutworms. What I remember best is that when I walked across the lawn in the very early morning or late evening, huge clouds of moths would rise up out of the grass. Now, that's the main thing I watch for in order to "get a clue" that it is going to be a bad cutworm year. I'd never seen a cutworm year like that before dating back to my childhood in the 1960s and not since, but this winter, while cleaning out garden beds, I have found tons and tons and tons of cutworms overwintering in the mulch---probably 6 to 9 per square foot. I'd been collecting them in a big yellow plastic bowl and feeding them to our poultry. When they see me coming with the yellow bowl, they get real excited. The natural world is amazing. No matter what pest was a problem in the previous year, it will be something else entirely in the current year. I rarely have the same major pest issue (except for traveling hordes of grasshoppers) twice in the same decade. Squash vine borers and squash bugs are the exception to that. They probably are a pest in 8 or 9 years out of 10. The last year in which we didn't have trouble with either of them was in 2011, and I remember it well because we repeatedly went up to 113, 114, an 115 degrees and I was out at wildfires day and night. It didn't rain for 80 or 90 days. Maybe it was too hot and too dry for squash bugs and SVBs. I tried to make it out to the garden as often as possible if only to harvest, and always was surprised to find my squash plants (including pumpkins, which usually fall prey to SVBs) alive, well and producing. So, I can remember the years by whether they were the year of the squash bug, leaf-footed bug, Colorado Potato Beetle, etc. I cannot imagine what life would be like in a year when we had them all at the same time. I don't worry much about spraying for anything. I just work hard to make an ecosystem that is very attractive to predatory insects. If I do my job well, my garden will be full of all kinds of predatory insects feeding on pest insects. Unfortunately, I don't know of anything that feeds on squash bugs or SVBs quickly enough to save those particular plants. I'm toying with the idea of investing in Proteknet Biothrips insect netting. I've wanted to do it for a long time so I could grow actual pumpkins again, and not just C. moschata squash, but the price of a roll always makes me drop the idea. If I told Tim "I need this", he'd absolutely agree I should order it and get it, but I'm awfully thrifty so it is hard for me to spend that sort of money on something for a home garden. I can ignore most any garden pest for a long time because as long as we're harvesting plenty, I don't care if the pests get some, but you cannot ignore squash bugs since they spread disease, and you cannot ignore SVBs because they'll kill the plants, often before you harvest anything. I have become more laid back about pests over the years, having learned that often if I do nothing at all, the beneficial insects, turtles, frogs, toads, birds, snakes, lizards, etc. take care of the pests for me. It has been hard for me to let go of my tendency to be a micromanager or control freak, but it has happened. In order to have all those garden helpers, though, you have to have enough pests to attract them, so there always is that point where I feel like the garden is on the verge of becoming overrun by pests, and then the garden helpers kick in and the pest population falls. One year I was almost distraught when all my green lacewings that had filled the garden just up and disappeared. They were here today, and gone tomorrow. I couldn't imagine why. Slowly a light bulb when off in my head (guess I was having a blonde moment) and I realized the green lacewings had moved on because they had devoured all the pests they like to eat that we had here, so they had to move elsewhere, following the food, so to speak. The next year they were back again, working their magic. Now, if only I could find gigantic green lacewings that like to eat grasshoppers. Nosema locuste is a great grasshoper control when the hoppers are in the younger instars and while the weather is cooler. Once the hoppers hit the larger instars (about anything over 1/2" in length) and the heat sets in, the Nosema locuste is not nearly as effective. It helps control hoppers in March-May, but not so much thereafter. For me, the bad hopper years peak in July-August, and there is not a good solution then. One year the hoppers were incredibly bad. It might have been 2003, which was really dry, and all the ranchers sprayed heavy-duty pesticides to save their rangeland. The sad result of that? All our bluebirds disappeared, likely killed by ingesting grasshoppers turned poisonous by the pesticides, and we didn't see a single bluebird for three years. Be careful with pest control books because sometimes the info in them isn't as good as it sounds, especially if it is lots of home remedies. You can do as much harm as good when using them. I have found that, overall, the less I interfere, the fewer pests I have, so it is best when I proceed very cautiously. When nature is in balance, pests don't get out of control very often because for almost every pest insect we have, there is a beneficial insect, reptile, amphibian, mammal or bird (or maybe a marsupial like a possum!) that controls it. Sometimes we have to stay out of Nature's way and let it work the way it is supposed to work. In your part of the state, Japanese Beetles can sometimes become a big problem (just ask Carol about that) but at my end of the state, they usually aren't. Some people in NE OK have ground hogs. We don't have them down here, but we have billions of vicious fire ants (for which the best organic solution is an organic ant bait that contains Spinosad in a granular formulation). The organic fire ant baits work so well that they are almost magic. I like magic. That reminds me. I need to buy Slug-Go and/or Slug-Go Plus. I think armadillos are cute, until they are in the yard and garden plowing it up. Nothing we have tried works on voles, except lining beds with quarter-inch hardware cloth. By comparison, moles and gophers are relatively easy to exterminate (cats, cats, cats). Honestly, if I am in the garden 10 hours a day, I bet I don't spend a total of 10 minutes on pest control a day, and most of it is just hand-picking and killing various pests.