Same here ltilton,was about to ask the same question with an extra my problem is that I grew the red onios from transplants and they didn't reach the "normal" size(maybe because I did not give them enough space,they spent all summer in a basket in the garage now only the red ones are sprouting 2-3" stems already they are about golf ball size;so my question is should I plant them and expect good grow if so when?sorry ltilton for asking on you post:)

Nancy, I'm just happy that you posted this question, since I had never heard of Candy Apple Jelly. I looked up the recipe on line, and plan on making some later this week. My son wanted to make something with apples, and the local ones aren't quite in season yet, so this will keep him happy till then! For others who may not have heard of it before, I thought I would post the recipe: CANDY APPLE JELLY 4 cups apple juice 1/2 cup red-hot candies 1 (1.75 ounce) package powdered fruit pectin 4 1/2 cups sugar DIRECTIONS In a large kettle, combine apple juice, candies and pectin. Bring to a full rolling boil over high heat, stirring constantly. Stir in sugar; return to a full rolling boil. Boil for 2 minutes, stirring constantly. Remove from the heat; skim off any foam and undissolved candies. Pour hot liquid into hot jars, leaving 1/4-in. headspace. Adjust caps. Process for 5 minutes in a boiling-water bath. Thanks again for the idea! Bonnie

At our house, the harvest is hot and heavy right now. We have potatoes and onions curing everywhere, on every flat surface available. Today I'm going to start slicing and chopping onions to freeze for later use in cooking, and then the rest of the first batch of cured onions will go into tubular net bags for storage. The second onion batch needs to cure for at least another week and then they'll get the same treatment. I'm going to send 10 or 20 lbs. of onions and the same amount of potatoes to work with DS on the next day he works, which I think is Thursday, because I've promised his fire station chef a steady supply of fresh veggies. I am picking tomatoes about every other day, and we have more than we can handle at this point, which is a great problem to have. I don't think it will continue to be such a great tomato year for too many more weeks though, because our temperatures are well above the range at which flowers set fruit.) We need a cold spell here. By cold, I mean any weather with highs only in the low 90s and lows in the low 7os. We have enough tomato fruitset that I think we'll be harvesting all we can handle through mid-July but am not sure what we'll get after that. Yesterday we were down in the metroplex shopping for a few hours and we dropped off two Wal-Mart bags of tomatoes for DS's crew at the station which generated a lot of excitement among them, and saved me from having to do any canning yesterday. (I didn't have time.) On Sunday afternoon I put up 8 quart bags of green beans in the freezer, and I'm going outside in just a few minutes to pick beans again. I was hoping it would be nice and cool this morning, but our low temp for the night was 80, so we're starting out kind of warm already and the sun isn't even up yet. Yesterday morning we harvested the early sweet corn, which was the variety 'Early Sunglow'. We got about 75 good ears and a few bad ones that either had been 'sampled' by the raccoons, had poor fertilization because of the heat or something else that resulted in unusable ears. I gave the bad ears (less than a dozen total) to the chickens who were delighted with them, and put the rest in the refrigerator. We ate some fresh last night and will have more today, and I am going to blanch and freeze the rest this afternoon. Some years the raccoons get all the corn, and there's rarely a year in which we beat them to all of it, so I'm very happy with our harvest. I hope we're able to get as many ears from the mid-season corn and the late-season corn, but we'll be fighting both the coons and the corn earworms and European corn borers, so who knows what we'll get from them. Our garden is in the transition stage, where the last of the cool-season crops have just come out (I finally yanked the broccoli and cabbage because they just weren't doing anything at all) and have been replaced with hot-season crops so we'll have something to harvest in July and August. With highs in the upper 90s and lower 100s already and lows in the mid-70s throug low-80s, our weather here feels more like late July and August than June, so I am concerned about the effect of the heat on the garden---but there's nothing we can do about the heat except go with the flow. The bigger issue is the lack of rainfall. There's been no rain here for about 3 weeks our last rainfall was a half-inch on May 24t), and no good chance of rain anytime for us anytime in the foreseeable future. With 100-degree heat and no rainfall, everything here is rapidly drying out and turning brown, and we are starting to see grassfires. I'm already wrestling with the decision about whether to water or how much to water. We did run the soaker hoses to water the soil/foundation area yesterday, and I'm going to run a soaker hose in the garden today to water a couple of beds, but I am not doing a lot of watering. The problem with trying to keep a veggie garden green in this kind of heat is that the garden becomes an oasis that attracts tons of bugs when everything else is browning out, and we have a lot of wildlife (deer, raccoons, possums, skunks, rabbits, etc.) trying to get into the garden every day and every night. It is going to be a long summer. We have a surging spider mite and grasshopper population too, but also have lots of ladybugs so I'm not overly worried about the mites. The hoppers may be a problem, but only time will tell. Dawn

Jay, Our weather has been all over the place the last 6 weeks with very little consistency. Some nights it has dropped into the 60s and many nights it has dropped into the lower 70s. Walking out the door before sunrise to an air temperature of 84 was just pathetic. We usually have that kind of heat here at night in early August, not early July. I cancelled my plan to dehydrate the tomatoes today when the heat index hit 105 and the power went out. The power was only out a couple of minutes, but it caught my attention and made me decide to wait until tomorrow. I don't want to have an oven full of baking sheets with little dehydrating tomatoes on them and then have the power go out. It currently is 98 here with a heat index of 105, and we're in the "cooler" Red River Valley. Up in Ardmore and Madill, one of which is one county north and the other is one county northeast of us, they have hit 100 degrees and Ardmore's heat index is 106 and Madill's is 107. We're supposed to hit 103 here today but I keep hoping the cold front will send T-storms out ahead of it that will cool us down. I hope my mentioning the ripe tomatoes didn't hurt you too much! I am sure you'll have ripe ones before you know it. My harvest is peaking a month late--it usually starts in earnest the first week in June and this year it really started around July 1st. I think the harvest will be just as large as past years, assuming some disease does not suddenly strike, but over a shorter period. As long as we get tomatoes to eat, that's all I care about. Have you ever had trouble with the foundation of the garage wicking moisture away from the plants? Is that possible? I wonder too, if somewhere in the subsoil there might be a big crack and the water is seeping down into the ground through it. When our clay soil cracks, I could stand there with a hose running all day and the water would keep draining down....the crack would never "fill up". Our sandy soil hardly ever cracks, but our first drought year here I couldn't keep plants in it watered enough to keep them from dying. After a decade of soil improvement, that's not an issue any more though. I went and bought Daconil but haven't sprayed yet. I keep trying and can't get to it before the heat gets too bad and I have to come inside. This morning, I picked all the ripe fruit I could before I came in for brunch, and then intended to go back outside, pick the rest of the ripe ones, remove the diseased foliage, and then spray. Since it got so hot so fast, I didn't get it done, so maybe I can finish it this evening when the temps drop down to some reasonable temperature like 92 or something. When you lift those plants that are failing in that one hole, do you see any signs of root knot nematodes? Other than something that is strictly a soil drainage issue, nematodes are another possibility for a plant in sandy soil that is not thriving. Other than that possibility, I am stumped. The farmer's market will be such fun. If you get hooked on selling there, you'll "have to" build a greenhouse or high tunnel so you can plant early and have the first ripe fruit at the market every year! I am leaning towards building a high tunnel before next year. It wouldn't have to be really huge. I'd be happy if I could just plant 20 or 30 tomato plants really early and know they'd be protected from the colder nights and heavy rains. If we build a high tunnel, we'll put it on higher ground than the current veggie garden so that heavy rains aren't an issue. It is so miserably hot here that I brought the outside dogs in from the garage to cool off for a couple of hours, and the feral cat who hates all the other cats and starts fights with them is even inside. He's in Tim's weight room, though, so he can sleep and chill out and not have any "contact" with our other laid-back, mellow kitties. We're pretty much in a regular routine now where the house dogs go to the master bedroom to sleep on their dog beds all afternoon, the cats go to the guest room (because the outdoor dogs like to chase cats), Yellow Cat goes to the weight room and the outdoor dogs sleep downstairs in the living room, breakfast room or kitchen. The only animals still outside are the poultry! I am eagerly watching the radar for signs of cooling rain. I do have the sprinkler on right now, "watering" the chicken coop and fenced-in poultry run in an attempt to cool it down a bit for the 10-week old chickens. Dawn