I know it is a bit early in the season, but the next several days, with rain and highs of 77,73,78,68,76, are ideal to start outside a number of large fall vegetables, lacinato kale, collard, rutabaga, broccoli, kale, cabbage, and fennel. These wild weather fluctuations can be used to advantage. In particular most of the brassica do not germinate at temperatures above 80. I find that only turnips germinate in hot soil. I have 72 lacinato in cells and one bed of kale seeded last night, plus 72 collards that were started in april and have been in the ground since mid-May. I will do the rest tonight. If I am not happy with the upcoming weather, I will keep the cells in shade on my porch for a while.

Thanks, Seedmama. Mine are doing well, too. So far, the Sugar Ann are outpacing the Sugar Snap in flowers, and I have a few tiny peas starting, I'm amazed at the plant growth--inches every day. I only have 200 plants, so not sure if I'll have enough to freeze. I should get a few nice meals from them, though. Prof

Sarah - I think most people haven't seen the babies. It's always been a standard joke about people never seeing baby pigeons. But then I guess that's because they tend to nest high up on buildings and grow up so fast. l know there are folks who raise show pigeons as a hobby so they obviously see them. The above 2 were born around the middle - end of June and were mature and flying by the beginning of August (they learned by practicing to flap while jumping off my larger containers... LOL). One main difference about them vs the hummer is that the male and female are a mated pair and both help to raise the babies. The mother will leave the nest during the day and get some food for herself while the father watches the nest from his perch nearby. If the babies start screaming, he'll go get them some food and feed them and check on them, then he'll go back out on his perch and "guard the nest". LOL At night, the mother comes back to the nest and sleeps with them, including doing some feeding and the father will sleep somewhere else for the night. It was interesting to watch this whole dynamic unfold. This was mom and one of her babies. Dad was out on the ledge.... "guarding". LOL Sorry to hear about the damage you had from the storms and tornadoes. When there's heat like that, any cold front coming through can produce some nasty storms and tornadoes. I remember that tornado that went through Morris Arboretum that's not that far up the street from me and they lost something like 200 trees. And the remnants of the hurricanes were pretty rough (I think it was Isabel then?). Even last year this time, we had some bad flooding rains. Monday will be the 1-year anniversary of a particularly bad torrential rain event where we got something like 6" of rain in an hour and it washed out Cresheim Valley Drive (which they finally repaired and opened a couple months ago). Then it happened again the following week I think. Such is Mother Nature!

I hope Susan is right and that El Nino will give us all some drought relief. Sometimes El Nino brings us a really wet summer....does anyone remember the summer of 2004? It wouldn't quit raining here at our house. Other times, though, El Nino peters out in April or May, so I guess we'll have to keep our fingers crossed. What worked for me in the summer of '06: Lots of mulching. Mulching early and often. Watering very early or very late in the day to minimize evaporation. Using soaker hoses and drip irrigation. Grouping plants together with similar needs, that is....put all your "thirstiest" plants in one bed and give them more water if they need it. Growing more stuff in containers. Water gardening is great, but I did have to keep adding water to the smallest pond so it wouldn't dry up completely. I moved all my water plants to that one pond and let the big ponds dry up. Planting mostly native plants and a few very well adapted non-native plants. One of the most important things I have done these last few years is to observe how all the native plants on our acreage react to the weather. I watch to see which ones are the hardiest, which ones come back even after going dormant and losing all their leaves. I try to learn from the native plants, and it guides me in making decisions about what to plant and what not to plant too. In the veggie garden, I always try to have plants in the ground as early as possible in the spring so they can produce before the hot weather and lack of rain kill them. I evaluate the veg. garden in mid-June and decide whether it is worth it financially to continue to water, or whether to turn off the hose and finish out the summer with 'dry-land' gardening. I do always put a few tomato plants and pepper plants in containers so I keep them going by watering them even if I let the rest of the veg garden go dry. I select varieties carefully. Vegetables that have been grown for many years in the southwest do better for me than many of the modern-day hybrids that guzzle water. The same is true of many flowers. And, I'm hoping for a grasshopper year this year EXACTLY like we had last year. It was our best year ever as we had hardly any grasshoppers at all. Our county had lots of grasshoppers, but they weren't at our house. I think the guineas had a lot to do with that. Also, I've put out semasphore every other year or so, so it is probably well established on our land and is doing its job in keeping the grasshopper population down. My poor guineas had to range far and wide to find the grasshoppers they wanted to eat. Luckily my neighbors are very tolerant and didn't mind having the guineas coming over to eat their ticks and grasshoppers. As far as I know, except for the vegetable garden which mostly died after I quit watering it in late June, I didn't lose many plants. I did lose some of the common big green elephant ears that were in dry shade. And I lost my banana shrub. Plants that survived the drought of 06: Native redbuds (I watered them once a month, just when they seemed about to die. I usually don't water them at all.) Native oaks, hackberries, pecans, willows, walnuts, hickories, ashes, some sumac, wild blackberries, wild grapes, trumpet vine and elms all survived (unirrigated). The native roughleaf dogwoods and persimmons suffered greatly and had lots of leaf scorching and lost some but not all leaves. They didn't die though. The wild plums that grow along all the fence lines here in southern Oklahoma all died, or at least went dormant. We're waiting to see if they green up in the spring. The Mexican plums handled the heat well. Native cottonwoods had a little dieback near the top of the crown, but were otherwise unscathed. Understory plants in the woods did better than prairie plants in the meadows in full sun. Guess the shade helped them. These included black cherries, American beautyberries, indian currants, redbuds, black haw viburnums, virginia creeper, greenbrier and poison ivy (in the shade they lived, in the sun they died), possom haw hollies, `and many others I can't identify. The river oats grasses went dormant exceptionally early. All the prairie grasses went dormant early and many wildflowers did the same. However, the native sunflowers hung in there all summer as did the milkweeds and a few other flowers like the greenthread daisies. Some of the plants we've planted in the yard around our house that did well: desert willow, chaste tree, four o'clocks, American cross vine, sweet autumn clematis, Burford hollies, southern wax myrtle, cannas, verbena bonariensis, purple wintercreeper, the low, spreading ground-cover type junipers and Madam Galens trumpet creepers. Most sumacs along the roadside went totally dormant (we thought they were dead) and then revived in the fall. Some Eastern Red Cedars turned brown and died but some didn't. As far as the ones that survived...they'll be dying soon as we continue to cut them down and remove them. With our large wooded area, this is an ongoing job. We had a small amount of rain at the end of July and then again at the end of August. This caused many of the wildflowers that normally bloom in spring/early summer to suddently sprout and bloom. Maybe they were there all along, but were dormant and so we hadn't noticed them. The fall bloomers like liatris amd goldenrod and helnium and the little fall asters started a little late but put on a great show. Of course, it doesn't take much water to keep them happy. The plants that surprised me the most? Eggplants and my sweet peppers and hot peppers. Long after I stopped watering the veg garden, they were flowering and fruiting and carrying on, business as usual, in spite of the drought. They were still fruiting when they froze in late November. Okra, sweet potatoes and back-eyed peas fared better than most of the other veggies. On the edge of the garden, the white-flowered daturas (aka jimsonweed) hung on through the heat. The devil's claw did not. The black-eyed susan vines got really sad looking after I stopped watering the veg. garden (they grow on the fence that surrounds it), but stayed alive and put on new leaves and new flowers in the fall after small amounts of rain began to fall. They were tougher than I expected them to be. Sadly, despite my best efforts, the bermuda grass DID NOT die. Hoping for a better year, courtesy of El Nino, in 2007. Dawn