Jan, It is too bad the coons got the corn. It happened to me too this year. The coons get my corn about every other year. In 2008 I beat them to all of it, in 2009 we split it, and this year they got it all because they were willing to harvest it 4 or 5 days before it was going to be fully ripe, and I wasn't! Tim said he'd build me a fully enclosed 'corn cage' similar to our fenced chicken runs that are attached to each chicken coop, so maybe we can foil the coons once and for all. With the Red River to our west, south and east, we have raccoons the way some people have butterflies or birds....just all over the place. Our first year here, they'd sit on the lawn furniture on the front porch and knock on the windows and make faces at us. They can be quite vicious and are only 'cute' from a distance. I hope your kids are feeling better. That MRSA is nasty stuff. Tim came home from a housefire one day with a little black spot on his calf and told me he thought a spider had been inside his boot at the fire station and had bitten him. He went to work that night and his leg started heating up and feeling inflamed. He went to the doctor and found out it was MRSA. It took it quite a while to clear up, but he was lucky because it didn't grow larger or spread and a simple course of antibiotics cleared it up, just slowly. Zucchini time is one of my favorite times of the year. With all the various veggies that can be slow and stubborn to set and ripen veggies, it is nice to have plants as enthusiastic as squash plants! Here, we just sneak bags of zukes into people's cars when they leave them unlocked downtown. About 5 or 6 years ago, Tim's best friend's son planted his first garden. He planted a whole row of yellow squash and a whole row of zucchini, and gave away tons and tons of that stuff...but never ripened a tomato at all, which was perceived as quite a tragedy. So, what he learned from his first garden was to plant less squash and to plant more tomatoes, and to plant the tomatoes earlier. That was a really good summer for zukes here, and I ended up 'feeding' a lot of the ones he gave us to our compost pile because our own plants (and everyone else's) were producing well and you can only eat/can/freeze so many zukes. As far as the grasshoppers go, we have the most I've ever seen, but the only damage I'm seeing so far is that they are eating holes in the leaves of all my large-leaved herbs, sweet potatoes and beans. They did a lot more damage in the early 2000s when we had the last really huge outbreak. I think the difference may be that we had severe drought then so there wasn't much for them to eat, but we've had adequate rainfall this year so there's lots of green forage in the pastures for them to feast upon. Susan, You're welcome. As soon as I saw the name Pokemon, I felt pretty sure you had Li'l Pump-ke-mon. I've grown it here before, but only used it as an ornamental autumn decoration and didn't try it as an edible. I've never tried dehydrating in the car, but cannot imagine it would work with our humidity. Tomatoes are just so high in water--around 90-95%--that the air has to be incredibly dry in order to dry them down to the proper percentage of water (8-16%) for them to be considered properly dehydrated. In a dehydrator, you have a fan blowing warm air to help dry them out, and in a car you wouldn't have that. With a dehydrator fan blowing, it still can take from about 12 to about 36, or sometimes 48, hours to dehydrate tomatoes to the right dryness level and that's at a constant temperature. With fluctuating temperatures and no fan to circulate the air, there's no telling how long it will take. You also wouldn't have any control over the temperature reached in the car. When you dry tomatoes in a dehydrator, you use a specific temperature that dries them out evenly so they don't become too dry on the outside while still so moist inside that they will mold. Depending on the outdoor temperature, the size of the car, and the area in which the car is sitting, you actually could get higher heat inside the car than the recommended temperature for drying tomatoes and that would give you the mold. Finally, with a dehydrator, you have constant, even temperatures. In a car the temperatures likely would go too high during the hottest part of the day and too low after the sun goes down in the evening. I just don't see it working for tomatoes. You might be able to dry the leaves of some herbs in a car, but not a high-moisture fruit like tomatoes. Inexpensive dehydrators are easy to find at big box stores in spring through at least mid-winter. Gardeners tend to buy them during the spring and summer, and hunters buy them in fall and winter because a lot of them use dehydrators to make jerkey. That was why I purchased my first dehydrator in the 1980s or 1990s---to make jerkey from venison given to us by Tim's deer-hunting coworkers. As far as your green tomatoes, I don't think there is anything wrong with them. Some tomatoes have that sort of color variation as they go through the ripening process and it is perfectly normal. Blossom drop is common in the heat and there's no way around it. That's why planting as early as possible in spring is so very important--so you can get the maxium fruit set before temps get too high. Unfortunately for much of the state, temps got too high about 6 weeks earlier than usual so a lot of people did not get good fruit set early and have had to battle the temps and diseases since then. Hopefully, new fruit sat during the cool spell. I know I had good fruit set during the week or ten days that we had lower temperatures. I'm still harvesting from the fruit that set in May, but it is nice to know small ones have formed and are coming along that I'll be harvesting sometime in August. In that respect, the cool spell was perfectly timed. I'll be canning salsa every week for the rest of the summer if the tomatoes continue ripening at the current pace, and I prefer that to having a huge number of them all at once. I had my largest tomato harvest during the fruit harvest/canning marathon and gave many of them away because one person can only preserve so many batches of food in one day, but I've still got several dozen jars of salsa put up already and feel like I'm ahead of where I was at this time last year in terms of canning salsa. I could have frozen them and canned the salsa later, but DS and his family and the guys at the fire station were wanting to do some salsa-making of their own, so I passed those tomatoes on to them so they could have a little fun too. I cannot imagine Tess's grown in a container, so if you're planning to grow it, I hope you'll put it in the ground. In my garden, Tess's Land Race Currant usually climbs to the top of an 8' cage, and cascades back down to the ground again. Once the cascading branches are beginning to touch the ground, I cut them off to keep them from having constant soil contact and develop diseases. In a large enough cage, the plant gets about 5' wide. Diane has a photo of her Tess's on her blog and it is huge. I'll go find it so you can see what a jungle one plant would be. My only 'complaint' about Tess's is that you can spend hours just picking all the fruit off one in August when it is a maximum production. I love it though because it gives me tons of small tomatoes to dehydrate, plus I can eat them all day long in the garden (a gardener's form of Gatorade, lol) and still have more ripe than I care to pick daily. Jay, For me, Indian Stripe sets just like Cherokee Purple (only maybe a little earlier and a little heavier in spring), meaning it sets a great crop early if I get it into the ground early enough, then sets nothing for ages during the heat, then sets again in August for the fall. If I get it into the ground late, or if heat arrives early, I don't get great numbers of fruit from it until fall. Amazon Chocolate, by contrast, set heavily all summer long last year. I had AC and IS side by side and AC set fruit evenly all along, but IS set just as many...only it formed them all at once in the spring and the fall. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: Photos of Tess's at Diane's Blog

I'm all over the map. I actually a weenie who enjoys reading up on food production methods, chemicals, etc. Natural resource managment is my field, and I teach a lot about various methods of growing things. Also thru that process I have developed local connections with people who farm. There's a whole controversy about the USDA label "organic" which many small growers feel is way to restrictive, and also way to bureaucratic and skewed in favor of large, commercial producers. I'm much more concerned about knowing where my food comes from, where the farms are and who the producers are than some type of label. I buy local or regional produce when I can. Most stuff I cannot afford to buy organic OR conventional out of season. For fruit, other than in-season, I mostly only eat apples and bananas which is all I can afford. I eat those conventional, and always peel apples. I can't afford many of the high pesticide veggies anyway. I buy organic celery, my one concession. I buy conventional potatoes and always peel. I can no longer eat green peppers so occasionally splurge on a conventional red pepper, which I can barely afford anyway so I don't buy organic. I'm lucky to have a great U-Pick place up the road for peaches, cherries, strawberries and some other fruits. I buy tomatoes in bulk from a produce farm and can for winter use. Also still lots of great farms in the area so local stores often carry regional produce. Meat is mostly a non issue for me. I eat so little of it. I can't really afford most fish, I buy it rarely but then follow the Monterey Bay Aquarium's recommendations. Excellent Web site they have on the subject. Don't get me started on what's happening to the oceans, it is such a tragedy. I've started buying the canned tuna and canned salmon in the health food store that is sustainably harvested. Since I use both the salmon and tuna as more of a condiment, even though they are twice the price of conventional, it isn't cost prohibitive for those small cans. I buy canned Pacific salmon for salmon patties. I eat freshwater fish from Michigan when I go every year. They have lots of contaminants, but I don't eat the fish that often. People say, "Aren't you worried about eating Lake Michigan fish?" and I say, "Well, that's why I have devoted my life to conservation!! As goes my Lake, so go I." If I was a meat eater, I would try to develop relationships with local producers. I know a farmer who produces local organic meat if I was so inclinded. There are lots of cooperatives here where you can get organics, if you can afford it. Cheese, milk, eggs, produce, the whole nine yards. There are even businesses that will deliver it to you straight from a Lancaster cooperative. I can't afford most cheese anyway, only eat a few kinds and can't afford organic. But I limit my consumption. I buy organic milk. Meat is actually an area I would seriously want to buy organic, considering most toxins concentrate in the fats of milk, cheese, meat. But since I eat those things so rarely, that's my compromise. Also from what I have tasted, organic free range poultry is superior. I don't like the other meats anyway so I can't really judge. For me, the most important thing in my food purchases is to support my LOCAL agriculture, and also local businesses. Even the local greengrocer, which has great prices, is a fun place to go. Most of the stuff comes from Mexico, but most of the shoppers are from there too! They carry stuff imported from the Middle East too. The store is filled with a whole variety of ethnicities. That's where I go for my out of season splurges. I enjoy educating myself about where my food comes from, and meeting and getting to know local producers and local business people. Here is a link that might be useful: Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch

Undoubtedly the organic potting soil contained herbicide residue of some sort, probably something from the picolinic acid (aka pyridine-2-carboxylic acid) group. Herbicides from this group tend to include one or more of these active ingredients: picloram, aminopyralid, aminocyclopyrachlor or clopyralid. These herbicides generally are sprayed on grain crops to kill broadleaf weeds. Unfortunately the herbicide residue can survive the digestive tract of animals that eat the grains and the herbicides can survive composting. This problem is referred to as herbicide carryover and a common nickname for it is killer compost. It has been a persistent (no pun intended) problem since around 2000, when it popped up in both Pennsylvania and Washington State. Herbicide carryover damages and kills many gardens every year. Herbicide carryover even has been found in commercially-sold bagged organic composted manure products. When the state agency in that case tried to work backwards to determine how the composted manure became contaminated, they learned that the horses who supplied the manure had been fed a famous-name bagged horse feed containing ingredients apparently grown with one of those persistent herbicides. As far as I know, that was the first case where commercially bagged animal feed was contaminated with the herbicide. It is much more common for hay to be contaminated since those herbicides are sprayed on hay and other grain fields. So, am I surprised this happened to you? Nope, it happens, and it does not get a lot of media attention. If you are sure that your potting soil was herbicide-contaminated, you should contact the manufacturer and let them know. If there is a batch number or other identifying info on the bag, you might want to let them know. Here's more on herbicide carryover from the U. S. Composting Council: Persistent Herbicide

Today I'm roasting a chicken, actually two of them and will have whipped potatoes, fresh garden peas, gravy, sliced garden tomatoes and cucumber with red wine vinegar and oil. Honeydew mellon chunks. Terilyn, LOL about showing my sons gf how to cook. Her mother is a fabulous cook and supposedly her daughter does know how but thinks instant is faster. I had to laugh when his gf said she couldn't make it here today for a chicken dinner...she said she was busy and besides she had poultry yesterday...LOL. I wanted to tell her turkey lunch meat isn't poultry its chemicals. LOL.