I have yellow meat watermelon, lavender, and red popcorn (I can't swear to it that it is strwaberry, as I got it at a farm as red popcorn) I am interested in your pink moonvine, winter squash (what kind/variety), and the french fillet bean pink eyed purple hull. Email me if you are interested in a trade. Jessica of dougnjess

Bump. I still have not been able to locate sweet meat squash or hybrid brussel sprouts in trade. I don't want to have to place another seed order.

Wayne, Disease is always a problem and wilt is a problem I deal with each year. I lost 6 plants under the netting due to wilt, it seem to went straight across in a line down the middle. I also lost one of my Stone mountains. I am completly Organic and I choose not to spray anything even organic sprays. Mainly I choose this approach because I don't have the time to spend worrying about each problem that arises and spending time and money trying to battle it. Instead I choose cultural practices to minimize the effects of insects , birds, deer ,rabbits, coons, squirrels and ever bacterial, fungal and viral microbes out they that want the vegetables and flowers of my garden. I have found the more I learn to let nature take its course and creat a garden inviting to beneficial insects and keeping the ground covered at all timeswith the use of mulches, cover crops, and employing tactics to ward off critters, including vigilant trapping of some pest such as squirrels the garden takes care of it self and I have more time to enjoy my garden and I feel a lot better about the produce I eat and raise. But wilt is probably my worst problem with melons and roatation is the key. I too have grown melons for years but not as long as you have especially in this garden spot. Hopefully I can continue to get a sweet summer melon for my troubles. Frank if referring to the Missouri yellow meated it is a big melon the one pictured is probable 35lbs I picked one the other day and that 's what it weighed. It was devine juicy and sweet. This was the first year growing it. Rodger

Dale, I am truly sorry to hear that man's best friend sort of went nuts and failed to mind his manners. I hope you get some more melons and tomatoes from those plants. There must be something about canines and melons, because here in the boondocks, coyotes devour melons like mad and don't even wait for the melons to get close to being ripe. Fred has lost practically all his melons at the old home place to coyotes the last few years, and he used to plant dozens and dozens of plants. I think he's given up on raising melons out there any more, and it is a shame because the old home place has great sandy soil along the Red River. Most of my dogs don't eat tomatoes, but they're fenced out of the garden anyway. Since we have hard clay soil, they can't dig under the fence although they certainly have run amok in the garden when I have forgotten and left the gate open. (A mistake you only make a couple of times before you learn that your garden pays the price for a gate left open.) Do you think your dog was playing or was thirsty? Maybe he or she had knocked over the water dish and sought out the fruit for the water content? Maybe the dog wanted to play ball? My dogs grow their own gourds and pumpkins on the dogyard fence and randomly pull them and play with them whenever the mood strikes, so they don't necessarily get a lot of gourds or pumpkins to full maturity, but they have fun. The stink bugs are atrocious this year. Between them and the grasshoppers, it is a wonder I have a garden left. I haven't had SVBs this year, but have squash bugs, the aforementioned stink bugs (they arrived in May again which is abnormally early), and leaf-footed bugs. You know, pelting the dog with tomatoes might not be a bad idea. Here in our area, when a country dog kills a family chicken, some people tie the dead chicken carcass to the dog's collar and leave it there a couple of days so the dog has to smell that decaying corpse. They claim it teaches the dog a lesson, but uggh, I don't think I could do it. Luckily, our dogs aren't bird killers. Every year we have different gardening challenges, and some years are more challenging than others. You still have plenty of time to get lots more tomatoes and other veggies since the average frost date for your area is....what....about early November? Every winter, I start out the year with such high hopes for the garden, and then it is always a struggle all spring and summer to try to make the dream a reality. If it isn't the weather, it is the pests, or the deer or the rabbits or.....whatever disease is most active that year. What keeps us all going? Probably that old saying "there's always next year". Since we've lived here, every animal known to mankind has attempted to destroy my garden, though thankfully not all in the same year. As soon as I figure out how to exclude one type of wildlife, another one figures out how to get into the garden. I've seen animals in/around my garden that I never knew existed....until we moved here, I didn't know that there was such a thing as a ring-tailed cat. (That particular wild critter likes to eat our young poultry.) I'd never expected to have a beaver killing our trees, or a cougar hanging out at the edge of the garden, or skunks digging up sunflowers or turtles eating tomatoes. It is always something......and I didn't know that deer ignore those lists of "plants that deer won't eat" and eat them anyway. Recently, I noticed 1 lone pigweed plant in the corner of the potato bed. I kept meaning to dig it up or cut it down---seems like it zoomed from 6" tall to 5' tall in about a week.....but before I got around to it, a deer ate it. Ha! At least the deer are good for something. I think I grew okra here for 5 years before I ever got a pod because the deer would jump the then-three-foot-tall garden fence and eat every plant down to the ground at some point during the season. All that's ever worked for me is the 7' tall fence we have now, and it only works if I remember to always close both gates. One reason I haven't expanded the garden more and more every year is because it means moving the 7' tall fence or errecting another one. I have friends who garden in towns, both large cities and small towns, and they often find fruit missing from their plants, or sometimes entire plants gone, and believe it is two-legged critters stealing their fruit and veggies, flowers and herbs. So, I guess a garden is never truly 'safe'. Hopefully the second half of this gardening year will turn out better than the first. Or, as I always say, there's always next year..... Dawn