Jacqueline Lee would be a yellow/yukon variety also resistant. The Defender is a dry russet variety.

If you want a compact sweet potato, Amish Bush Porto Rico does pretty well. It is a variant of the old Porto Rico. My personal favorite is Bradshaw aka Mahon. It is a a very good general purpose sweet potato that produces a good crop even in short season areas. Most important, they are much better flavored and have better texture than Georgia Jet. I've also had very good results with Covington which is a recent release that produces much higher quality sweet potatoes than industry standards like Beauregard. Sandhill's business is first come first serve. This is why it is important to order early. It is not a matter of being on a waiting list, you will be on a waiting list if you order from virtually any sweet potato supplier. Get your order in early and Sandhill will almost always ship slips in a 2 week window timed for your location. Mahon is also available from Johnny's this year so if you are ordering from them, consider getting sweet potato plants too.

Sus, Oh but I've always thought that you had a lot of enthusiasm, so I don't think I have you beat there. You're nice to say that though. ;) I know what you mean about biting off more than you can chew. I do that a lot. Well, most of the time actually. I have projects galore that are sitting around waiting to get done. That's great that you're getting into birding too. I've been into that for probably close to 25 years and really enjoy watching the birds out at the feeders. I have bluebird boxes up for the bluebirds and have gourds on shepherd's hooks for the tree swallows. I also get wrens nesting here and other kinds of birds and lots at the feeders. I love birds and of course also butterflies. I'll have to email you sometime about birding. You mentioned sparrows, and I have some things to say about them and some other things. Maybe none of it would be new to you but I'll at least mention some things then. Isn't that odd how you have PVS one year and none the next two! Actually, that has fascinated me about different kinds of butterflies; I'll see them here and then not again for awhile. Well, I hope that you get PVS in 2010! Oh yes, I agree with your about those being like hyperactive kids. If you take the lid off the container, you'd better keep your eye on it because those critters move fast. I had one crawling on the table one day when I just walked away from the container for a short time thinking the cats would stay put. I might be imagining things, but they almost seem to sense when I take the lid off and want to hightail it out of there. Yeah, I raise a lot of Monarchs if you call hundreds a lot. The most I raised was I think in 2007 when I released about 520. This year was 350. It's a ton of work and I want to try to come up with a better way of doing it. You sure get to see a variety of butterflies there. I wish I would get to raise some more kinds. I only saw a Red Admiral here very briefly several years ago. Wouldn't you know it, I didn't have false nettle then. I actually thought I had it here because I have plants coming up here that resemble it but isn't that (don't know what though). So I planted some last year but didn't see any Red Admirals. I'm hoping that I will eventually though. I saw a Common Buckeye here for maybe a minute in 2008 but didn't get a picture of it (dead battery). I planted Verbena hastata in hopes of getting them to lay eggs but didn't see any at all this year. The one I saw last year was nectaring on the Verbena bonariensis. Unlike you, I've never seen any Tawny Emperors here, but I didn't have any hackberry trees here until this past spring/summer. They're not much more than a foot tall, but a Question Mark managed to find them and I raised a few of those cats. I think I've had American Lady cats here every year since I planted some pussytoes that some very nice person got for me. It's kind of hard to cut those leaves off to bring inside and raise the cats in here, so I think I'm going to make an enclosure with some boards and screen (any other suggestions are welcome) and put it over the plants. It will only cover a small portion of the bed. I was thinking I could move all the cats to that area and then move the enclosure as the food supply dwindles. I really don't know if it's a good idea or not, but every year I worry when I don't see the cats on the plants anymore. I think they mostly hide during the day and come out at night though, so I always hope that nothing gets them, but I'd rather be more sure of that with a covering to protect them from wasps and birds, etc. Of course, with as tight as those plants are, I don't imagine that it would be too easy for me to try to find all of the spiders that are on them to remove them. I don't have any overwintering BSTs like I did the past few years because the three that I raised eclosed in the spring/summer. I still have the GSTs here from last year when they overwintered. I think if they don't eclose in 2010, I'll probably take them out of the containers and give them up for dead. Only one of them eclosed out of about 40. I only have 5 out there (in another building, no heat) overwintering from this year. GSTs are discouraging for me to raise because a lot of them die. I feed them rue, but eventually I'd like to try raising them on wafer ash (I just started a couple from seed). I also have gas plants, but they are very small. I hope that my Wild Indigo Duskywings are okay that I have out there bunking with the GSTs. I fed them Baptisia australis and Lupinus perennis, which they are still on but not moving (as far as I know anyway). I've never raised any kind of cats before that overwinter (I mean that the actual cats and not the chrysalids overwinter), so it's making me kind of nervous wondering how in the world they'll be okay in the spring. I don't understand why they don't freeze and die. If they are alive, I hope that they quell their appetites until after my plants have some growth on them. You're absolutely right...every year brings a surprise and I'm so looking forward to this coming year to see what kinds of butterflies and cats I get!!! My head is always so full of plans! You've helped me and I really appreciate it! Cathy

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