I'm a small handful of miles from you. (Oops, I was thinking Goodfield, about the same distance but the other way.) The Granny Smith will be pushing it some years. But probably better than what's in the stores but not fully ripe before you rescue it from freeze. You can leave apples on into the 20's so around here if you risk that cold snap at the beginning of November there's a good chance it will return to great apple ripening weather the rest of the month. I risked 27° this year with my Arkansas Black and got rewarded with plenty of time to get them fully ripe. Winesap will probably end up being your cider base. But I'm sure you'll find a use for the Honeycrisp if you decide you'd rather eat them than drink them. They don't last at all at the Upicks. Peach will probably be hit and miss. Sweet cherry is a pain. Both are candidates for borers. But you may get lucky. Borers hit fast in my yard. They haven't hit anything about a mile from me in a friend's yard (but he has lost 2 sweet cherries for some unknown reason, I also lost one mysteriously). I know sweet cherry can be grown around here. I knew an old guy in Creve Coeur that had one. So if you really want one keep on trying. For the borers spray permethrin, in August I think. You can search to find when they're laying. The Lesser Peach tree borer is what hits in my yard. Permethrin isn't rated for apples and I don't know what the rating is for sweet cherry or peach fruit but egg laying is after harvest so keep the trees separate from the apple trees so you don't get any overspray. Deer is a good warning. My niece is about halfway between me and you and the deer she once thought were cute are not so cute after eating her peach tree. She asked me if they'd be OK to remove the fences once the trees got full size and wasn't happy when I told her the bucks will rub their antlers and destroy a fruit tree. For your changed order, McIntosh also doesn't do good around here. It's too hot at ripening and lately too rainy. It's my favorite apple so I put up with it. It drops early and can shed the tree in the wrong weather, which we usually have at that time of year. It's usually too hot and humid but lately too hot and rainy. But it makes a great cider even grown here. Apricot will be like peach, hit and miss and susceptible to borers. But my nephew wanted one so I got him one for Christmas. On the years you get fruit it's a bigger reward. All will be susceptible to curculio which can be extremely bad. Spectracide Triazicide is effective on them and readily available at Walmart and Menards (you probably go to the ones about a mile from my house). When I last had plum trees and was organic out of three trees I think I managed to get one plum between the curculio nailing the fruit and the borers nailing the trees.

I started out getting my garden in late because I have a johnsongrass problem. I had to try to get rid of all the stolons as best as I could, put down a thick layer of horse manure and then cover all beds with black plastic to prevent johnsongrass from coming back again. I only planted two zucks because last year I was begging people to take them. Yep, you guessed, they both died before they got more then a few inches tall. I planted several crooknecks, only one survived. My tomatoes are doing well except for the romas that somehow didn't get covered by netting and the deer have been eating them down to the roots. If any of my other tomatoes grow out from under the netting, the deer nibble down as much as they can get to. The deer ate some of the squash leaves. We are in our 3rd year of drought and the deer are really hungry. They are eating things that they never touched before. Sometimes I felt guilty for covering up my plants, but then if they eat, we don't. With a family of 5, we need those tomatoes.

Update time.. At this point the number of tip strikes is up in the dozens per day. I am also seeing more fruit damage, still infrequent but I will have many infected late peaches at the current rate. My first peach tree, Gold Dust, ripened and the dratted birds took care of nearly all of them (however, at least in looking at the pecked fruits and the ones left there was little OFM damage). The birds plus my OFM problem has convinced me to pull out some bags for the rest of the season. I have used cotton drawstring "parts bags" to good effect in past years -- I find these bags both block the OFM (the peach doesn't rest against the bag like with the stockings so there is no way the moth can lay an egg through it) and I can tie the peach onto the tree and keep the birds from getting at it. I am soon going to put these bags on a good chunk of the peach crop and compare bagged vs non-bagged from here on out (note I will still get some worms in bagged fruit due to bagging fruit already infected - some fruits lack a visible entry scar due to e.g. stem entry). In terms of controls I think I can declare the mating confusion a total bust for the OFM. Also I had limited the amount of spinosad I was spraying compared to past year and that is not a good thing - spinosad is very important for OFM control. Overall the early peaches came out pretty good without bagging but I expect the late ones will be mostly wormy by the time we get there. For next year, at this point I feel I either need one more thing to get a leg up on the OFM, or I need to bag the peaches early. Adding up the time I have spent spraying and tip pruning, I believe the bagging approach is overall going to be less time. It also produces cleaner fruit since peach scab etc is largely blocked. The only big unknown is whether brown rot will be a problem; last time I used these bags I did not have much brown rot in the orchard. I do have some good news, the squirrels are for the first time in many years completely under control thanks to Kania traps. Usually at this time of year my entire peach crop is getting stolen by them. Also the mating disruption on the apples has completely prevented any damage, and Serenade sprays have thus far kept the fruit completely clean. Scott

Soybeans must be SUPERCOMPETITIVE. I can hardly believe anything could hold its own against the roots I see on my bred-for-the-south okra. I think it could even give cotton a run for its money... (Hmmm, that would be interesting to try... they're even kinfolk!) Cotton is infamous for its ability to take every last bit of moisture... and nutrients!!!... from the soil. Variety differences could also account for some of it. One okra I planted this year was a hybrid bred for the north (I bought it for its earliness and sent seeds to my siblings in Denver and SE Wyoming, so I figgered I should try it, too). It was fine til the weather got really hot and dry, then it was the first to wimp out. My brother in Wyoming, with unlimited water cuz he's the ranch foreman and his provided house is on the same meter as the stock tanks, used almost daily drip irrigation on it and was thrilled with his results. My sister in Denver...not even a strongly wannabe gardener... planted it in most-of-day shade. Far as I know she's still waiting for her first pod.... I can't use a shovel in my ground... too many rocks. I have 2.5 pound maddock picks mounted on 2 handle lengths, plus a few smaller diggers, and I use yardsale rollerbladers' knee guards to kneel with when I plant stuff that requires going to ground. I dig roots cuz that's how I get old plants out of way for the next crop, plus I guess I have just learned that powerful root systems mean success or failue here in this extreme climate and rocky clay soil. Also, where I do not cultivate except by earthworms, pulling out plants by the roots (and hand weeding) is a cultivation, of sorts. Hoes don't work very well on my ground, either. I have a pix... intended as humor mostly but it's the facts... which is my tool kit for Ozark gardeners. I'll post it and do a link below.... Dreadful to hear what happened to Heritage Farm's crops! When I watched weather reports all this spring and summer, my heart would just sink thinking about what it was doing to gardeners all over the country. The endless rain in Texas and all the way north from there would have just rotted seeds and plants. A garden underwater will never happen to me on my hilltop, but a 6-inch rain is quite a mess until it finishes draining away. I can barely imagine what week after week of it would mean... or maybe I CAN imagine it! We had a spring of uncommonly warm 3 weeks early, then a once-in-100-years hard freeze in mid-April (ie, all fruit trees and wild oaks already bloomed, strawberries brought into premature bloom, corn 6 inches high, most people's tomatoes and squash already up and growing) It was devastating... tomato plants actually became scarce around here for a short time... until Walmart via Bonnie's consignment hybrids filled the void. After the freeze, it rained just enough each day to keep foliage wet... and my generally dependable Brandywines and PA Amish / Mennonite / Upper Midwest varieties went down like 18th Century European soilders marching headfirst against cannon fire. This became a bit of an embarrassment to me. I had decided to go all fresh seed this year, so I grew off for transplants my left-over 2004 seeds of red and yellow heirlooms and gave them away to senior citizens, many of whom I have to face once a month. They had a lot of crop failures from foliage diseases, and most of them ain't that knowledgeable as gardeners, so they are acting like I lied about the plants' potentials! Anyway, back to my garden results. Only one open-pollinated tomato did not get BER. It was a variety bred for New Orleans! Unfortunately, it also turned out to be determinate, and last week the deer ate 100% of the mature green & ripening tomatoes off my sucker-started clones of it for fall tomatoes... no seed crop! Next came 2 months of drought, the last month of it with record triple-digit temps for a whole month. The survivors of the foliage diseases now began to produce quality tomatoes... til the heat felled a few more... and now there are 3 staked tomatoes still standing, plus a wildcard I bought mostly for its name but with low expectations because of its north Europe origins... Blondkopfchen from Germany!! Also had one red almost-cherry hang in there, and of course Matt's Wild Cherry from Mexico, but do you consider that a tomato? I think of it as a semi-wild berry. Beans as ripened seed on the vine are nearly impossible for me ... I take in very mature pods still leathery and let them finish inside. Heat + humidity doesn't dry off bean pods very well. I had some Christmas limas dry off on the vines, and in several of them the seeds actually sprouted before they dried!! Usually the problem is molds.... Oops, almost sunrise... I gotta finish and get out to see what deer and armadillos did last night, and be a "presence" while Chuckie McVarmit is figgering out where to have breakfast. Here is a link that might be useful: Tool kit for Ozark Gardeners