oh Haase I do..I have seen way to may drop. The only time I was able for them to hang on was last year. I watered them FOUR TIMES A DAY!! I think if I lived in Cal. they would have locked me up and thrown away the key lol Sorry it had to end..your love affair with the buds...but they will give you more...I am SURE!!! Lucy

IÂm sorry for all of you that got hit again this time, and sorry you got clobbered out there on the plains this time, Jali. I was thinking of you when I looked at radar and saw how bad it was out that way. I sure hope more than eight of your tomatoes are able to make a comeback! Nature can do some pretty miraculous things! Is it my imagination, or does it seem like weÂve gotten more hail than regularÂwhatever that isÂthis year? It just seems like people have been getting bashed in all over the place! Down on the south end of Denver it looked like winter on Sunday, and they were showing people out shoveling the hail which looked close to a foot deep! IÂve been really luckyÂso far! No hail at all with the Sunday storm. It got really gusty a few times, but only for short periods, and I think I wound up with about an inch of rain, but I had watered the grass earlier in the day and forgot to empty the rain gauge, so IÂm not really sureÂit was at least an inch. Could be more bad storms around here today again, but "theyÂre" saying itÂs gonna be more north and east of the Metro area this time. And, strangely, it looks like most of it could come overnite this time! If I do wind up getting hail, I sure hope I at least get some really good lightening and thunder along with it to enjoy! Good luck, every body, with your damaged plants. Let us know in a week or two what survived and how things are doing! Skybird

Thank you Barb!!! A bonus, indeed!! I love this variety!!! Hope you are enjoying the summer!!! Please post your beautiful b,pond!!! I can't wait!!! Hi Jason!! Isn't it strange? I love the ever changing beauty that I see daily.. Hope you have an awesome holiday!!! Please tell Nicole that's miss her greatly, ok? I hope she is well. Roxanne . I can't wait to see your pictures of your beauties!! You take such awesome pictures and I always see something different from your view... Have fun hunting.. You make me smile every time I think of " crack". To funny.. I really think I could have a problem if they were delivering trees to my local stores. I believe that I would either follow trucks, or flag them down. Been known to do this with some Fed Ex trucks, so I know I wouldn't have any control. Lol. It's all good though. I'll live through you guys in California, Texas and Florida !! Hubby doesn't realize that he is really lucky living here on the East Coast!!! Lol... Have a great night!!! Laura

Jennifer, We have been having more fun than a barrel of monkeys with the girls. It has been the most wonderful 3 days, and today will be the fourth. Then, everything gets back to normal again as the work week/school week start up again tomorrow, but at least we got to spend some time together. The girls have been totally exhausted by the end of each day. Tim and I have been totally exhausted by the end of each day. See a trend there? lol. Having their youthful exuberance around just seems to infuse the house (and us) with more energy. When the girls get home, they are going to have a big surprise this afternoon and I'll tell y'all about it later. I wouldn't want to ruin the surprise by having one of them walk in and start reading over my shoulder. All of you who are looking for seed: buy what you can now, and save what seed you can save from open-pollinated varieties. If this is like 2008-2009 all over again, then it is the second year of the economic downtown that was the worst then and could be the worst this time around too because new gardeners planned ahead better and ordered seed online earlier the second year after having so much trouble finding it the first year. I already have a horde of seeds set aside for 2021, and now I'm going to start buying for 2022. It can be very helpful to be thinking ahead and preparing ahead of the curve. I went to look at Renee's Garden Seeds' website a couple of days ago just to see how they were doing, and I don't think I've ever seen so many varieties sold out before summer even arrived. It was just nuts. If I didn't already have a collected seed stash for Fall 2020 (remember you can grow a ton of root and leafy crops this fall to help you have fresh produce in the fall and winter), I'd be feeling somewhat concerned that I wasn't going to be able to find the specific varieties I want. Not that the world would end if I couldn't find my favorite varieties---I'd just grow other varieties, but prefer to have the tried-and-true varieties that I know I always can count on. In some ways, the run on seeds may worsen over the next month or two as people in the northern tier of states finally get some decent weather and decide to plant a garden in May or June. I'm not saying they'd have success from one started that late in a short summer area, but that doesn't mean they might not be buying up the seeds to try. Now that some stupid states are saying seeds are non-essential and cannot be sold in big box stores, the online seed companies are going to get even busier. Nancy, Back in the year when our overnight forecast low of 50 gave us a surprise freeze and frost at 32 degrees, I lost virtually everything in the garden, including tomato plants that were knee-high. I did have about 4 True Black Brandywine tomato plants at the highest point of the garden that survived. In instant freak-out mode, I ran to the store and bought whatever tomato plants I could find. It was pretty late in the season, and I didn't have a lot of options, but I figured any tomatoes were better than no tomatoes. I did the same with pepper plants. Then, I came home, cut off the frozen plants at the soil level and planted new tomato plants in between the old, dead plants....so they alternated, dead plant, live plant, dead plant, live plant, etc. Lessons I learned: 1) It is good to not pull up dead plants by the roots because if they were old enough and well-rooted enough, they may resprout from the ground. My tomato and pepper plants both did, and because the root systems already were pretty large, they outgrew the newly purchased plants. 2) Any tomato variety you can find and buy is NOT better than nothing. We had a lot of hybrid varieties that produced reddish, roundish, baseball-sized looking things that claimed to be tomatoes. They had horrible texture and firmness (hard) and mealy flesh (yuck) and poor flavor. Their skin was tough. They were roughly the equivalent of grocery store tomatoes despite being grown in an organic home garden. Clearly they were bred for people who think any red round thing is a passable tomato and they weren't bred for flavor. They were bred for something else....and I suppose shelf life was that something else. To our picky palates that were used to eating a huge variety of open-pollinated tomatoes, those things were just horrible. They were fine, though, for making home-canned paste sauce or salsa because you add enough to those cooked products to make up for the poor flavor. Oh, and lesson number 3 was to never really trust the forecast, and to buy and use tons of frost blankets. I haven't lost a crop like that since then. Larry, I need to go for a long drive in the worst possible way. I think it would be great just to get out of our little world here and go somewhere, anywhere, for any reason at all. Tim doesn't feel the cabin fever burning like I do, likely because he "gets" to drive to work in Dallas 5 days a week, but I haven't left our little area in more than a month, not even to go to someplace a close as Sherman or Denton Texas, which are maybe 50-60 miles one-way, depending on where we're actually going in those cities. Maybe next weekend we'll do that because the girls and I have science experiments and other fun already planned for today. I'm pretty sure Tim is going to mow the lawn while he has the chance, if it isn't raining. The last time I looked, we had a 20% chance of rain for today, so I think the odds are that he'll get to mow. It was sad to realize it was Spring Fling day, but Tim and I had planned from the beginning to skip it so we wouldn't potentially carry Covid-19 germs from him, because of his work at an international airport, to y'all, so it wasn't that tough of a day for me....since I didn't expect to be able to attend it this year anyhow. There's always next year, so let's think positive and hope for the best. Kim, I'm glad your green babies are resprouting. I started my tomato seeds super late because we were continuously under water for months, and then Tim dropped a whole flat of them while they still were pretty small in the starter flat. Many of them lost their labels at that point, so now I truly have no idea what I have. I saved all the ones that were salvageable, potted them up, and have plants that are a decent size now but most have a ? on the label where the variety name ought to be. I hope when I plant them that I don't plant only cherry types. lol. Mine are ready to go into the garden except they aren't hardened off. I will start that today. I had started it a while back and they were up to 3 hours a day when the cold came back. Since I already had so many other flats of other plants outdoors that needed to be carried back indoors on the cold nights, I stopped carrying out those tomatoes and figured I'd just start over with hardening them off after the cold weather was done with us. So, I think the cold weather is done with us now, and I'll start hardening off the tomatoes again beginning today. The hardest part, though, is that we are staying mostly cloudy, so they are going to be hardened off more to cloudy/partly sunny weather than fully sunny weather. I bet you are having fun gardening with the kids and grandkids. I'd love to do that, but am very hesitant to have our granddaughters out in our garden with all the timber rattlers and copperheads that we have around here. I'd rather be out in their garden with them in their city yard where apparently, so far, there are no snakes. We'll go into our garden to look at everything, but I spend my whole time out there watching their feet to make sure they don't step on a snake. If there was such a thing as truly snake-proof fencing, I'd pay any price to have it so I could make our garden safe for the grandkids. I cannot imagine what your little man did to wear himself out enough that he needed 3 naps! I hope you enjoyed your 12-hour nap, especially since he gave you permission to take such a nice long nap. Rebecca, I'm glad your plants survived the cold snap. Thanks for the report on Lowe's. I'll continue to avoid it a while longer, though perhaps our country one wouldn't be as busy as one in the city. On the other hand, the Lowe's in Ardmore is the only one around for several counties. so people from some counties close to us (where there's a lot more coivd-19 cases than in our county) might be driving to it, so a person cannot just assume everyone there is safe to be around. When I'm finally able to step foot inside a big box store's nursery/garden center again, Tim's not going to be able to drag me out of there until I have a cart so loaded down with plants that I cannot squeeze in one more thing. Texas is trying to reopen stuff as early as next week, so I'll be watching their news to see if another round of new cases starts appearing 2 or 3 weeks after they reopen more stores and such. Jen, It sounds like the folks running your Lowe's had done a lot of preparation and planning and were ready to make safe shopping as little of an ordeal as possible. Kudos to them for that. The thought of a line wrapping around Walmart horrifies me, but it is the reason we aren't even trying to go to Costco or Sam's Club as I've seen their lines on the news. Our little country town Walmarts in this area probably aren't having lines like that or I think I'd see it on the news or on our FB shopping group where people share exciting news like "The Wal-Mart in Gainesville has toilet paper, bottled water and lots of meat!" or whatever. No one has even mentioned any lines anywhere, so I assume there aren't any. One thing I've learned from this group is that all the little mom and pop type stores in little towns scattered around the area have a much better supply of everything than the larger grocery stores frequented by large numbers of people, so I've filed that tidbit of info away from whenever I need something from a store. Melissa, It is so good to see you here. I hope your husband and daughter can stay safe throughout this public health emergency. My daughter-in-law works at the hospital in Ardmore, although not on the floor where they have Covid-19 case, if any, or even the suspected Covid-19 cases they're waiting for tests to clear. I worry about her but she's doing fine so far. Your poor daughter---my heart hurts for her too. She is too young to have to see all that she is seeing now. I cannot imagine being able to handle that when I was 20. The toilet paper thing is mind-boggling. We haven't had any trouble though. We shop at Costco, so as soon as I was aware of this virus, back when it was running through Wuhan rapidly in January, I started picking up an extra package of Costco's toilet paper here and there....maybe twice a month. I think I had 4 big packages of it stored away back when the panic buying/toilet paper drought set in. I gave one of them to our son and daughter-in-law for their family in March when the panic buying began because they couldn't find any then, and we still have plenty. I did not anticipate that there would be panic buying and toilet paper shortages (who could have foreseen that?), but I knew that the Kirkland brand of toilet paper at Costco was made in China, so I figured it would be in short supply at some point because of supply chain/distribution issues. I never expected it would sell out in panic buying. I just wanted to buy it while we could, and I thought that what I had would last forever. Now, of course, it won't last forever, but by the time we are running low, I expect the stores around us will be restocked again. We haven't had any trouble buying anything we need or want, but we were pretty well stocked before the virus became an issue here and, at this point, anything that we don't have is probably something we can live without. Because my husband and our son both work at DFW International Airport and have regular contact with large numbers of people, I know that the odds are they will be exposed to Covid-19 and possibly bring it home to Oklahoma with them, so I tried to prepare in advance so we could avoid stores as much as possible and encouraged our son and his family to do the same (and they did). I sure do miss going to the stores though and, you know, your body is going to crave whatever it is that you did not stock up on in advance. If my horde of chocolate runs out, then a trip to the store will become mandatory. : ) I really, really, really miss being able to wander through nurseries and garden centers and impulse buy plants but just keep reminding myself that no plant that I'd like to have is worth contracting the coronavirus. Of course, on some pretty spring morning I will decide to risk it and just go shopping, but in the meantime, the less I venture out into stores, the better. Jen, I agree about the proper usage of both masks and gloves! Rebecca, I haven't tried bush beans in between onions so have no idea how they two of them do together, but think it always is fun to experiment and learn from stuff like that. Go for it! The only issue I foresee is that if your onions are done before the beans are done, you'll have to harvest the onions carefully so you don't accidentally pull up the bean plants at the same time you pull up the onions. Dawn