WELL...last night someone on name that plant forum indicated that it was called Yellowrocket, which led to finding that it is probably a very close relative of Yellowrocket: Wild Radish. Whis is a very close relative to Wild Mustard :-) The only reason it can't be Yellowrocket is because the stems and leaves have tiny hairs, which indicates it is Wild Radish. However. I have seen pics of Wild Radish now on Google Images that don't look like this plant, and some that show Yellowrocket looking dead-on accurate, save for the leaves. Ha. At any rate, I'm pulling them up...tis' not to be... Thanks so much for your help, timbu and fammsimm. Now I am also familiar with two other kinds of weeds, so if I spot them, I'll know right away :-) Joanna

Glenda, The folks I know who've either had Black Cherry reseed and volunteer, or who've saved seeds and planted them, seem to have gotten true Black Cherry plants so I think it is likely you will as well. Most tomatoes reseed pretty easily but if you grow a lot of tomato varieties, you have no idea which ones reseeded until they form fruit. I pull out volunteers and toss them on the compost pile because I don't want to give space to a plant when I don't know what it is. Susan, it is usually the small, bite-sized tomatoes that reseed most easily and that's because it is easy to drop one and lose it in the mulch or the foliage of companion plants. So, it sits there and rots, and then the seeds come up the next year. With larger tomatoes, if you drop one, you tend to see the fruit and pick them up. Sometimes I get tomato plants in the compost pile, especially because I dump the seeds there after my tomato strainer removes them when I'm making sauce. Based on how many tomato seeds and pepper seeds I dumped there last year while canning, I ought to have huge numbers of volunteers in my pasture compost pile, but it is furthest from the house and full of snakes so I don't even stand there and look at it. I just walk back there, heave the contents of the compost bucket onto it, and scurry back to the house before I find a snake or something worse. Last year, a bobcat hung around that compost pile a lot. I hope Jess has an easy labor to make up for the difficult pregnancy and that little Charly or Sophia makes her grand debut soon. I bet Kenna is excited about becoming a big sister! Beth, Throw a handful of ripe cherry tomatoes somewhere that you DON'T want to grow tomatoes and I guarantee you they'll come up in that spot just so you have to dig them up and move them someplace else. Dawn

It is crazy. We were so wet, and flooding, and with fungal and bacterial diseases breaking out on every shrub, tree, weed and grass. Now the green has gone brown and dry. This happened a few years back. I think it was in the summer of 2008. We'd had all that rain (and flooding, sound familiar?) in 2007 and the 2008 started out pretty decently. We seemed green and wet and it was nice enough, and then it was like we hit a brick wall and suddenly were hot and dry. This month reminds me very much of that year, and from what I remember of 2008, we ended up miserably hot, dry and back in drought with tons of wildfires through April 2009. I really don't want for this year to end up like that year did. I did water the garden today. I left the gate open and the chickens were all over the place. They like the damp mulch, and they weren't really bothering anything. Since I've been letting them into the garden for a few hours a day, the grasshoppers are disappearing. If they start pecking tomatoes (which they haven't done at all yet), then I'll have to keep the gate closed and ban the poultry from the garden.

I have been getting the male and female orioles the last two years (not Baltimore I'm west coast) however, I can not get a picture of them! They're too fast and I hide waiting for them. I love the orange/yellow feathers when the sun shines on the male!