Hi Highlander, "So, if they aren't coming up this year, how long will they last in or on the soil or mulch? Will the seeds dropped last year come up next year or in future years?" A very small percentage of zinnia seeds survive as "volunteers" the next Spring, but I wouldn't expect any of those seeds to make it to a second year. "That brings up question 1: How to prevent powdery mildew on zinnias?" A non-toxic way is frequent sprays of a product called GreenCure. It is basically potassium bicarbonate with a proprietary wetting agent. You have to spray it fairly frequently because it is water soluble and rains or even heavy dews can wash it off into the soil, where it acts as a source of potassium nutrition. I suspect it also foliar feeds some potassium. It is safe to use. It is better than using sodium bicarbonate. I breed zinnias as a hobby (see the "It can be fun to breed your own zinnias" message thread), and three years ago I found a tubular petaled mutant that I wanted to preserve as long as possible, providing pollen for crossing with other zinnias and developing seeds of its own. To prolong the life of that zinnia plant right up to our killing freeze, I applied Bayer All-in-One Rose and Flower Care as a drench applied about every two weeks, and it prevented Powdery Mildew and other foliage diseases on that zinnia specimen right up until it was killed by a hard freeze in late Fall. It is fairly expensive, so I don't use it routinely on my zinnias. But since it is systemic, it isn't washed off by rain and it spreads its protection to new growth, unlike surface sprays. It is not for organic gardeners, because it does contain "chemicals". I foliar feed my zinnias with Miracle-Gro products, and I am experimenting with adding some Physan 20 as a wetting agent and, since it is a bactericide and fungicide, among other things (some hospitals use it in their mop water), it may tend to prevent Powdery Mildew. This isn't the "season" for PM yet, so I won't know until this Fall if it can play a role in preventing PM and other diseases on my zinnias. But so far, so good. ZM (not associated with any product or vendor mentioned or linked)

A week after starting this thread I am seeing more damage than I first thought. Agave blue glow is showing some spots on its leaves while the equally beautiful blue green leaves of Yucca pallida are pristine. Tropical guayacan leaves are yellowing, the native variety is not. This big swooping trunk of Arroya sweetwood tree in the front yard is dead ... The upright trunks to the left are okay, Shoe string acacia is dead. While the sun loving drought tolerant Floratam St. Augustine is showing a few green sprigs it remains to be seen whether it will recover quickly and fully. The neighbor's old fashioned St. Augustine protected by oak trees is still green and thick. Satsuma has dropped a few leaves, but will be fine. Ditto Dwarf Barbados cherry shrubs which are usually evergreen. Bob is already removing the dead-to-the-ground Almond verbena trees. I hope they come back. On the upside when scratched the bottom half of the Brazilian orchid tree is still green. The weather is warm and spring like, but dang -- the real spring is still a couple of months away. February is usually our coldest month so there will probably be more freezes. Oh well, the yard is requiring lots of work this year, but life goes on ... :-)

farmgardener, Yay! Congrats on the okra. I am glad it is producing. Desperate times, like this year, sometimes all for desperate measures. It sure has been a weird year. Jacob, Your garden looks great as always and it is so good to hear everything has recovered so well from the hail. The drought news from your area is not good, but in the next seven days I expect you'll get some drought relief, and so will we. I'm keeping my fingers crossed for all of us. We're in Severe Drought here now with increasing fire activity that is keeping me away from home and away from my garden---poor, pitiful, heat-roasted and drought-dehydrated mess that it is. I'm just hoping rain falls soon before we can advance to Extreme Drought. At this point, though, in our area we only want rain if it is going to bring hard downpours of rain---those half-hearted thunderstorms we keep getting that are mostly dry storms with lots of lightning (which starts fires) and very little rain just make things worse at this point since the lightning striking in dry fields can start fires so easily. Here's the 7-day Qualitative Precipitation Forecast, offering us a glimmer of hope. Now, y'all, don't take this thing too seriously because it updates multiple times daily and can be all over the place with regards to amounts. Still, as we watch it evolve over the next few days, we should have some clue about how much rain to expect. 7-day QPF Larry, I loved Little Lucy and was so unhappy when the seed company that carried it dropped it from production. It was so pretty and so productive. Rebecca, Hmmm. Baby Bubba usually produces a lot. Know what I'd do? I'd hit that sucker with Bloom Booster type fertilizer to push it into flowering. I don't know why it is being lazy this year. It isn't like we are cool and cloudy, so it ought to be happy with the weather. I am so happy that Seeds of India worked out well for your co-worker. Please tell her how thrilled I am to hear that their garden is doing so well. I was only able to work in the garden yesterday for a little while. I deadheaded flowers, dodging all the bees who take it personally when I start snipping off blooms. I did a little weeding, but there's not many weeds at this point since I've worked so hard to mulch heavily and remove each weed when first noticed. I have one path that gets a bit weedy because I never have gotten it mulched. Mulching that path is on my To Do list but I never seem to get around to getting it done. I harvested okra. I talked to the tree frog who was sitting on top of my sun umbrella. I scared the deer to death by walking out of my garden while they were trying to sneak into the driveway to steal the doves' cracked corn. We had four fire calls yesterday. I didn't go on the first two as they were relatively small and minor, but the third was a big one and we were out there for 7 hours in horrific heat. The thermometer on our fire dept. vehicle showed 121 degrees at one point, and that was because we were being heated up by residual heat from the adjacent fire, which was just a 100' or so from us at that point (but not moving towards us). It was so hot out there, and so dry. When we finally made it home, we rushed off to town to grab a quick hamburger. Wqe'f fed the firefighters cold cut sandwiches and chips, but we still were starving when the fire was extinguished anyhow. On our way back from town, wolfing down our hamburgers as we traveled down the highway, I saw a familiar orange glow in the night sky and told Tim that our fire had rekindled. He didn't want to believe it and thought it was somebody else's fire---maybe across the river. (This is what I call magical thinking....wanting something to be true so you just believe it is......). We went to investigate and, of course, it was our fire. So, we sounded the alarm and then spent the next two hours back out there again. Having a wildfire rekindle is not unusual because when hundreds of acres burn, there's inevitably smoldering trees and logs and such that will flare back up----there's not enough water in this county to soak down hundreds of acres, so you just do the best you can with what you've got. Now, as I am typing this on Saturday morning, Tim is back there on a very small rekindle. It probably is going to be a rough day here again today since it started out with a fire call around 7 a.m. So, I guess we are having the August I expected and dreaded----a drought-decimated garden full of grasshoppers, and fires daily, and with the fires seeming to increase in number and severity daily. I'm hoping we'll start getting rain soon and that conditions will improve. Even in 2011 when it was hotter, drier and we were much deeper in drought than we are now, we got our first hint of drought relief on August 11th, so that gives me hope for this coming week---that maybe we'll be getting some real drought relief within the next 7 to 10 days. The forecast looks kinda good right now, but then you really cannot trust a forecast 7 days out, so we'll see. I hope you all have a good day today. Dawn

Jennifer, I was supposed to be growing okra, southern peas, melons, cucumbers, winter squash, summer squash and gourds in the back garden but the constant Spring rain ruined that plan after the front garden was mostly filled with other plantings, leaving me little to no space to squeeze them in. Well, really the tomatoes were to be in the back garden too, but the muddy quagmire made that impossible too, so the tomatoes ended up in the front garden, leaving even less space for anything else. When I moved them there, I just figured the back garden would dry out eventually, and it is beginning to, but it is such a weedy mess, since weeds will grow in heavy mud, that I really don't even want to tackle planting back there this late. My fear is that our rain will suddenly stop and I'll have a huge back garden filled with young plants that will need a lot of water. The rain has largely dried up here, though the lower end of the front garden still is very wet. The upper portions of the front garden have dried out enough that the soil is fairly workable but not so dry that I have to water anything, except for newly transplanted seedlings. So, I have half the garden I planned, and the heat has arrived here. We've been in the upper 80s all week and are expected to hit 88-90 degrees today. So far, I have squeezed okra into the front garden, taking out the sugar snap peas (they are burning up in our near-90s high temperatures) just yesterday and replacing them with Jambalaya okra plants that I had growing in red Solo cups. I have a couple of summer squash plants, and cannot figure out how to squeeze in winter squash plants unless something dies unexpectedly and opens up a space for them. After I dig the potatoes, that will open up a 4' x 10' raised bed, so I guess I will put southern peas there. I still don't really have a place to plant any melons or cucumbers. In some years I have grown both of them on the garden fence, using it as a trellis, but with the way herbicide drift keeps hitting the front garden, anything on the fence is first in the line of fire so I sort of hate to plant anything there at all. At least if I have random flowers along the fence line, they seem, for the most part, to be more resilient and to bounce back from getting herbicide drift damage. I could plant melons and cucumbers along the northern fence line, but that's the lower end of our strongly sloping garden (sitting several feet lower than the upper end) and it still is very wet down there. The plants I have there now (Heidi tomato plants and some herbs) are producing but the plants are too waterlogged and look horrible and I am sort of amazed they still are alive. I don't think melons or cukes would fare well down there this year unless we dry out a lot. With potentially heavy rain in the Sunday forecast, drying out might not happen. I have grown cucumbers on the north garden fence before, but not in recent years---the woodland has moved across the 10 feet of open space that used to serve as a buffer between the woodland and the garden and now trees and vines are trying to grow right up to and through that fence line, making that fence line a bit shady. We lost control of that open buffer space in 2010 when we got almost 80" of rain and all the woodland plants went crazy and exploded into growth. We need to spend time this winter clearing it out. We can't do it now because of the risk of dropping a tree on the garden fence. We'll have to wait for the off-season when it wouldn't matter so much if the fence was destroyed. Well, it would matter, because we'd have to rebuild the fence, but there wouldn't be garden plants exposed to deer in winter if the fence was damaged like there would be right now. I do have about a 20' row of bush beans in the same bed as the okra. Those are just now starting to bloom, so they'll likely be producing throughout June, depending on how soon we hit the mid-90s, which tends to shut down bean production. I might be able to replace the bush beans with southern peas if we don't keep getting too much rain. I think late June would be pretty late to plant melons or winter squash though and it only would be possible anyway if we dry out some. When I transplanted the okra after taking out the sad-looking sugar snap pea plants, I found the soil there was still really, really wet. Thus, it seems like melons those probably will come from the Farmer's Market this summer. We can get really good locally-grown melons here, if anyone was able to get them planted this year. A lot of the good melon-growing areas here are on lower-lying ground near the river. I don't think they've been flooded, but they may have been too wet at planting time. It just isn't an ideal situation at all this year. I probably should have planted only half as many tomato plants as I had planned, reserving one of the two large raised beds currently filled with tomato plants for non-tomatoes, but I didn't. I have contemplated taking all the tomato plants out of one raised bed fairly early, as soon as I finish harvesting their first big round of fruit, just to have space for something else. I kinda hate to do that, but then, we're getting a lot more tomatoes than we can eat anyway, so I need to start canning now or the fruit sitting on the counter is going to get overly ripe. I'm not used to having to start canning quite this early. I could take out those two dozen tomato plants in the smaller of the two tomato beds and hardly miss them. I don't know if I will. It is hard to take out plants that are producing. It isn't quite as hard though when you're already overloaded with ripe fruit, so that might help make it easier. Those tomato plants are interplanted with basil, borage, marigolds and other plants that would make planting cucumbers or melons there a real challenge, so I wouldn't gain much by taking them out except I could plant more flowers and herbs there. Really, I am trying to be content with what I do have planted because there's plenty of people in OK and AR with flooded gardens, yards, homes, etc. that really are suffering and losing everything, so having to skip planting a few favorite veggies this year is so very minor by comparison. JetStar and Supersonic can be a little late to set fruit, but usually not extremely late. This has been such a weird year weather-wise that nothing would surprise me. With tomatoes, when we have high moisture and high humidity, tomato plants can go downhill overnight. Diseases like bacterial speck, bacterial spot, Septoria Leaf Spot and Early Blight are much worse in years with weather like this. While I usually don't have trouble with the more serious wilt diseases like southern blight or fusarium wilt, they also seem a lot worse in wet, humid years----not in my garden, but just in a lot of people's gardens in general. I would expect we'd see more of those across the state this year than usual. I even have wondered if this might be one of the very rare years we have late blight in OK. Normally we are too warm and mostly too dry for it, but with all the moisture and all the cool weather in May, we may have had a period of time when it could have developed. Hopefully not, though, since it is a totally devastating disease that can completely destroy a tomato planting in just a few days....and there is no cure, nor can you salvage any fruit---they all are infected and rot. The weird white stuff on your strawberry plants does look like some form of slime mold, though not necessarily the right color and texture to be dog vomit slime mold, which is a real thing. It is peculiar because slime molds usually grow on the ground, and then they quickly die away as soon as the soil dries out a little. They feed on decaying plant matter in the soil. Slime molds are just unicellular beings that thrive on decaying matter and tend to be short-lived when they do appear, often disappearing within a few days. While it is rare here, you can get slime mold on strawberry plants, on the leaves and even on the fruit. Normally we do not have high-enough moisture or humidity levels to support this sort of slime mold on strawberries, but it looks like your plants do have it growing on them right now. Don't worry, the slime mold is a growth but it is not an infection, so your plants aren't ill or anything---they just have an unwelcome guest temporarily growing on them. If it is dry enough, you might be able to scrape it off the plants. If the plants are mulched, the slime mold likely started growing there since, obviously, your strawberry plants are not decaying plant matter. It would help if the next round of rain would miss your garden so more drying out can occur and the slime mold will just go away on its own. I have been finding and killing a lot of armyworms on plants in my garden. Mostly I am finding them while they are very small--maybe a half-inch long at most, so have been able to kill them before they can do too much damage. I have seen other unidentified caterpillars and have left them alone if I don't know what kind they are. I don't want to spray with Bt because I have swallowtails caterpillars all over the place, anywhere that I'm growing parsley, cilantro, dill or fennel for them. I think I have those plants in 4 or 5 different locations and it is a deliberate choice to spread them around so that the songbirds won't be able to find and eat the swallowtail cats as easily. Larry, Your deer are smart---checking to see if some of their favorites have sprouted yet. We are seeing the deer a lot more often too. Sometimes they walk right by the garden fence while I'm in the garden. I have a feeling that if I were not in the garden, they might walk right in through the gate (they've done it before) and help themselves to whatever they are craving. I have no really good explanation why the deer are checking out the yard and garden as much as they are lately, and I've been wondering why I am seeing them so much. I suppose I could blame it a little bit on the river being so high--it is running only about 3 feet below flood stage--but the river bottom lands frequented by the deer aren't even under water, so why more of them are up here on higher ground this last month or two is something I really don't understand. There's plentiful native food for them as we certainly are not in drought. I'm having the same issue with the wild turkeys. The dogs will start barking like mad and I'll know there's wild turkeys in the front yard. They stroll right down the driveway from out west behind the barn, which is the area they always come from and return to, walk down the middle of the driveway a couple hundred feet to the front garden and then either slip off into the woodland adjacent to the garden or turn around and walk back up the driveway like they own the place. I put out cracked corn and a little hen scratch for them west of the barn each morning and they have become quite spoiled. Often, when I walk out the back door, the wild turkeys are waiting for me at their feeding spot. They take off into the back pasture as soon as they see me, but they don't go far. They just stand in the tall grass watching me, and come back to eat as soon as I had back towards the house. We've never had as many wild turkeys before as we've had this year. I see them in flocks of as many as 7 or 8 at one time. Some come from our woodland, and undoubtedly are living in it or the nearby pasture or both, and others come from our neighbors' pasture and woodland area. I hear them all day long, so I know they are around even when I'm not seeing them. Our neighbor who used to hunt them passed away a couple of months ago and I didn't hear his kids or grandkids back there hunting during the spring turkey season---undoubtedly they were occupied with other things. So, maybe we're just seeing more because they feel like they're in a safer spot with that property behind us currently unoccupied. Patti, I just cut them any old time. Like you, I hate cutting them down while the bees are visiting them so much, so I usually wait until they get so big that they are flopping over on the ground, which is happening now. I haven't cut mine yet, but will do so soon. You can cut them back pretty much any time you want, and you can cut them back as hard as you want. I have cut them back almost to the ground some years. They regrow like crazy and are big again in the blink of an eye. Often, I cut back half of them, leaving the other half for the bees. Then, when the ones I cut are about ready to bloom again, I'll cut back the other half. It doesn't matter though. You can cut them all at one time. When I've done that, the bees just switch to other flowering plants until the comfrey comes back into bloom. I worked in the garden longer on Friday than I have in a long time...from around 7:30 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. I weeded, weeded, weeded seemingly all day long, but also was able to get quite a lot of herbs and flowers tucked into little places here and there in the beds. I finally feel like I made a lot of progress with the weeds---not nearly enough, but enough that it gives me hope that I'll have weed-free beds in another week or two. Not that they will stay weed-free, but they do look a lot better now with all those sprouting weeds pulled out. It takes me so long to weed such a large garden though that if I start at the highest raised bed at the south end of the garden, then by the time I work my way down through the rest of the garden, from south to north, and eventually get back to the first bed, it has new weeds sprouting and the whole weeding cycle starts over again. I need to do some more mulching in the trouble spots. With all this rain, the whole garden seems to be a weedy trouble spot and I don't have enough mulch for the whole thing. With potentially heavy rain in the forecast for Sunday, I'm going to skip grocery shopping and running errands today if I can and spend as much time as possible in the garden again today, or at least until it gets too hot to stay out there. I probably stayed out in the heat too long yesterday and I know I didn't drink enough fluids, but I really tried to stay hydrated. I can grocery shop and run errands on a rainy day. I need to spend the sunny day in the garden. I was amazed at how many small armyworms I found and killed. I've been killing them for weeks, and more just keep coming. Their name suits them. I wasn't even looking for them....just killing them as I came across them. Often they were on small weeds that I was pulling, or on plants near the weeds....a reminder that we try to keep our gardens weed-free for just this reason....to give the pests fewer places to hide. I don't mind looking at weeds in the garden that much, but I don't like knowing the weeds are providing a home for pests that I don't want in the garden in the first place. Speaking of pests, I've been finding and killing a lot of green stink bugs lately, and I'm finding them in about the 4th instar stage. I don't know why I don't find them younger than that. Perhaps they're hatching and growing outside the garden and don't move into it until they're at the 4th instar. I never see their eggs either, or the newly hatched nymphs. Regardless, so far I'm seeing a lot more green stink bugs than brown stink bugs. I've hardly seen any squash bugs at all and when I do see them, they are sitting on non-squash plants looking confused, perhaps because the squash plants are under micromesh netting and they cannot get to them. So far I think I have been successful at killing every squash bug I've found. One advantage to not having many cucurbit crops this Spring is that the squash bugs cannot find anything to eat. Yay! I found a leaf-footed bug inside my garden shed and killed it. I haven't seen many of them yet, and I am glad, as they are quick to fly away when you spot them. I mostly just watch for them on the tomato plants. Right now it is likely they're feeding more on tree fruit. Speaking of tree fruit, the first sand plums are beginning to ripen now and I need to start picking them so I can make some jelly. I'm really sort of surprised we have any at all because we had multiple late freezes after they bloomed that I figured would have killed all the fruit. The freezes killed a lot of the fruit, but apparently not all of it. Have a great day everyone, and Happy June! The heat is arriving right on schedule, unfortunately. Dawn