People here are receiving seeds and starting them already, and i've just made an order! Mostly, i've waited because i'd be too tempted to start things earlier if i got them earlier, and i wanted to start things like petunias and impatiens a little later than last year. Anyway, here is what i've ordered from Vesey's: Pepper Orange Sun Swiss Chard Orange Fantasia Cosmos Sonata Mix Osteospermum Passion Mix Petunias O Canada Mix Petunias Ramblin' Red Petunias Tidal Silver Wave Petunias Tidal Wave Hot Pink Campanula Dwarf Pink Snow Pansies Mix Pansy Rhapsody Mix Impatiens Tempo Mix Impatiens Seaside Mix Hemerocallis 'Startle' Lilium 'Centrefold' (3 more bulbs - i can't wait for the one i already have to multiply!) Astrantia collection (thank you, enablers!) Lilium 'Starfighter' Dahlia 'Freak of Nature' Dahlia Pinwheel Mix That's only Veseys! Eep! The old Visa was vibrating! :>

Kathy, These are the onion varieties recommended for Oklahoma in the OSU Vegetable Variety Guide for Home Gardeners: YELLOW: Granex, Grano 1015Y (Texas Supersweet), Yellow Sweet Spanish, Walla Walla Sweet RED: Granex WHITE: Crystal White, Granex, White Sweet Spanish BUNCHING: Evergreen White I'm not at all an onion expert, but I think all the above varieties are fairly sweet, or at least more sweet than pungent. Of the OSU-recommended varieties, I think the Yellow Sweet Spanish and the White Sweet Spanish would be the least sweet and most pungent. The problem with wanting to grow onions considered hotter, more pungent or more spicey is that the onions that grow best in the southern US are the sweet ones. The onions that grow best in the north are the more pungent ones. And, the types of onions that grow well in each area is determined by day-length. SHORT DAY ONIONS: These start the bulbing process when daylength reaches only 10-12 hours. Here in Oklahoma, short-day onions grow best. Short day onions grow well only in southern states, which would be everything from Oklahoma, Arkansas, etc. southward. You can grow them in the northern states, but they remain small. INTERMEDIATE DAY ONIONS: Require 12-14 hours of daily sunlight to begin bulbing, so they will grown best in most of the south, except the southernmost parts of the southern states, but they also grow well through the states that sit one state or two above the southern tier of states. Here in the middle of the USA, for example, they can be grown in the northern half of Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas. Above all but northernmost Kansas, you have to grow the next category.... LONG DAY ONIONS: These do best in northern states that have 14-16 hours of sunlight daily, and there are both sweet and storage (pungent) types that do well in the northern states. Here in the middle of the country, you can grow long day onions in the northernmost half, or maybe third, of Kansas (if planted very early) and then all the way north to Canada. Most of the more pungent or spicier or hotter onions (however you prefer to describe them) that I am familiar with are the long-day types. Can you grow long-day types in Oklahoma? Perhaps and, the farther north you are, the more likely they'd bulb up a little but they most likely wouldn't get as big as they do when grown in the more northern states. Since you are pretty far north in Oklahoma, I think you might have success with a Long Daylength type like Big Daddy (100days)(available from Dixondale online and probably other onion suppliers as well). A new long daylength onion at Dixondale that is supposed to be a bit more pungent is Sterling (95 days). I have grown one of Dixondale's long daylength specialty onions--Red Torpedo--and it did OK. It is, as the name implies, a long torpedo-shaped onion and not a round one. It is a sweet onion, so I just mentioned it because it was a long daylength type that did form a bulb here (somewhat). If you buy your onion plants locally (cause Dixondale's are very expensive), check the side of the wooden crate they're shipped in. Sometimes on the side, the word "storage" or "sweet" is printed either on the box or the label. Anything labeled "storage" would be more pungent than those labeled "sweet". I usually buy from Dixondale so I can get exactly the variety I want at exactly the time I want to plant it, so the extra expense is worth it to me. Sometimes my local feed/seed stores sell onions from Dixondale and sometimes they sell seeds from Bonnie Plant Farms. They all have about the same onions every year though, and they are almost always the sweet types, although at least the sweet spanish types are not quite as sweet as the supersweet types. You could try asking your local ag extension agent if any pungent type onions grow in your part of the state. And, if you decide to try growing a long daylength type, the earlier you can get them into the ground the better. Then, keep them well-fed and well-watered so you'll have the biggest, healthiest green tops possible at the time that bulbing initiates and that will give you a good chance of having some size to the bulbs. Dawn

Moni, I love the garden catalogs....I can sit and look at them endlessly as the guys are watching football, for example, on a cold Sunday afternoon. Still, even after looking at the paper copies, I'll go and order online because it is faster. We do not have a lot of seed sources here in southern OK--mostly just Wal-Mart and Lowe's in Ardmore, and Home Depot in Gainesville, Texas. The farm and ranch stores don't offer much of a selection, and even less the last couple of years. I miss the places in Fort Worth that had a gazillion kinds of seeds, especially the ones with bulk seed in big cans that you scooped out and bought by the ounce. When we returned from doing a little Christmas shopping earlier today, I picked up the mail and noticed two new catalogs today: one from Vermont Bean Seed Co. and one from Totally Tomatoes. Both are owned by the same parent company, and it also owns HPS (two catalogs from them in the last 4 months) and Shumway Seeds (no cat. yet). If the grassfires or wildfires don't start up on this "Extreme to Very High Fire Danger" day, I hope to finish a fencing project in the next couple of hours, and maybe then I can squeeze in time to scan through the pages of these two catalogs to see "what's new". Well, my late lunch is over and I need to get back outside. Hope you're enjoying this wild and windy day. It's warm here this afternoon, but I think that changes tomorrow. Dawn

Carol, I always have transplants standing by to a certain extent even if I just started them in small paper cups a week or two before I intend to transplant them. How old the transplants are will vary. I usually keep a few tomato and pepper transplants in 1 gallon pots on the patio where they get morning sun/afternoon shade well into June or early July so I can plop them into the ground to replace a plant that dies. If nothing dies, I'll eventually toss the unused 'backup' plants onto the compost pile. In a rainier year, they may send roots down into the compost pile and grow there, but since the compost pile is not fenced off from the wild animals, a deer or rabbit or something usually will eat them within a few weeks. For follow-on or succession crops, how I prepare succession plantings will vary, depending on which kind of vegetable we're talking about. For example, I often plant southern peas to replace broccoli and cabbage when they're done. So, when I see the little broccoli heads just starting to size up, I'll sow southern pea seeds in tiny bathroom-sized paper cups with the bottoms cut out of them. Then, when it is broccoli harvest time, I harvest the heads, pull up the plants (normally I don't leave them for sideshooting because I'm eager to get the new crop into the ground) in the morning and then in the cool evening hours, I'll transplant the southern peas, cups and all, into the garden and water them well. Then they have a little time overnight to adjust to being transplanted, but since I have transplanted them in their bottomless paper cups, there's rarely any transplant shock at all. It is not essential, obviously to start the seeds in cups as opposed to direct sowing, but I do it for two reasons. First, to get the succession crop to produce earlier a bit earlier. (Remember that everything I do is aimed at maximizing the harvest we get from our garden.) The plants from cups are a week old most of the time when I set them out. Secondly, to ensure no wasted space. If I sow seeds, I may have an empty spot here and there where seed didn't sprout. When I transplant young seedlings, there are no empty spots. It can drive my friends and neighbors crazy when they stop by one day and see a raised bed full of young pea plants that only yesterday had huge broccoli plants. I, however, love those fast transitions. For a long time, I assumed I was a garden wierdo (and maybe I am) because I preferred to start every followon crop in cups and transplant immediately after yanking out the previous crop. However, I then learned that some serious biointensive gardeners use a similar method--starting every single thing they grow from transplants and direct seeding virtually nothing for the same reasons I do...maximizing harvest and productivity, and then I didn't feel like such a weirdo any more. That's one way I succession plant, but there's another method that works really well too and that is to plant sprawling, rambling warm-season plants close to early season plants. You might be putting those sprawling plants into the ground in April or May when the cool-season crop was planted in February or March. Then, after the early cool-season plants are harvested, the warm-season plant that was planted much later will quickly spread and take over the recently-made-available space. For example, I might plant Seminole pumpkin near the potato bed. It will be starting to ramble and roam and move close to the potato bed, and then after I dig the potatoes, it will take over that area. Or, I might plant Sugar Baby watermelon in May somewhat close to the carrots that were planted in March. Once the carrots are harvested in June, Sugar Baby rapidly takes over the space they formerly occupied. Most years, this works out really well. It may seem peculiar to some folks to start carrot seeds inside and transplant them outside, but it guarantees me a carrot crop instead of having to spend 2, 3 or 4 weeks to wait and see how well the carrots do (or do not) sprout in any given year. Some years, usually either in a drought year when soil is exceptionally dry or in an exceptionally wet, rainy year, I start carrots inside and other years when the weather is right in the middle--not too dry and not too wet--I direct sow them outside. If I am direct sowing carrots, I prefer to use homemade seed tapes made during the cold winter months, so sowing the carrot seeds outdoors takes only a few minutes and their spacing is pretty good other than maybe an occasional gap in a row where a seed didn't germinate. A Three Sisters garden is another form of succession planting where you can harvest 3 crops at 3 different times from one bed. I plant the corn first and let it get at least knee-high before I plant beans that will climb the beanstalks later. These beans need to be direct-seeded because I don't want to disturb the roots of the previously planted corn plants by using a trowel to dig a hole large enough to transplant beans started in cups. If it is an early corn with short stalks like Early Sunglow, I plant half-runners that won't overwhelm the stalks when they start climbing. A much taller corn can handle a bean that is more of a rampant grower. I will plant pumpkins and winter squash a couple of weeks later (it depends on soil temps) around the perimeter of the corn and bean planting. They'll ramble and roam and eventually spread all over that area. The corn is normally harvested first. Then, later on, it will be the green beans that are harvested and, when harvesting them, I have to be careful that I don't step on the pumpkins vines and crush them. Eventually, the beans are pretty much done and the pumpkins or winter squash are getting quite large and I'll harvest them last. That's a way to get at least three crops from the space generally devoted to one crop. I think I have grown virtually every single crop you can grow from seed in paper cups, except for carrots, turnips, radishes and beets. I have started carrots inside in the cardboard tubes from paper towels, wrapping paper, and toilet paper. I save all those cardboard tubes, cut the larger ones down to the same size as the ones from toilet paper, line them up in a seed flat, fill them with a soil-less seed starting mix, plant the carrot seets, and transplant them out into the garden within a week of the carrots sprouting. Carrot seeds will sprout much more quickly for me indoors in warmer temps under lights than they do outdoors, and if we have one hard rain while I'm waiting for the carrot seeds to sprout outside in my sloping garden, there won't be any carrots because a hard rain will wash the seeds out of the garden and down into the bar ditch or the woods. In order for carrots sprouted indoors to do well, though, you must transplant them outside almost the minute they sprout. They get really long really fast so you can't keep them inside more than a very few days after they sprout or they'll grow out of the bottom of the cardboard tubes. Another way I speed up the succession planting process is to pre-sprout seeds indoors in wet paper towels or coffee filters, and then transfer those pre-sprouted seeds directly into the ground where they are to grow. So, I'm still direct seeding them, but with the pre-sprouted seeds, the plants will pop up out of the ground in a day or two instead of in a week or two, and there won't be any gaps in a row where seeds didn't sprout, because I discard seeds that didn't sprout and only plant the sprouted ones. I even use presprouting for seeds I'm starting in flats on the light shelf sometimes, although that's more common in a year with few fires. In a year with lots of fires, I'm gone too mcuh to pre-sprout and just throw the seeds in the flat, put them on the light shelf, and try to remember to check them every morning and evening to see if they need watered. I use all kinds of tricks like that to make my garden as productive as possible. When people say they cannot understand how I can fill up a root cellar, 2 or 3 freezers and hundreds of canning jars from a garden "only" the size of mine, I think to myself that if they lived here with me for one gardening year and saw all the extra effort I put into keeping every square inch planted and producing something, then they'd understand how it is possible to get such large yields. I hate, hate, hate "wasted space" in the garden and do everything I can to avoid having any land sit idle for any period of time during the gardening season. Dawn