SCHOOLS OUT FOR SUMMER!!!Then why am I awake before 10:00??Cause my dang dog had a racoon treed,& wouldn't quit barking!I'm one of those people who, once awakened,CAN'T go back to sleep!!grrrrr... ~Ribbon Count~ Taylor~ 2 blue ribbons on field day,ALL A's this last nine weeks,and drumroll please.....300.1 AR points!! She got the silver medal!!(to the non school age kid members AR stands for Accelerated Reader) Brett~ 3 blue ribbons on field day, ALL A's the WHOLE school year, and a Presidential Physical Fittness award (plus T-shirt) Hubby told them that if Taylor gets 450 AR points & Brett gets 150 during the next school year, he would buy them a go-cart next summer. Guess who wants to go to the library right now?? LOL!! ~Basket Status~ Linda~ sent/received Vina~ sent/received Chellflower~sent/received Dan~sent/received April~sent/received ****YAY!!!**** All baskets have reached their destinations!Thanks to everyone who joined this month.See ya over in the June Swap!! later....April

Hold the phone!! I GOT MAIL!! Yipee!!!!! It's from Savvychick (ya know, crafty lady's youngin') I ripped open that box soooo fast I totally destroyed the beautiful wrapping paper she used! (sorry). But da-hannnng, Holy dawg snot and everything else! It's beautiful! It's done in shades of blue glass, some of it's irredescent. And to top it all off, She done put a picture of my fur babies in it. Yep, that's Beans and Taters in that there frame!! I LOVE IT!!!!! BTW: She also sent a bag of Almond M&M's!!!

Nancy, Hooray for blooms on the tomatoes. Today's max wind gusts weren't as bad as yesterday's---in fact, 4 mph lower, so the wind wasn't as bad, but we were two degrees hotter so it still felt warm/windy and sort of miserable. I am sorry to hear that you and GDW have been through the wringer this week. That must have been very scary. My dad and I both reacted very badly to anesthesia. I hope I never have to have it again for any reason. Amy, Congrats on the score! I love it when a gift I've selected for someone else is an obvious hit so I know how you're feeling about that. I hope y'all's Mother's Day gathering with your mom was wonderful. Rebecca, I agree about just how bad this early heat is. I cannot ever remember a year when May was hot and then June turned back cooler, so I'm not expecting it to happen this year. I hate to say I've already lost hope, weather-wise, but I sort of have. Usually, at least we have May, you know? The cold of April is gone, our usual May weather is nice, we might have some severe storm days but we have plenty of other nice gardening days. We work ourselves to death in the garden in May because we know the June heat is coming and this is our last good month to really spend all the time we want in the garden, right? So, to have May feeling more like June or even early July is very discouraging. I'm already working around the heat like I normally do from late June onward. This isn't good. It is bad that your TV meteorologists already are comparing this year to 2011 and 2012.....it was okay when I was doing it because I'm not an official anything...but they are official....so we have to take them seriously. Hailey, Begonias are ridiculously easy and so pretty---I just love them. They are very forgiving of dry spells too---surprisingly so. With the Wave petunias, they are hybrids so any seed you save is not necessarily going to give you identical plants next year--they might give you some plants that look like this year's plants, or they might give you something entirely different. They might give you a similar color, but most people who have tried to grow F-2 Wave or Tidal Wave petunia seeds have gotten a whole range of colors. You might get the color, but not the same growth rate or disease tolerance or whatever. It depends on how the genes resort themselves in the F-2 generation (the plants you have now are the F-1 generation). So, if you want to get an exact color of Wave petunia or an exact growth habit, you'd be better off purchasing F-1 seed than saving F-2 seed from F-1 plants. Even if you have to buy the F-1 seed, it still is a lot less expensive than buying the plants. Petunias are surprisingly easy from seeds. We'd better have a fall! Mother Nature owes us a very nice, beautiful, mild, prolonged autumn to make it up to us for taking us straight from winter to summer with no spring. Actually, that's not a fair statement. At my location in southern OK, this is how the seasons have gone: January & February: Winter, March Spring, April Winter, May Summer. It isn't fair, though, to have Spring followed by a return to Winter. It sure confused all the plants. I blame it all on the convergence of Easter with April Fool's Day. I just knew something horrible would happen as a result, and the April cold is the horrible thing that happened. The whole month of April was one big April Fool's Joke, but then there's May. Who is to blame for May being so summery? I love liquid seaweed. It works great. Tips? Never use it indoors because it is stinky, and that's doubly true of liquid fish fertilizer. Both of them will attract cats and coons, and sometimes vultures, so keep that in mind. Are you rural or semi-rural? Every time I use blood meal or bone meal, I have vultures circling above the garden for days. Also, all of these can attract dogs and cats....I cannot let dogs come into the garden with me or they'll try to dig up the bone meal. You can use liquid seaweed either to drench the ground beneath the ground or as a foliar feeding. It seems to work fine either way (just like compost tea or manure tea). Since the NPK on liquid seaweed is low, you probably could use it weekly if you wish. Jen, Plants always do that. When there's something I really want to take to the SF, those volunteers never sprout until after the SF. Your comment about the doctors in Tulsa is not the first such comment I've seen or heard. When we moved here, we just kept using our Texas doctors because we were so comfortable with them. Nancy, I'm glad your blooms are beginning to appear. It is about time! I still feel like not enough is in bloom yet, but we do have lots of blooms in our garden-just not as many as usual. The wildflowers in the fields are the same way---some didn't bloom at all, some haven't shown up yet but I still have some hope we'll see them, and others are blooming either very or somewhat early---there's no rhyme or reason to it. Blame the weather. The weeds are indeed growing like weeds with many new ones sprouting daily. I weeded most of the asparagus bed today as it is the only one that didn't get weeded during the week, and it looks so much more normal and under control now. Rebecca, Those tomato plants were born in a cabbage plant....no, wait, that is Cabbage Patch kids. Hmmm. Well, it all starts out with one tomato blossom that has anthers and pistils.......hmmm. That might be too boring. Well, where did they come from? Did they fall off the turnip truck? Follow you home wagging their tails behind them like little stray puppies? If you do not know where your tomato plants came from, how are we supposed to know? Let's ask the squirrels what they think. I bet they'll know. Hailey, The bottles of liquid fertilizer ought to have directions right there on the bottles. So, it hit 89 degrees here today and it didn't feel quite as bad as some days earlier in the week, but it was no picnic either. I worked in the garden this afternoon while Tim mowed. I weeded, planted a few things, water those things in well with a watering can, etc. and harvested some more tomatoes---this time Early Girls. I also ate Sungolds while working in the garden---they are a natural form of gardener's Gatorade. Tim broke some sort of belt on the riding mower and didn't want to push the push mower around in the heat, so his workday outdoors ended early. He came and offered to help in the garden and I sent him to the house. I felt like he needed some free time that didn't involve working on anything. Mosquitoes are horrible, horrible, horrible here now. Now, I'm off to bed because I hope to get into the garden early for a couple of hours of work before the day gets too busy. Dawn

Good Morning, Everyone! Nancy, Bruce alerted me earlier in the day to the fact that he had rain and it was moving my way, so I started watching, but I still wasn't really believing because it always seems to veer east of us. This time it didn't veer east until it had gone south of us, so we got almost an inch of desperately needed rain. I was so thrilled. So, the garden will be happy for a few days, but I suspect the moisture won't last long in the high temperatures. This really was our first good rainfall since around May 3rd or 4th, and for once, we got more rain than our Mesonet station instead of getting a lot less than was recorded there. Lillie helped snap beans and string beans for a couple of hours. She's a hard worker and loves gardening (she has a great-grandfather with a huge garden and always has helped with the garden since she was very small). We had 4 varieties of beans all harvested together, and she was fascinated with the purple ones and loved the Provider beans, which are more flat like Romas than round, because the Providers have very obvious strings and she loves pulling the strings. She'd pick those out of the pile to string and then snap. Catmint makes me think of Yellow Cat, who we lost a few months ago at a very old age, because he was the only cat we've ever had who liked catmint more than catnip. I can hardly bear to look at the catmint right now because it makes me miss him so, but we'll always have it in the garden because some of the little beneficial insects love it. Paula, I'm sorry to hear about the seizure. I'm so glad you're okay. Did they figure out what caused it? That must have been frightening. Take that Short Term Disability and live it up in the garden! God has a plan, and maybe his plan is for you to have a few months of gardening and grandkids without any other distractions. As far as gardening in one's PJs, my experience with that is that if I venture into my garden for just a minute in my PJs, I end up staying out there in them and that will be the day the mailman brings me a package that won't fit in the mailbox and there I stand at the garden gate accepting that package while wishing a hole in the earth would open up and swallow me right up. I'm always thinking "maybe he won't think these are pajamas" but who am I kidding? Melissa, I'd been wondering where you were. You poor mama! She'll come back, you know, even if only to visit and she's very young still so they might move back here at some point. Or, their relationship might not last anyhow. Often, what you think you want at 18 is not what you discover you really want later on as you continue to mature. Chris was the same age the first time he left home (for Georgia) and he was back home in a few months. Congrats on getting through to your son about the importance of living at home for at least the first year since he lives so close to school and congrats on his scholarship. I think college is such a huge adjustment anyway, and I think he has no idea how lucky he is to be able to live at home. I am glad that you and Sassy Pants will at least have the butterfly garden. You didn't mention how your mother-in-law is doing. I hope she is okay and is in remission. Mostly we're just excited to have 3 weekend days together because Tim's workdays are so long during the week. We're going out to the dinner tonight with our son and his girlfriend at their favorite restaurant in Ardmore. That's about it for our big weekend plans. Other than that, I suppose our big plans are grocery shopping and mowing a couple of acres. It doesn't sound very exciting, but I like having all the supplies bought and put up so we don't have to make little trips to the store during the week and there's nothing like mowing the grass to help make it easier to avoid stepping on snakes at this time of the year. Rebecca, I hope the next round of rain doesn't miss you. I know exactly how it feels to watch the rain fall everywhere else except at your own place, and it isn't encouraging at all. Jennifer, Your hen sounds okay then. Her broodiness should pass and she'd get back to normal soon I imagine. I probably won't be working in the garden this weekend, y'all, because I feel like I worked so hard all week getting that pallet of mulch into the garden that I deserve a break today....and tomorrow...and maybe the next day. I weeded and mulched until I couldn't see straight any more, and the last thing I want to do for the next three days is any weeding and/or mulching. Well, I'll have to harvest so that requires going into the garden, but except for that, I'll get a break. Actually, going into the garden is dangerous because if I see new weeds sprouting, which is so common in May after rainfall, that then I feel compelled to weed. It is sort of sad to see all the cool-season stuff coming out of the garden, but it is late May, so it is time. I've already got most of the hot season crops planted, so the succession crops to fill in empty spots left by the harvest of the remaining cool-season plants (onions and potatoes) will be mostly melons of all kinds (muskmelons, watermelons, Crane melons.....) and probably some zinnias. I am working so hard, lol, to have an easier summer that I'm being very careful to not plant too many succession crops of edibles. This is hard for me to do because I have to fight my usual pattern of just planting more edibles. I'll probably plant more zinnias over time, and maybe some cosmos. You never can have too many zinnias for the butterflies in the hot summer months. The heat and general lack of adequate rainfall are encouraging me to stay on my quest for an easier summer with less time spent processing and putting up the harvest. I still have 5 large containers to fill, or maybe six, and will be plant shopping for plants for those containers either today or tomorrow. I do not understand how this tomato problem keeps happening. We have so many tomatoes piling up on the kitchen counter that we either need to eat a ton of tomatoes for three meals a day all weekend long, or I need to make some salsa or sauce or something to use them up. I cut back so much on how many tomato plants I planted that I didn't think we'd hit the 'too many tomatoes' point until at least June. I think the heat is speeding up the ripening of the tomatoes too much. I'm not complaining about having tomatoes, but just about how they all seem to ripen together at one time instead of spreading themselves out better over a longer period of time. I need to have a talk with them about that. Last night, I awakened in the middle of the night to the sound of a bunch of coyotes that sounded like they were sitting right outside our bedroom window. It was at least one adult with a bunch of babies yipping and yapping, and it was close enough to be scary. I was glad all our animals sleep indoors at night. It is more typical to hear the coyotes howling further off, though not always very far away. I don't like it when I know they're in the yard. The cottontail bunnies are very plentiful at this time of the year, so I expect Mama was teaching the babies how to hunt for their meal. Something has been roaming through the woods all day and our dogs are barking at it nonstop. I never see anything when I look for whatever they're barking at, but Princess and Ace just have a conniption fit constantly. Now I'm wondering if that mama coyote is raising her young ones in there and if our dogs are hitting on their scent. I hope everyone has a great holiday weekend, whether inside of or outside of the garden. Dawn