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I grow luffa gourd every year for cooking and sponges. For cooking, pick them when they are young about 12"-15", soft outside. I had the same way cooking as bluebirdie. For sponges, I wait until the first frost kill the vine and dry the long gourd until the outside black, you can hear the seed inside. Spongy is good for bath and kitchen use. Wendy

Are you asking for advice on starting plants indoors? Couple things I learned from last year's experience... - 24 hours of light is not too much (my plants grew better after I increased the light from 16 to 24 hours) - Don't overwater - Don't use water that has been through a water softener (I tried both softened and hard water. The plants that I used soft water on looked a little sickly when I put them in the garden) - Don't start too early. The plants that did best for me were the ones that I started a little later and were smaller. (I started some later because I overwatered some and killed them) - Repot often to bigger pots (the plants seemed to like that) - Don't overfertilize (They only needed a little) Hope it helps. Rick

Robert, Welcome back. Yes sir, I do believe we know what you're talking about. Brown is the new green. : ( I hope y'all were able to get enough hay baled to at least keep the cows fed through the winter. I know that anyone here who is baling hay that they don't need for their own cattle is able to sell the stuff before they're even through cutting and baling it. People are standing in line to buy it. Unfortunately, we're seeing a lot of hay pastures and round bales going up in flames lately. How awful is that? I'd be so frustrated if I had enough hay to bale and then lost it to a pasture fire or a barn fire. My mid-season and late-season corn performed about like yours. At least the early corn made a good crop. My okra and purplehulls are producing because I am managing to keep them watered, but they are not producing as well as they should. I didn't even plant sweet potatoes because no rain fell in April and I gave up on the idea of even planting sweet potatoes because I knew that I wouldn't be able to water them enough to get good yields. My peppers have been slow, but are at least producing something. Other than the cherry tomatoes, I think my tomatoes are toast too. The summer squash is still producing and I am sick and tired of it. Where's a squash vine borer or squash bug when you need one? The watermelons,cukes and muskmelons are slow, slow, slow but still flowering and producing. When I completely stop watering, that will stop too. Every day now I have the "turn off the water and just stop trying" discussion in my head and, so far, every day I decide to water the producing part of the garden just one more day. I stopped watering the tomatoes a couple of weeks ago. Water restrictions have hit the folks just north of us, so I'm afraid that we'll likely have them any day now. Not only is rain not falling, but the water that remains is evaporating at a ridiculously high rate. In agricultural terms, our county already has been declared a disaster area. Honestly, though, I am not sure that helps anyone unless they're just wanting to take on even more debt in order to try to stay in farming or ranching another year. We were out west in the Leon and Rubottom area fighting a very large grassfire in the riverbottom area over the weekend. Their drought out there is so much worse than ours, even though they're only 20-30 miles west of us. They had grasshoppers large enough to pick up a tractor and carry it off. Compared to them, I have no grasshoppers at all (and believe me, I actually have plenty). What I most noticed out there (other than the fire and the grasshoppers) is that their soil is just as you described...dust. Most folks out there have sandy soil but now they just have dust. Those of us with clay now have rock-hard concrete clay with big cracks in it. We had bulldozers cutting fire containment lines at the fire and they put up so much dust in the air that some people thought it was smoke and that the fire was right there where the dozers were, but it actually was quite some distance away. The grass is just gone...as if it dried up and disintegrated. I've been pouring water onto our landscape and garden, hoping to get the soil wet enough that everything will survive, but I'm at about at the point where it is time to turn off the hose and just let it go. Our Keetch Byram Drought Index is so high here that I know we're at the point that I cannot water "enough" to make a real difference. I hope all my landscape plantings are well-established enough to get through July and August....and September and beyond. My gut feeling is this drought will continue for some weeks yet....at least into September. I'm hoping for a tropical depression, storm or hurricane to come close enough to the Texas gulf coast to send a big plume of tropical moisture our way. That seems to be about our best hope at this time. Here at our house, our highs lately have been between 103-107. Who even wants to go outside in those temps? I'm hibernating inside in the AC as much as I can! Dawn