Wow Karen quite surreal and sad at the same time. I am watching the new now and it is showing everything that happened in N.Y, It's unbelievable and quite a mess. 33 people passed away there. I am happy you are ok and that were able to get out of harms ways. hopefully you'll be back for your plants to welcome you home soon and to quilting again. Unfathonable is what it all is. My neighbors tree are lost and electricity is out all over, but certainly not as bad as many folks. Thunderstorms galore and winds that could of knocked many more trees down if they had bee as green as they were last year at this time. Thank goodness for our early fall and many bare trees. The beaches are covered here and and you can no longer stand on them The waves were still huge today. I managed to spare all my plants but a few of my jades. They took a good tumble. What's up with these massive storms lately doing weird things and earthquakes? Mike

Woo hoo! A fig form first: a political thread. Frank, you are dead on right about New York vs New Orleans. We are simple savages when times get tough. New Yorkers are more sophisticated, and the crimes to expect are going to be more cleverly planned and executed, and the victims will be not just robbed, but ruined. Bummer. But then, you are obviously an optimist, Frank. You still believe that elections matter. No matter who wins the election, the people will get screwed. Every election. Everywhere. Forever. Good guys don't run for office beyond dog catcher. It's the system. The regular people cannot win in this system. Magic formula for happiness regarding politicians: Expect much less. Works every time. And yet... the sun is shining, my family is warm and happy, and there's over 50 ripening figs in my little orchard. I'll just take it day by day.

Pam, I am working on my grow lists but, ironically, the garden is taking so much time lately that between it and VFD stuff, I haven't had time to finish my grow lists. I'll try to get them done sometime in the next few days if I can. In my garden Piricicaba has been very cold tolerant and very heat tolerant. The odd thing about it? Aphids just love, love, love it. I rarely have aphids at all, other than sometimes seeing them on sugar snap peas or southern peas, but Piricicaba is an aphid magnet. I watch carefully for them and as soon as they show up, I spray the plants with Neem. I can have four rows of broccoli, with each one being a different variety and with the rows right beside one another, and Piricicaba will get aphids and the others won't. However, if I don't control them on the Piricicaba, they'll disperse to the other varieties after several weeks. Our forecast for the next couple of days includes highs in the 80s and lows in the 60s. Then, a cold front hits and we'll have highs in the 50s or 60s and lows in the 30s or maybe even the 20s. Around here, the weather is yo-yoing like mad. At times like this, the floating row cover certainly is worth the time it takes to put it over the plants because it keeps everything producing. I feel for the folks in NY and NJ. From what I have seen on TV, some areas (if not all?) had a really wet snow and/or freezing rain and/or sleet that was coating trees and power lines, bringing more power outages. They just cannot catch a break. As for the blooms and green tomatoes.....as long as the plants get some heat and some light and do not freeze, they tend to sporadically set fruit here. For several years, I'd keep a tomato plant or two in a container and drag it into the garage on freezing nights or freezing days, and then drag it back outside as soon as the temperatures were above freezing. I did the same thing with peppers. Both continued to flower and set fruit all winter, or at least until the garage itself got down to 18 degrees inside and they froze. Then, almost immediately thereafter, the pepper plant (but not the tomato plant) that had frozen back to the soil began putting out new growth and was growing again right away and setting fruit about 6 weeks later. The only issue I have with winter peppers and winter tomatoes is that they grow very slowly, stay smaller than the same variety in hotter weather and have poor flavor. I think that even though it is hot enough at times for them to flower and form fruit, it isn't hot enough and there is not enough hours per day of sunlight to make them perform the same way as they do in the warm season. This year instead of having the plants in the garage, they're in the greenhouse and I expect they'll freeze to death soon---perhaps as early as next week. That's okay. I preserved so many tomatoes in so many ways this summer that I do not feel like going to a lot of trouble for winter tomatoes. We have at least a two-year supply of every tomato product you can imagine...canned, dried, frozen, etc. We like sun-dried tomatoes (actually dehydrator-dried, lol) so much that they keep us happy enough in winter that we don't miss fresh tomatoes as much as you'd think we would. I normally only put the winter row cover over winter veggies if I'd expecting the low temps to drop below about 25-26 degrees. I haven't covered up any winter veggies yet, except for the lettuce in the cattle trough, and that's because I am not sure how it will be affected by having cold air underneath it. This is one of those modern day cattle troughs with steel-tubing legs and frame and black plastic tub-like material that holds the cattle feed...or in my case, it holds the soil-less mix and plants. It sits a bit above the ground with about a foot of air space between the ground and the bottom of the trough. I ought to stick a soil thermometer in that soil and see how cold it is dropping on cold nights. The broccoli and cabbage have some freeze-burn on a few leaves from the night we went down to 26 degrees, so I guess I should have covered them that night--but the forecast was for 34 or 36, so I didn't. My experience with winter lettuce is about the same as yours. If I plant it early enough, it will produce from October through March. This year I sowed the seed in August, and we were harvesting by October. It was really hard to keep the tiny little lettuce plants happy (or even alive) in temperatures above 100 degrees, but I managed. We have two dozen chickens and I cut a couple of pounds of lettuce and other greens for them daily, and we still have oodles of it. If a tub of plants starts slowing down and I want to replace those with new plants in the winter, I start seeds inside on the light shelf in bathroom sized paper cups in a flat (not a real flat, I use those disposable aluminum lasagna pans that I buy at CostCo or Sam's in large packages) and get the plants a couple of inches tall indoors in the warmth and then transplant them into the tubs or into the ground. Since they get off to a good, warm start indoors, they tend to grow faster in winter than plants from seed direct-sowed in colder soil outdoors in fall through early spring. I harvest using the cut-and-come-again method and it amazes me how quickly the leaves regrow to a usable size---in mere days. The chickens love fresh greens so much and I was worried that I hadn't planted enough to keep them happy, but the plants regrow so fast that I think they'll have an endless supply of all-you-can-eat lettuce. With the heat we've had, I've been worried the lettuce will bolt. We've been in the upper 80s and low 90s a lot this fall, but the lettuce hasn't bolted like it does in spring once the hot days arrive. Maybe it is because most of the day's weather is mild and we only sit at that high temperature for a relatively brief time. I have lettuce in the ground, in the cattle feed trough, in an old rusty, leaky wheelbarrow, and in big plastic tubs in the greenhouse. I probably have enough lettuce and mesclun mix growing to feed all of southern OK. I planted in several different areas because it has been such a rough weather year and I was hedging my bets. Well, you know, all of it is doing great, and we have far too much. That's a great problem to have, though. The last couple of years, we have discussed "the new normal" here a lot. For me, the new normal began around 2005 or 2006 when we began having persistent late freezes the first week in May instead of the last week in April. When it happened once and froze my whole garden, I was flabbergasted. Then, it happened the next year and the next and the next. Sigh. This was the first year since then that we didn't have a freeze or frost in May, which is a good thing because I put tomato plants in the ground around the first week in March (it was hot, hot, hot). So, we had what I think of as fairly typical weather for this region from 1999-2005. Since then, a lot has changed and we seem to swing from one extreme to another consistently, much more since then than before then. I see it in fire weather too. Before 2005, we hardly had any grass fires or wildfires here. Since then? About every other year we have a horrific wildfire season. What can you do? You have to go with the flow, so I work a lot harder now at extending the season with row covers, etc., and grow in containers to get around the heavy rainfall periods (which are a lot more rare now than they were just a few years ago). I don't know what else we can do. We have to adapt to whatever weather we are getting in order to succeed as gardeners. For 2 or 3 years I kept waiting for the weather to go back to normal, and then I decided that this must be the new normal and I just have to deal with it. That doesn't mean I like it though. Dawn

I am worried about Alex.. The area is really damaged. I know there was a post at the Palm forum , but i know the area and it was hit hard. I will post if i hear anything more.. At least we know all is well. Im just concerned with the structual loss and the overall well being because of the severe drop in temperatures and they still dont have any power.. I did see a large convoy of trucks with huge generators heading up the eastern shore to NY and NJ from out military bases here. They have suffered so much loss. I flew over NJ shore today and into Newark.. It is realy bad... I think of just having issues from my car being flooded and thinking that i had it BAD.. All i have to do is think of them up north and see it with my own eyes and i realize i have nothing to worry about. If you all are reading this.. we are thinking of you and sending you our prayers.. Help is on its way, Staten Island... Laura