Well, I guess we can't complain much about the weather, or neighbors to the north and west have had it so bad. We've had a snow/slush mix for several days, only accumlation is on the deck, and windbreaks in the pasture. Horses decided they needed a different pasture, so the onery one just pushed her bulk against the gate till it gave way.Only benefit is, they dont want hay now. On another forum , a poster in N.Y said she was still paying 1.00 per square bale. Did you get your stitches out, Gldno? Did everyone have a nice Christmas? Its so nice to see new posters, and former ones coming back, missed you even if I dont know you personally, keep posting. Do you like a journal type entry? William, I'm in trouble!! The site I mentioned Gary Ibsens Tomato Fest, wants a 15.00 order!! Do you know how many tomato seeds that would be?? And I SIMPLY MUST have San Marzeno Redorta, and Long Tom, so guess I'll be adding to storage seeds. And then!!LOL--did you see Tangerine Mama in Burpees? Yes, my name is-------- and I'm addicted to growing, tomatoes especially. And, Hope springs eternal, I'm going to try yellow, purple, and green cauliflower again--just not so much. I cut my garden down some last year, told myself that at my age, I didnt need so much--but myself dont listen to me in the spring!! I find myself admiring how well the beds are looking, with the leaves mounded over them. Gldno, I read another Catherine Coulter book yesterday, F.B.I series, the sheriff finally found his wife (from a previous book) It was "Double Take". I've also read James Patterson's "Quickie" and Sandra Browns "Play Dirty" With all this mixture falling from the sky, its either gaze wistfully out the window at the garden, or curl up by the fire with a good book--or a seed catalog. Got territoral yesterday, Havent gotten Baker Creek, despite complaining, so guess they wont get a order. Oh, and I must tell you about my Christmas Turkey!! It was PURPLE!! I was ready to put it in the oven when I noticed under the skin, the entire bird was purple! It didnt have a off smell, just like a raw turkey, so I apprehensively went ahead and cooked it. When it came out, it did have a off odor, so it was buried deep. No, really, I didnt cook Barney, as some suggested. Good thing we were going to daughters for dinner. Everyone stay safe for the New Yesr.

Pam, Ever since the year I was visited at/near the fenced garden by 2 different cougars (the second one was smaller than the first, so obviously wasn't the same one) about six weeks apart, I have tried to remember every morning to take a gun out to the garden with me. I haven't seen a cougar on our near our property since then, but neighbors have spotted them on their property and on ours, so even thoug it is an uncommon occurrence, the fact that it occurred at all has made me much more cautious. Those two occurrences were not my first encounters with cougars, but they were the first ones that were so close, and certainly the first time they were in our yard while a human was out there. The majority of our wildlife issues come from venomous snakes, coons (which prey upon chickens like mad), skunks, bobcats and coyotes. We see lots of other wildlife, but they generally steer clear of us. The foxes, for example, seem shy and not especially happy to be seen so they'll run away when they see us. We hear feral pigs more than we see them, though we have had them on our property occasionally. We live in a bend of the Red River near the TX border with Texas to our west, south and east. There is a lot of wild, river bottom land, on those three sides of us and some of the bottom land is Wildlife Management Area, so there is a huge amount of wildlife here. I expected wildlife before we moved here. What we got is wildlife, wildlife, wildlife, wildlife, wildlife. For example, I knew ringtail cats existed but never had seen them in the wild until we moved here. I don't see them often, and when I do, I'm not happy to see them because they're generally trying to get into the chicken run or chicken coop, but I'm still always just amazed to see them. Last year, we got almost 79" of rain and had repeatedly flooding over and over again. The Red River even swept away a few homes that had been near it for over 50 years and never had been flooded before. The river bottom lands were flooded for months. Consequently, the wildlife was driven to higher ground.....and guess where we live? On the higher ground they were seeking. We had so many snakes, and so many huge ones much larger than what we normally see, especially broad-banded copperheads (so I am guessing they really stay in the bottom lands most of the time). I am hoping for a more normal year this year, but doubt we will get it. We had snakes out in January and February, which is incredibly rare, because we just weren't cold enough. I've already had enough snake encounters this year to make me a nervous wreck. Living here would be just about perfect if we didn't have all the venomous snakes. Being visited by a skunk, a possum and a stray dog in broad daylight all within a few hours, was disconcerting to say the least. Days like that are why I am exceptionally careful to close and latch the garden gate behind me. I don't want to be trapped in a garden with an 8' tall fence and with wildlife that might be dangerous. It also is the reason our two separate fenced gardens have two gates each---a main gate that gets used daily and a back gate on the opposite side of the garden in case something comes in the main gate and a person needs to escape quickly from the garden to avoid it. Normally, we assume all skunks out in broad daylight are rabid and shoot them, but if I had shot that one, the garden and I would have smelled strongly of skunk for days. I don't like shooting one so close to the house if we can just follow it 50 or 100 yards and shoot it. I hate to shoot possums, so was relieved when this one ran off. Possums are predators of venomous snakes, so I try to just leave them alone when they are out. It had been a rainy night for two consecutive nights, so I felt like maybe they were hunting for food because of those two rainy nights/days. Stray dogs are, sadly, a dime a dozen here as people commonly dump them in the country all the time. Most stray dogs form packs and begin preying upon foals, calves, kids, etc. and then the ranchers shoot them. Everyone who lives around us has taken in more dogs than they need or want, but we all could have 100 times the number we do have because so many sorry excuses for human beings dump them all the time. The same is true of feral cats, but feral cats prey more upon wildlife than farm and ranch animals, so people have more toleration for them and generally either ignore them or trap them and try to tame them at least enough to turn them into semi-feral barn cats. One surprising benefit of bird netting, by the way, is that apparently snakes cannot see it well or they think they can squeeze through it. We've caught quite a few copperheads that way, though not on purpose. I'd rather the copperhead get hung up in the bird netting before it can bite a person. Last year, as our adult son was bending over to open one of the barn's roll-up doors, a copperhead struck at him, but it got entangled in a piece of bird netting I had left drying on the pavement there, so the snake couldn't reach him, thank goodness. So, while I've never put up bird netting on purpose to catch snakes or to keep them out of certain places, it is a sort of beneficial side effect of using the netting. We wanted to live surrounded by nature. It is one of the reasons we moved to the country. It still is one of the things we love most about living here, but all wildlife is not created equal. I can sit and watch cottontails hop around in the yard or pastures endlessly. Coyotes? Not so much. Dawn

Glenda, What you said is so true, and for decades now, if you say you eat or garden organically, a lot of people instantly lump you into that whole 1960s-hippie-back-to-the-land-movement (not that I mind that). Even when we moved here in 1999 and I put a big organic veggie garden in the front pasture, between the road and the house, everyone thought I was crazy. The old farmers and ranchers couldn't wait to tell me how I was doing stuff wrong and was going to fail. They didn't think much of my wide raised beds, narrow paths, hay mulch, companion plants ("you're wasting space on weeds") and (horrors!) my reliance on manure and compost instead of liquid fertilizers. When I refused to use pesticides, they gave up on me. One even said to me "You probably do yoga and eat granola". (I do! LOL) They also weren't impressed with the appearance of my heirloom tomatoes, which were the wrong colors, too lumpy and bumpy, etc. You know what, though? Every now and then over the years one or another of them has asked me about an organic solution for this or that, so I've won over a few of them. There are aspects of the green movement that bother me, including the way the government dumbed down the organic standards and allow practices which devoted organic gardeners never would use, but for which the commercial industry had lobbied. I do think a lot of the green news we hear has more to do with marketing than with doing anything for the right ethical reasons. Still, I do see lots of folks (many of them right here on this forum) who are quite serious about gardening in the most healthy way, eating organically when possible, etc. That gives me hope that we're realizing there's a better way to raise food and take care of Mother Earth too. The spice place made me nuts, but in a good way. I didn't want to leave. Tim just stood in the pepper room talking on his cell phone while I put bag after bag in the basket. At one point I handed him the basket to hold for me while I was looking for the turmeric, and he headed for the cashier's register, thinking I was done. I had to chase him down and say "Wait, I'm not finished yet!" LOL Silly guy. Just because the basket was full, he thought I was finished shopping. I want to know why Fort Worth has all these interesting food places now---they didn't have them when we lived there. Dawn

Squash Vine Borers are very hard to control and you have to take a multifaceted approach in order to achieve good control. Most people don't give Squash Vine Borers a second thought until they see their plants wilting and dying. To outwit the SVBs, you have to engage in year-round practices that harm them. With squash vine borers, it is always preferable to be proactive and to do everything in your power to prevent them from getting to your plants. Once they are inside the plant, there is little you can do except slit open the stem and remove them. Some research has indicated that infested plants can have up to 100 SVBs inside them, but I usually only have a couple in any given plant, so slitting the vine open and removing them is pretty easy for a home gardener, but imposssible for someone growing acres of cucurbits. At the broadest level, you want to use garden system practices to combat SVBs. This can include timing plants very early to try to get a harvest before SVBs arrive and kill the plants, and using succession plantings to give you a harvest after Oklahoma's two separate generations of SVBs are through doing their dirty work. You also can use cultivar selection. Squash Vine Borers prefer Hubbard Squash above all others. You can use this knowledge to your advantage in a couple of different ways. 1) If you want to raise Hubbard Squash, give it extra attention using Level 2 and 3 practices mentioned below; OR 2) Plant Hubbard Squash outside your regular veggie garden and use it as a trap crop. Hopefully, the SVBs will be drawn to it and you can find them/destroy them on these plants before they move on to the other types of cucurbits in your regular veggie plot. If you are using Hubbard Squash as a trap plot, you shouldn't expect to harvest any Hubbards since they are the 'sacrificial' plants that may give your other plants a better chance of survival. Another systemic practice that can reduce SVB populations is to manage your garden plot well. This includes prompt removal/destruction of all infested plants, late fall rototilling of soil where cucurbits grew in order to expose overwintering pupae/larvae to predators and weather, and deep incorporation digging or plowing or tilling in spring just before planting. Deep incorporation helps by burying any surviving larvae/pupae very deep in the soil which may prevent them from emerging. Another systemic practice is to rotate your cucurbit plantings to a new bed or area of the garden each year. This may help some because the newly emerged SVB moths will have to 'travel' to find plants to attack instead of emerging from the soil right there in the squash patch. However, research shows newly emerged SVBs can travel up to 1/2 mile to find squash plants, so rotation may help reduce their numbers or slow them down, but it isn't a 'cure'. During the SVB season, as soon as you realize a cucurbit plant is dying and cannot be saved, remove it promptly from the garden and destroy it. You can destroy it by burning the plant debris if you are in an area where open burning of brush is not prohibited by burn ban laws or local ordinances, or you can bag up the plant debris and dispose of it with household trash. You also can destroy the SVBs inside the plants by hot composting of the debris. All of the above systemic practices can help limit the SVB population's ability to survive in your soil and emerge, but those practices won't prevent them. To do that, you need to use another level of good gardening practices: physical and mechanical prevention practices. At this level, you're trying to keep SVBs that appear in your garden (whether locally hatched or migrating ones) from getting to your plants. For this, you can use any/all of the following: A barrier product on the ground to keep emerging SVBs from traveling to the plants. You can use newspaper or cardboard on top of the soil surface, or you can use landscape fabric. On top of this type of barrier, place a thick layer of hay or straw mulch or whatever else you have handy. The layer of cardboard/paper/landscape fabric beneath the mulch just makes it harder for the SVBS to emerge easily. To prevent flying SVBs from landing on your plants and laying eggs, you can use a lightweight (sort of gauzey-looking) floating row cover like Agribon or Reemay but it MUST BE tightly secured to keep the SVBs from getting underneath it. Also, it must be used over beds where cucurbits were not grown during the previous year. Otherwise, you're likely to have SVBs emerge from the soil under the floating row cover. When you use floating row covers, you either have to remove them when it is time for pollination since they will exclude bees and other pollinators, or you'll have to lift the floating row cover and hand-pollinate. If you hand-pollinate, watch very closely for the SVB moths while doing so because they are likely to get on the plants during that few minutes that you are conducting hand-pollination. One way to protect your cucurbit plants from SVBs is to raise seedlings in containers and transplant the into the ground. At the time you are transplanting, wrap the stems to protect them and be sure your wrapped portion of the stem extends an inch or two underground. Continue wrapping as the plant grows so that you have 6" to 8" of stem above the ground that is protected. You can use aluminum foil to wrap stems if you want, or you can use the legs of panty hose (and they are great because they stretch and expand) or you can use strips of floating row cover. While you want to wrap the entire stem, leave the wrapping loose enough that the stem can grow and expand so it will not become girdled. Stems wrapped in this manner generally exclude small larvae from penetrating and getting into the stem. Another good practice is to heap dirt over a section of vine every 3 to 4 feet as the vines grow. This will encourage the plants to root into the soil at those spots and that will help the overall plant survive even if you lose a portion of it to SVBs. Other practices you can employ at this level is the use of moth traps (available at online companies that special in organic gardening solutions), barrier products like Surround (kaolin clay) and the planting of insectary plants to attarct beneficial insects. Finally, your third level involves the use of certain materials and practicers to directly 'attack' SVBs that are already present in/around your garden. This includes the use of botanical insecticides like BT 'Kurstaki', spinosad, pyrethrum and DE. However, for the most part, these are only effective if you use them before the larvae penetrate the stems. Once they are inside the stems, you have to slit the stems and remove them and destroy them. Then you bury the slit portion of the stem and water well the next few days so the stem can heal and re-root and hopefully survive. You can apply beneficial nematodes too. You can mix them with water and apply them to the ground following package directions (they are most effective if applied in early to mid-Spring) and they should attack and kill any pupae/larvae they find in the soil. You also can inject them into infested plant stems. You can inject Bt 'kurstaki' in the same way. You can spray your plants with Bt 'kurstaki' weekly, and you can spray weekly with insecticidal soap to smother eggs before they hatch. You also can rub a damp cloth up and down the plant stems once or twice a week (I wear disposable latex gloves when doing this) to remove eggs before they can hatch. You can spray the plants weekly with a botanically-derived pesticide like spinosad, pyrethrum or neem but if you use these, be careful with your timing so you don't hurt the bees and other pollinators. You can use rotenone but its use is strongly discouraged because of research that links it to health problems. You should watch your plants carefully, checking them every couple of days for SVB eggs. Be sure to check the leaf stems because often they are laid there. Remove any destroy/dispose of any eggs your find. To a certain extent you can control squash vine borers by selecting plants that are less susceptible to them. In order of preference from highest to lowest preference, the SVBs prefer C. maxima, C. pepo, C. moschata and C. agrgyrosperma (formerly known as mixta). The C. maxima group includes the following kinds of squashes: hubbard, buttercup, Australian blue, turban, banana, zapalito, mammoth (giant) exhibition squashes and a few miscellanous ones that don't fall into any of those groups. Some common maximas include Jarrahdale, Queensland Blue, Triamble, Guatemalan Blue Sibley, Pink Banana and Blue Banana, any variety of Buttercup, Golden Hubbard, Green Hubabard, Red Warty Thing (aka Victor), Dill's Atlantic Giant, Jaune Gros de Paris, Cindarella (aka Rogue Vif d'Etampes) Turk's Turban, Marina di Chioggia, Lumina, Valencia, Fortna White, Georgia Candy Roaster and Galeuse d'Eysines. C. pepo includes virtually all summer squash (crookneck, straightneck, scallop), acorn squash, Halloween-type pumpkins, nonedible ornamental gourds, zucchini and vegetable marrows like spaghetti squash. The C. pepo group includes Howden, Lady Godiva, Jack-B-Little, Connecticut Field Pumpkin and all other orange pumpkins, Winter Luxury Pie, Table Queen and all similar acorn squash, all Delicata squash, all scalloped/pattypan squash like White Bush Scallop and Benning's Green Tint, Early Prolific Straightneck and all other straightneck and crookneck types, Spaghetti Squash, Golden Zucchini, Costa Romanesco, Cocozelle, etc. C. moschata includes all the tropical pumpkins, cheese pumpkins, neck pumpkins and japonica pumpkins. Some of the more well-known moschatas are Seminole, Long Island Cheese, Musquee' de Provence, Lunga di Napoli, Golden Cushaw, Japanese Black Futtsu, and Yokohama. Here in Oklahoma, none of the moschata I've grown have been bothered by SVBs. C. Argyrosperma (formerly known as C. mixta) includes squashes grown primarly for their seeds and includes most neck pumpkins. These include Green-Striped Cushaw, Jonathan, Japanese Pie Pumpkin (which isn't actually used for pies, by the way), and Tennessee Sweet Potato (which, despite its name is a squash and not a sweet potato). There is a class of wild squash (C. foetidissima) that SVBs generally ignore. I've never had SVBs attack my melons or cucumbers although some people say they do. I would assume the same practices used to control them on squashes and pumpkins could be used on other cucurbits. In my garden, the SVBs always seem to go for the yellow straightneck or crookneck squash and don't bother the zucchini types nearly as much. In the C. pepo group I usually grow Golden Zucchini, Costata Romanesco and Cocozelle and rarely have SVB issues with them. Dawn