SlimeyOkra, your weather sounds much like ours. It's been a VERY dry spring - only had 4/10 of rain so far - which has been very welcome given all the flooding we've had here for the past four years. Some of the farmers around us are finally reclaiming some of their land. :) We don't really grow greens most years, but have been eating asparagus and rhubarb for over a week now. I'm still putting out transplants, which isn't unusual for early June for us. Tomatoes and peppers and pole beans are the last to go out. I don't do much fussing to get early crops. The peas are up nicely, though. This year was the earliest I've ever gotten them planted!

Thanks for the follow-up! Freckled cellophane, that's a great description. I was kinda wondering cos I know he is part cellophane, but with 'spots'. Freckled sounds infinitely cuter, and also less doggish, not that it's a bad thing ;P hummm, the water is still the main issue. I thought I cleared the cloudy issue by removing the leaching pebbles but the water is cloudy again, and I did a full change yesterday! Well it's more hazy than cloudy, I can really see the difference from today's versus yesterday's water. I should really get the test kit and find out what the problem is. Do uncycled and unfiltered tanks get bacterial bloom? The tank is a 1.5 gallon. In it is just the betta and some hornwart, plus 2 silk plants. And a little aquarium figurine from walmart. I would really like to find the cause of this. When I had him in the 0.5 gallon betta kit there wasn't this problem. The hazy issue has only cropped up with the Faunarium, and has does so overnight immediately after water change. I use Aquaplus, and aquarium salt. Plus the water was left overnight to help adjust the temperature. The water looked sparkly clear after the change. Suddenly overnight it turns hazy. I have a feeling that it is contributing to the splitting fins. Gaaah, this is when inexperience really kicks in....my poor fish. I cleaned the tank with warm water, then rinse it off with cold, if that makes a difference. I didn't use soaps of any kind...Another factor could be the difference in water I'm getting - I was on residence before, but has since moved. I found that the water gets hazy in the new place. Other thing is, the water I have standing by in jars are still clear, so I wonder if its the tank. Sunshine is still acting fine, he's a bit toned down today, not as much zipping around. Hope he's just having a lazier day. He's eating, flaring and curious as ever. Hope I can find a conclusion to this, and many thanks to all who've replied!

Hey everyone, here's my report from Washington County. I'm just worn out. Spent most of the evening covering things, I have little flower transplants set out and a couple of currant bushes I moved and on and on. Not to mention the last of my tomato plants have been planted, and Lo and Behold, one of my Black Krims that had been reduced to just a bare stem actually had started making new leaves at the bottom. New grapevines just beginning to leaf out...iris in full bloom....tiny peaches, apples and plums on my trees...even some flowers on my blueberry bushes. Dang it! I'm so sick of these cold nights!!!! I have pepper plants with their "feet" hanging out of their newspaper pots, so I have to keep everything well watered so as not to dry out those roots. They've started to bloom and two even have a tiny pepper set on. They need planting BADLY. Every weekend I say, after Monday, I'm getting them in their permanent homes... and then Monday's weather forecast includes low night temps 4 or 5 days away.... GRRRRRR I can't do the happy dance about my fruit trees because I'm afraid if I do, old Mother Nature's going to blast the fruit off the trees just to keep me humble!!! I didn't sleep well last night because of that, and, well, it was prom night for DGS. Oh, gosh, he looked so handsome in his tux. He is such a good-looking boy. It's hard to believe my sweet first grandson is just about all grown up. We had all kinds of trouble with his tux, it was rented (oh, gosh, how expensive. I think we would've been as well off to just buy one). We got there to pick it up and just the jacket was there. So the shop owner had to improvise. It turned out the jacket had been discontinued and she had had to buy it, so she just gave us the jacket because of all the mix-up. But still it was nerve-wracking because I had to wait till Saturday for her to round up everything and the prom was that night... But anyhow, he got home at 3a.m. (after prom party) and all was well. I went out and checked the thermometer at 2am and it was 40. This morning at 6am it was still 40. So once again we dodged the bullet here. But I am so tired today I can hardly do anything. My yard is so overgrown and out of shape from so many years of doing the bare minimum. DH mows and DS comes over and weed-eats. He is flat-out an expert with that weed-eater. He edges with it and even cleans out the stuff that grows between the bricks in the walk with it. But I'm the only one who digs and pulls. They till the raised beds for me every spring. Last year I had the nicest raised beds I'd ever had cause I mulched with grass clippings. Working full time and taking care of a yard the way it should be done has been more than I have been able to manage in the past. So anyway I've been working at it daily for this whole month. I just about have the flower/herb garden cleaned out. There are so few flowers/herbs left. The Bermuda got in it and choked out a lot of things so I've been planting things I wintersowed as I get part of the bed prepared. Oh, what a job! Today I had to go around and uncover everything, and planted Munstead Dwarf Lavender along the herb garden walk, put a layer of manure into the compost bin (it's too full of weed seeds to put directly in the garden), and put in some stakes to keep the hose out of things, then made sure everything was watered well enough. I have a lot of things still in newspaper pots and they dry out really fast. And I have to protect things from the dog, he likes to tear across my herb garden to bark at the neighbor's dogs when they are turned out into their yard. For this moment everything's fine here. We have another cold night scheduled for tonight, though it's not supposed to get as cold as last night -- but who knows? I just don't know if I have the steam left to do the dance again tonight, (not the happy dance, the covering-up dance) so I'm trying to relax the rest of this day. Maybe I will get my "second wind".

Jennifer, I hope that Finbar came in. Our cats must have felt the weather coming because when we got home late Friday afternoon, they all came right indoors, including the one who usually stays out after dark and makes me worry. Larry, I know people eat the tender vines/shoots of regular English peas and sugar snap type peas, so I don't know why you couldn't do the same with Austrian winter peas. I hope you and Madge can catch up on your rest and stay healthy while you're busy taking care of sick folks. dbarron, Pouring down snow? Like thundersnow? That would be so cool. I love thundersnow. We have two dogs who bark and howl at the thunder, and one who goes into the bathroom and hides from it. Currently our 2 barkers/howlers are howling at the sound of emergency sirens because there is a serious motor vehicle accident near our home (not really close, but close enough that the dogs can hear the sirens from the fire trucks, police cars and ambulance). Tim is gone to that, so they are watching out the window for him to come home and, in the meantime, doing their howling thing. It is impossible to sleep through anything in this house. Once the sirens stop, the two dogs will stop. Or, I can tell them to stop howling and they will stop. For a minute. Then when they think I've gone back to bed or whatever, they start up again. They try to be good but they love to howl. We used to have a dog named Biscuit (RIP, sweet doggie) who howled along with opera music and truly loved to sing along with it, but other than that, he never howled at anything. These two blue heeler mixes we have now believe they were put on earth to howl at everything---sirens, the howling of coyotes, the howling wind, etc. When the fire pagers woke us up around 3:40 a.m., I looked out the window and heavy snow with big, wet fluffy flakes was coming down like crazy. The temperature, which was around 58 degrees right around midnight, now is sitting right there at 32 degrees at our house, but shows 33 degrees at the nearest Mesonet station. The snow covers everything....the ground, the evergreen shrubs and trees, the lawn furniture, and even my greenhouse. I don't know how long it has been falling. What the forecasters had said was that if any snow fell this far south, it likely would be mixed with rain and would not accumulate. Well, there's no rain mixed with this and it is accumulating. Our ground is pretty warm (the mesonet map shows our soil temperature is 47 degrees at a depth of 2 inches) so I would think the snow will melt away pretty quickly---perhaps even before sunrise, so people here might miss seeing it unless they're awake in the middle of the night for some reason. So, I got the longed-for snow. I don't think we'll be outside tomorrow building snowmen or anything but I am enjoying watching those big flakes coming down. It definitely is not Spring yet here, notwithstanding yesterday's official high temperature of 69 degrees. I checked our weather just now, and the NWS extended the Wind Advisory, which had excluded southern OK, to us at 3:13 a.m. I had been amused by the fact that the Texas county that surrounds our part of our county on three sides had a Wind Advisory and yet we did not. Was NWS-Norman thinking the wind would just stop at the Red River? Even before I went to sleep last night, we had wind gusts as high as 40 mph, while the folks near us with a Wind Advisory had wind gusts in the mid 30s. So I suppose after several hours of those higher wind gusts, NWS-Norman finally decided to add us to the Wind Advisory. Better late than never, but who is awake at 3:13 a.m. to notice such things? NWS-Norman always does this, by the way, adding us later on to Wind Advisories long after NWS-Fort Worth put the Texas counties surrounding us under one. This is a persistent thing here, and I don't know why it is that way. When the Fort Worth Stock Show folks last evening cancelled the scheduled Saturday morning Stock Show parade for only the second time in its history (and people on FB instantly were outraged by the annual parade being cancelled), I knew that they were expecting snow or sleet down there because someone mentioned they didn't want the horses to slip and fall on the dangerous, slick roadways. I had explained to Lillie earlier in the day that Friday was the opening day of the stock show and we'd try to take her and her younger sister down there to the stock show one day during its run if we didn't get the traditional Stock Show weather of ice and snow. While they had a gorgeous sunny and warm day for the opening day, it appears they have snow/sleet/ice for the first night of the show. I doubt it will last for the three week duration of the show. Dawn