Merry Heart, We got down to 34 degrees last night, and had frost forming right about 3 a.m. and I DIDN'T cover up my plants. I wanted to, but the wind gusted hard all day and there was no way I could have gotten those big sheets of plastic out and over the plants. The plastic would have blown away before I could use something to tie it down. When the skies started clearing late in the afternoon, I knew we were in trouble. And, when the wind stopped blowing after sunset, I knew we were in deep trouble. I went outside at 3:30 a.m. and turned on the sprinkler, hoping to give my plants a chance of surviving what was rapidly becoming a very hard frost. I moved the sprinkler once an hour. I just checked on my tomato plants, and they seem fine. I'm not so sure about the beans and corn. They don't seem as fine, but I'll wait a few hours longer to see if they either perk up....or look worse. And, if you don't find Espoma anywhere in Ardmore, let me know. My DH will be picking up some for me one day after work this week, probably on Fri. or Sat., and he could pick up some for you at the same time. Once it is here at my house, we will figure out how to get it from me to you. You can come here, or I can come to Ardmore, or whatever. I know Carla would pick up some and ship it, but you and I are within easy driving distance of each other, and there's no need for y'all to spend money on shipping. Ilene, I used Epsom salts for a couple of years. I really couldn't see much difference in my tomato plants, but it made a HUGE difference in my pepper plants. The plants were large and green and lush. I didn't get as many peppers as usual those 2 years, though, and I haven't tried it since. I'm not sure why it didn't seem as helpful to the tomato plants as to the peppers. And I don't know if the Epsom salts had anything to do with the decreased pepper production or if it was just a bad year for peppers. Ilene, I've posted a link to Reinhard Kraft's website. He has photos of over 800 heirloom tomatoes in his photo gallery. Many of the ones he grows are the same ones we grow here in the USA. He has been active in promoting heirlooms for a long time, and has sent seed to gardening friends in the USA for trial and vice versa. And, y'all, we have just too much wildlife around here. When I was out during the night putting the sprinkler on the garden, there were raccoons on the porch (nothing there for them to eat, but that didn't stop them from looking), rabbits in the semi-tall grass along the fence line between our place and the neighbor's place, and coyotes.....at least one on our place near the barn, and one on the neighbor's place between their house and ours. The coyotes were howling back and forth. I know coyotes seldom attack humans, but it made me a little bit nervous. Hoping to work in the garden this afternoon after it warms up! Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: Reinhard Krafts website and fotogalerie

Hi Larry, I hope you are recovering well from surgery. I grow a lot in containers the size of the one you've pictured. There are lots of plants that grow well in them. I think peppers produce even better in containers than in the ground, for example. The only difference with smaller containers (as long as you aren't trying to grow huge indeterminate tomato plants in them) is that they need to be watered more often. If you set them up with drip irrigation on a timer, they are very low-maintenance. Also, since they are watered more often, the nutrients can leach out more quickly so you may have to fertilize them more often to compensate for that. However, you can have great harvests of many kinds of veggies from containers that size. Dawn

It was a surprisingly good market today especially compared to usual January and how little people purchased in December. There was maybe 1/4 the people in the facility as in December but a lot more buying. I advertised on the local facebook pages to the uninformed market crowd but I am not sure which of the new faces today were due to that. I sold a lot of seeds. Without those I would have made a lot less. I had a funny thing happen though. A customer ordered seeds from me again this year but we decided that instead of mailing them she would come to market since she wanted bulbs too. Her last name is Johnson. A customer came up to me and said she was there to pick up the stuff she ordered and her last name was Johnson but I had the wrong first name. I sold her the stuff I had set aside. Later the correct Johnson came to pick up her order! I told her someone else named Johnson already got it and then I scrambled to find the majority of it for her. I am glad she brought a list. So then I messaged the other gal who assured me except for the dahlias, all the seeds she bought were what she ordered. Now I am not so busy as to forget an order so I am dumbfounded as to how she thinks she ordered!

That's a great pic of Woman at the Well. I think it's Stumbling Stone, and I've never seen the contrasting colors so clear. Korth cultivars can vary in their coloration quite a bit. Yes, Wind on Water is a lovely soft apricot. Pandora's Treasure has good color here, but lacks substance.