If one wasnt showing life here Id start to worry. About the alkaline soil thing.....I've read your posts before about alkaline soil and taxodium. They are supposed to be light green not dark green, at least all the ones Ive seen, including native stands, are not very dark green. Id worry if they were yellowm but not light green. Id have a tissue analysis done if you think one is chlorotic. This alkaline tolerant variety you spotted might just be a darker colored foliage variant. Analysis of the tissue is the only way to know if one in fact had a deficiency. Im scoping some native trees for witches brooms....I saw one, but must have been 60-70 feet up. At first I thought It was a birds nest but I looked with binoculars and its a broom. It looked like a climbable tree, but Im a little hesitant....If you climb it this next winter Ill share the scion wood :)

Hello, I contacted the nursery last week and they are going to replace my BC. Thank goodness!!:-) They have three that are around 6 to 8 feet tall which is a tad smaller than the one we bought last fall. Ours is around 9 feet. I spoke with the owner and he said the 3 he has are just starting to bud out. He wants to wait a week before planting it to let it bud out more. He said he will have it planted by the week of May 14th. My question is: Is that too late?? He said you can plant BC any time of year- I found that hard to believe. Another question: Since the ones he has are budding out - will it hurt the tree if it's planted while it's budding out??? I hope this time around all will go well. Also, when it is planted should I fertilize? If so, what kind of fertilizer is best to use?? I appreciate all your help and advice.:-) I just hope we have good luck this time around. Thanks alot!!

Thanks to everyone for the feedback. I did transplant two of the BC last year that were from the same batch and they have done ok so far (budding this year), but one year of growth appears to have made a big difference in the size of the tap root. Like I said earlier, I just didn't do my homework on this one. I will plan to transplant the smaller ones next and see if that is any better. The two I moved this weekend were two of the taller ones. I would imagine that if I wait for colder weather I would have to use a small backhoe or just consider them a loss since I can only imagine how much the tap root will grow this year.

Bon, I expect it will get pretty miserable here on Sunday too. I think our worst weather at this end of the state will be Sunday and Monday. Right now our temperature is hovering at 33 degrees, but most of the rain has moved on...not that much fell, a little over a tenth of an inch, but any rain is good. I can see more rain on the Texas radar to our southwest but when it gets about a county away from us, it vanishes. That's the story of our year---rain vanishes when it gets close to us. I won't mind if the ice vanishes before it reaches us though. (grin) For the rest of the weekend, the weather is expected to be about the same as it is right now---with temperatures here hovering in the low 30s and rain coming through in little waves. The issue will be whether the rain falls while we are at 32 or below or if if falls when we are 33 degrees or higher. Thursday was an odd day. We had snakes out in the yard, which I'm never happy about, but it was oddly warm for this late in November. We made it up to 69 degrees before the cold front rolled in and dropped us about 30 degrees in three hours. Earlier in the day, when walking past the garden on my way back from the mailbox, I saw a watermelon in the garden. How I have missed seeing it before now is beyond me, but it looked whole and intact, so I brought in the mail (so it wouldn't blow away) and went out to the garden to pick the watermelon. We have been down as low as 19 degrees, so I figured it was rotted on the bottom, perhaps, and only looked good on the top. I picked it from the dead vine, and it was whole and intact. How crazy is that? After carrying the melon inside, I cut it in half, expecting the flavor to be poor because we had so much rain in October and early November. If the flavor was poor, I was going to feed it to the chickens. Nope. The flavor was good. In fact, it was great, so I celebrated the survival of the watermelon by eating some of it, and saving the rest for other family members. Then I carried the rind out to the chickens and they happily picked it clean of any remaining bits of red flesh. Enjoying a slice of the 'Harvest Moon' watermelon in the final hours before a brutal cold front arrived was a fittingly weird end to a weird growing season. The plant itself had roamed and rambled around the garden before the freeze got it, and had produced plenty of melons in the summer months, but none in the fall. I never thought it would have produced a melon so late in fall that would survive several freezing nights. I likely didn't see it before because cosmos and zinnias sort of surrounded the part of the plant where this melon was. Still, I walk by the garden every day on my way to the mailbox and I do generally look at it as I go by, and I still don't know why I didn't see the melon before now. Harvest Moon was probably my best producer in terms of pounds of melons this summer, although Yellow Doll produced a larger number of melons per plant. It is just that Yellow Doll is a really small melon. I hope y'all stay warm and safe up there, and that the ice misses your place, or at least that it melts quickly. Our driveway is a long, gentle, uphill slope, so when ice falls, we sometimes have problems getting up or down the driveway without sliding off of it. That is reason enough (I think) to stay home when it is icy, but Tim and Chris both are pigheaded and try to make that long drive to work in Dallas despite the ice. I've been waiting for a quiet day to sit and flip through the seed catalogs, and I am thinking that today will be it. Other than going outside to feed the animals after sunrise, I don't plan on being outside much. The wind chills are going to be brutally cold, especially since we haven't had enough cold yet for our bodies to get acclimated to the colder temperatures. We remain, still (and forever, it seems), abnormally dry here. I keep thinking we'll get a good 2 or 3" rainfall that will pull us out of drought for at least a week or two. Sadly, it isn't happening. Obviously it won't happen this weekend because the forecasted rain/ice amounts are really low (and I'm okay with that). Our local TV met said last night that all the kids hoping for a snow day today were going to be disappointed, and that their best chance of having a snow day here will be Monday. It seems ludicrous that we're talking about snow days in November. We started this week with an 80 degree day and I guess we'll end it with a 30 or 32-degree night. That sort of sums up Oklahoma weather in a nutshell. Dawn