Fawnridge, thanks very much for those names, I did not know one of them. Whenever I saw a croton that I liked, I bought it and because they are so difficult to grow here in Cape Town, the nurseries do not bother with cv names. Tomas, that white orchid is definitely a Dendrobium, but not nobile. It might be a cv with nobile as one of the parents. The flowers are fuller than nobile and as you remarked, nobile flowers end of winter, beginning of spring and this white one mid to end of winter and then all through the year sporadically. It also flowers on stems that still have leaves where as nobile flowers from bare stems. Den nobile: Thanks Lisa. That upper storey greenhouse might be the answer! My first own seedlings have germinated already!!

Thanks everyone for the compliments. It's nice to hear that all the hard work has paid off. I really appreciate the nice things everyone said. tjsangel, S. James Kraft has done well for me. Its a good grower & has lots of blooms with a nice size flower on a 20 inch plant. I love the soft yellow color and it blooms pretty late in the season as others are stopping (listed as a M, but more ML for me). To give you an idea, S. Double Classic opened early this year for me on June 19th & S. JK's first bloom was on July 24th. One thing the picture doesn't show is that this is a very heavy textured crepe daylily & it gets more yellow as the day progresses (picture was taken in early morning before it was quite open) & becomes more yellow when it stays hot for awhile. Available at Marietta's. Check out that picture.

It will depend on what plants we will too much of around that time. We could post our list then. I always have a lot of phlox to thin out. And the wild rose seems to always pop up again - pretty but not in the correct spot. We should post what time would be better for us - before or after labor day? Or even that weekend? Or flexible?

Amy, We've always had various brown stink bugs in Texas going back as far as my memory goes, and the brown marmorated ones are a relatively new invasive species. I am sure Oklahoma has some of the same native ones we had in Texas. I see various brown ones here all the time, and not necessarily brown marmorated ones although I sometimes see one of them here and there. I think one reason that all the talk of the brown marmorated stink bug (and they truly are huge home invaders in the northeastern USA so I understand the concern) arriving in OK a decade or so didn't bother me because we've always had to deal with brown stink bugs...so, eh, what's one more? If a person already has worked (via caulking and such) to keep out the invasive Asian lady bugs, which we have had to deal with ever since moving to OK in 1999, then their efforts will keep out the stink bugs too. There's a great webpage of Texas' Brown Stink Bugs, and though I looked, I could not find anything similar for OK. Here it is...look at all of them. Some are common, some are rare, but they have to have been seen and documented in Texas to make it onto the webpage: Texas: Brown Stink Bugs I'm pretty sure the big box stores here don't get the brassicas until sometime in September, and perhaps not until October. I'll start watching for them and let you know when I see them. They almost arrive too late here. I really think they should be in the stores right now for proper timing of planting them to beat the cold, but they usually aren't. I believe the wholesale growers and retailers might be afraid no one will buy them in the typically vicious August heat, but that is when they need to be planted. If the cats were pretty big, maybe they've just moved on to the next step in the process. Wasps will get a lot of them though, and so will birds. I've never interfered in the process because I don't want to disrupt the food web, but butterflies are incredibly plentiful here in our rural area so it is likely we have enough to go around. In a more city-like setting where there's fewer cats, I understand why people might feel the need to protect them. Rebecca, I agree with you on fall tomatoes needing a pretty early start. I like to have them growing by mid-June. They won't necessarily set a lot of fruit in summer, but they'll be big and flowering when the August cool-down arrives. Coleus is very slow from seed. Takes them forever to sprout and forever to grow. Just press the seeds lightly into a fine, sterile, seed-starting growing medium and do not cover them up---they need light to germinate. If you're sprouting them at 70-75 degrees, they should sprout in 7-14 days. Larry, I am glad you and Madge are getting out a little bit. I actually think right now is a pretty good time to get out---the numbers of cases from the big July resurgence are falling and the fall/winter cold/flu/Covid-19 season is not upon us yet. Tim and I went to the Olive Garden about a month ago when we were in Sherman to shop at Sam's Club. It was wonderful! We hadn't been in an Olive Garden in years and enjoyed it so much, but it definitely felt odd with all the mask-wearing, social distancing, etc. About once a month we try to go to some sort of restaurant to sit and eat a meal as if things are normal, which they aren't. Back in June we went to Red Lobster, and that was enjoyable too. Honestly, as empty as these restaurants have been when we have been in them, I don't know how they are doing enough business to survive. We do try to be there at 11 a.m. when they open up, figuring that's the healthiest, safest time to get in early and eat and beat the crowd. Maybe they are more crowded later in the day. At the present time I feel safer in a relatively uncrowded restaurant than in a crowded grocery store. Nancy, I have made sweetened condensed milk from scratch using artificial sweeteners so it is not as intensely sweet as the version made with sugar. Enjoy all those potatoes. There are so many different ways to fix potatoes, so at least there's a lot of possibilities with them. Amy, I don't specifically take B-12, but do take a B-Complex vitamin that contains it. A couple of years ago, someone on the Oklahoma Gardening FB page said that after they started talking a B-complex vitamin daily, the mosquitoes started leaving them alone. I was skeptical, but figured for the cost of a bottle of B-Complex vitamins, I could find out for myself. Tim and I have been taking the B-Complex vitamins for a couple of years now and the mosquitoes leave us alone 98-99% of the time. It is as close to a miracle solution for mosquitoes as I've ever seen. At one point, late last summer, we ran out of the B-Complex tablets and thought we'd just wait and buy a new bottle the following Spring. Ha! Within days, mosquitoes were all over us and biting us, so when we were at Costco I bought their huge bottle of B-complex vitamins and we've been taking it ever since. Mosquitoes will buzz around us but 99% of the time they won't even attempt to land on us. I don't know if it works for all people, but it works for us, and I've been a huge skeeter magnet all my life...until now. As long as it continues working, we'll continue taking it. Was a vitamin B deficiency the reason mosquitoes always have flocked to us? Who knows? However, having plenty of vitamin B in our bodies seems to repel them from us now. Jennifer, Yes, the ones with the blue-black horns are the actual tomato hornworms. They are much more rare in OK than the similar tobacco hornworms with red horns which feed on all the same plants that they do. Hu, Getting a fall garden started in July and/or August always is the hardest part, isn't it? The heat and the grasshoppers both hang on forever some years and make it virtually impossible. I've started skipping gardening in August for the most part, but that's because it is rattlesnake season. A friend of mine here killed a huge rattler in his yard yesterday, a nice reminder to me to keep my eyes on the ground and to watch carefully for them. Larry, I'm sorry you are not feeling well. Getting older is hard---the body wears out and hurts more, and seems less cooperative. The energy level changes as well. I sure am learning to pace myself better as I get older. Those glorious days of working in the garden from sunrise to sunset when I was in my 40s and early 50s...yep, those are so far gone that I can scarcely remember them now. All the news from here, y'all, is not really good news. I am laughing at myself though because yesterday felt like Monday instead of Thursday since the girls had been here for a couple of days mid-week and we took them home on Wednesday afternoon, making it feel like Sunday. So, it felt like Monday all day and then I discovered it was Thursday when the weekly newspaper arrived in the mail, and thus I was overjoyed to discover it was almost the weekend already. (grin) All these August days just run together. Jana had a very tough day on Thursday, in what was already a very stressful week as her senior year of nursing school resumed this week and there's tons and tons of clinicals scheduled, some of them left over from the spring semester because Covid-19 interrupted that semester. The kids started back to school. They already were having a crazy week, and then it got even crazier. Somewhere around mid-day, Chris called to tell me that his father-in-law had passed away unexpectedly. I don't know his exact age, but think he was a bit younger than Tim and I. We had met him a handful of times and I really liked him but we did have the advantage of meeting him when he was sober (which he usually was not). Chris and Jana were up in the air all day trying to figure out who was going to travel to claim his body, make his final arrangements, etc. and neither Jana nor her siblings had any clue about his finances, whether he had life insurance, a will, etc. so they didn't even really know where to start. He was up in OKC visiting a relative, so that relative headed south last night to bring down the house keys so Jana and her siblings could search his home for paperwork to lead them in whatever direction for planning his funeral. Clearly this is a topic they'd never discussed with their father. Then, about 4 or 5 hours later, Chris called again, this time to tell me that Jana's great-aunt on her father's side had just passed away due to complications from Covid-19. This means that since December, Jana has lost her grandmother (her father's mom) to whom she was incredibly close, then her father's sister a couple of weeks later, and now her dad and her grandmother's sister on the same day. Every time Chris called me yesterday (a month's worth of phone calls in one day, I think) , the plan had changed and the grandkids were coming here to stay while he and Jana drove to OKC, then they weren't, then they were, etc. I just told him "whenever, whatever, however" to emphasize that they could drop off the kids here anytime 24/7 when and if they needed to and we'd take care of things here on this end. Oddly, just the other night at dinner on Tuesday, Aurora was talking about how great-grandma (my mom) died last August and she misses her, and then she mentioned that Great-Grandma Ruth (Jana's mom) had died last Christmas and she misses her too. She also reminded me that she hasn't seen all her Texas cousins (my sister's grandkids) in a long time and she misses them, and I reminded here that it is because of Covid-19 and we just have to be patient and wait for the virus situation to get better. We spent a substantial amount of time at dinner that night discussing how we keep them both alive in our hearts, souls and memories and I was impressed at how well an almost-six-year-old understands death. We never could have imagined she'd be losing her grandfather a couple of days after we had that discussion. The cool nights and early mornings here have been heavenly and it is nice the HVAC system has been getting a bit of a break. The heat was forecast to start cranking back up yesterday, but it really didn't do it. There's no rain in our forecast this week, so I need to keep watering everything, but there's two Tropical Depressions headed for the Gulf Coast and expected to make landfall early next week, and one of them ought to send rain up across Texas towards Oklahoma after it makes landfall, probably near Houston, as a hurricane. I'll be watching for that. It seems we always spend part of August down here hoping for a hurricane because it might bring us rain, though we certainly are hoping for a minor hurricane that doesn't damage coastal areas too much as it makes landfall. I am awake in the middle of the night. I went to bed too early because I was so worn out after a couple of really fun days with the girls, but then apparently my body decided it had had enough sleep and awakened, feeling refreshed, at 3 a.m. There is not much you can do at 3 a.m. except try to be quiet and not wake up your spouse and the dogs. I'd like to think I could maybe fall back asleep for a while, and I think I'll try that now, but the odds are that about the time I fall asleep, Tim's alarm clock will go off to wake him up...and it always wakes me up too. That makes falling back asleep seem pointless. I'm sitting here looking at the thermometer and it shows it is 68 degrees outside---a huge change from earlier in the month when we would awaken to overnight lows around 78-80. Have a great Friday everybody! Dawn