well, the tops were yellowing and i needed the space for cassava. so, i dug up the 3x3 area and this is what i found... From taters and cukes not bad... zero investment, just a bit of space, and a couple pounds of organic new potatoes. i'd do it again. since i spent the winter piling mulch, grass, hay and other assorted trash on top, the soil has a nice three inch layer of organic material... should be just right for the cassava's modest needs. oh, and, the cucumbers have really kicked in for me: From taters and cukes my daughter is a total ham, which i find adorable about 1/3 of the time. i grow cucino, which has only female flowers and great disease resistance. off my two plants i'll get a handful of these tasty little cukes every day until the first week of june... when the PICKLEWORM arrives.

Thanks for the words of encouragement and photo ideas grannybj65, I have a really nice digital camera and plan to take LOTS of photos all along the way as I develop the garden. The photos linked here were taken by a good friend. I have an eye for good snapshots so once I'm down there I'll be taking dozens of photos from all angles and different weather conditions. The joy of digital photography - you never run out of film. LOL One of the things I like to do is take a series of photos from the same angle all day long on a sunny day to get a general idea of where the shady and sunny spots are. Doing that a few times throughout the year as the Earth changes kilter I'll perfect an image in my mind of where best to place different plants based on their light/shade tolerance. Looking at the photo of the front of the house dead-on, I just got a great idea. Facing the house, the living room is on the right side with the single window and the kitchen is on the left side with the double windows. In front of the double windows inside is the kitchen sink, so it is not a spot that will have tremendous "looking out the window" appeal. So, as the cogs turn in this hard head of mine, I'm visualizing lattice from the center pole on the porch going to the left corner, then around to where the porch meets the house. Then cutting a rectangular window out of the center of the front of the lattice and framing it a bit so there is a clear view out to the road from the kitchen window. And then I can visualize the lattice painted white (or more likely light gray as I'm not too fond of white outside) and covered in Scarlet Runner Bean and Clematis with maybe some "Joseph's Coat" (Amaranthus tricolor) in front and some dwarf Cannas with some "Love lies Bleeding" (Amaranthus sp.) along the side. The scarlet, violet, purple and deep reds and burgundys will all be in harmony with one another, at least until I decide on a totally different look down the road. I can have a nice metal frame rocking deck seat out on the porch hidden away behind the wall of vines where I can sit and enjoy the shade - and a good spray from the gardening hose on all the vines will create a nice cooling breeze. Well, it's a thought anyway. :) I saw on eBay this evening someone in San Diego California is selling several batches of Tillandsias (the common T. ionantha). They are offering them as a box of 50 child fist-sized clumps of them for around $20 if I recall - quite cheap. I immediately thought how neat it would be to buy 50 or 100 clumps and then carefully wire them to a wire-frame wreath for a living, blooming front door wreath, especially once the front porch is semi-latticed in and well shaded. A few sprigs of Spanish Moss draping down from the wreath here and there would further kick off the effect. It would live on the wet air, constantly regenerate itself with new growth, and bloom off and on throughout the year. During the colder months I could bring it inside and hang up it in the living room window where it can get plenty of bright indirect light. Ok, I'll shut up now.

Sally, Well, the Eastern Red Cedars are fast growing at our house. I'm in an area of mixed grasslands/post oak-hickory forests and the Eastern Red Cedars grow like mad here, even in poor, dense, red clay soil and periods of frequent summer drought. They are so invasive here that we spend an inordinate amount of time removing them because they pop up everywhere and grow like mad. One day they're small and you're thinking "I need to cut down that sucker" and the next thing you know, it is 3', 4' or 5' tall and you're wondering how that happened! Because of our frequent grassfires/wildfires here, we have cut down and removed every cedar tree on our property that is within 100 yards of the house. When they burn, they can explode and send burning sap/resin flying from the air and that burning sap stuff ignites new fires wherever it lands. In your part of OK, there is not a serious, ongoing grassfire or wildfire issue like we have here in southcentral OK many years so cedars wouldn't be as big of a fire threat there as they are here. You probably noticed I didn't mention red-tippped photinias which, as I'm sure you know, are very overused in north central Texas and also plagued by disease. I don't see many of them here in our very rural part of OK, but they might be a possibility for your new place too if you like them. We had them in Fort Worth in the 1980s and they grew like mad, giving us a nice privacy hedge in about 7 years from small one-gallon plants. However, in northeastern OK, there generally is a lot of humidity most years so the fungal diseases that plague photinias in Texas might be a problem for them in NE OK. I have seen a few old Chinese Photinias here and they are beautiful and healthy although not always easy to find in stores. I generally recommend mixed hedges too, and still would stick more with hollies than with cedars if I were putting in a screening hedge and didn't mind waiting a couple years longer for the shrubs to get nice and big. My hollies, which are Burford hollies, are more slow-growing than cedars. I think it has taken them about 8 or 9 years to reach about 12-15' in height, but that is in dense, Red River-type clay soil. In better soil, they might be more fast-growing. I am not sure how quickly you're expecting your privacy screen to grow, hence, the cedar tree recommendation. If I were trying to put in a screening hedge here, I'd likely mix deciduous trees (assuming a power line isn't a issue where the border or hedge will be) with shrubs and perennials for a much more interesting look. However, if doing that, I'd expect slower growth and would have to resign myself to looking at the unsightly area next door for a bit longer. Sally, there's a book or two with some Oklahoma natives, and I think you'll be surprised to see how many of the plants in it are also in Sally W.'s books. Of course, there are several geographic regions in OK that vary wildly from one another (just like in Texas) so some of the OK natives are more for western OK. I'll try to find and link info about at least one of those books. There are not a great many books specifically about gardening in Oklahoma. Many of the regional gardening books in bookstores here in southern OK are the some ones you'll see in Texas---Neil Sperry, Howard Garrett, etc. I don't know if that is true in the rest of the state, but it certainly is true in southern OK. In your part of the state, with its usually abundant rainfall (notwithstanding the horrid drought in that area this spring and summer) and great soil (in most places), I think you'll find that many plants grow incredibly well there and you'll probably see faster growth than you're used to seeing in the Dallas area, which is somewhat more rainfall-challenged. A lot of the gardeners in NE OK grow lovely plants, like hydrangeas, that I can't grow in southern OK because we have so many recurring droughts here in this part of the state. In my part of the state, the most popular natives for borders or hedges seem to be Eastern Red Cedar, oak trees, trumpet creeper vines and plum trees (the small thicket-forming types). Someone near Thackerville has a trumpet creeper vine hedge that runs along a fence line and it is about 150' long and about 8' tall and is beautiful, but it isn't tall enough to fully screen off a bad view and it isn't evergreen. Possomhaw hollies are also abundant in my part of the state, but they're also deciduous. I suspect you can grow a much wider variety of plants in NE OK than we can in southern OK. Probably the most popular non-native in southern OK is the holly family. I am out in a very rural area, though, where not many people plant a screening hedge because we're so far apart from one another that we can't see each other's houses and a privacy screen isn't that essential. Here in southern OK, what passes for privacy screening is just the native plants that grow up along the fencelines, so that means lots of thicket plums, rough-leaved dogwoods (which are more a shrub than a tree here), shining sumac, smooth sumac, greenbrier, trumpet creeper vine, blackberries, winged elm, cedar elm, redbuds, American beautyberry, persimmon, poison ivy, osage orange, western hackberry, several kinds of ash, Kentucky Coffee tree, pepper vine (ampelopsis), black cherry, chokecherry, virginia creeper and several native grapes. So, in areas where the birds have planted a fenceline, all you have to do is engage in selective pruning to turn a messy fenceline row into a lovely, mixed hedge of native plants and when folks here do that, they tend to eventually end up with a hedge of Eastern Red Cedar because it eventually outgrows everything else. I don't think either of Steve Dobbs books focus exclusively on native plants, but both include many natives. I've linked one below, and the other one is referenced on the linked page too. Other than the books by Steve Dobbs, the books that I've used most since moving here are two small books by Doyle McCoy called "Roadside Trees and Shrubs of Oklahoma" and "Roadside Wild Fruits of Oklahoma". Really, though, I use my Texas gardening books as much as I use the Oklahoma ones. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: Oklahoma Gardener's Guide

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