My first crop of Blue Lake beans are done. Put the 2nd crop in the ground Saturday. Garden plot is 8 ft x 8 ft maybe. Got 70 pints of canned beans out of it. I am single & only eat the beans on weekends with a steak or if I have a girlfriend over so the pint jars work really well for me. The Silver Queen corn I planted on April 11th is almost done. The ground may have been a little too cold when I planted it. Took FOREVER to come out it seemed. Was rearing to go because it was warming up & I go bonkers in warm weather when there is dirt outside with nothing in it growing! My maters ( Big Boy ) are starting to produce. The plants are over 7 feet tall & bunches of green ones are waiting to turn red. Bell Peppers are smaller than the maters. They have been shielded from the sun by the sheer size of the tomatoes growing near them but I do see a few on the branches. I would REALLY like to try to grow some Hickory King corn in the patch where the Silver Queen is growing ( After it`s done ) this year but I don`t think I have time. Sad. Never grew it before but would LOVE to see how tall that stuff gets! :) I have seen pics of Shots patch & I drool when looking at what he has grown! When the next beans come in, I am going to stick turnips in the ground. That should be about mid October. Gardening for me is like I drug I can`t get enough of. Wish I could bottle the feeling of joy & happiness I have from it & sell it. I would be a millionaire! Hehehe!

The fat lady sang here in Love County, but maybe she didn' sing long enough. It went down to 36 here along the Red River and we have mixed frost and dew. On the car windshields, there is a solid sheet of icy frost....thick enough that anyone leaving right now would have to scrape it off with an ice scraper. On the ground and on the plants, it is patchy and hit-and-miss. I am sure the few plants I covered are fine, but that only was about 10% of what I had. The others probably will have some frost-burn and dead foliage, but maybe not over the entire plant. I bet the okra blooms drop without forming pods since they don't like cold weather. Paula, How sweet for you to offer to host the spring swap! And, of course you are right, we have to 'let go' of this year's garden and start planning for next year at some point. I just hate to see the growing season end though. Even though our "official" first freeze is supposed to come about mid-November here, it almost always arrives around October 20-23. Last year, we went down to 31 on October 23 and the year before it was on October 20th, so we are seemingly right on schedule. River, it sounds like you lucked out again. I was ready for this one, having harvested all the peppers and tomatoes that were even close to being almost ripe or at least a usable size. They both have produced very heavily since July, so I cannot complain. I'll be a happier camper, though, if I can keep the green beans going a little bit longer. They're producing quite heavily now so I hate to see that end. I wonder how the folks in far NE and eastern OK fared? Dawn

Lol, George! I went back and had a look. It seems like the tree did fine, but I trimmed some branches from the center away, and there are still a bunch of whiteflies buzzing around and some white powdery stuff is on the leaves. Time for a fungicide maybe? This navel orange tree is no fun! KC

It was Rosh HaShanah and I was too busy cooking to reply to this thread earlier. My vegetarian son's family came up for a holiday dinner Saturday night. I made a Moroccan butternut squash soup, carrot salad, beet salad, cucumber and tomato salad, an apple and raisin noodle kugel, a Sephardic leek, zucchini and potato casserole (kind of like a crustless quiche). My husband made round braided challahs - I think the braided ones taste better than the spiral ones. Dessert was carrot cake and mini-honey cakes. With all the prep for Saturday night, we wanted something simple but still holiday for Friday night so I made stake, roasted potato and sweet potato "fries," and steamed fioretto cauliflower. We had some of the mini-honey cakes for dessert. The mini-honey cakes were a new recipe. Honey cake is traditional for the holiday, but I don't like the slightly burnt taste most honey cakes have. These were more of a cake-y cookie/biscuit which is soaked in a spiced honey syrup after baking - very good. The spiced honey was so good (cinnamon, vanilla and lemon juice and zest), that I also made some extra to use with our challah and apples instead of plain honey.