You could pile the manure on top of the green pile and let it cook. If it gets hot that could kill bad things. Manure is great but sometimes it can contain herbicides. The test is to grow bean seeds in it because they are sensitive. Unlimited manure sounds wonderful to me. Tree leaves wouldn't have herbicides but grass could. I am taking a chance on straw which I am putting over cardboard to smother weeds. Straw can also have herbicides. There are long posts on this if you search. Below is one.

Here is a link that might be useful: informative thread on your topic

My feeling is you'll have weeds either way, so do whatever feels right to you and trust your gut instinct.

My second spring here my farmer friend, Fred (who is still ranching and gardening at 90 years young!) brought me a trailer load of cow manure from his barn. It wasn't even completely composted (some of it was, some of it wasn't), but my soil was terrible and I immediately rototilled it into the worst section of the garden. I got all kinds of weeds that spring, but at least one of them was a weed I wanted (devil's claw) and I just pulled up the rest. The rest of my garden had weeds anyhow even without the cow manure. I expected that. Newly broken/newly rototilled soil will have a bunch of weeds the first couple of years just because so many weed seeds were exposed to light by the rototilling.

I love Ruth Stout's books by the way, and read them long before moving here, and was eager to try her no-work gardening once we got here. It works, but it requires longer to get it to work effectively if you are starting out with dense clay and bermuda grass together. Deep thick hay or straw will smother out the bermuda eventually, but it takes years. I prefer to remove all the bermuda first, most of the time, by digging it out and then I layer on the hay, straw, grass clippings and chopped/shredded leaves thickly. In areas where I've done that, the soil we have now bears little resemble to the dense red clay we started out with.

The area I am preparing for a new ornamental border, to be called "The Chocolate Garden", has had spoiled hay stacked 4' high on top of part of it it for about two years now. You wouldn't believe how nice the formerly red clay soil is underneath that hay. The hay started out at about 6' tall, and now is down to a depth between 3' and 4' depending on how much it has collapsed and broken down in any given area. In the area directly under the hay, the bermuda grass has been smothered out, but I'll need to dig out some from along the edges.

My bigger worry with manure of any sort would be whether it had been sprayed with any of the class of herbicides known as pyralids that are known to persist in hay or straw for several years, in manure from cows that ate grasses sprayed with it, or in compost made from the manure, hay or straw. These same herbicides sometimes show up in city compost because the golf courses were treated with similar herbicides to kill broad leaf weeds.

The issue of contaminated compost has been around for over a decade now, and pops up even in commercial compost purchased in bags sometimes. There is no easy solution. When ranching friends offer me old hay or manure, I inquire (in the nicest way possible) about any use of this kind of herbicide on their own pastures or hayfields, and I also ask if they're fed their cows hay purchased from someone else. You cannot be too careful. Some folks who have had their garden soil contaminated by these herbicide residues have been unable to grow anything in them, except for grass/grain crops, for several years after discovering the contamination.

What I do is test the hay/straw/manure by trying to sprout bean or pea seeds in it. (You can mix some soil in with the test material if you want.) If the peas and beans sprout, grow and suddenly die, the compost could be contaminated with a herbicide.

One of our neighbors now is dealing with suddenly unproductive soil with many issues she's never had before up to and including plant death, and the last time I saw her, she asked me if I thought she inadvertently had contaminated her soil as that seems to her like the best explanation for the problems in her garden. She's gardened for many years too and I hate to see this happening to her garden plot. When we last spoke, she was planning to leave that area fallow and start a new garden in a new portion of her property.

I've linked some info on herbicide residue contamination for you below.

If you haven't seen the "Back to Eden" video that's been all the rage these last couple of years, let me know and I'll find it and link it. You might enjoy seeing what they've done with piles of mulch.

Here is a link that might be useful: Brief Article on Pyralid Carryover

I have a hard time getting all the organic matter I need, therefore I get it any time of the year I can and pile it. This make me handle it more than once most of the time, but I had rather do that than miss out on it. I think I would let the manure compost, even throwing some of the other organic matter in with it.

I may use the green mulch forget about the manure for garden.

I wonder about the manure for my orchard would the possibility of chemicals bother fruit trees

Yes, it would bother anything that has broad-leaves.

I'd just pile it up and let it decompose for a while. Watch around the edges of the area where you're letting it decompose. If broadleaf weeds are growing right there around the manure pile, then it likely doesn't have any herbicide residues that are potentially harmful.

I've never yet gotten any herbicide-contaminated hay, straw or manure, but I am very careful about who I accept it from. I've lived here long enough to know who sprays their pastures and who doesn't, so I just kindly decline any offers of manure, hay or straw from anyone that I know uses herbicides or who uses purchased hay of unknown origin where those herbicides could have been used.

By the way, alfalfa is a legume and cannot be sprayed with pyralids (it will kill it) so I never turn down free spoiled alfalfa hay. If I have to buy hay, I only buy alfalfa. It is more expensive, but worth the peace of mind to know I'm not bringing in anything contaminated with pyralid residue.

Oldokie do you have to shovel the manure when you pick it up or do they load it? I think manure is great stuff. If they load it I would get a pile of it to have on hand.

they load the last time i checked $5 a load whether a wheelbarrow or trailer full I will be using a 16 ft utility trailer with 30 inch sides that i am making now.

I like the idea to pile it off to the side and let compost and see if it will grow weeds

In the early 90's I lived about 30 miles north of Dawn in south central Oklahoma. I have nephews there that all have cattle and at that time, hay didn't cost an arm and a leg. My nephew had told me to get what I needed from his barn. I was planting in a new garden space, with lots of red dirt and which hadn't been improved very much. I had worked for years, and since I wasn't working anymore, I really wanted a nice garden.

My tomato plants were looking really good, but I thought they probably needed to be mulched. We went to the barn and got a few square bales of hay and mulched them heavily. By night time, they were all droopy and looked like all of the moisture had been drained out of them. They just looked terrible. I quickly removed the mulch and watered them good and they somewhat recovered, but never looked as good as they had before the contact with the hay. That was my lesson, learned the hard way.

I compost loads of horse manure mixed with wood chips and straw and use that on the garden. I would never apply any manure to a garden without first composting it.

I also live in Tulsa and have brought home many loads of the free wood chip mulch. I put large sheets of cardboard down between raised beds and covered it 5-6 inches deep with mulch to kill grass. When I'm building new beds, I lay sheets of cardboard or several layers of paper down first to kill the grass. Both have been reasonably effective, with some grass growing up around the edges.

I think deep mulch makes a big difference during Oklahoma summers, but it can keep the ground from warming in spring. You can pull back the mulch and cover the exposed ground for a couple days with black plastic to help speed warming, if needed.

Sometimes I just rake the mulch into the walkways when I first plant, and then add it back as the plants come up.

Having a good, deep layer of mulch or leaves on your garden beds over winter acts like sheet composting, with material breaking down and adding nutrients to the soil while the beds are idle.

I put deep mulch on my beds for that very reason--to sheet compost in place.

I also sheet compost in the pathways of my garden all year long. I pile up hay, grass clippings, weeds I've pulled, etc. in the pathways throughout the growing season. I do have cardboard unerneath the material to keep weeds from sprouting and growing in the pathways. I walk on that stuff all year and it breaks down. By the following late winter/early spring, it is compost and I shovel it up into the beds on either side of the pathway before planting time arrives. Then, I put down new cardboard and start another round of sheet composting. To me, it is a lot easier to use a compost scoop to scoop up compost from the path and put it in adjacent beds than to have to haul wheelbarrow loads of compost from the compost pile to the garden.

I do keep a compost pile going year-round too, though its' compost is normally used in new planting beds to get them off to a good start. I also am using a combination of hugelkultur beds with sheet composting on top of them to heal badly eroded land on our sloping property. After putting down a good sized number of woody material first as the base, I sheet compost on top just by adding stuff to the top continually. After you've done that for a few years, the once-bare, eroded land heals, the erosion stops, and eventually native plants sprout and grow on what was once eroded gullies with naked red clay. It takes a long time, but once we get one bare area on the road to healing, we start working on another one.

Sheet composting is my favorite way to compost.

Hi Oldokie:

Interesting questions.

Brent and Becky Heath [https://store.brentandbeckysbulbs.com/ ] are neighbors. A few years ago, they bought a large tract of farmland. The soil was poor - maybe 1/4=1/2" of "topsoil" over hard clay. I wondered how B & B could grow quality bulbs in that soil. Brent goes to The Netherlands and other countries for business several times a year, and he gets ideas on these trips. When they bought the land and restarted their bulb business, they started using different techniques - fertilizing with compost tea, uses various natural oils as natural insecticides inside their greenhouses. He also developed new techniques to grow bulbs.

In the Fall, he creates mounds of chips, pine needles, and/or rough compost. He puts bulbs on these mounds. then covers the bulbs with several inches of the same material. He puts some bulbs in plastic crates on top of chips/compost, then covers the crates with the same material. No dirt. (see links to photos below). After a year or two, the mulch / chips breaks down into soil.

B & B have several demonstration gardens that get more beautiful every year. When I visited, I was curious, looked under the mulch, discovered that many plants were growing in this rough compost. Not in dirt.

I've used this technique to grow bulbs. Most of my land is similar to theirs - we live in the Tidewater area of Virginia so land is flat, soil is poor, and we usually have a very high water table in late winter and spring which caused bulbs to rot. When I started planting bulbs and perennials on or in mounds of chips, as I saw Brent do, that was not a problem. Although most of our mulch comes from pine trees and is acidic, plants thrive. One day, I need to find out if Brent does anything to mitigate the impact of acidic compost.

I was so inspired by the evolution of Brent and Becky's gardens that I went to their farm and took photos in winter, spring and summer. The link below will show you how Brent plants bulbs into chips in the fall. The link in this post shows you how to make nursery beds for bulbs in crates:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/48529854@N07/5236273050/in/set-72157625411883985/

Have fun!

Here is a link that might be useful: Nursery beds made of rough compost:

thank you

thinking about planting potatoes that way many spring are wet and cold and seed potatoes rot.

oldokie: I'm experimenting with potatoes too. Last year, I had a bad harvest, not sure how i messed up. Think I made several mistakes. Got seed potatoes in late March, cut them into chunks for chitting. After they sprouted, I dusted with a fungicide, and planted the chunks on May 1 - very late for this area.

I've read about planting potatoes and covering then with straw but I haven't tried this so don't know how well this works. I looked up my notes about growing potatoes, found this:

Two beds planted at the same time with tomatoes which we pulled a few weeks back. Note the difference in weed growth in the near bed heavily mulched with wood chips and the further bed without mulch

Pam,

Usually when potatoes are planted late, they produce poorly. That's likely what happened with yours.

Potatoes grow best at temperatures between 45 and 75 (to be more specific they grow best when daytime highs are 60-75 and nighttime lows are 45-55)......so we have to plant them insanely early here because our temperatures do not stay in that range very long at all.

If you plant too late, the temperatures hit the range that stops tubers from setting and sizing up, which is about 85 degrees.

Mulching the soil to keep it cooler as the air temps heat up will help some, but nothing helps enough if you plant too late. They'll start trying to set and size up their tubers while the plants are too young and small and you'll get small potatoes.

Other reasons that a person might have disappointing yields could be: (s) the variety planted was not suited to your area; (b) they were planted too deeply or not deeply enough (ideal is 6-8"deep because all the potatoes form on the main stem above the seed potato piece....although planting them more deeply than recommended doesn't give you more potatoes either) or (c) plants were heavily frosted after spring emergence which set them back and caused lower productivity or (d) in fall, the first frost comes too early and the potato plants haven't had time to set and size their tubers yet before the foliage freezes back to the ground.

Other reasons I can think of that might cause a poor potato harvest would be too much nitrogen which kept the plant focused too much on foliage and not enough on the tubers, or if your soil pH was too acidic.

I'm not sure why your seed potatoes took over a month to sprout. Mine usually sprout in about 5-7 days. Sometimes it will take 10 days if I am chitting them in a location that is a bit too cool.

The recommended time to plant potatoes here is about 4-6 weeks before our average last killing frost. For most of us here in OK, that means sometime between mid February and mid March.

Sometimes I plant in trenches, and sometimes I plant in a grid pattern a la' John Jeavon's recommendations. I vary it a bit depending on which area of the garden, and whether I'm planting in a raised bed or a grade-level planting area, and whether it is a dry winter or a wet one. When you have soil that doesn't drain well, potatoes are risky in a wet year and I have to be extra careful to plant them as high and dry as possible if December, January and February have had a lot of rainfall and the ground is saturated as it was at this time last year. I cannot plant potatoes under straw mulch here in our rural area. If I do, the field mice and voles will come from miles around to live in the straw and eat the seed potatoes, and then the snakes start hanging around looking for the rodents. I can mulch the plants heavily after they are up and growing, but the seed potatoes themselves have to be down in the soil to avoid being eaten.

Dawn

Hi Dawn: You are right about planting potatoes too late. I didn't realize that they were so sensitive to warm temperatures. Thanks for the diagnosis.

When I was thinking about growing potatoes, I saw a post by Farmerdill. When he farmed in VA, he planted "earlies" (midseason potatoes) around March 15 and a late crop of "early earlies" (short season potatoes) in mid July to dig at frost. When I read about the late crop, I assumed I could plant in June. In retrospect, not a good assumption to make.

Our official last frost is listed as mid-April but I don't recall a frost after mid-March. I should probably plant potatoes at around the same time you do - mid-February to early March. We've been having more rain than usual so if that continues, the deciding issue will be when the soil dries out.

I have two gardens and had soil tests on both last year. In the big garden (fenced in, a long distance from house) where I will plant potatoes, the test recommended lime and a "total fertilizer." In the kitchen garden (raised beds, closer to house), the test found "very high" levels of potassium, phosphorus, calcium, and magnesium - recommended lime and a nitrogen only fertilizer. I amended both gardens last year so should probably get new tests this year.

Do you get your seed potatoes locally? Do you have a favorite vendor?

The climate experts predict that after a cold spell next week, temps in Feb, March and April will be much warmer than usual. The weather is beyond strange, and more than a little unsettling.

Feb-March-April outlook:
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/predictions/long_range/seasonal.php?lead=2

Thanks!
Pam

Pam,

You're welcome. With potatoes in warm spring/hot summer areas, the problem usually is the heat. I guess that's why we don't have large-scale potato farming in OK.

I have purchased seed potatoes from Ronnigers (changed their name to potatogarden.com a while back), Irish Eyes and Wood Prairie Farm in some previous years, and their varieties just don't perform as well for me here as the varieties I buy in local stores like Wal-Mart, Home Depot or Tractor Supply Company. Those stores here near us must pay attention to the varieties recommended for Oklahoma and Texas because they have at least some of the varieties recommended by OSU and TAMU.

Did your soil test tell you your soil's pH? I assume since they are saying to add lime that your soil must be somewhat acidic. Potatoes need a pH above 4.8 but that's hardly an issue for me since my unimproved soil tests with a pH a little over 8. With monumental amounts of amendments we've been able to get the soil pH down around 6.8 and 7.0 and keep it there, but it is a constant challenge because our water tests at 8.2 or 8.3. Obviously I'd never have to add lime. Potato scab is an issue on alkaline soils but also when potatoes are grown in acidic soils to which calcium recently has been added, so be sure you don't overdo the lime. I've only had scab on my potatoes one year and I don't know what I did differently that year.

Usually I grow Red Norland, Red LaSoda or Pontiac Red for my red potatoes. For White ones I usually plant Irish Cobbler or Kennebec (which is far easier to find locally than Irish Cobbler). For Yellow ones I usually plant Yukon Gold because it is rare to find the recommended Yellow Finn here. For russets, I usually plant Norkota, although Norgold is also recommended. I just never see Norgold locally.

One issue with ordering seed potatoes is that most suppliers don't even start shipping until March and I need to get mine planted before Valentine's Day so they can beat the heat. When I've ordered seed potatoes and spent a lot more money for some of the dazzling selection of potatoes available, their yields have been disappointing so I tend to stick to what I can can locally. If I want to plant fingerlings, I just buy organic fingerling potatoes at a local store in January, put them in a brown paper bag in the pantry floor and wait for them to start sprouting. When eyes start developing, I plant them.

I've been cautiously watching those forecasts for Feb-April and am not sure I trust them. Last year at this time, I already had tomato and other seeds started because my gut feeling told me to get ready early because an early spring was coming. So far this year? If an early spring is coming, I'm just not feeling it and I haven't started a single seed yet. Hopefully my gut feeling is right. I'd hate to have it heat up early and for me to not be ready for it. I won't say my gut feelings never are wrong, but I trust them more than I trust the professional forecasts.

Dawn

Do you not plant the purple (or are they considered Blue) potatoes, Dawn? I've never eaten them and don't know if the flavor is good, better, or indifferent, as dad used to say.

Susan

Dawn, Susan: Probably need to start a new thread about seed starting and/or potatoes. I'm curious about whether other folks have started yet, and if they have, what they started.

I'll start seeds for broccoli, Napa cabbage, and greens as soon as I can get organized. Hopefully, this weekend.

Dawn, I'm with you on the out-of-state potato suppliers. Last night, I checked the Southern States site - they are our farm coop. We also have Tractor Supply, WMart, Lowes, HD. The Southern States site has a good selection of potatoes but they don't ship so we have to buy our seed potatoes at a local store. The local store won't have all varieties but will have enough to meet our needs - a couple of reds, a couple of whites, a russet, Yukon Gold. If I decide to plant fingerlings, I'll go to a high end grocery store that carries organic potatoes. I called my local Southern States store today. They don't expect to receive seed potatoes until next month so I have plenty of time. They expect to get their Southern States branded seeds any day. I think their prices beat anything I can find on Internet seed stores, and they have a surprisingly good selection.

Susan, I generally do not plant the purple potatoes because the purple seed potatoes normally are not available here locally and it costs a lot (shipping is a killer) to order online and have them delivered.

If I want to grow Peruviana Purple, which is a fingerling type, I usually can find them at Central Market in Southlake. We usually go there about once a month, but between the holidays, everyone having the flu, etc, we have not been down to Central Market in about 2 months. Clearly a Central Market trip is long overdue.

My favorite purple potato is Purple Viking, which I grew several years back. It isn't just purple, but has red to hot pink streaks on it. It is the most beautiful potato I've ever seen.

With potatoes, the color of the flesh is not always the same as the color of the skin, so sometimes with some varieties of purple (or red or blue) potatoes, the flesh is white. With some varieties, the flesh is the same color as the skin. When you make mashed potatoes with purple-fleshed or blue-fleshed potatoes, you usually end up with violet or light blue mashed potatoes. When you make them from one of the red-fleshed potatoes, you end up with pink mashed potatoes.

To me, all potatoes pretty much taste the same. Good, fresh, straight-from-the-garden potatoes have an earthy flavor that is so unbelieveably good that it is hard for me to make myself eat store-bought potatoes after out home-grown potatoes have been devoured. When we give home-grown taters to someone who's never eaten home-grown potatoes, they want to know what we do to make it taste "like that". I tell them we do nothing....that all fresh potatoes taste like that, but that grocery store potatoes normally are held in cold storage so long that they do not, and that the flavor they admire so much is what is known as "fresh flavor". You will notice variation in the texture of different varieties--some are more dry, some are more waxy, but to me those are fairly subtle differences.

I'll link a photo of Purple Viking from the potatogarden website so you can she how beautiful it is. If ever there was a potato that is worth ordering, this would be it. It just isn't cost effective though.

Pam, I don't know of anyone who has started anything here yet, except for a couple of folks growing in heated greenhouses. It still is kinda early and the weather has been pretty cold still. My soil temps are in the 30s so I'm not getting in any sort of hurry to do anything. I usually don't start any seeds until Super Bowl Sunday except in an obviously hot winter like we had in 2012....and aren't having this year.

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: Purple Viking Potato

I could have sworn that Lowe's carried the purples last year (purple skin/flesh), but maybe I'm just hallucinating again!

Thanks for the response BTW.

Susan

Dawn, I think you're right about no one being in a hurry to get started. My broccoli crop is pretty much done. I want to get broccoli seedlings started so they are ready to plant out when it warms up.

Piricicaba was one of four broccoli varieties I trialed this fall. It did okay when the weather turned colder. A few Piricicaba plants bolted in late December while the other varieties did not. I've read that broccoli is sensitive to temperature changes so I'll be interested to see how Piricicaba does when planted in the spring.

Take care,
Pam

Susan, You may have seen purple potatoes in a local store. It wouldn't surprise me. In different years, the Lowe's and Home Depot near me (and even Wal-Mart one year) have had All-Blue and Adirondack Blue. With more and more interest in edible gardening these days, it wouldn't surprise me to see stores offer a bigger and better selection of seed potatoes.

Pam, I planted Piricicaba broccoli in the spring of 2011. I put it at the extreme west end of the veggie garden where it received afternoon shade from a large pecan tree that sits west of the garden.

It is hard to describe how bad 2011 was, but I'll try. At our house, we were over 100 degrees for about 80 days, including every single day in July and all but two days in August. In July and August our high temps weren't just over 100, they often were in the 108-115 degree range. By the end of August, we'd only had 12" of rain for the entire calendar year. It was a brutal year. I spent many days and some nights at fires. We had firefighters who experienced heat-related illnesses, including a young FF who had a heart attack, despite our best efforts to keep them well-hydrated and to keep them as cool as possible with mist, fans, cool wet towels, etc. It was the most miserable summer I've ever experienced and the garden plants suffered more than the people did. Even our cacti dehydrated, shriveled up and either went dormant or died. All the native cacti at our place that were in full sun died and did not come back in 2012. The ones that had some shade from adjacent woodland did come back this year. We'd never had any of the cactus plants die in drought before. On two different days when I was away at wildfires all day and wasn't home to turn on the sprinkler and literally water the chickens, we had several chickens die each day, even with plenty of drinking water available and fans running in their coops. I also left their coops open so they could free-range and seek out a cool shady spot in the woods. The high temp at our house on those two days was 115 and 116. It is impossible to describe how awful it was.

I stopped watering the garden in July and almost everything died. The Piricicaba? It somehow survived. It looked dead, but I didn't pull it out. In September or October, after the temperatures cooled down and rain began falling again, the Piricicaba regrew from the roots and we were able to harvest from it until December. By then it had been in the ground since March and was still going strong when a hard freeze killed it in the first or second week of December. I likely could have kept it going longer if I had covered it up with floating row cover, but I was tired and needed a break from the garden.

Any broccoli that could survive a summer like 2011 is worth growing and I'll keep Piricicaba in my growing rotation though I may not plant it every single year.

We have to be really careful with spring-planted broccoli here because our spring temperatures frequently see-saw from too cold to too hot back to too cold over and over again. Those see-sawing temperatures can give us buttonheads if the broccoli reaches a certain size and then is exposed to cool temps for as little as a week after it is that large. It will stall and go dormant, and then either give bolt or give you buttonheads. Because of the erratic temperature swings, I tend to plant broccoli a little later than recommended. When I plant it at the recommended time, it will bolt 90% of the time. If I wait a couple more weeks and then plant it, it rarely bolts. This is one of those things I learned here the hard way--from Mother Nature's School of Hard Knocks.

Dawn

Wal-Mart had small bags of blue seed potatoes last year. Last year was bad here - as bad as 2011 except no tornado. The blue potatoes made fingerlings which I think are harder to clean but mine were kind of rough and irregular which could have been the weather. They are good roasted as a treat but it is more rewarding digging up nice big brown ones. Blue potatoes would be a health food if I didn't use butter. I didn't like the color of them boiled - grey blue.

Dawn, Atwoods usually has at least six types of potatoes, and good prices. They are not rare types, but good types for our area. It looks like the closest store to you is Madill though and you probably don't go that way as often as you go south.

Carol,

Believe it or not I do make it over to Madill....approximately once every 7 years. We're in our 14th year here and we've been there twice. So, unless I can think of an excuse to go to Madill, it is likely I won't make it to Atwoods any time soon. It is hard to get too far from home at this time of year because of the grass fires. I usually only go a 'far' distance on a rainy day when a fire seems unlikely. Now, if a rainy day pops up soon, I might go to Madill, but there's no rain in our foreseeable future.

I like the seed potatoes I already have just fine. I've got the three types I always plant, and I'll likely pick up three more before planting time. So far, only Wal-Mart has had any in stock. Usually TSC gets them a week or two after Wal-Mart puts theirs on the shelves, and then Home Depot and Lowe's are right behind TSC.

Pretty soon, all the stores will have seed potatoes, asparagus, rhubarb, etc. They may already have them now. I haven't been in a store since about Tuesday and the stores here usually put out new gardening merchandise right before each weekend at this time of year.

Our Wal-Mart has had some bulbs in for several weeks now--glads, Dutch iris, bags of daylily roots, Cannas, etc.

Dawn

Dawn - I read your post about 2011. Heart-breaking. We have several close friends who live in Oklahoma so I was paying close attention to their weather that summer. It was painful to watch the weather because I knew my friends had to be struggling in that unbelievable heat - and the fires. Although I didn't visit that summer, I haven't forgotten that stretch of incredibly miserable weather.

I read Helen and Carol's discussion about places to get potatoes, and your statement that "Wal-Mart has had bulbs for several weeks now ..." - and the three of you got my attention.

You are officially in Zone 7. I'm Zone 8-ish. We had our first "semi hard" frost when temps hit 30 a few nights ago. Our Zone 8 farm supply stores are waiting for the bulk of their seed to arrive. They won't have onions and seed potatoes until February (although they used to get seed potatoes in March).

Have OK stores always had this stuff in January? Makes me wonder if the buyers/ suppliers watch the same climate forecasts we do, and make decisions to ship a few weeks earlier than they did a decade or so ago.
Just a thought. I'm in awe of the power and reach of WM.

Our weather was good today - a sunny day with temps in the 50s so I planted seeds for Piricicaba. I want to have transplants ready to plant out in March. ;-) Gotta love row cover!

Pam

Pam, I am in Zone 6A and about 40 miles from Joplin MO and a very different climate from where Dawn lives, but I have lived there before. My onion planting time is mid to late February, and I never know when to plant potatoes, but I think I usually plant toward the end of March and my last Spring avg. frost is around the 7th of April. I normally have a lot of Spring rain so I usually just try to have my ground ready early, then just plant when everything seems right.

Less than a week ago our low temperature was 9 degrees according to the Mesonet figure and today it was 62. This may happen several more times before Spring. Oklahoma weather is not for sissies. LOL

I am not nearly as programmed as Dawn, and I will get my potatoes whenever I happen to go to a town that has an Atwoods. I also grow in a limited space. My friends think I have a big garden, but it doesn't seem very big to me.

This year I had a tree blow over in a storm, so that has opened up a little more space to good sunlight but I still have tree roots there. Today we moved a raised bed over part of them and filled it with soil. I have one more bed to build and some additional leaves to move in then I will be ready for Spring. I haven't started seed yet but I will very soon.

Dawn can always put in her Spring things long before I can, but some years I can plant Summer crops earlier than she can. I just start looking at my normal last frost date, and when I can see 10 days out from it and it looks good, I go for it. That doesn't mean that I don't have to cover sometimes, but normally I cover for a predicted hail storm rather than cold, but not always. My house hasn't had much hail since I have lived here, but it comes really close LOTS of times. I have a lot of plastic flower pots and you would be surprised how fast I can place a pot and lay a brick on top when that weather radio tells me hail is coming. LOL

Dawn, I went THROUGH Madill a lot when I lived down there, but I was a bit closer. I don't think they will get much business from you. LOL

I have 2 onions left from last years crop and I haven't placed my Dixondale order yet. Usually they have them up here, but only certain ones, and the ones I order always look fresher. I haven't ordered because I can't decide how many I want to plant. So much for early planning.

Pam,

To some extent, the W-M stores here have always had the plants and bulbs that can be planted in cool weather on store shelves in January, but it used to be at the end of January. Now they start popping up just as soon as they can clear one aisle or half an aisle of Christmas merchandise. I usually notice them them in the stores shortly after New Year's Day. At first it is a couple of things. I think this year the first things they had were glads, daylily roots and cannas. Since cannas overwinter in the ground here, I'm not surprised to see them in the stores but I wouldn't plant cannas into cold wet ground when we still are having nighttime lows in the teens and twenties. There's a difference in how much cold an established canna can endure underground versus a new one that's not hardened off. Keep in mind, though, that I generally shop at Wal-Mart 20 miles to my south in Gainesville, TX, and less frequently at Wal-Mart 25 miles to my north in Ardmore, OK. It does make a bit of a difference. With most cool-season gardening products, the Gainesville store can be 2 to 4 weeks ahead of the Ardmore store. I suspect Gainesville's supplies are shipped more on a schedule for Dallas-Fort Worth and Ardmore's might be shipped more on a schedule similar to OKC's.

Already, the home depot in Gainesville has containerized fruit trees and they were unloading their seed displays and gardening stuff when Tim and I were in their on Tuesday buying a roll of field fencing for the new garden out back. I expect that if I pop in there today or tomorrow, they'll have everything out on the shelves like Wal-Mart does. I usually find about half my seed potatoes at Wal-Mart and the other half at Tractor Supply Company. TSC usually has some of the varieties recommended for OK, like Norkota, that other stores don't. Sometimes Lowe's or Home Depot has some potato varieties that are not on the list of recommended varieties, not that there's anything wrong with that. Pretty much any potato variety I've planted here has done well as long as I planted it early enough to beat the heat.

Sometimes you just have to ignore the zones. Sure, we are zone 7 but we are an erratic zone 7. We have occasional days when the high temps hit the 80s in February and March and the 90s in April, but still might have an occasional freezing night in late April or early May.

In 2007 we had pretty decent weather in winter and spring and a lot of folks in my area planted early. By early April I had tomato plants and pepper plants that were 1-2' tall and some of the tomato plants already had fruit. Then came the big cold spell that brought us snow, sleet and two weeks of very cold temperatures. As I recall, from around April 6th through the 17th or 18th we had a lot of freezing nights. Our Mesonet station mostly recorded temps right at or right above freezing, but I am in a microclimate that consistently goes a good bit colder in spring, and I think we were in the upper 20s and low 30s for most of that period. My tomatoes already were caged so there was no easy way to cover them. In the two days before the cold spell hit, I built temporary, hastily-thrown together hoop houses (and sorry-looking things they were too) over 7 raised beds that were 4' wide x 35' long, most of which were filled with tomato cages 6' tall. I put 5-gallon buckets of water in them to serve as solar collectors, putting one bucket in between every two tomato plants, and I just worked like a maniac to get a little hoop house over each individual bed. I used clear 4 mm and 6mm plastic, a boat tarp, any every other bit of plastic I could scrape up and saved all my plantings, but it took a ridiculous amount of effort. I also mulched them heavily with straw and hay right before I put the plastic covers over the beds.

Last year I planted my tomato plants at the exact same time as I had in 2007 and barely had to cover them with row cover at all--maybe on 2 or 3 nights, and it ended up not freezing or frosting on those nights but I had covered them out of an abundance of caution, and largely because of my memories of 2007 and 2008, which also was warm very early in the late but then had a killing freeze/hard frost the first week in May.

So, you never know what to expect here in January-May because anything can happen, and it usually does. June through August are easy to predict....hot, sunny, dry.

The small amount of offerings the stores have here in January quickly become a flood. Within a week or two of the first appearance of live plant material on the shelves, the display that had filled the endcap of a row that first week suddenly fills an aisle or two, with seed potatoes, onion sets, shallots, asparagus roots, bareroot strawberries, many more types of flower corms, tubers, roots, etc. Each week there's more and more. By late February, you'd think it was late April from the looks of the shelves in the gardening section.

Prior to 2009, I had to drive to the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex to find the early tomato plants from Bonnie Plants to put into containers in mid- to late-February. Then, in 2010 some of the stores closer to us---as close as Denton---got the plants in during the first week in February. Even for the D-FW area, that really is too early. Stores can make it work if they remember to take the plants inside at night if temps will drop low enough that floating row cover won't save them from freezing. The year that Cowboys Stadium hosted the Super Bowl, which I think was 2010, we had snow arrive after many stores had those early tomato plants and every single store left them outside in the snow and let them freeze. What were they thinking? If a retailer is going to carry warm-season transplants in February, they'd better be prepared to carry them inside if snow or sub-freezing temps are forecast. Some stores do use row covers, but the row covers won't protect them on bitterly cold nights. In 2011 the Wal-Mart in Gainesville had tiny tomato plants inside the store the last week in January, but I was worried they weren't big enough and would need to be hardened off so still drove to Grapevine or Southlake, TX, to get the larger Bonnie Plants tomatoes in 5" peat pots because they were larger and were hardened off.

It seems to me that ever since more and more people began veggie gardening around 2008-2009, the stores push harder and harder to get transplants into the stores earlier and earlier. I am not sure how good of an idea that is. It irritates me enough to see swimsuits in stores in January or February or winter coats in August, but plants just cannot be safely pushed too far ahead of their natural season. Experienced gardeners may buy a few things very early but they know how much cold remains in a typical year, and they know to shelter and protect early plantings. I always am concerned that new gardeners will think that if the plants are in the stores then they can be planted in the ground now, which isn't necessarily true.

On Monday or Tuesday when we were in Gainesville, not only did the W-M store have the bulbs and stuff inside, they had bundles of onion plants outside, and transplants of winter veggies and a few herbs that I wouldn't even think of putting in the ground now.

Our weather see-saws back and forth so much that sometimes it is hard to decide when it is safe to plant. Yesterday it was 67 degrees and sunny here and just as gorgeous of a January day as you dare hope for. Overnight it dropped to 26 degrees and we woke up to heavy fog at our house. I feel like I had a spring day followed by a winter night and early morning. Yet, today likely will be as nice as yesterday and then a cold front comes through and tomorrow our high temp will be 20 degrees lower than today's.

I'll use onions as an example of how variable planting dates can be. I have found onion plants in a store in Fort Worth as early as January 1st, bought some, brought them home and planted them and got a great harvest from them even though I put them in the ground a good 6 weeks early. In other years, I have planted between 2 and 6 weeks late because it was very cold here and very wet and I still have lost the onion plants to the combination of cold, wet soil and cold nighttime lows. It is impossible to do anything other than guess when to plant because you have no idea what the weather will do after you plant.

Right now is a good time to do soil prep, which is good for me, because I'm working on a new garden area out back of the barn-style garage. I have wanted to enlarge the veggie garden by making a new garden in this space since 2010, but 2010 was too snowy, wet and cold, and 2011 and 2012 were drought-plagued. You cannot break ground if it is as hard as concrete. So, having had recent rains but not in flooding amounts, the soil is soft enough to work but only ever-so-slightly damp, not wet. I hope to work out there every day this week. With no rain in the 7-day forecast, it seems likely I'll get my wish.

I also hope to get the big garden ready to plant this week. Then it is just a matter of watching the temperatures and deciding when it feels safe to plant.

I may start some seeds inside this week. I need to go a little more research and see what the models are showing for February. Yesterday someone on Wunderground mentioned models showing some very warm temperatures in February, which made my heart sing. I just wish that I could be sure that March wouldn't turn back freezing cold again.

Dawn

Dawn:
I�m about 30 miles east of you. This pic was taken this past Friday. It is in a greenhouse but it is not a heated house. Lettuce in the foreground, broccoli behind.

Ponderpaul,

Cool! It looks great.

I still have lettuce, kale, mustard and Swiss chard outside that we are cutting and eating weekly. It is in a cattle trough up on legs so the rabbits can't reach it, and we throw blankets on it whenever the temps are supposed to dip below freezing. We planted it into the trough sometime in August or September and have been eating it forever. I am pleased it has lasted this long because we have had some nights down in the 9-11 degree range.

I like your broccoli plants in the tubs, and think I may do something similar, though I might not get mine planted until later in the week. I still have tubs of soil-less mix in the greenhouse that held peppers and tomatoes until December, so I could yank those dead plants out, stir in some compost and organic fertilizer, and stick some plants in the containers and it really wouldn't take any time at all.

This week we are breaking ground for a new garden area out behind the barn/garage and putting up fencing around it since DH is off work the next two days, and I don't want to do anything that will distract him from the backbreaking work on our 'To Do'. I can plant in the greenhouse after he goes back to work on Wednesday.

They have all the cool-season crops in 9-packs at the Wal-Mart in Gainesville and I am so tempted to pick up a pack of broccoli plants and take a chance on getting an early start.

If the weather stays nice for a couple more weeks without turning bitterly cold, I'll likely lose my mind and plant all sorts of stuff. I might even start my tomato and pepper seeds on Wednesday instead of waiting until Super Bowl Sunday.

See there....give me 3 or 4 pretty, sunny, warm winter days in a row and I start thinking it is spring.

Dawn