Paula, I'm glad you got them all picked. I'm betting you have a frost this morning too. It was so cold by the time I went to bed last night that I wondered if I'd wake up to an unexpected frost here this morning and you can't go much further south than I am and still be in OK. So far, it isn't frosty out there, but we're at 42 degrees and they said 44....and it's over an hour until sunrise so we could drop another degree or two just before the sun comes up.....brrrr! I do think the high humidity just makes it worst for frost, doesn't it? If this were a dry, droughty year there might not be enough moisture in the air to form frost, but it certainly is not dry or droughty. Our humidity right here right now is 97%. Not only is it cozy houseshoe time, but flannel PJ time and also time to drag out the jackets and fleece-lined boots. I am SO not ready for cold weather, but we're going to have it anyway. Those deer hunters and their "deer camps" and cold weather! I am glad someone is enjoying the 'cool' weather. LOL George, Oh no! I tried to post warnings last night as soon as I saw them, but it was already late and dark and probably not as useful as it would have been....I guess we should have been watching the weather earlier in the day. I think we all still were reeling from the heavy rain and weren't real focused on "frost". Whatever plants managed to survive (and I hope most if not all did survive) Friday night are still in trouble for Sat. night, so watch your forecast closely. When I looked at the Tulsa forecast for tonight, it said "35 degrees" and that is likely to be a problem for your plants. They've got a Freeze Warning for the OK panhandle and adjacent parts of TX and KS, and a Freeze Watch for several counties in NW OK. I think Saturday night is going to be a bad night for everyone in zone 6 in OK and the freezing conditions may dip down into parts of zone 7. It is WAY too early for this. Keep us posted. Maybe y'all had just enough light wind to protect everything, or maybe it is "just a touch" of frost and not a hard killing frost. The forecast for those of you in northern OK has me so spooked I may pick all my tomatoes and peppers and green beans and cukes today....just in case. Remember, George, you and I both have experienced the shock of having a 50-degree forecast low turn into the lower 30s and dead plants. Dawn

merrybookwyrm, You still have to be pretty tough, independent and determined to live out there around Orr because it is just so remote. Even with modern-day vehicles, it can take police, firefighters and medics a long time to reach you out there in the boondocks even without flooding or road washouts which just compound an already difficult situation. Western Love County, including Orr, and the adjacent portions of Carter and Jefferson County were hit really hard by this last storm. They got a lot more rain and flooding out there than we had here in southcentral Love County. There's a point where you even stop having cell phone service once you get out there, and where the fire and police radios cut in and out and have so much static that they are pretty much unusable for communication. In this day and age, it is shocking to me that there's still areas that are not so remote, mileage-wise, but that still are far enough out there that communication is spotty. Carol, I love the sunshine and it helps the garden a lot, but the heat and heat index numbers kinda take the fun out of it. We gardeners and our gardens are going to be roasting hot this week which will help plant growth but make life miserable otherwise. I've been so busy with other things, or flooded out of the garden, that I am so far behind on harvesting and canning that it isn't even funny. Today I'm going to sort, wash and freeze about 10-15 gallons of tomatoes that I can use later on to make salsa. I just don't have time to make it this week. I've already got that many frozen, so they're really piling up and still there's tomatoes piled up on every flat surface in the house. I am more behind than usual. Partly it is because of the peppers. I have hot peppers, onions, garlic, tomatoes, etc. for making salsa, but the sweet peppers are so far behind it isn't even funny. If I picked every sweet bell that is even half-sized, I might not get enough for one batch of Annie's Salsa. I did hold the pepper plants in cups forever during the May flooding before finally getting them planted and they are way behind everything else. The jalapenos were quicker to set fruit and start making up for lost time but the sweet bells and poblano plants are just sitting there. Apparently 33+" of rain in the last 7 weeks does not impress them at all. I've been trying to just stay caught up on making plum jelly, but last week I didn't have time to make jelly so I just extracted the juice and froze it. I can make jelly any time, but I don't like the fact that I'm stockpiling everything in the freezer. I wanted to have all the plums finished before the peaches began to ripen, and we're only 2-3 days away from the first peach harvest (if I can keep the birds out of them, which seems like a losing battle). I'm hoping to pick a day later in the week, maybe on Wed or Thurs, where I block out any and every other thing and just focus on thawing that plum juice and making all the jelly. Oh, and I have more plums to harvest sometime today. It is cloudy and there's been rain (and flash-flooding) to our southeast. The last thing any part of this region needs today is more rain. Lake Texoma's rise has slowed dramatically in the last day, so I am not sure its crest will even match the record crest that happened around June 1st. The Red River is falling fast, and everyone here is relieved by that. I never got okra, cucumbers, winter squash or purple hull peas planted, and I need to do it now or not do it at all, but I'm so distracted by trying to deal with the tomato and fruit harvest that I don't know if I'll do it. I might wait and see how the watermelons and muskmelons I planted before last week's heavy rain/flooding do. If they don't survive or quickly become diseased in the waterlogged soil, I might not bother planting anything else. At least all the cracks in the ground healed up, though I am sure the silty ones on the surface will return soon. Dawn

There's nothing wrong with that. I do that sort of freezing for later a lot at peak tomato harvest, which for me is usually June-July and peak fruit harvest, which is about the same time frame. I often have a freeze full of stuff in fall that I do go back and can eventually, or I use it for cooking. This year I kept up on the fresh preserving fairly well though. And, so course, some things like cucumbers need to be canned immediately so I always do them first even if it means freezing fruit and tomatoes for later. I did a huge amount of food preservation pretty much daily in June and July, mostly canning but also quite a bit of freezing and fermentation. When I stopped watering the garden and walked away from it in August or whenever it was, I didn't know if it would produce anything else. We were so hot and so dry, and at that point it doesn't matter how much it rained in May or June because that rain is long ago all used up And, I wasn't sure how the kitchen remodel would go and if I'd have a usable kitchen in time to do any fall food preservation either. Thankfully, the kitchen is almost done now, so I can use it for food preservation. Surprisingly, the garden is still a huge jungle and has produced a lot since the weather cooled down some earlier in the fall and rain began falling again. The plants don't look great as it still is too dry and they remain wilted most of the time, but they are productive which is what matters. And it is weedy, but snakes hide in weeds, so once I lose control of the weeds, I cannot do major weeding to get rid of them until after we freeze. Of course, it still hasn't rained enough, and it has stayed hot too long but the heat has been good for the garden in the sense that it remains in production. I harvested a ton of stuff about 2 weeks ago and have been preserving like crazy. I've also continued to harvest occasionally since then. The latest things I've made are pepper vinegar and a currently fermenting pepper mash that eventually will be made into hot sauce. I need to harvest again before the weekend frost/freeze, as there's still a lot of peppers I left in there to continue to grow and size up. When I walked through the garden earlier this morning, I made a list of things to harvest: watermelons, winter squash, birdhouse gourds, about 10 kinds of peppers, fennel, dill, lima beans and southern peas. There's green tomatoes that I may harvest on Friday, or I may just cover them up overnight. There's Laura Bush petunias that are newly sprouted volunteers about 4 weeks ago and about to bloom. Those usually can handle temperatures down to at least 20 degrees, so I'll work around them when cleaning up. I'd like to start cleaning out beds, but every bed has blooming plants in it and the garden still is full of butterflies and bees. So, I'll be patient and wait for it all to freeze. I really don't want to deny the bees and butterflies any of the flowers that remain even if it messes up my own timetable for garden cleanup. No matter what we do, I never have enough room to store everything when harvested, so it piles up in bowls and buckets all over the walk-in pantry, laundry room, kitchen and breakfast room. We have been working on fixing that. We put in a tall cabinet type pantry with pull-out drawers in the kitchen for normal pantry type food storage so I now can use the walk-in pantry only for produce and for home-preserved foods. I think that will help a lot. We need to reconfigure the interior of the walk-in pantry,move some shelves around, etc. (we moved the door to that pantry from the kitchen to the breakfast room), improve the lighting in it, etc. but that won't be hard or take long. Tim still has been working 6 days a week so we haven't worked on much of anything lately that requires power tools and his expertise. I cannot imagine what it would be like to be having to harvest produce and hang on to it for a couple of days before going to market. You're going to need a food storage facility bigger than your camper, Kim! Hazel, Are you good about watering indoor plants? If so, almost anything would work in a hanging planter. If you aren't really good about watering, then you could put something like a succulent in the hanging planter. Succulents like to stay on the dry side and don't need a lot of water. Just be sure you hang it in a place that has enough natural light. Dawn

I live in Florida and am now experiencing the same nightmare as this person did. I bought two brand new houses by the same builder who put in KitchenAid appliances. Not only has my own Kitchenaid Frig failed but also my rental next door. A friend who bought from the same builder has so far had a failed dishwasher and Frig. I will agree with you that Kitchenaid warranty center is just worthless as all they do is recite a script of how sorry they are the appliance is broken and we will send a tech out to fix...in a week. But their only authorized repair company Flamingo Appliance repair must hire some real special people because the same tech kept calling me claiming he would not come out because ticket information from Kitchenaid was missing. Or I had to be there to pay him. This went on for two weeks with first a call to worthless Kitchenaid always on hold or disconnected service where another ticket would be created and Flamingo would be dispatched out to repair. Second then I would get a call from their brain dead tech who refused to listen to me as the customer and just kept repeating he would not come out because the ticket did not contain who would pay for it. By my fourth call back to Kitchenaid I asked that they give me a supervisor to escalate the issue with Flamingo and the warranty person said "No all we can do is create a new ticket". Terrible customer service on both sides. The tech finally shows up after we sent them a note on FB and claimed the filtered water and ice maker issue was resolved. Only to find out 30 minutes it was not and again the scramble with Flamingo to contact the tech to go back to the house to resolve. Flamingo said well all we can do "is schedule another visit" if he does not call us. Maddening and terrible service.