Pam, You're welcome. I would be in hog heaven with all the organic matter rolling in....although maybe by the 3rd time in six months, hog heaven might not be as appealing as it once was. Could Pete take the tractor and pile up all that new mulchy stuff in long rows 2 or 3 feet tall? I suppose you'd have to let them sit a while so the salt water could leach out? Then you could pile soil on top of them, or compost, or mulch, or all three...and you'd have instant hugelkultur beds that might be available for planting for fall 2013 or spring 2014. If you build them tall enough, even after they break down, they'd be elevated enough to keep whatever is planted in them above the next storm surge line perhaps. I am cautious with above-ground hugelkutlur beds here because the copperheads and rattlers like to hide in them, but sometimes I build them below ground with only dirt on top above the grade level.. Sometimes I put them in eroded areas and just keep piling on composty stuff on top of them until eventually native plants pop up out of nowhere and I know the eroded gullies have healed. I just hate thinking of all that free mulch type material not being used. I worked in the garden all day, except I did come inside to eat lunch, and I am worn out. I bet the Mantis cultivator is more tired than I am though. It can rain all it wants tomorrow, because my work is done and my beds are ready for planting. I only uncovered one toad, as far as I know, and he wasn't hit by the tiller itself....he just kind of popped up in a raised bed when I was cultivating the soil nearby. As for Pruden's Purple? Absolutely add it! Ours were so superb last year that it made me wonder I don't plant that variety every year. Of course, I feel that way about any and every tomato that makes a return engagement to my garden after being absent for a year or two. I start asking why I ever dropped it to begin with. The answer always is the same---a lack of space. With the kind of late winter/early spring your part of the country has been having with one storm system after another rolling across the continental US headed your way, I think starting your tomatoes "late" was genius! Even if it was accidental genius. It is likely that by the time the weather calms down and your soil is dry enough for planting, your plants will be the perfect size. Sometimes I fret and worry about plants not being started on time, but it always works out just fine...leading me to believe that things tend to work out they way they were meant to work out. I experience a lot of potato and onion-planting frustration almost every year. I don't care if it hasn't rained in 3 to 6 months, rain will arrive the very day my Dixondale order arrives. I always try to get onions in the ground as much on time as possible, but the rain seems determined every year to make me plant them 2 or 3 weeks later than I should. I just try not to stress over it. Mine just finally went into the ground last week and the ground was a little wet, but not too wet. Now I am hoping that this weekend's rain doesn't delay potato planting too much. I have some planted, some chitting and some still in their bags. I figured this weekend I would get all the rest out and chitting on the sunporch (but, lol, not in the sun) while it pours down rain outside. With any luck at all, the amount of rain we receive won't be too bad and I'll be able to plant potatoes Monday or Tuesday. I don't see any numbers on the Weather Prediction Center's (new name for HPC) QPF that makes me think we'll have so much rain that I won't be able to plant. The longer I have had to wait, the more my seed potato stash has grown. I already had two reds, two russets and Yukon Gold. This week I added All Red, All Blue and Purple Majesty, so that's a total of 8 potato varieties. If I delay planting much more, I'll just keep adding more varieties....as if buying more seed potatoes somehow makes up for the fact that I haven't been able to plant them this week. I learned a lesson last year. We had a really wet fall and winter here, and I knew a huge rainstorm was approaching and I rushed, rushed, rushed to plant onions and potatoes ahead of the storm, and then we had 6" of rain in the next couple of weeks which was too much on top of all the other rain we'd already had, and many of my potatoes and onions rotted before they could grow. So, this year, the onions are in a really well-raised bed that drains well, and the potatoes are going into the raised beds on the highest point of land we have....but not until this rainy weekend is past. Rushing to beat the rain last year was a mistake, and I won't do it again. If the choice comes down to planting either onions or potatoes first, I always choose onions because their maturity is governed by daylength, over which we have no control. Potatoes, on the other hand, often give just as high of a yield if planted "late" as if planted on time---it just depends on when the soil temps reach the range where tubers stop forming. I have looked at the long-range forecasts from NCEP until I am crosseyed for the last month. I keep wanting them to change from 'hotter than normal' to 'cooler than normal'. If only wishing would make it so! I also watch the ENSO forecasts like a hawk, and at this time of the year you know that I do not even know why! It isn't like we suddenly will have an El Nino begin developing at this time of the year! lol I am laughing at myself. This summer, if we luck out and the ENSO forecast starts predicting that an El Nino will develop next winter, then at least I'd know to do all my soil prep for 2014 in autumn and to build those beds high because a wet year is likely. Looking at the ENSO update regularly only makes me crazy this year (and last year...and the year before....) because it only indicates more of what we're already having. Because NCEP offers us so little hope on the long-term forecast, I am going to plant like crazy in March, and put everything into the ground as early as the soil temperatures allow. At this point, we shouldn't have any nights get so cold that I cannot cover up plants to protect them. I feel like it will be just as important to beat the heat this spring as it was last spring, even though March this year is cooler than March was last year. I have a feeling that March will stay cool until one day, just as if someone flipped a switch, it suddenly will be too hot. I hate it when we go from too cold to too hot in one day! Dawn

Game bird, This is the first year any of us have tried Candy Apple Red since it is the first year Dixondale has offered them, so I am curious to see how they do. Mine are about the same size as yours, but I haven't harvested yet, so they might get a bit larger. Of course, nothing in my garden is a good indicator this year because the 12" of rain that fell in one day at the end of April absolutely halted all apparent growth for 4 weeks or longer, so my entire garden is stunted compared to last year. Still, as long they they taste good, that's what matters. I intend to try them again next year and will hope for a more typical spring growing season so I'll know how they perform under "average" conditions. When Ruth Stout was trying to interest people in mulch gardening, she was sort of out there on her own. I sort of thought of her as "a lone voice crying in the wilderness". Now, of course, she looks positively phophetic During her time, the gardening fad was all the chemicals developed after WWII---chemical pesticides, chemical fertilizers, etc. She persevered and stuck to her guns about soil improvement and mulching, and she was right. I think Jay must have fantastic soil too, plus he works very, very hard. I cannot imagine trying to grow everything he grows in his semi-desert conditions. We are in our 11th year here and the areas that I've been improving and mulching for that time frame do not even look like the soil I started with, and that is despite repeated droughts that have baked the ground to a concrete-hard consistency over and over and over again. Except for the first 2 or 3 years when I amended heavily, all I've done is mulch, mulch, mulch. The difference in the soil is amazing. The formerly red clay that was so hard and sticky that you couldn't even break it up with a fork or mattock is now a milk chocolate brown colored sandy loam and has improved beyond my wildest dreams. Even in the pathways where I routinely mulch, the soil is so different from what we started with. Nowadays, I only improve soil by adding amendments the first year that I break up new ground. After that, it is all just stuff that's layered on top of the ground as mulch and time, Mother Nature and the earthworms do the rest. When we moved here, we had a tremendous issue with Cotton Root Rot, a soil-borne disease that affects thousands of different plants and folks who live here told me I'd never be able to overcome it and grow what I wanted to grow. After the first three years of soil amending, though, the CRR has never reared its ugly head again and I plant what I want in that soil, including many plants that you "cannot" grow if you have CRR. So, I think well-amended and well-enriched soil can overcome almost anything. Like you with the wood chips, I find that no matter how much mulch I put out, pile up and spread around, it is never enough and I always want more. We have to remember that "heat eats compost" and here in OK, it gobbles it up and breaks it down almost more quickly than we can add it. So, mulching is just a great way to keep replenishing what is being used up, and it keeps the soil so much cooler underneath the mulch which helps the plants too. Wheelbarrow time will build muscles and help give you a tan! Of course, the front end loaded was a mulch more efficient way to do it. Jay, I can relate! When the drought of 2005-2006 finally broke and we had a simply luscious summertime late afternoon thunderstorm, Tim and I sat out on the covered patio for 2 or 3 hours and watching it rain and listened to the thunder and watching the lightning. We also watched the frogs come out of "hiding" and play all over the yard and in the puddles. Later on, we spoke to several different neighbors and discovered they all were doing pretty much the same thing....watching the rain and the frogs. We all joked that it doesn't take much to entertain us here in Love County, but I'm telling you, we were so starved for rain at that point that nothing was more important than seeing that rain fall. I hope you get to enjoy every minute of the rain and hope it is falling at your mom's place too. I'm looking forward to hearing about your onion results. Except for being too dry, you've probably had the most "typical" or "average" weather of all of us. I don't know what the rain has done to everyone else's onions, but it almost killed mine. I was just looking at the garden earlier this week and marveling at how good it looks, considering that I thought the flooding rains might kill everything in it. I hope you're out playing or working in the rain, or at least spent some time sitting on the porch with a cup of coffee enjoying that strange phenomenon of liquid falling from the sky! Dawn

Pam, I do start a lot of seedlings and, oddly, I don't really have a formal plan. One day my mind will just say "you'd better start the _____ seeds now (fill in the blank with whatever it is that day or week)" and so I do it. Some how it all works out. My indoor light shelf in the spare room holds 12-15 flats depending on the size of the flats. When I want to move plants out of the spare room, they can go to the unheated greenhouse, garage, potting shed, porch or sunroom. Or onto tables on the patio, but I cover those with bird netting if left out 24/7 so that possums and other night-roaming creatures don't climb up onto the tables and eat the plants. The general path the plants travel is from spare room light shelf to greenhouse (which is covered year-round with 50% shade cloth) to shaded patio to tables in full sun to the garden. I don't keep a formal list and say "okay, that's a week in the greenhouse, now outdoors to harden off more in shade.....I just wing it. Somehow it works. My system works because I've done it so long that it is just automatic and I don't even think about it. My subconscious mind must keep track of things and just tell my conscious mind what to do. Right now it is saying 'OK, your cucumbers are up, it is time to start seeds of watermelons', so tomorrow I probably will. Our weather has been crazy and I've felt like Alice in Garden Wonderland because everything is so mixed up. We have had warm season reseeding annuals sprout at the same time as cool-season reseeding annuals, which is insane. Usually the warm-season ones don't start sprouting until the cool-season ones already are in bloom. That's just one example of the craziness. Another is that the asparagus starting producing harvestable shoots in January. January! Normally that mostly happens in mid- to late-March, though a warm spell in late February occasionally starts some of the asparagus early. And, it was backwards....usually the purple asparagus is earlier and the green asparagus is later, and this year it was the opposite. This totally defies logic and I don't understand why it happened. And, now the asparagus is finishing up far too early, but we have harvested it for about as many weeks as we do in a normal year---just that the harvest started much earlier than usual. The broccoli has headed up and I'll begin harvesting any day now. The cabbage is heading up, but it takes longer to form heads so it will be a while yet. The collards are huge. I've been having trouble keeping up with the timely harvesting of lettuce, spinach, kale and collards because the heat has made them enlarge abnormally quickly. The early tomatoes in pots have produced two ripe red tomatoes so far, and several more are turning. Usually the first tomatoes are at the end of April. The lettuce got really big really quick and some of it already is trying to bolt, which I blame on a few days with 88-degree highs. However, I have plenty more lettuce plants in flats to plug into bare spots in the garden, so I can yank out some of the lettuce that is trying to bolt. I usually plant leaf, iceberg and romaine for early lettuce and Summer Crisp types for later season lettuce, so none of my SummerCrisp types have gone into the ground yet, though some will be companion-planted with tomatoes tomorrow. I was going to do that today, but it was cool and rainy so I stayed inside and potted up small peppers into larger paper cups. The onions also have loved the early warmth and are the size now that they usually are in mid- to late-May, making me think my little pepper plants are going to be lost in there amongst the gigantic onions when I finally start plugging them into that bed. This week's cooler, wetter weather is a blessing in disguise as it enabled some angry, uncomfortably warm, stalled snap pea plants to relax, grow more and bloom. I was starting to worry the hot weather would get them before they could produce peas. My bush bean plants aren't that old or big, but already have buds and will flower any day now. I don't think we've ever harvested bush beans in April, but it looks like we will this year. I really feel like I fell down the rabbithole and woke up in somebody else's garden. Since late January, I have felt like the garden is running straight ahead, pell mell, right into summer and I am running behind it trying to catch up with it. I just hope all the early warmth isn't a sign of a terribly hot summer to come. I worry that the transition from El Nino to La Nina will be very quick while I'd prefer a slow transition, or even better, a transition from El Nino to neutral conditions instead. Of course, we'll get whatever we get, and we'll just deal with it. All the early warmth didn't mean we escaped late cold nights, but we certainly had fewer late cold nights than we do most years. I never really feel safe until around May 4th (because May 4th is the latest late frost we've had here). Y'all must have gotten out of Ft. Worth just in the nick of time as a horrible hail storm, with hail stones up to the size of softballs (though most of the big ones were "only" golf ball to tennis ball sized) blew through a couple of days ago and damaged northern parts of the DFW meteroplex. It was awful and the video is incredible. One similar storm came very close to us, but sort of went around us and hailed on one county north of us and another northeast of us. As a gardener, hail is my worst weather fear. Dawn

Coyotes are everywhere. I've even seen photos taken of them roaming the streets of New York City and Chicago. They are an excellent example of a type of wildlife that can adapt to almost any environment. I've seen a lot of them dead beside the roads and highways lately, likely struck by vehicles as they were attempting to cross roads in the darkness. T he coyote population here in our area is huge this year. The problem with having a large population is that during the winter they start to run out of food, becoming increasingly desperate and increasingly bold. Yesterday morning I couldn't let our chickens out to free-range until well after 9 a.m. because I could hear coyotes howling from fairly close by. I usually let them out around 7:30 or 8:00 a.m. in the winter. The coyotes probably weren't on our property but likely were on the property just west of us that separates us from the Red River, and we have roughly 1000' feet between our house and our west property line, so it isn't that I thought they'd come dashing out of the woods and grab a chicken, but I just wanted to be careful in case they decided to come back east again. I don't know if I've ever heard them yipping and howling like that well after sunrise on a winter's day. However, sometimes we see them hunting in the middle of the day in winter, though they normally are nocturnal. All the bunnies long ago disappeared, which also is common in years when the coyote population is at a high point. Hazel, I love what you would do with your lottery winnings. Whenever we go back to Texas to visit family, I'm shocked by how rapidly the beautiful rural countryside between us and them is being transformed into housing subdivisions and shopping centers. I always complain to Tim that the developers won't be happy until they've paved over every square inch of the once-rural countryside. One reason we came so far north when we were looking for land to buy in a rural area is that we wanted to get far enough away from the D-FW metro area that the development couldn't catch up with us. I think eventually it still will, but I think our specific neighborhood will stay largely rural for another decade or two. The difference in Slug-Go and Slug-Go Plus is that Slug-Go contains the active ingredient iron phosphate, which is what kills the slugs and snails. Many of us who used it quickly learned it also killed pill bugs and sow bugs. Because there was widespread online discussion about using Slug-Go to kill pill bugs and sow bugs, the folks who make Slug-Go then came up with an improved product that they believed would be even more effective on pills, sow bugs and cutworms as well as on snails and slugs. They did it by adding Spinosad to the iron phosphate, giving us Slug-Go Plus. Both products work well for me. I do think Slug-Go Plus might be a little more effective, but when I can't find it, I'm perfectly happy with the original Slug-Go. *Edited to add this: I understand your frustration with the utility room. It is frustrating when you can't get things done that are on your To Do list. It also is very irritating when new cabinets arrive broken already. We have been trying forever to add cabinets to our utility room (repurposed old kitchen cabinets painted to match the new kitchen cabinets). This past weekend we were certain we'd get it done. And we would have, except.....President Trump signed that Executive Order about immigration. Chaos broke out at airports. Tim got called in to work on Saturday afternoon because of the protests (peaceful ones) and worked for about 15 or 16 hours running the command post at DFW Airport. Once he got home Sunday morning, he needed to sleep. When he woke up, he would have gone straight to work on installing those cabinets, but he'd only slept for maybe 4 hours and I wanted him to take it easy for the rest of the day. So, this coming Saturday, we'll try again. One of these weekends we'll get it done. His new workload is impossibly heavy and I don't see that ever changing until he retires. He's got three trips scheduled in February, so I feel like anything that's on our To Do list that absolutely, positively must be done needs to be done this coming weekend, or postponed until at least March. While he's traveling so much, I'll be focusing on planting the cool-season crops, so at least I won't be trying to cram planting season/household DIY projects into the same time frame. I long ago gave up on the concept of having pretty flower beds around the house. Between the deer, the rabbits and the free-ranging chickens, nothing but the toughest shrubs survive. So, any flowers I want to grow have to be within the fenced vegetable garden spaces. I'm not happy about it, but even if we didn't have free-ranging chickens, the rabbits and deer would eat everything anyway. I learned that the hard way our first few years here.