Ahh - New plant disease. LOL I almost did the same thing, but not with peppers. I have a newly planted salad bed that I stuck a few of my transplants into and planted seed in the rest. A few days later, I could see little green things all over it. Well some of the lettuces had started to come up and were teeny, tiny, but the rest was something blowing in from the neighbors tree. It was bright green and in tiny little pieces. Thanks for the pepper info. I was hoping that they would be a small plant, but was afraid they would not be. I think there are going to be some crowded plants in my garden this year. I wish seed companies would put the size of the fruit or other edible part of the plant AND the 'average' size of the plant on seed packages. It would certainly make planning easier.....and I HATE, HATE, HATE generic seed packages. If it weren't for the internet we probably wouldn't know what we were planting. LOL Actually I don't mind the Thompson and Morgan method of a generic package inside the 'picture pack'. I think the foil pack may also protect for a little longer. It looks like a good business decision to me since you don't have to use colored and expensive printing to print packs for things that never make it to the shelf. Just stuff the pack as your inventory needs require. With the date stamped on the inside pack only, you could use the same outside pack for years, but only pay printing costs for the ones you really sell or display. I think maybe the Brits got it right on that one. LOL I had two tomato plants outside last night. One was in a container and covered with a milk jug with the cap off and the bottom cut out. I slid it under a glass top table for the night, and the other was in the center of a huge container with a window across the top. The window didn't cover the top of the pot, but did help to shield the plant a little. Everything here looks good but it still feels cool at 48 degrees. I need to go pull my 'tomato wagons' out into the sun. Just as I was typing this the temp jumped to 50 so I guess the peppers get to come out also. We're walking, walking, walking. I need to go move a few more from their tiny blocks to a pot. I'm almost done with that task, but I am getting some pepper seed in the mail this week and I know I will have to plant a few of those. Do I need them? No, of course not, but they will be pretty in the garden. LOL

G.M., Y'all may have gotten colder than us, but when I checked the mesonet a 4 a.m., y'all were 2 degrees warmer at that time. (Of course, my yard never matches what our mesonet station records and yours may not match what your mesonet station records.) I thought it was only me who was getting slower and slower in the cold weather (and less likely to go out into it), so maybe it is related to the fact that every year we're a year older than the year before. LOL I think that, with the exception of those few days where the high hit the upper 80s and the low stayed in the 60s, we are having a cool spring and very cool nights. A lot of the plants are "slower" this year, and it may be a combination of the cooler nights and the relative winter dryness followed by drenching rains. When I was younger, I could be outside from sunup to sundown in any temperature and be perfectly comfortable and perfectly happy. Now, though, I prefer moderate temperatures--say above 50 and below 95. I don't like going out when it is too cold in the morning or too hot during the heat of the day. And I have noticed as I get older that the ankles, knees, hips and other joints get a bit more achey than they used to. Since DH just turned 50 and I will turn 50 next year, we've been joking that "60 is the new 30". BUT, I don't think my body is going to feel anywhere near as good at 60 as it did at 30 (or even at 40 or 45). LOL On the other hand, gardening is great exercise and if I wasn't doing it, I probably would have more aches and pains. I did see your photo of the photinias and think they make a great screening plant. Unfortunately you sometimes see them planted 2' apart and 3' from the exterior wall of a house, and they just aren't going to be manageable there. I had photinias in a row alongside our driveway in Fort Worth where they did work perfectly to separate our yard from our neighbor's yard. I only had them about 6' apart and had to do a lot of pruning, but there weren't any overhead lines there, so I pruned them up tree form. I liked them OK, but they are massively overused there and that type of monoculture leads to disease issues. The red-tip photinia shrubs have lots of trouble in the D-FW metroplex with a fugal disease called entomosporium leaf spot, which became an issue there in I guess the early to mid 1990s, if my memory is correct. I moved all my plants outside today and they are sunbathing. I hope I don't have to more them back onto the screened-in porch one more time. Dawn

Jay, Y'all have the same fire danger today too. I heard about your fire danger on our local National Weather Service radio broadcast from Ardmore, about 25 miles north of us. It seemed odd to me that they were mentioning fire danger from an area geographically so far from us, but I figured it was because they needed to fill "air time" since you can't say much about "sunny, clear, and perfect weather again today. Chance of severe weather: zero percent". For a long time, we were in no man's land here too. When we first moved here in 1999, there was NO internet service available, the local TV stations were very hard to pick up even with a large antenna, and cell phone service was pathetic. We pretty much had to walk down to the road (300' from the house) to use our cell phones. I felt like we'd moved to the land that time forgot. Eventually, all three improved but it has taken years. Our then 14-year-old son wouldn't have survived the move to rural Love County without the DirectPC and DirectTV satellites we used to get internet service and TV reception. When we lived in Fort Worth, I always felt our weather forecasts were pretty accurate. Then, we moved here and I was just bewildered by how far off the forecasters could be. I don't necessarily blame the forecasters for that....we are in a very, very low-lying microclimate that's hard to forecast. So, through careful observation, I have learned that frosts occur here at our low-lying elevation even when they are not occurring in Marietta. I learned that our low temps here by the river could routinely go 10 degrees lower than the forecast in Jan.-April although that's not true the rest of the year, and the low temps have gone as low as 18 degrees below the forecast. (It was a shock to have an overnight low forecast of 50 degrees, and to go out in the morning and have frozen, dead tomato plants and a hard freeze.) In spring, nowadays I look at the overnight low and instantly assume we could go 10 degrees colder at a minimum and cover plants accordingly. I'm still having trouble understanding the rainfall. Based on 30-year averages, we should get 38" of rain here a year. I did a lot of research before we moved here, and found "average rainfall" data ranging from 38 to 48". However, most years we are thrilled to get 34", and have had several years when the rainfall was between 18" and 23". I suspect that, if they recalculate the 30-year averages at the end of the first decade of the 2000s, our "average" rainfall will drop from 38" to about 34". I hate that the wind is beating up your plants. We had those hot, drying winds last May in combination with the drought but I think the winds ended here in June and didn't last all summer. However, almost no rain fell. And, stink bugs which have never been a big problem here before, arrived in May of last year and I fought them all year long. I did have stink bugs and leaf-footed bugs in 2007, late in the year (August, I think), but not in the quantities that arrived last year in May. I also didn't understand how much of a "drought pocket" we were in here. It doesn't matter where rain is on the radar, it tends to go either west of us or east of us. It is like the rain reaches the Love County border and "can't" cross over the county line. It has taken me years to understand the drought patterns. Finally, this year a Noble Foundation researcher said that no matter how much rain falls, it only takes us three weeks of "no rain" here to fall back into a drought pattern. That backed up what I had finally figured out on my own. Of course, this year has been a rainy year so far, and I am grateful for the rain. I know from experience here, though, that heavy spring rainfall is usually followed by almost zero summer rainfall, so I am dreading the summer months before they even arrive. I had a lot more trouble with wind in the early years here. Now I have a lot more small trees, shrubs and flowers (not close enough to shade my veggies) that help serve as a wind break. on the west side, but can't do much with the south side because the driveway is there. I do grow vines on the garden fence, and once they attain some height, they help break the wind some too. My tomato and pepper plants are deliriously happy this week. Actually, they weren't totally thrilled at first. The first couple of days they had a little wilting by about 1 p.m. because they'd had mostly cloudy skies and almost no sun for over two weeks. They've adjusted though. The tomato plants are blooming and setting fruit. The pepper plants have just begun blooming. My largest unripe tomato is about the size of a tennis ball and we've already harvested some ripe tomatoes from container plants that I transplanted into large pots in February. I should start having ripe fruit from plants in the ground any time now because we have quite a few green ones. Of course, in the same way that a watched pot never boils, a watched green tomato doesn't turn red, so I am trying to ignore them and not obsess over when they are going to ripen. After three hard days in the garden, I am slowly regaining some control and it is starting to look like my garden again. By the end of the week, I think I'll be pretty happy with it overall. The mosquitoes, though, are the size of small aircraft. Dawn

Bumping this down