Keep the faith.It may be coming your way. Has rained for 2 days here in Iowa.Got about 3 1/2 inches. And we was very dry also.

I can't believe this is confusing to people. All you have to have is a little common sense. It does not matter what people call them in different parts of the country. They are the same. They are light green Lima beans when picked fresh, shelled and cooked. They are grayish/white after being dried for you to cook. However, you can also buy them canned where they are cooked for you after they are dried - and these are sometimes incorrectly called Lima beans even though they are no longer green. Technically you can call either one by either name. It's a cultural thing.

I think both of my dogs just got over that same thing. First my 2 year old Rat Terrier got it and the vet put him on antibiotics. He no sooner finished the meds and my year old Min Pin came down with it. She did the antibiotics thing too, and now I think they are both over it! At least I hope so. I feel bad for them when I hear that coughing. It almost sounds like they have something caught in their throats.

Carol, You know, all the oxhearts I've ever grown have the wilty gene and look like crap half the time. I'm forever looking at them and thinking "what in the world is wrong with you?" and then I realize it is an oxheart and wilty looking, wimpy looking foliage is normal for it. If that's the kind of wilty look it has to it, that's normal. Maybe this plant is just slower than the others and will shape up soon. My Kim's Civil War Oxheart plants looked worse than anything else in the garden until one day they just shaped up and got over it. I don't know if they had a root issue or whatever, but finally they look about as good as anything else. I planted too much cabbage this year (specifically because I wanted to make a lot of sauerkraut) and I finally have harvested the last of the cabbage and my long cabbage shredding/sauerkraut making nightmare is going to end today. I'm glad I have made it, and I've used several recipes so we have sauerkraut flavor options, but I'll be happy to not look at another head of cabbage for a few months after I finish making sauerkraut today. I love cabbage, but too much of it is still too much. My front garden is in really great shape, other than the diseases that accompany constant wetness, but the back garden is way behind. It has been too wet to plant for virtually all of May and now, with yesterday's deluge, I don't know when I'll get it planted. I suppose it will be pretty much a fall garden, other than the sweet corn that is tasseling back there now, because by the time I get it planted, nothing in it is going to produce much of anything until late summer or early autumn. I suspect this always will be an issue in the back garden in wet years until we finally get raised, vole-proof beds built back there. I do not have all my summer things in either, and I blame it on the rain. I only have watermelons planted in the front garden because I had a lot of Sugar Baby volunteers sprouting in one bed where I grew them last year, so I dug them up and transplanted them to another bed at the low north end of the garden. Hopefully they'll survive the rain and runoff from yesterday. I still have 5 or 6 more icebox melon varieties to get planted somewhere, somehow. The okra I had planted died so I have to replant it, and I'm way behind on planting melons and winter squash. I did notice that a commercial farm near Thackerville that always grows southern peas and muskmelons doesn't have theirs in yet either, undoubtedly due to the excessively wet May and now June weather, so at least I'm not any further behind than they are. As soon as this infernal rain stops (we had light to very light rain most of the night), which might be tomorrow, I am going to plant a lot of melon, okra and winter squash seeds in beds where onions have been harvested (I already have lima beans and southern peas in some of that space) and where I just yanked out bush beans on Wednesday as they were nearing the end of their productive period and had developed a major spider mite infestation. I probably could have left the bush beans a couple more weeks if it were not for the spider mites, but the pole beans are blooming now, which made it easier to let go of the old bush bean plans. I've been harvesting from them for 6 or 7 weeks, so they were looking pretty tired and worn out too. Oh, and since I just harvested the last dozen or so cabbage plants, there's all that space to fill up too. In wet years, I stay so behind on planting that it seems like the line between planting the spring and fall garden has become really blurred and I feel like I plant nonstop all spring and summer long as the wet spots finally dry out. I like having rainfall, of course, and never really am hoping for drought, but it sure is easier to get the planting done when the garden isn't ankle deep in water. Yesterday the garden was more like knee deep in runoff at the worst point and I dread seeing it this morning. Our usually quiet little tame 3-season creek usually is about 6 to 8' wide in a good year and has water maybe 2-4' deep in the summer months, except in drought years when it completely dries up. Late yesterday afternoon when I went out in light rain to check it after the heavier rain had fallen, it was a good 10-12' deep, almost out of its banks, and 30-40' wide with heavy runoff. It was crazy. If a person had fallen in that creek, I believe they would have been swept away and unlikely to survive. It is not often our creek looks like a river, but it did yesterday. Our neighbor's huge, steel water gap fencing that goes across the creek on their side of the road to allow water to flow out at times like this but to keep the cattle in was lifted up horizontally by the heavy runoff, and an elephant likely could have walked under it if not for the flooding. I don't think they had any cattle or horses in that field yesterday (great planning on their part) and I was glad to see that because livestock on the wrong side of the creek would have been trapped and unable to go anywhere else. In a lot of ways, yesterday's runoff was worse, with only 3-4" of rain falling in a couple of hours, than last year's 12" that fell over a longer period of time in one day in May and that did horrific flooding. At least it was out here in the country. I don't know if they had damage in town like we have here. Very close friends of ours who live a couple of miles north of us on the same road have a real mess today. Tim was talking to one of them on the phone yesterday, telling him "your driveway is gone, I don't know if Amber will even be able to get her vehicle out of your driveway, which is gone". He repeated the phrase "driveway is just gone" several times. After he got off the phone, I asked how gone it was, and he said 'it is all gone'. I cannot imagine this, as the county road guys had worked with them this spring to try to correct some long-standing drainage issues on the country right-of-way where our friends' driveway repeatedly gets washed out by heavy runoff in the bar ditches. I watched the friend of ours who worked on the bar ditches and driveway and did a lot of work to fix the problem this spring, and was really impressed with all the work he did in that area to try to fix the problem. He was out there with a road grader and other equipment when Fran and I were going to fires, I guess it was, and the driveway and bar ditches looked great after a couple of days' work. It looked so great that I thought the problem finally had been solved. Apparently not. There's a long strip of homes there that have a constant issue of that sort and no matter what anyone does to repair the mess after a very heavy rainfall, it seems like the problem recurs over and over again. There's still roadway problems here with areas not fully repaired and functioning from last year's floods, and here we are with new flooding and new damage. And, by the way, their house was struck by lighting during the early morning storms yesterday, (but at least it didn't catch fire) so it was a bad day all around at their place. I suspect all of us will be out this weekend trying to fix the damage to all our gravel (and, for some folks, dirt and no gravel) driveways. Runoff carved gullies in our driveway and washed gravel down into the road and bar ditch, but with a couple of hours of work once the rain stops, we ought to be able to fix it pretty quickly. For some folks, the damage is so severe it might take longer to get it repaired. It seems like rainfall here just refuses to fall in amounts that are just right. It always is feast or famine, flood or drought. If it rains again today, I hope the heavy bands miss us. We've had more than enough. At our house, we pretty much got our average June rainfall all in a couple of days time. Dawn