bumping this down

Diane, Poor little Nellie. Glad she's recovering from the heat exhaustion and so sorry to hear about the tonsillitis. It's not easy being 4 years old. The cure for anything at that age? Popsicles! Ice cream! Jello! Pudding! (Well, if I was an overheated 4-year-old OR a 4-year-old with tonsillitis, that's what I would want!) Your hubby is able to tinker and fix and build anything, I think, which is great! The folks at the electric company are already hard at work calculating how much their profit is going to rise....and it is all coming from your pockets! I don't know what's worse in the summer: watching the electric bill skyrocket when the heat arrives or watching the water bill creep higher and higher when the rains don't fall. Plants are just going to burn up in this heat. What are you going to do? (sigh) Sometimes you can't water them enough to save them (even if you try). Last year I lost one shrub in a row of shrubs. Undoubtedly it was because of the drought, but I'd watered them all the same. The others made it and that one didn't. I guess I probably should be grateful only 1 shrub died. At least a cold front is coming although, of course, the use of the word "cold" is relative. For us, it will mean perhaps an 8-10 drop in the temperature on Sunday from Saturday and, of course, if that happens we'll be thrilled....but we'll be plenty hot even with the 8-10 degree drop. Dawn

David, Y'all are lucky. We've had some little bits of it, but every time it clouds over and I run outside, the clouds go away and the sun comes back out. More clouds are likely coming our way. That's the good news. The bad news is that they'll be pushed our way by current Tropical Depression #3, likely soon to be Tropical Storm Bonnie, and perhaps even Tropical Hurricane Bonnie. I've been watching the tropical weather models and many of them show this tropical depression sending lots of tropical moisture towards Oklahoma if it continues on its current projected path. I'm down here in southcentral OK where we have only had heat indices in the 103-108 range, so only an occasional heat advisory or excessive heat warning here, but not like many folks north of us are having. Every time I look at the heat index at Tulsa or Grove or anyplace in northeastern OK, I feel so terrible for everyone up there. I don't know if I can remember a day that someone in NE OK hasn't had a heat advisory or excessive heat warning in the last two weeks. Since tropical moisture will worsen the humidity, the tropical moisture from Tropical Depression #3/the future 'Bonnie' isn't much to look forward to even though many of us need rain. I'm normally not real fond of our usual summer drought down here in southcentral OK, but after all this humidity, I'm kind of missing that hot, dry air. If I had to put up with the humidity Carol and others have had in the Grove area (I remember one day the heat index near the lake was 128!), I think I'd go spend the summers in Alaska or something. 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