Greetings: I fully realize that this post is too late to help folks in winter 2012, but if your planting plums in the SE USA, and can provide some maintenance, I recommend using hybrids between P angustafolia (Chickasaw Plum) and P. salicacia (Asian plum). These are bread to have the eating quality of an Asian plum but the disease resistance of a Chickasaw plum. Even with these you will have to do some pruning and spraying. There are two series of these, one produced by Auburn University. The Auburn series plums tend to have higher chill requirements and would be better for the upper south. The other major series is the "Byron Series" developed by the agricultural station in Byron GA. These trees have lower chill requirements and are best for the lower south like the coastal plains of GA and AL. There is a third series called the Gulf Series which may be a hybrid with a different wild plum species, but these are good for hardiness zone 9 and higher. Thanks and God bless. PS: I planted 4 varieties of the Byron series and one of the Auburn University series this winter, and so far all the plants are doing great. You can get several members of the AU and Byron Series from Johnson's Nursery out of Ellerjay GA. A couple members of the Byron Series and the Gulf series are available at Just Fruits and Exotics outside of Tallahassee FL.

I didn't start out to grow so much, it just kind of happened. I was also a military wife and planted small gardens and flower beds in a lot of different climates as we moved from place to place. When we finally retired, I wanted a garden, but we lived in southern Oklahoma at the time and I had only red clay. Although I tried to improve it, I never got it the way I wanted it. When we moved to Grove, I cleared a corner of the back yard, which had once been a garden, but was then a lawn, and I planted a small garden. The soil was really good and it did well. The garden did so well, that I wanted it to be larger, then larger, then larger, until it now takes up the entire back yard. Some Springs we get a lot of rain, and in the beginning, I had such mud that I have had it pull my shoes off when I tried to walk in it. I sometimes had to rescue tomato plants that appeared to be swimming, by digging a trench to drain off the water. I live in a neighborhood with a lot of trees and many people burn their leaves. Some of them now know that they can just dump the leaves in my north yard. One guy has a huge lot and he just drives here on his lawn mower with his 4x4x4 grass catcher, and dumps them for me. He loves it because he doesn't have to burn them. I love it because he doesn't have to burn them. I not only hate the smoke, but they are great for my garden. I also buy mushroom compost by the pickup load, and I have chickens. Although I still get rain, I just don't have the mud problem that I once had. At first, I only grew what I thought we could eat fresh because that is what I had always done since I had small gardens and we moved so much. What I discovered was that there were so many great things to grow, that I wanted to grow them all. LOL I wanted the great taste of fresh produce, I wanted food that hadn't been sprayed with dangerous chemicals, and most of all I just wanted to learn how to grow as many things as I could. I think our economy stinks, and is going down hill each year, so I wanted to learn to be self-sufficient in the event I needed that skill. Although I plant mostly in the ground, I have 3 raised beds that I use for early crops. One now has asparagus so I can control the moisture level, and I normally plant salad crops in another so I'm not growing them in the Spring mud. This year the third bed is filled with the first onions I planted. I covered it with row cover as soon as I planted because we have a neighborhood cat that thinks any box is just for him. As far as costs go, I consider gardening a hobby, and a health benefit and a lot more exciting than a gym membership. As my gardening skills improved, my soil improved, and I practiced growing more things, I found myself with all of this food. I can't stand to see it wasted, so we freeze it, can it, and eat it. If I had more space, I would grow even more, because I like doing it. I could garden for less money than I spend, but I am no longer young and I have some health issues so I need to do things in the smartest way that I can. Like George, I buy Lee Valley tools. I have others as well, but it is the Lee Valley that I normally reach far. My daughter-in-law says that my shovel is so heavy, that you just hold it up and drop it instead of pushing it into the ground. LOL When I have big purchases to make, I just buy in quantity, but buy for several years. Once you have a hoop bender, then it is cheap to make all of the hoops that you need. One year, I bought 500 feet of row cover which I am still using. I can usually get several years use out of each piece. If it gets holes in it, it is still useful. It is good enough to use over the raised bed that the cat likes, or to lay over the tops of plants that are under a poly low tunnel if we get excessively cold weather, or even to wrap around the sides of a CRW tomato cage to keep sharp winds off small plants. One year I had pepper plants until after Thanksgiving by surrounding the bed with row cover and putting a piece of greenhouse plastic just over the top part of the plants. There was plenty of air flow, but it still provided protection from the harsh cold wind. I still have plenty of unused row cover to use for a few more years. Last year I bought greenhouse plastic that was 100 feet by 10 feet. It is perfect for use on low tunnels since conduit comes in ten foot lengths. With the conduit pushed into the ground, the ten foot poly works just great. I only needed about a third of that last year, and even that piece is still good enough to use again. I need to learn to grow more herbs. I am fine with basil, dill, cutting celery, parsley and things like that, but struggle with others. They may get too much moisture, but I'm working on building a new VERY raised bed to try again. If you saw the location of my garden, you would wonder how I can grow anything because I have trees and buildings all around. Oklahoma has such brutal summers that the shade seems to help, and the buildings seem to take winds mostly over my garden instead of whipping through at ground level, so I think that extends my Fall growing. Even in the same State, we have many different growing conditions and just like a flower that 'will bloom where it's planted', we have to take what we have available to us and make it work, and just 'bloom where we are planted'. Every year I learn more about my garden. Last year I lost a tree which made a difference, so I have to adjust for that. Everyone has waste, whether it is paper, cardboard, kitchen scraps, chicken pen cleanings, hay, etc. If you don't, your neighbors do. Just get creative and you can make your soil better for gardening. Spend money if you have it, and want to spend it on gardening, but even if you don't, you can still grow a few things and learn a lot....and most of all..have fun.

Matt, We have some naturalized Kentucky Coffee trees here along our road (but not on our property) where they tend to grow in fencelines that are a mass of bird-planted natives. I like them and they are incredibly drought-tolerant, almost what I'd call droughtproof. In our two worst drought years here (2003 with a little under 19" of rainfall and 2005 with a little over 23" of rainfall) which both were "Exceptional Drought" years, they were about the last plants to show drought stress, with the only plant that was later than them being the prickly pear cacti. If I ever plant a Kentucky Coffee Tree, I'll choose one with no seed pods because the naturalized ones here drop seed pods all over creation. Believe it or not, we've planted so many trees on the once treeless portions of our property that I have to be careful now about planting any more or I'm going to shade all my veggie and fruit growing areas, a problem I'm already having on the western and northern edges of my veggie garden. I'm already having to transition some understory areas from grass to ground covers because those areas now are too shaded for grass. This is fine with me because my ultimate plan has been to shade out all the areas around the house where bermuda grass grows so we don't have to deal with mowing it twice a week for the rest of our lives. We have kept one native grassland area west of the landscaped home-garage area open for the deer and other wildlife, so that would be one place I could plant a tree or two, but I don't want to shade out all the native grassland either. Our 'civilized' parts of our property where the house, garage, yard and gardens are was just a long, narrow open area of long-fallow farm land in between two large wooded areas. When we cleared the brush before building the house, all we kept was 1 large pecan tree, 1 large post oak and a few cedars. We later removed the cedars after we saw what high-risk trees they are in grassland areas where wildfires are somewhat common and, in some years, frequent. At first, we sat here and roasted all summer long in full sunlight while we waited for our tiny trees (most were transplanted from the woods as 8-12" seedlings) to grow. After a dozen years, though, and with native trees that have made amazing growth since we planted them, the yard area is fairly shady nowadays. I'm afraid that from now on, I have to be really careful about planting more trees or we'll end up being too shady and having to remove trees. Darwin, We are on the dividing line too, in Love County which sits right along I-35 with the area east of I-35 seeming more lush and green most of the time (with higher rainfall), compared to the area west of I-35 which seems significantly drier most years (and has several inches less of rain each year) and not nearly as lush and green, especially in dry years. (Our specific place is west of I-35, though not by much.) And to add one important point about trees making good growth---when we moved here, we deliberately choose to transplant teeny-tiny seedling trees from our woodland to the open grassland where we built the house. I believed our trees would grow better and be healthier if they had a root system that was equal to their top growth. We dug the tree seedlings as carefully as we could. In general, we moved oak trees, and a couple of native persimmons and one Mexican Plum and they had 8-12" of topgrowth and the rootball was 12-15" 'tall'. I don't think we started planting trees until 2001 after moving here in 1999 because 1999 and 2000 were severe drought years. We have a two-story house, and almost every one of those teeny-tiny trees are now as tall as the house, and most of them are taller than the house. I am positive we would not have had that kind of growth if we'd started with containerized trees that had a lot of topgrowth in comparison to the small root systems. Our tallest oak tree is a red oak that grew from an acorn 'planted' by a squirrel. I believe it popped up in the shrub bed on the south side of the house in 2002 or 2003. It is easily 4 or 5' taller than the seedling red oaks we transplanted from the woods around the same time or the year before. For anyone interested in propagating native plants, I highly recommend an almost-600 page book by Jill Nokes called "How To Grow Native Plants of Texas and the Southwest". It is an amazing book, and mine is old and dogeared and well-worn. Two books I found very helpful when I was trying to figure out what all the native plants on our land were back after we bought this land in 1997 are by Doyle McCoy and are: "Roadside Wild Fruits of Oklahoma" and "Roadside Trees and Shrubs of Oklahoma". I bought both of them at Barnes & Noble in the OKC area (might have been the one in Norman) in the late 1990s. They were published in 1981 and I don't know if they are still in print, but they have been invaluable in helping me identify all the native plants here. Our house is in a slightly more hospitable area than yours, but not by much, and I think it is only more hospitable because of its proximity to the Red River. Love County is a transitional county, sitting right in the middle of south Central OK and it varies greatly in rainfall with higher rainfall in the eastern portion of the county (ave. of 42" per year) and much less rain in the western portion of the county (ave. of 38" per year). We're right in the middle. I would imagine the western end of our county is very similar to the El Reno area, and it always amazes me how much drier the western portion of our county is. We were out in the western end of our county a couple of weeks ago and even though we were only 15 or 20 miles further west than our home, it was significantly drier and the native plants were 'short' compared to those same plants at our house. So, even though we and they can grow the same exact native trees, they are going to get a lot larger in our part of the county than at the western end of the county, and I think there is an important lesson there. However, they also have sandy soil in the area where we were, and we have red clay that holds water better so I'm sure that accounts for some of the differences in plant growth. It is much harder for young trees to survive/grow during extended periods of drought in fast-draining sand than in clay. I noticed, for example, that the further west you go, the shorter the oak trees. There's also a lot more native cacti out there than here and slight differences in the native grasses....theirs are undoubtedly the more drought-tolerant ones. I noticed they have large stands of sand lovegrass out there that get huge. We have scattered bits of lovegrass here at our place in clay but it doesn't grow as large in the dense clay and it doesn't compete well with taller prairie grasses here like it does further west. We all can learn a lot from native plants compared to more exotic imported ones. At first I tried to plant a lot of landscape plants like hostas and hydrangeas, and they really didn't grow well here in our soil and with our frequent summer droughts. That caused me to quickly convert to native plants, which only made sense. There aren't many non-natives I'll plant any more because they just don't tolerate recurring drought as well. With clay soil, it is even more difficult, though, because I have to select plants that can handle a drought year with 19" of rainfall and temps in the 100s for a long time but which also will tolerate a wet year with 50" of rain, and sometimes 6 to 9 to 12" of rain or more in one day. (Our record one-day rainfall is 12.89" and the soil stayed saturated for weeks.) It can be hard to find plants that tolerate both extremes. Natives, I have found, do tolerate them and that's why that's mostly what we plant on our property. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to look at our property during the drought years and realize that the native plants handle it a thousand times better than the non-native ones. Dawn

Welcome back, Molly. I thought I was the only fool who plants flowers in the bar ditches for the butterflies. It drives my husband crazy that he can't keep our bar ditch mowed down all nice and neat like his buddies do. (I remind him that they don't have all the butterflies, birds, dragonflies and other creatures that we have here.) Susan, You'll never make me like hackberries, but I tolerate them for the sake of the wildlife. They sprout everywhere and are hugely invasive. However, even though I pull up every one that sprouts in the yard or garden, I leave them in our 10+ acres of woodland, including a lot of them on the edge of the woods right by my garden. I try to leave as many native plants in place as possible, including leaving poison ivy alone, except for removing it from my garden fence line and from the pathways we've cut through the woods. It drives me crazy when people bulldoze the native woodland (even though it also may have invasive non-natives that they could selectively remove) and leave just a couple of trees, put in a lawn, and then complain because all the wildlife, including birds, bees and butterflies, has disappeared. I'd disappear, too, if all my food sources were removed and replaced with bermuda grass. The hummingbird population is huge this year, much larger than usual, and in general the bird population seems really large. I so enjoy having them all here. Instead of our usual Phoebe in a nest on the back porch, we have four Phoebes nesting in 4 different places. For us, that's a lot of Phoebes at one time. Dawn