Wow! You are lucky. Everything froze here earlier this week, and for the first time in ages, I didn't try to keep any peppers or tomatoes going in containers that I could drag into the garage at night. Last year, I was picking tomatoes and peppers from potted plants until at least December.

I hope you can keep everything going a lot longer. Our best autumn here several years ago was one in which we didn't have a heavy frost or killing freeze until mid-December, so we still had fresh-from-the-garden veggies, herbs and flower arrangements at Thanksgiving and home-grown tomatoes at Christmas.

Dawn

We got down to 29 degrees for 4 hours in OKC and thats the only freeze we've had. That burns the tops of the plants but its not a killing freeze so we look pretty good here. I am hoping to get some cherry tomatoes and keeping my fingers crossed, the plants are loaded with green ones.

I left a couple of tropical roadkill cactus outdoors and they are fine. I always wait to bring my pots in as long as possible and sometimes can go until December. All of my perennials and annuals are hardy types. I usually have blooms well into December. It is very colorful right now.

Seems the southern part of the state is getting it first this year and I think the panhandle got nipped.

Gardenrod, thanks for sharing your pictures. I am always looking for an idea to steal, and this forum has many.

Everything was wiped out for me on 10-20 except the fall garden, it is still doing fine after several hard frosts.

My neighbor, less than a mile away brought down some corn and squash this past week, his garden is still doing well. It is amazing what difference a little elevation will make.

I hope good luck stays with you much longer.

Larry

My zone 6b garden went into the twenties on 10-20 and wiped out all the tender stuff. The fall garden is doing ok and providing salads still, and enough kale and perrenial onions for a mess

After the long, hot summer, I reallly don't even mind that we had an early freeze. It is just so nice to walk outside and not feel like you're standing in an oven.

Not everything froze. There's still quite a bit in bloom for the butterflies: asters and gayfeather in the pastures along with the normally spring-blooming wild onions, and in the garden there's verbena bonariensis, Texas hummingbird sage, salvia farinacea, 'Pink Lemonade' honeysuckle, autumn sage, some 4 o'clocks (the top foot to 18" froze on the night we went to 23 degrees, but the foliage and flowers underneath are fine), and Laura Bush petunias. Like the 4 o'clocks, the morning glories froze on top but the ones underneath are fine and still blooming as well.

I was walking through the garden yesterday, and there are billions of tiny larkspur, catnip, Laura Bush petunia, and chamomile seedlings. They usually don't sprout quite this early in the fall. Out in the pastures, all the usual forbs that sprout in November and December sprouted in October, and we have a dandelion about to bloom.

Our chances for rain today have dropped from 80% to 30% so I am planning to do a lot of garden clean-up if the rain holds off. I think that the rain a lot of y'all will get today won't reach us until tonight, when we have a 90% chance. The weather is pleasant and mild this morning so it should be a lovely day to spend time out in the garden.

I'm still eating fresh lettuce and spinach, picking parsley and basil.
Mild Fall has some disadvantages - tulips and garlic are sprouting up like wildfire. The garlic will be OK, not so sure about the tulips.
Anyone else having trouble with Squirrels tearing up container and raised beds by burying nuts?
I spend a lot of effort covering raised beds with chicken wire and bird netting, and placing screens over containers to control birds, rabbits, squirrels, and even RATS.
I've even rabbits jump into my flower pots to reach the upper leaves.

I always have that problem with the squirrels. Another thing they do is dig up seedlings in the spring especially when you use those round peat things that have the mesh around them. I think their sensors pick up a change in the soil and they detect it as a pecan. I have gone out many times to see plants laying wilted on the ground. Its always worse when my pecan tree produces. I haven't had any pecans for the last two years so it won't be so bad this year. Pecan trees saplings are a big garden nuisance because they have that long rat-tail and need digging. I don't have rabbits or deer so I guess it could be worse.

Toads are another problem. They love to insinuate their fat butts into that cool soil and nap there and could care less what they uproot or smash.

I found if I keep my pots on the porch close to the house they get messed with less.

I've had tulips, daffodils, hyacinths, chives and garlic sprout in fall or early winter and overwinter just fine and behave normally in spring. Sometimes they freeze back to the ground a couple of times, but they green right back up again and grow just fine. I'm a lot further south than you are, so your somewhat colder winters might be a little rougher on them. I've had all kinds of perennials and reseeding annuals sprouting like crazy this fall much earlier than usual. Some years are just like that.

Squirrels are gonna act like squirrels. They run all over the yard and dig in any square inch of soil they deem digable. I used to have a dog who relentlessly chased them back into the woodland, but none of our other dogs are good squirrels chasers like she was.

I keep my containers up close to the fenced-in dog yard so the squirrels don't usually mess with the plants in containers, although at night the possums, raccoons and rabbits sometimes will bother those plants when the dogs are inside sleeping. With containers that have edible plants like tomatoes and peppers, I have tomato cages around them to help keep any wild critter from tearing them up too badly. I use a lot of woven wire fencing, chicken wire, bird netting, deer netting, etc.

Welcome to the club with the wildlife battles. My biggest challenge is white-tailed deer, raccoons, armadilloes, possums, turtles and cottontail rabbits. Sometimes I win,sometimes they win and sometimes it is a draw. Fencing and netting are about all you can do other than put up electric fencing if that is an option you choose to use. I don't because I've seen it electrocute little frogs and birds, but lots of people here in our rural area use it to keep farm animals contained on their property and keep some other critters out.

Anything that is especially important to me is grown only within the fenced garden that has a fence 10' tall. I grow a mixture of veggies, flowers and herbs within it. The fence started at 3', went to 6', then 8', then 10' I don't think any wildlife here can breach the fence, except raccoons who can climb it and birds who just fly in. I don't have a lot of bird trouble, but I keep a birdbath, waterer and birdfeeder out for them. They reward me by not bothering my plants much, except for the fruit. I have to cover fruit with bird netting or deer netting.

If you are in a rural area where wildlife is far too plentiful, you can trap them and dispose of them. That is the method that works best for us with predator type animals that bother our chickens or edible plants.

I know that rabbits are very annoying to gardeners, but I like seeing them hopping around the yard. We just fenced them out of the big garden and also put food out for them about as far as we reasonably can from the garden. Once your local bunnies are 'trained' to eat where you put out food, that is where they go. I haven't had a rabbit get into my fenced garden in years. As far as unfenced flower beds--they are fair game but the rabbits don't seem to bother them too much. They do bother container plantings, but I just cage those and that works pretty well. The supersized tomato cages are large enough to go around the outside of the container and rest on the ground which denies the rabbits access to the pots, and tall enough the rabbits can get over the top of them.

The problem with wildlife, whether it is the kind of wildlife we want to have around us or not, is that for them, eating = survival. So, they can concentrate on finding food every waking minute, and we cannot spend every waking minute of our lives working on ways to keep them out.

I have found cats to be great garden helpers. My cats relentlessly hunt down and kill every field mouse, vole, mole or gopher that dares set foot in our garden and yard. However, the cats have to be inside the house or barn at night so a bobcat or coyote won't get them, and that means the rodents can roam at will at night. Lately, there's been a barn owl sitting in the pecan tree at night hunting for his dinner. Owls are great predators to have around and will take out a lot of the little critters that are bothering your plants, but other than putting up barn owl nesting boxes, you cannot do much to attract them. They just go wherever the food supply is.

Dawn

I agree with what you say about wildlife and take it all in stride. I always over plant to have extras. However, when its the toads I take offense and have no mercy as I scoot out their fat bodies or give them a cold shower with the hose when they take up an entire 4" pot sleeping. Vagrants. There is just something that comes across as lazy about it like an unwelcome guest making himself at home in your house like he lives there. They have plenty of rocks here to use and other cool places to park it during the day. LOL. Baby killers.

My biggest complaint with critters is Crows, next would be squirrels. It seems as tho I can protect my garden to some degree with an electric fence to keep the deer and coons out. The hawks and coyotes keep the rabbits under control.

There were at least two deer waiting for me to come into the house so they could get into the garden not more than 30 min's ago. They dont need my garden, but I have much more than I can use, so dont mind sharing. It will be a different story when my spring garden is planted, they just do too much damage to young plants.

I don't mind toads because they eat bugs, but I can see where it would be annoying if they were digging up baby plants.

Larry, I am not usually a big fan of crows. However, they will chase off hawks that are attempting to catch one of our chickens so I can appreciate their usefulness in that way.

It is nice that the deer love you so much that they are "larry watching" in the way we might be bird watching or deer watching. They love you because you plant a garden for them, which is so nice and considerate of you. I had to fence them out of our garden because they wouldn't leave anything for us.

I have a love-hate relationship with the deer. I love watching them roam around the property but hate seeing them eating my plants. Sometimes we have deer tracks in the soil just outside our breakfast room window, and I mean the tracks are 6" from the window, so I think the deer are spying on us.

Dawn

When we first moved here we had window boxes and had a bird that would come sit on the window box and peck on the storm window to get our attention when the bird feeder was empty. The window boxes came down when I came home one night to find two big tom cats doing their thing in two of them at the same time. Ewww

lol Cats sure do think every container of the soil in the world is meant for them.

I have a hummingbird feeder that hangs outside my kitchen window. If it needs to be refilled, the hummers come peck at the window.

We also have a crazy cardinal that fights his reflection in one window, and only that window, on the northeast corner of the house. He does it endlessly every spring and summer and you'll hear him peck and hit that window dozens of times a day.

We have tried everything, from taping a life-sized photo of a cat (from a cat calendar) in the window to hanging bird flash/scare tape directly outside the window, to suspending shiny CDs from a tree right outside the tree. He doesn't care. He is determined to fight the bird he sees in the window, apparently not realizing it is himself. He's done this for three years now. We've decided he's fought himself so long that he is brain-damaged. I don't know why it is only that one window either.

Those animal/bird stories are funny.
This may have been posted before, but here is a link to a really talented squirrel:

Here is a link that might be useful: Mission Impossible Squirrel

Most years someone comes by and asks us if they can pick up the black walnuts out of our yard and we let them. In years that they don't, I pick them up and put them in a big flower pot under the shed and the squirrels get them out for food when they want them. However, I don't want the squirrels on my bird feeder because they can empty it in one day.

At first I had some plastic tube feeders and they would eat big holes in them or chew the perches off so the birds couldn't sit and eat. I finally found a big heavy duty feeder which makes them 'eat like a bird' out of the tray. It hangs on a heavy metal shepherd's hook and I have to move it far enough from a tree that they can't jump on it.

I had one squirrel that would climb this little metal pole on the shepherd's hook. One day I mixed hot, hot pepper in some Crisco and coated this post and waited. Here came the squirrel and tried to jump up to the first branch of the hook. He started sliding down the pole. He would try again and slide again. Finally he realized that he had something slick on his feet and it must have been burning a little because he would stand upright and shake both front paws in the air like he was trying to shake it off. Then he decided to wash his paws, and starting to shake his head to get the heat out of his mouth. I laughed till I cried. I'm not sure if it kept that one for coming back but it was sure entertaining. There were so many more to take the place of it that scaring one off didn't make much difference.

In the last few years we haven't had as many so someone is probably giving them more that spicy feet. There are so many walnut trees in our neighborhood that they have plenty of food and my neighbor keeps corn out for them. Also, they aren't as bad about getting into attics here because there are so many huge trees. In southern Oklahoma they drove us crazy by getting into the attic. My biggest problem with them is digging up all the walnut trees they plant.

It got cold enough last night that the tops of some of the plants in the garden turned black. The plants in containers that get some protection from buildings still don't show any damage. What a strange gardening year!

Mine usually do that. They die back bit by bit until they are completely dead. When we went to 23 degrees last week, the tops of a lot of 4 o'clocks and morning glories froze, but lower portions of the plants survived. Last night's cold froze back the rest of the morning glory plants, but the four o'clock's bottom halves are still green and flowering.

We had mostly green foliage in the trees until we went to 23 degrees, but now we have gorgeous yellows and golds and bits of red are beginning to show up. I guess the very cold night reminded them that it was autumn. The trees are changing color and dropping leaves about 2-3 weeks later than usual, but I am not complaining. Our persimmons usually have lost all their leaves by the end of September or the first week in October, and they just went completely bare yesterday. I enjoyed their golden orange-yellow color for every day that it lasted.

We hit 32 degrees again Wednesday night- car windows were frosted, but still don't see any damage to foliage.
The trees between 31st & Peoria and 41st and Lewis are as colorful as those we have seen on the Talimina Drive.

Gardenrod - The trees were like that in Grove also, and on our trip to Joplin we pass through Seneca MO and their trees are always beautiful in Fall. It's a small town but people stand in the street and take pictures. We just never feel the need to go anywhere else for foliage.