Happy Monday Morning, Nice to be home!!!! Hope all of your gardens are happily blooming!!!!! I had sent Susan an email before I left to go out of town and told her to post here. I do not see a posting from her. There was an email from her on my return last night. Susan is experiencing some serious personal problems. She stated that she can not remember everyone who sent her boxes...she tried to post as she received her birthday boxes. As well, she said that she would try to send out a June box but could not promise! She said she would try to make up for any months that she missed but it might take a month or so........................ So shall we move the swap around just one more time??? Great idea for the month of December...A swap between Deb...Debbya...Miss April Linda...Lindaruzicka...Miss June Lisa...IShareFlowers...Miss July Deb...Momcat...Miss August Annie...Canyonwind...Miss September Sonja...Happyseed...Miss October Kara...UNCGardener...Miss November And then for the month of December, we will do a swap amongst this group of seven "GARDENERS OF THE MONTH"................... Does everyone agree with this???????? Linda, last day of your Birthday month! Lisa...tomorrow your fun begins! I will post a new Gardener of the Month for July...LISA....tonight or in the morning! Annie

I'd try Aunt Ruby's German Green, I like it much better than Green Giant. White Queen has a much more acidic taste than most of the other whites in my opinion and it's been on my "grow again" list for at least 5 years now.I agree that most whites are plain tasting. I've grown carbon for several years now and never been impressed with it yet. Southern Night is a great and weird shaped black tomato though. I'm putting it on my grow again list. Boat shaped, or kidney bean shaped and very prolific.Black Krim still my fave, but for a smaller tomato, black prince is pretty darned good too. Ping pong ball size. Hillbilly is a good one in the bicolor catagory I've not seen on your list yet.Big and yellow/pink. Kellogg's Breakfast is a great orange one. Large and good. Ildi yellow grape is a must have. Great flavor and doesn't crack. It will sometimes turn pear shaped if it doesn't get enough rain. They are very prolific. Agree with you on Black Cherry! they're great. I also like snow white cherry. Sometimes they crack but they taste great and look wonderful with the black cherry, and make a great contrast. I loved Pink Peach, Garden Peach, and Furry Red Boar this year for fuzzy tomatoes. Wasn't impressed with Angora red fuzzy cherry, except I liked the leaves. Didn't like Elberta Peach either. Those two weren't productive enough. Pork Chop was a great yellow tomato, kind of striped. It's on my grow again list for sure, kind of a salty flavored one. Bocek Italian is the only paste/oxheart type I've been really thrilled with. It's been on the grow again list for five years now. Russian 117 is good and large, but kind of a skimpy producer for me.Will try it one more year. Really liked amish salad this year, didn't crack and kept me loaded with tomatoes all season. Larger than a cherry, and it takes about 10 to fill a pint for the farmers market.Looks like a giant pinkish red grape tomato with that consistancy, kind of hard and good taste a little on the sweet side. About 2.5 inches X 1". Best all season producer this year; Celebrity bush (hybrid). I'd imagine the non-compact would be good too. I had the first tomato on those early,and I still have green ones ripening now that I picked before first frost. Customers with those in containers liked them too,and this was a terrible year for container tomatoes around here this year, too hot and dry. I'd bet they really would like them in a decent year.

If ever there was anything that would drive me back to the city, it would be the annual onslaught of venomous snakes....and I am NEVER, EVER, EVER going back to the city. Living in the country is 1 million times more fun than living in the city and I'm never going to stop feeling that way. I do not mean any disrespect for cities by saying that either, but just that I've lived in a big city and in a very rural location and, for our family, the rural location wins hands-down. We moved here when our son was a teenager and he was not overwhelmingly happy about it. He couldn't wait to grow up, move away and never come back. Of course, he grew up and he did give city living a try, and he loved it for a month or two, and then tolerated it for a couple more years. Now he's back here, building his own home with his own two hands, so he can live here in the country right beside us. City living wasn't all that wonderful after all, once he'd lived in the country for a few years. I want to emphasize that we live in an extraordinarily wild area because we are surrounded on three sides (although the southern side isn't as wild as the east and west) by the Red River flood plain lands (aka river bottom lands) that are heavily inhabited by wildlife of all kinds. The average person living in an average rural setting likely won't see 1/10th as many snakes as we see. My brother lived in the country south of Ft. Worth in what I'd consider a pretty wild area in the 1980s and 1990s and probably didn't see but maybe 3 snakes, a few armadillos, and a bobcat a year. It is all about location. If you don't want wildlife, stay away from rivers, bottom lands and wildlife management areas. : ) Seeing a snake will not kill you. I kinda felt that way before we moved here, but I have gotten used to them. That doesn't mean I am happy to see them, but just that I have done my best to make peace with having them around. I even like the rough green tree snakes. They are the color of canna leaves in the springtime and are very gentle and slow moving. They like to hang out on the asparagus plants, canna lilies and on top of shade cloth (to sun themselves) in the garden in the summer. Since they are not venomous, I tread lightly around them and try not to scare them off. Don't get me wrong. Any venomous snake in our yard, driveway or garden is considered a threat to our safety and is shot and killed. We have 14.4 acres and they can freely roam about 11 or 12 acres and we'll never see them and they'll never see us, but if they come up on the couple of acres closest to the house, they are history. While many people like black rat snakes and like to have them around (many people here who do not have poultry like to have one or two living in their garage, shed, shop building or barns) to kill rodents, but we shoot them when we find them in any building of ours, and especially in the chicken coops. They will eat eggs and chicks, and I don't just mean tiny chicks----they wrap themselves around half-grown chickens and guineas, squeeze them to death (like a boa constrictor) and eat them too. So, any rat snake (or chicken snake, which we rarely see) gets shot. We are raising poultry for ourselves, not to provide fast food for snakes. As long as you are careful and vigilant about watching where you put your hands and feet (I walk looking down at the ground around me as I take each step, even (lol) when we are at a mall in a parking lot or something....and I've never been bitten. Sometimes I think it is just that the Good Lord is looking after me....I have stepped on snakes, stepped right over them in the garden path without even seeing them, and have had a rattlesnake a couple of inches away from my hand on a particularly memorable occasion in which I did a backwards summersault from a sitting position to get away from it before it could strike me. Luckily, there was no one around to witness that! Our first 6 or 8 years here, when I was working so hard to turn dense, concrete-like red clay into decent soil, I was outside 12-16 hours per day 364 days per year. I never have been bitten by a snake. Could it happen? Sure it could. But, it hasn't happened yet, and I think that is largely because I never let my guard down. If you are really nervous about snakes, you can buy snake-proof boots and snake-proof pants (I believe they are made for and marketed to hunters) or snake chaps. As nervous as snakes make me, I've never been upset enough by close encounters with them to buy the snake-proof clothing, but I do wear really heavy duty (meaning ugly) high-top leather boots with steel toes, and I gave up wearing sandals and open-toed or open-heeled shoes over a decade ago. I SO agree with every word Stockergal said. I cannot even begin to describe how awesome it is to live here in what we jokingly call the Oklahoma Outback. I've seen bald eagles perched on top of pole barn roofs, I've had golden eagles fly overhead....hummingbirds circling me in the garden visiting flowers we planted specifically for them. There's all the many songbirds almost year-round, purple martins in spring and summer, ducks and geese flying overhead in fall....does bringing their fawns to my garden to teach them how to nibble at the bean plants climbing the fence. One old doe who lived here when we bought the land used to bring her brand new fawns to the meadow beside my garden and leave them there for me to babysit while she left for a couple of hours. It was bizarre, but she did it often enough that I felt sure she was leaving them there near me on purpose. How often is that going to happen in the city? How often will you hear a knock at your window and pull back the curtain to see two young coons trying to get you to give them a handout? (I suspect someone else near us was feeding them.) It still amuses me to walk out the door at night and have a possum spot me and fall over on the ground, seemingly dead and drooling, though I know it is only "playing possum" to make me go away. Can you see that in the city? I think not. We have wildflowers in bloom almost year-round if you know where to look for them in late fall through late winter. We get to watch all kinds of wild animals raise their young. We get to enjoy seeing lambs, kids, colts and calves in the fields and we get to watch them grow up. We get to watch the endless changing of the seasons, up close and personal, day in and day out, year-round. I love it, love it, love it. I'm never in the garden alone. There's always tons of butterflies, bees dragonflies, lacewings, lady bugs, wheel bugs, soldier bugs, frogs, toads, non-venomous snakes, birds of all types, moths, etc. in there with me. I love that too. Who wouldn't want to live this way? Snakes are especially bad this year because we have had three big rounds of Red River flooding, including it getting higher here than it ever has before. Although this likely didn't make the news there in central OK, the Red River got so high here that it damaged roads 2 MILES from the river. That blows my mind. It washed away a few homes. It cut a new channel (fairly common in flooding) and destroyed some folks' property by carrying away a lot of it. It has been a horrible year. It flooded the Falconhead Airport, with water getting at least 6' high inside the aircraft hangars. That was unprecedented flooding, and it pushed wild animals up out of the river bottom lands, including Wildlife Management Areas, and onto higher ground, like the place where we live. That's what has happened here. Usually snakes aren't this bad. They probably won't be this bad again for another decade. I'll just be extra careful until the cold weather arrives and we'll get through this snakey period. So what if I have to hibernate indoors in August while the snakes are especially active? August is no great prize anyhow, and indoors is the place to be, based solely on the high temperatures and heat index numbers. Although my parents were city folks, they both grew up in the country, and I had many relatives who lived in the country. Some of them ranched and farmed. I knew what country living was all about and we haven't run into anything here that I didn't expect (well, except maybe the cougars, but they are rare and I can go years in between seeing them). If I had to do it all again, knowing what I know about all the nervous, hair-raising moments some wild animals can cause you, I'd move here again in a heartbeat. We were around 40 years old when we moved here. I wish we'd done it when we were 25 years old. I hate that we missed so many years of county living that we could have had. We are living the dream! I am so very happy and so very grateful to live here, snakes and all, and wouldn't trade it for anything else anywhere else ever. Don't let the inconvenience of a few snake encounters a year keep you from moving the country. Friends of ours who live about 2 miles up the road from us may see 1 or 2 snakes a year because they are further away from the river and the bottom lands than we are. It is all about location. I know you can find a location less snakey than mine. Go for it! You will not regret it. You live in Oklahoma. You deal with crazy weather. No snake encounter I've ever had since moving here has been 1/10th as scary as sitting in the tornado shelter, under a tornado warning, while family and friends in Texas are texting me images of a tornado filmed by storm chasers in our own county (though, thankfully, not over our own property). You don't let Oklahoma's tornadoes, microbursts, ice storms, dust storms, heat waves, baseball or softball-sized hail, derechoes, etc., chase you away from Oklahoma, and I bet more people are injured by weather events annually in this state than are injured by snakebites. Why let a few serpents steal your joy and keep you from moving to the country? I encourage you to let go of the fear of snakes and move to the country anyway. They haven't got me yet, and they've certainly had plenty of opportunity. There's bad things everywhere. You just learn to live with them.

I am so far behind on this week's news that I feel like I cannot catch up. First, the mudroom report. Knocking out the north wall so we could expand into former sunroom space was very hard. Amy, if you'd been sitting and watching, I believe you would have heard a curse word here and there. Apparently when Tim and Chris sectioned off the mudroom from the sunroom about 4 years ago, they built that wall to last forever. It had a gazillion nails and screws to hold it all in place forever, and there was a thick wall there. From the mudroom side, we had to remove the following materials in the order listed: beadboard wainscotting, drywall, 1/2 inch plywood, insulation and then, on the sunroom side, more drywall....and all the framing to which all of that was attached. Tim started demo while I was cooking a big breakfast of bacon, eggs and grain-free pancakes (made with almond meal and I think I like them better than regular pancakes, too). After we ate breakfast, he continued demo while I cleaned up the kitchen, did laundry, etc. I think the demo alone took until a little after 12 noon. Oh, and he removed the flooring from the part of the sunroom that is becoming part of the enlarged mudroom. Then, in the afternoon, we built the new west wall of the mudroom, getting the framing up, the internal window put in (it will allow the sunlight from the sunroom to enter the mudroom and help keep it light in there), the drywall put up on the sunroom side of the wall, and a new light fixture installed. I love the new light----it is a gooseneck style barn light. Then the fire pagers went off (for three grass fires) and that was it for Saturday's mudroom work. On Sunday, we put up the insulation and the drywall on the mudroom side of the wall and framed in the closet and cubbie storage area at the north end of the new mudroom area. We tried to intermittently watch part of the Dallas Cowboys game---we had the TV on in the living room so we could walk into the house and check on the game periodically. After the Cowboys seemingly gave up in the second half, we quit trying to watch the game and just tried to work on the room. We stopped for dinner around 5 pm after cleaning up all our construction mess, and put the mudroom furniture back into the mudroom so the room is functional, though nowhere close to being done and it is a good thing we did because about as soon as we had finished eating, our fire pagers went off for back-to-back wrecks on the interstate. I was hoping the mudroom would be a 2 or 3 weekend project, but based on how busy the fire pagers are all of a sudden, I fear it may be a 4 or 5 weekend project. That's okay. We'll get it done in October and will have a much more useful space. Part of the storage area is a garden closet where I can store my seed box, which doesn't really have its own spot inside the house so it tends to float from room to room, and my garden tool bucket, which I tend to leave in the mudroom year round. At least now I'll be able to hide it away behind a closet door. Nancy, We have gazillions of deer here along the river. They come to the compost pile daily to eat whatever I've tossed on it that they find edible. I probably see 8 or 10 visit at a time, multiple times daily (not necessarily the same ones in the afternoon or evening as we had in the morning). They often cruise along the fencelines of the two enclosed gardens and eat bean vines and such growing on the outside of the fence. However, they don't like to go inside an enclosed area if they cannot see what is inside of it, so they tend to not step foot in the garden at this time of year, even if I leave the gate open, because they cannot see beyond the plants growing on the garden fences. They'll go into the garden as soon as frost (or lack of rain) kills the plants growing on the garden fences. I put out deer corn and other goodies for them in winter, and every day/night of the year, they scarf up any hen scratch or sunflower seeds that the wild birds and chickens don't devour during the course of the day. During canning season (they know exactly when canning season is) they often stand out by the compost pile waiting for me to bring my compost bucket out to empty out all the waste product so they can gobble i t up, I have to yell at them to go away just so I can walk out to the compost pile safely, It is a wonder I get any compost at all because the deer and other wild critters love to feast on stuff that I think I am going to compost. One reason we moved here was that we wanted to live surrounded by wildlife, and we have almost everything imaginable here---whitetail deer, cottontail rabbits, skunks (striped and spotted), possums, raccoons, armadillos, snakes, turtles, frogs, skinks, lizards, coyotes, beaver, bobcats, ringtail cats, ferrets, feral hogs, squirrels, moles, voles, field mice, pack rats, all kinds of birds--including eagles (which is the coolest thing!), and an occasional cougar (they stalk the garden a lot when they are around), and more. I think we got more wildlife than we bargained for, but you learn to coexist with them and to avoid the dangerous ones. Occasionally there is an alligator spotted in the area, usually in a farm pond when the Red River is low during drought, but we've never had one on our property, as far as we know, The nearest one we know of was in a farm pond about a half-mile from us. We don't have ground hogs this far south or bears either, though they've been seen this year as close to us as Pontotoc County. which is closer than usual. Kim, I am sorry for all your troubles and especially for your poor head. I hope you don't have a concussion. Take care of yourself. Your tomatoes would be growing fine here as we have abundant sunshine and mostly a lack of moisture. Yesterday was hot, today is supposed to be even hotter, and then I think we cool down again, though the heavy rainfall in the forecast this week is expected to miss us for the most part. I think we might get a half-inch or inch. We'll see. I'd say the autumn fire season started up here this past weekend, despite most areas getting close to an inch of rain last week. Sadly, an inch of rain is not much when you have waist-high dried, cured grasses filling pastures---the August rainfall caused rampant growth of grasses and brush, but the almost total lack of rain in the month of September allowed everything to dry out and become fuel for fires. Tomatoes, peppers and beans are exceptionally happy thought. My squash plants died suddenly over the weekend---not sure if it is SVBs (I'll look for signs of them next time I step foot into the garden) or if disease hit them along with last week's rain. Amy, I hope you can just take it easy this week and recover from the draining effects of your mom's surgery last week. Dealing with aging and ill parents can be so exhausting, and I think the strain is every bit as much mental/psychological as it is physical too. You just need some down time to chill and relax and not feel so stressed and worried. Nancy, When sweet potatoes fail to form tubers, there can be several different reasons. One is that the soil is too rich and they plow all their growth into foliage. Similarly, too much fertilizer can cause the same issue even in poor soil. Another is too much shade. It also can be a variety thing---there's a few varieties that need really, really long growing seasons, but in my garden, even those will produce tubers by October if I planted them in May. Sometimes if you let the long runners root into the ground, that can prevent you from getting large tubers---I believe it diverts the energy from forming tubers and keeps the plants overly vegetative. One way to prevent that is to use a stick or garden tool to move around the rambling foliage every few days so it does not root into the ground all over the place. Rebecca, Where Tim is from in Pennsylvania, those brown marmorated stink bugs have been invading homes in the autumn for years now, and they show up by the hundreds and by the thousands. (I hopt that is not what you are starting to see up there now.) They do sell traps with scent baits to draw them in so that people can (hopefully) trap them outdoors before they find a way indoors. Kim, Roselles usually bloom most heavily in October here (sometimes they start blooming in late September) but it can depend on exactly which type you have. Some bloom later than others, and all the ones I've grown have been daylength sensitive. I seem to have more blooms from the ones I grow at the shady west end of the garden as the afternoon shade may trick them into thinking daylength is shortening a bit more than it actually is. Some years, when I have had tons and tons of calyxes on the plants in October or early November as the first frost approaches, I have had to cut off the limbs (the plants are too huge and too deeply rooted to pull up) and take them into the garage or the house to keep them from freezing. Then, as the calyxes dry out a bit indoors and the blossoms fall, I can harvest and use the calyxes. If frost threatens before you can harvest enough roselles, since you don't have a lot of indoor storage space, you might be able to cover the plants with frost blankets or even regular blankets to keep them alive long enough for you to harvest an ample supply of calyxes. Not only are the great for tea but they also make a wonderful jelly---I like it better than any other fruity jelly I've ever made. The rat snake in the camper is horrifying. It is that time of the year when they are looking for places to den up for winter, and also looking for food to gobble up before they hibernate. I am so very careful in October to not leave a garage or shed door open because I don't want unwelcome residents. I do leave the greenhouse doors open so that cool nights will push snakes out of the greenhouse just in case they are thinking of overwintering there...poor Ryder! His daddy played such a mean trick on him. Nancy, To fill up raised beds, use anything and everything you can get your hands on---logs (preferably partially rotted ones, a la hugelkulture style), chopped/shredded autumn leaves, twigs, grass clippings, animal manure (local farms or rabbit raisers often offer it on Craig's List or Freecycle), hay, straw, wood bark, mushroom compost from eastern OK, etc. If you fill up the beds with all that stuff from now throughout winter, then by Spring you'll have a surprising amount of decomposition and it will be ready for planting. I have built our garden bed soil the same way the woodland builds its own soil----by piling up organic matter of all kinds and just letting it decay in place. I raked up and used lots of leaf mold from our woodland in the early years here because it is so good for the soil, but I can only collect stuff in the woods after we've had several very hard freezes. Otherwise, I have snake encounters even in winter (I learned that years ago with a pygmy rattler encounter during what should have been the snake-free season). You can add layers of cardboard to attract earthworms. Earthworms love cardboard. They'll come to eat it and stick around to devour everything else. I have to go now---Jet is demanding his morning walk whether I'm ready to go now or not. Dawn