Sam, Those are great shots! I have first hand experience regarding the beauty of this bird... When I was in high school, (nearly 20 years ago), I loved art class but by no means was I an artist although I could draw birds very well. My art teacher, (In time, I became her pet student), encouraged me to find ways to keep drawing different birds, so I would goto zoos, nature & botanical gardens, and aviaries. It was at a local botanical garden that I saw a pair of courting Waxwings. I was about 15' from them and they kept me entertained for nearly an hour while they passed Crabapple blossoms and petals back and forth to each other. This was the first and only time I drew more than one bird in a single drawing, and the first time I actually impressed myself with how the finished drawing turned out - considering I was on a park bench, on a foggy, misty, cool spring day, with my drawing supplies on my lap, on my bench, on the ground and whatever pencils my two ears would hold. LOL! By the time I graduated from HS I had quite a portfolio of about 125 drawings. My art teacher asked if she could borrow them to show to her students, but that was just a ploy so she could have them professionally mounted in a scrapbook, and she gave it to me for a graduation present. My 2 older sisters are the true artists in the family, and when my sister in Utah heard that they were all put together in a scrapbook she asked if I would be willing to send it to her for awhile, she was a starving artist at the time, so I sent it Fed-Ex and to make an even longer story short, the entire scrapbook was destroyed in a car accident.... I haven't drawn anything, (outside of drafting at work), since then. I did receive $2000 from part of my sister's accident settlement for them, (my sister insisted). If I ever do start drawing again, I think I'll draw roses. :) Anyway, (sorry for the life story - it just brought back some good memories and some not-so good), it is a gorgeous bird and one that gave me an experience I will never forget. Thanks for letting me hi-jack your thread Sam, BC:)

Michael---That's it! Cuccuzi. Obviously it is my first time growing it. I will stake them up first thing in the morning. I would LOVE to trade some peaches for jabotacaba. There are only so many I can eat in a day and they are at their peak ripeness right now. I can come by tomorrow since I need to do some shopping. Let me know. No, not all of the beans are bush type. The beans on the tablecloth are pole beans. I didn't notice any color on my Bella Rosa tomatoes but they are producing well. I found a ripe Sungella but it was heavily cracked, almost in half. Sure hope that it was a fluke. juliana---When to start the seeds depends upon where you live. You have no zone listed or any email address. If you could update your info that would help. I have a thread that I started around the begging of March that has a picture of me actually planting the bean seeds. The thread is called My Garden Got Lots Bigger. I'll find it and bring it forward for you. I was wanting to post an update picture anyway. Silvia---Yes, time to highlight the squash. Also, I'm going to start a highlight on cukes. I have a good cucumber salad recipe to share. You can do the squash and I do the cukes, OK? I thought that Tom gave them to me but I wasn't quite sure.

That is plenty of room. Your soil is most likely too fertile. It causes leaf production over radish growth as you can see in the long skinny one. Much bigger leaf growth. Climate also. They like cool soil and cool nights. Once it heats up they slow way down. Probably harvested too soon. You can try another sowing in late August for a fall crop. (depending where you are). Some mistakes happen when a garden is planted all at once. Some crops love going in as soon as the soil can be worked and don't mind very cold weather.

Rebecca, There are all kinds of options. For example, you know those pop-up canopies you can buy for camping trips or tailgating or whatever? They have a metal frame and then you put the canvas top over it and tie it to the frame? I think it would be easy to take the frame of one of those and attach one-inch chicken wire to it. You could use zip-ties (which evetually will break from the UV exposure weakening them) to attach the chicken wire, jut taking care to attach it every few inches so the squirrels couldn't find a gap to squeeze through. The only construction involved would be to use wood framing to build in a door so you could easily enter and exit the cage. I use one of these frames as a trellis in the back garden with woven wire fencing attached to it so that cucumbers and vining squash can climb it. I merely left an opening with no fencing for a door so I can harvest from inside or outside of it since mine wasn't meant to exclude any varmints. I'm talking about canopies like this: Pop-Up Canopy If I were doing this, I'd put pressure-treated lumber around the bottom to attach the chicken wire to so that the squirrels couldn't squeeze underneath the chicken wire there. The canopy frame I use in the backyard is a 10' x 10' but they come in different sizes. Or, for a larger tomato-growing area, you could use the framing from one of those portable garages. The frame is about the same as for the canopies, but bigger and (I assume) likely is sturdier. Here's an example of a portable garage: Portable Garage I know I've seen this for lower prices at times than the one I linked---I just wanted to find a quick example. If you want a geodesic dome style, there's kits you can buy to do the framing. Often you can buy the hubs used to connect the PVC pipe online or buy starplates or something similar and then just have your handyman buy and deliver the PVC pipe or wood locally and built the frame. Strombergs sells the starplates and people use them to construct wood framing that then can be turned into the structure of their choice---everything from solid wood chicken coops to chicken wire-covered chicken runs or plastic-covered greenhouses. The starplates are meant for wood-framing, but there's similar hubs available meant for use with PVC or pipe framing. Starplate Building System One of the easiest ways to build a simple greenhouse involves building a high tunnel you can walk into using PVC framing or even cattle panel framing built into a hoop house/high tunnel shape. To make a fruit cage (more accurately, a tomato cage structure) you'd just use chicken wire for the covering instead of greenhouse plastic. You can do this! Or, you can get a handyman to do this and then you'd have a way to keep the squirrels off your plants. Kim, Oh, I play that sort of hide and seek with the snakes. With three people bitten by copperheads in my county last week, I've officially given up weeding for the rest of snake season. It just isn't worth it. Timeout sounds nice. I am giving myself timeout indoors on every hot day....so probably most of every day from now through the end of August. For the rest of July and August, all I will do is water and harvest. At some point, I'll pull out the excessive number of tomato plants (which are well-mulched and almost weed-free) that have been in the ground since March (whenever disease and spider mites hit a certain point, I'll take out those plants) and put fall crops in those beds. My two early tomato beds remain in production so far, and the interim bed of 10 tomato plants at the other end of the garden (planted at the end of April and meant to provide us with fresh tomatoes in between the time I yank out the 4 rows planted in March and the time the fall tomatoes begin producing) already has fruit breaking color. I should yank out those older, tired and increasingly sickly plants this week but that would require working outdoors in the heat for more hours per day than I intend to spend outdoors so I might not do it this week. I wish I could do it at night, but that's when the snakes are the worst. You know that it is too hot and I am too tired of dealing with it when I am contemplating pulling plants out of the ground just to give myself a break from having to deal with them. It is scary enough harvesting southern peas while just hoping no snakes lie beneath the plants, which are planted close enough together to shade the ground....eliminating weeds by shading them out but also providing dense shade that the snakes like. There's no way I am weeding anything at this point, and sometimes harvesting feels sort of iffy in terms of safety. All my muskmelons and crane melons are trellised, and so are about 80% of my icebox watermelons, so I can harvest those off their trellises easily enough without being too worried about snakes. Usually the only snakes that climb the trellises and hang out on the plant foliage are the rought green tree snakes and I don't mind them. Sometimes they startle me when I don't see them before almost accidentally touching one while harvesting pole beans or lima beans, but the green snakes themselves are very shy and not aggressive and all I have to do is take a couple of steps back and they quickly disappear, generally racing across the garden, through the fence and into the woodland beyond. Nancy, Sorry about the snake scare. I don't like having them in any building. Snakes are free to roam about 12 or 13 of our 14.4 acres as they wish, but they had better stay out of the house, garage, greenhouse, shed and garden. Even in the yard, if they will leave, we won't even shoot the venomous ones....but if they are determined to stay there where we and the animals are inhabiting the same space and they won't turn and flee, they get shot. We haven't shot a non-venomous snake this year, but if we had chicken or rat snakes getting into the coops and eating eggs or chicks, we'd shoot them if we caught them in there. I can tell when snakes are in the garden even if I am not seeing them because all the frogs, toads, lizards, etc. disappear and that aggravates me a great deal because those creatures help out a great deal with garden pest control. Cherokee Carbon is a hybrid cross of Cherokee Purple x Carbon, so if you save seeds from the fruit produced by these F-1 plants, you will have the F-2 generation. That means that you have no idea what sort of plant or fruit you will get. Generally in the F-2 generation, you will get a variety of results--and some of them might produce fruit that strongly resemble the original Cherokee Carbon and some of them might not...and it is possible that none of them will produce the sort of fruit you want. ("Life is like a box of chocolates....."). What you get has to do with the way the genes resort themselves within the hybrid plant's offspring. Some people have successfully dehybridized a hybrid through multiple generations and eventually (often only after many generations of plants) ended up with a fruit that resembled the original fruit from which they saved the seed, but it is not easy to do. I have bought seed of supposedly stablized dehybridized versions of hybrids in the past and found that the plants and fruit I got were nowhere near the quality of the original hybrid plant/fruit, so after trying that for a couple of years, I went back to just buying the hybrid seed. I don't have garden space/time to waste on saving seed from hybrids and replanting it only to be disappointed in whatever fruit the plants produce. YMMV. I'm sorry to hear about your mom. It surely does sound like somebody dropped the ball in terms of notifying the family. I hope she makes a quick recovery and I wish she would come visit you while the yard and garden are so beautiful so she can see what you and Garry have done. Amy, The thought did cross my mind that returning the stockings did sound like a human activity. The thought that a person might be entering Rebecca's yard and stealing her tomatoes seems 1000 times worse than knowing squirrels are doing it. If they are watching how hard she is working to protect her fruit and returning the stockings, that seems vaguely stalkerish and disturbing. I had a lot of trouble with a mentally ill person who lived up the road from us (he passed away sometime within the last year, I guess) coming onto our property while I was in the garden (and other people had different sorts of problems with him), so I started locking the driveway gate all the time, whether we are home or not, and that stopped that. I don't have locks on the garden gates but could and would add locks if I thought someone was sneaking into the garden and stealing stuff. (People here know I will share produce with them if they want some, so why steal?) Jay, I'm sorry the rainfall is missing y'all. The 3+" we have received in July saved my garden from certain death (or at least postponed certain death for a while), but we remain in Moderate Drought and conditions are unlikely to improve during the summer months. I hope we don't go the rest of the month with no rain since that 3+" is more than our average July rainfall. I have little expectation of getting more rain any time soon. Despite the recent rainfall, our portion of our county has the highest year-to-date rainfall deficit in the state and that is so discouraging. I do think the OKC area in general is worse off than us though, because their rainfall for the last couple of months is much more severe than ours.....and the rainfall they got in March or April isn't helping them at all now. How much can I complain about drought? Well a lot, I guess, but it does no good. We spend most of each summer in drought so I should be used to it, but I just hate seeing all the green turn brown and production drop.....etc. I think the heat wouldn't be so bad if it would just rain every now and then. Well, dry heat doesn't feel as bad as humid heat so the benefit of rain is a two-edged sword. Dawn