Chandra, I truly hope you enjoyed your day off and were able to get a lot of those tasks done. Please tell Priya how much we are thinking about her and hoping that all goes well for her with the pending birth of your twins. She is so tiny and petite and I am amazed that she has carried the twins so well and so long. She must be amazingly healthy to accomplish that! Tanu looks so darling surrounded by the veggie harvest. I hope she is enjoying the wonderful harvest and her wonderful play area in the backyard too. Your entire yard and garden are a masterpiece. Every area looks so good and so right and so beautiful. I hope you have been able to enjoy the visits from all your sweet, loving friends and family who have visited to help Priya in these last few weeks before the babies arrive. Now, to address some of your gardening concerns: Watering: This has been a big concern for most of us, except for Carol, Michelle and a few others who have had plenty of rain (in fact, too much rain at times!). Just do the best you can and don't fret over it too much. Remember that infrequent slow, deep watering is better for the plants than shorter, more shallow waterings done more often since it encourages the roots to go deeper. If life gets too crazy after the babies arrive, you can put soaker hoses or sprinklers or drip irrigation systems on a timer. Red Candy Apple is a little hard to manage as it can be slow to grow and doesn't size up nearly as well as Candy grown in identical conditions. It has superb flavor but seems to be a slower grower. I read Bruce Frasier's advice on the Dixondale website to northern growers to give Red Candy Apple extra nitrogen to push it to perform better and grow bigger, so I tried it, even though I'm obviously a southern gardener. I gave Red Candy Apple a standard pelleted all-nitrogen lawn fertilizer (33-0-0) sometime in May when we were having all that rain. They really increased in size, for the most part. I think next year I'll try to give them more nitrogen earlier in their lives. Some of my Red Candy Apple onions were the same size as some of the big Candy and Super Star onions, but not all were. That difference in sizes might be an indication that I didn't distribute the pelleted fertilizer evenly. I normally don't use pelleted chemical fertilizers, and I just scattered it by hand. Still, I was pleased with the difference it made, and think using it earlier next year will make an even bigger difference, so I'll likely either rototill it into the soil before planting or will top dress it after the onions have been in the ground 3 or 4 weeks. Cool Season crops have suffered greatly from the very early arrival of abnoirmally hot temperatures this year. We get a second chance with cool season crops in the fall, and all we can do is hope for the weather to be better in the fall or next winter. Blackberries and raspberries may have had issues with late freezes freezing their blossoms. Or, if you just planted them next year, they just need to make some growth and ought to do better next year. It wasn't a great berry year here either. Telow gave you great grape advice. I'll try to pull up the OSU grape growing guide and post it in its own thread. It is incredibly hard to grow grapes here without preventive spraying for diseases. The peas had the heat issues to deal with. For comparison's sake....last year was a great pea year in our garden because the weather stayed cooler longer and we harvested about 35 lbs. of sugar snap peas. This year, we got maybe 6 or 8 lbs. We got too hot too early this year, and all the rain in May also caused some disease issues (mostly powdery mildew) for some Oklahoma gardeners with their peas. Carrots that mature in warm weather do lack sweetness. When carrots are able to mature before the heat arrives, they will be much more tender and sweet. Lettuce performed really well here too. Remember that you can plant it again in the fall, and some people grow it indoors in the winter. I think you can grow it in containers this winter in your greenhouse if you want to. I don't grow fava beans but I think Mrs. Frodo (Andria)does. Maybe she'll see this and tell you her secrets to growing fava beans. I think they are cool season and may need to be planted in the fall. Likely the heat is what is damaging your fava bean blossoms. It has been a great potato year here too. I am glad you got such a good harvest. If you had any small potatoes that you didn't use for eating purposes, you can save them to use as seed potatoes for your fall crop. Your corn sounds right on schedule. Silver Queen is a very late corn and I imagine it will tassel and silk soon. Tomatoes: My feeling is that I don't care how the plants look as long as they are producing. Tomatoes get every foliar disease that comes along, pests love them and the high temperatures are hard on them, but as long as they are flowering and setting fruit, all that other stuff doesn't really matter. High temperatures can impede pollination, fertilization and fruit set, but that doesn't mean it permanently shuts them down. Whenever we have a day with highs less than 92-95 degrees and lows less than 72-75, you'll still have some fruit set. Patience pays off. Some summers I've seen my plants sit there and drop blossoms for 3 or 4 weeks, but then a cool spell comes along and they do set fruit on whatever flowers they have at that time. The plants that produce bite-sized tomatoes are not affected by high temperatures nearly as much as the varieties that produce larger fruit. Peppera often have foliage issues and there are several diseases that cause the puckering and curling of foliage. I generally just ignore it and it either corrects itself or the plants just keep on producing anyway. I don't see any difference in production between plants with perfect foliage and plants with puckered or distorted foliage. I don't pinch off blooms usually because I don't think it is strictly necessary. In our climate, I try to let the tomatoes and peppers set all the fruit they want before the heat shuts down production. Eggplants are virtually indestructible, at least in summer heat. Just watch how they perform all summer. One year, during exceptional drought, I stopped watering the garden in June. Despite that, the eggplants produced until the first frost in November in an almost total absence of rainfall and irrigation, which I think is remarkable. I fully expected them to wither and die after I stopped watering. All your "hot season" crops like sweet potatoes, okra, etc. ougt to be exceptionally happy in this weather! Thank you for sharing all the beautiful photos of your garden with us. I am so proud of you and so proud of how well your garden is performing this year. I know you spent many, many hours on research and never hesitated to ask questions and to carefully read the answers and glean from them all the info you could. Your efforts certainly have paid off as you have a fantastic garden. Your garden must be giving you great joy this year, and I am happy that so many of your friends and family members have been visiting y'all this spring and summer and have been able to see your garden and enjoy it too. The beautiful rainbow of crops in many colors that you're growing are something to be proud of, and just think.....a year or two from now, Tanu will have to share those sugar snap peas with the twins, so you're going to have to plant a lot of them! Happy Gardening to you, and give my best wishes to Priya for a restful, quiet week and for a happy delivery next week (if not sooner). Dawn

Heehee! I know about the "tomato lists". But, we all have good intentions. It's just hard not to make them "gooder"..... Today, I noticed the currants are starting to really turn, so not much longer for them. Also, the Burpee Super Beefsteak and Rutgers are turning as well. The cherries are a bit behind (Black and Supersweet 100), so I don't know what's gonna happen with them. Whatever, I have decided to just harvest what I can when we get a freeze warning, which, as you say, could be any day now. The fall tomatos were just so gorgeous, and much nicer than the spring ones. But, I only started out with the Rutgers and Jet Star (it bit the dust in August), and a later planting in May of the Supersweet 100. By that time, it was too late for the Supersweet 100 to really set many tomatos - the heat was on. The fall planting I did in July did great and those are the ones that look soooo good right now. I'm happy with the container soil I've mixed, the fertilizer I used - I will increase how often I fertilizer next year. Happy with the watering I did - not overwatering cuz I do have a heavy hand in general. Happy with the containers I use, but do intend to purchase some grow bags in 20 gallon size, but will still keep to 8 (okay, okay, maybe 9 or 10) plants. I've really enjoyed growing tomatos much more than I thought I ever would, with an eye toward growing them for me, anyways, and not the hornworms. Altho the hornworms still have their place in the garden, it's just on the Datura now and not the tomatoes, so we're all happy. I did grow pots of basil around the plants, and it did seem to help with some of the pests. The grasshoppers did not touch the tomatoes, no white flies, no flying anything except for the happy little honeybees, bumble bees and skippers, that loved the Basil blooms. Did have some problems with the beet armyworms and the tomato fruitworms, but they remained manageable by handpicking and damaged only very few fruits. All in all, container growing worked out very well for me and I look forward to next year's growing season. Susan

Barbara, I went out and harvested what I could today, and covered the beans and cukes, hoping to keep them producing at least one more week because they have lots of little beans and little cukes. I don't know what will happen here....might have frost or might not. We're in the 'iffy' zone. We had a high of 71 today and clear, sunny skies with light wind. The wind has pretty much stopped, the sky is still clear and that 71 degrees is a distant memory--it is now 52 degrees and falling fast. I'll be surprised if we don't go at least to 38 here. In a 'normal' year (if there is such a thing) we'll average one almost-freezing night a week from mid-Oct through mid-Nov, when the first hard freeze generally arrives. So far, we're right on track....one almost-freezing night last week, and now one due to arrive tonight. However, our daytime highs (until today) have been averaging 10-15 degrees below normal, so I've been expecting that early frost. Even if we have a hard freeze and lose everything, I don't normally clean out my garden until we're consistently having very cold nights and days......there's too many snakes slithering around as long as the days are marginally warm. Usually, we're pretty much snake-free by December and I can clean out the garden to my heart's content without running into a snake. Dawn

The National Weather Service JUST issued a Frost Advisory for about a dozen counties in southcentral OK for 1 thru 9 a.m. Friday morning. Gee, guys, thanks for all the advance warning. Luckily, I wasn't waiting for them to advise us to cover up or bring in plants (I did both those things late this afternoon) but the Advisory is kind of late for anyone who wasn't already watching the weather and figuring it out for themselves. Jo, You may have to put something around your young fig trees' trunks to keep them from being gnawed on this winter. It has been warm enough during the day that bugs are still around even though we've had cold nights. Some years I see insects even into December in surprising numbers. I think a lot of them can handle cold weather if they hide under mulch or plant debris or whatever. I still have grasshoppers, including new small ones that hatched in September. Susan, I brought two containerized tomatoes into the garage, and covered up two that are out in the garden. We are expecting a freeze here, though, so if it gets cold enough, the covered-up ones won't make it. After covering up those plants and dragging the containerized plants (the 2 toms, a few peppers, and some brugs) into the garage, I harvested the last of the purple hyacinth beans for seeds and stripped the peppe plants of any peppers of decent size. Then I took one long last look at the Texas hummingbird sage, tithonias, petunias, marigolds, morning glories, black-eyed susan vines, zinnias, begonias, periwinkles, salvias and four o'clocks and sighed because by Saturday they'll probably be frozen and it really will be over for this year. They just look so beautiful right now that I hate to say goodbye to them. It has been really chilly here today so a lot of the flowers, though still blooming, are looking a little ratty. The okra and pepper plants started dropping leaves this week too as if they knew their days were numbered. I hate the morning after the first freeze...seeing all that blackened foliage. I haven't received any catalogs yet except for HPS's, but have received a few e-mails from companies that have their websites updated for 2011 and also saying "the catalog is in the mail" (that one was from T&M). Susan, It's a long tomato list! Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: Text of the Just-Issued Frost Advisory for SC OK