Oh little lady! Around here it's used when men mean to be polite & is most often used by men of a certain age. When we were living in Dallas a young couple bought a the house next to ours. It had been vacant for about a year & before that was a rental property, so it wasn't in the best shape. One Saturday the parents of the husband were there helping to work on the house. The dad was scraping paint off the outside woodwork & soffits as I was leaving to run some errands. I told him he should be wearing a face mask as the pain probably contained lead. He sort of blew me of with the attitude of "this woman doesn't know what she's talking about" & I went on my way with my own stereotype thinking he was a stupid geezer. The next weekend he was back & he stopped me during my work in the front garden. He told me that I had been right! That he had gone home & the next day was coughing up all sorts of "junk" that he'd inhaled. He looked at me & said, "I just told my misses, that little lady knew what she was talking about" Yeah, I was the little lady, but he was also admitting that he was wrong & I was right, so how could I get angry?

Itsmce - I don't think you have to worry about the cabbage worms going forward. I haven't seen any of the moths for a couple weeks up here and I would imagine the hard freeze would have killed any that had already hatched out. As Chris mentioned, the carrots should continue to sweeten up as well as size up the longer they are exposed to cool temps. I'm going to wait until at least Thanksgiving week to harvest mine and may leave some of them until December as long as it doesn't get cold enough for the ground to freeze solid. I've still got a lot of garden cleanup to do. I still have 26 broccoli plants that are slowly putting out more side shoots. I'll probably leave them be until I get around to starting my new compost piles and then chop them up to mix with the fall leaves. Chris - Yes, I'm still planning to build the 3 new beds. I need somewhere to put the soil from the beds that I am ripping out. Besides, I have a $100 Home Depot gift card burning a hole in my wallet I need to use. That's great that your friend is going to let you use his garden next year. More food! Naturegirl - Yep I am going to make my goal. The potatoes didn't put me over the top but they sure helped get me close. I didn't know my garden had fans rooting for it...thanks!!! I don't know what I should set my goal at next year especially if I use my friends garden too. Maybe 1250 lbs. would be reasonable. Did your bunching onions multiply this fall? I overwintered them one year and then separated them the following spring and they did well but I think I prefer just planting new seedlings in the spring. It sounds like you really got dumped on this week and now it looks like snow is coming down over most of Michigan. There is some snow in western KS heading our way as I type but it is supposed to turn into a cold rain before it gets here tonight. Perfect for the little Trick-or-Treaters :-(.

Larry, I don't know what that is. Do you suppose it could be some sort of Asian green similar to Bok Choy? That white base is what reminds me of Bok Choy, but I don't grow it, so don't know what it looks like at a young stage. Jennifer, I agree that the more property you have, the harder it is. At least the deer and voles have made it easy for me...they eat everything I plant that is not fenced off to exclude them, so I quit trying to have nice landscaping around the house, other than trees and a few shrubs and a couple of vines, because it all just becomes Deer Chow. This isn't necessarily a bad thing as it forces me to concentrate my efforts only within the fenced garden spots. I hope y'all got the photos done today. The weather here was bad in the morning, but not so bad by mid-afternoon. The sun even came out eventually, but now we're back to mud and standing puddles. The dogs came in from their dog yard, and I don't know what they did, but they all had wet, gooey mud about the consistency of chocolate pudding caked all over their feet up to their ankles. I spent a long time cleaning up after them since they left splotches of very wet mud with every step that they took. I'd rather have spent today in the garden, but it just wasn't a garden day today and tomorrow won't be either. Rebecca, I guess everyone was beyond ready for the Cherry Street market to be open and to have all those wonderful things available there. They sure did sell out early. I haven't seen anything 'yet' in the forecast that indicates your area will experience freezing temperatures, but I only look at the NWS forecast and it only goes out 7 days. Our coldest night so far looks like it will be Thursday night, and it really won't be that bad either (46 degrees on Thurs and 49 on Fri), but you're a lot further north, so seeing forecast lows in the upper 30s for your area isn't totally shocking. What worries me about forecast lows is that they often are highly inaccurate a week out. Last week we started out with a forecast low of 39 for our coldest weekend night, and then it dropped daily until it hit 32 I think, and our actual low was 31 or 32 but our Mesonet station was even colder---maybe 29. I think that whole progression of decreasing forecast lows for the 31st of Mar and 1st of Apr was a good reminder to me that just because the forecast looks good 6 or 7 days out, well.....I shouldn't assume it actually will be that good. The rain has been kind to us though....only rain, no hail, and that is about the best one can hope for in April. Areas of Texas well south and east of us got the sort of hail that was in our forecast as a general possibility. At least one area got much worse hail---Grapeland TX had mixed hail that seemed to range from maybe quarter sized to softball sized. I saw not just car windshields and windows either completely knocked out or with huge holes in them, but big fist-sized or larger holes in the bodies of the cars as well. Can y'all imagine what that sort of hail would do to a garden? I heard on the news that some hail-related injuries were reported---mostly due to flying glass. We were supposed to have 3 rounds of rain Friday night/Saturday and instead we only had 1. I'm okay with that. One was enough. Dawn

I hope that everyone had a Happy Thanksgiving. Jennifer, Plumbing problems seem so common at this time of the year. I hope y'all are able to get that slow drain running properly without calling a plumber. Those fires were so bad. I hate seeing evacuation warnings when there's wildfires like that. I don't worry about the people at home---they usually have at least enough notice to hop in their cars or trucks and go. I worry about all the animals at home whose people might be at work and who cannot get home to make sure the animals are evacuated or otherwise sheltered (cattle or horses standing in a farm pond, for example, as the flames go around them). We were lucky here. Earlier in the day when our dewpoint and relative humidity were very low, we didn't have the strong wind, and then our dewpoint and Rh values went back up. THEN the cold front came through and then dewpoints and relative humidity values fell sharply but by the time fires started, the wind had moved on through already, so we never had all the components for really bad fires in place at the same exact time. Still, there was a series of fires---arson fires---set east of Marietta towards Lake Texoma in late evening. The somewhat surprising thing about this was that it occurred either 1 or 2 days after another arsonist had been arrested setting multiple fires along I-35 in broad daylight. You'd think one arson arrest like that would deter a copycat, but apparently not. Rebecca, So far, every tomato variety I've tried with so-called EB resistance or tolerance has been a total dud and the plants got Early Blight anyway, and at the same time other surrounding plants got it. So, I have found limited value in any of those. They might show some form of resistance or tolerance if planted in an area that does not have a recurring problem with Early Blight, but in an area where EB is a persistent problem, I haven't found them to be any better than plants with no known tolerance of or resistance to EB. I used to love the Totally Tomatoes catalog, but haven't had much luck with any of their exclusive varieties the last 10-15 years, so I'm sort of over them too. This year I had much better luck with tomato plants in containers in an area of the yard where we hadn't had tomatoes in recent years. Those plants survived the whole summer and produced well and stayed 95% EB free (it is windborne, so I never expect plants to be 100% free of it). The plants out back in containers did much better than the tomatoes in the ground in the front garden where I've grown a plethora of all nightshades (potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, etc.) every year since we moved here. I'm going to leave the whole front garden free of night-shade veggies for the next few years to give the EB a chance to clear the soil there. This is one form of crop rotation since there's no bed in the front garden that hasn't had nightshades in it at some point over the last 3 years. I'm just rotating to a whole new area instead of rotating to new beds in the existing area. okmulgeeboy, I hate the Persephone days but just stay busy with indoor plants, grandkids, the holidays, etc. and before I know it, we have made it through the Persephone days and things are looking up. Amy, Y'all had more wind that we had. I think our max gusts were either in the upper 30s or lower 40s and were of short duration, for which we were grateful. I love, love, love decorating for Christmas. Every inch of our house gets holiday decorations, and we like to joke that our living room is just two Christmas trees, three wreaths and a little pine garland short of being a Hallmark Christmas movie living room. If you've ever seen all the over-the-top Christmas décor in the Hallmark Christmas movies....well, we do not measure up to that by any means, but we do have a lot of Christmas décor. I haven't even finished decorating yet---only the downstairs is complete, but I'll do the staircase and the upstairs next week. The girls are coming over in a couple of hours and we'll have them all weekend, so I'm sure we'll be busy with other stuff that does not include breakable Christmas ornaments. This year for Thanksgiving, we had three Amaryllis plants in full bloom---one Minerva and two Red Lions, and one of the Red Lions had two stalks up with 4 blossoms each on them. That one was especially spectacular. They all bloomed earlier than normal, but I am not going to complain. I have four more taking their pokey old sweet time that probably won't bloom until Christmas itself, so we'll have more then. These three amaryllis plants that are in bloom were grouped on one end table and looked so spectacular that Chris stopped and stared at them when he walked in the door and said something like "I know they are real, but they are so perfect this year that they look fake". lol. He was right! I was worried about the safety of the Christmas tree with Jesse and the new kittens, but Jesse is too busy with his basket of dog toys to even give the Christmas tree a second glance. He just runs by it on his way to get a toy out of his basket and doesn't even stop and look at the tree. Having said that, we don't leave him unattended in the living room with the tree because we fear what might happen if one of us isn't right there in the living room with him. The kittens are too little to care---they still are perfectly happy playing with each other, their scratching post and their cat toys and don't seem to have noticed the tree either. They play near it, but not on it or directly underneath it. So far, so good. Of course, it isn't even December yet and they still have lots of time to discover it and destroy it. Larry, I think the quail restoration project sounds awesome. I do know we hear and see a lot fewer quail here around us than we used to. There used to be a guy up the road who raised and released them, but he no longer is with us and I don't know of anyone else local who has taken on that task. All we have had the last couple of days is rain, mist, drizzle, fog, clouds, cool weather, and mud, mud, mud. I've over it already and we have another half a day or so of this November gloom to go before sunshine returns. Perhaps somewhat ironically, we go straight from today's/tonight's rain to tomorrow's return to high fire danger in the afternoon. Since everything has frozen repeatedly, none of the dead or dormant plants will hold moisture any length of time at all after the rain stops falling, so we face having dry vegetation in bad fire conditions tomorrow (and possibly Sunday as well) while the ground is muddy enough to slow down and even stop firefighters trying to fight wildland fires. It is a bad combination. Some of our worst wild fires historically have occurred on the weekend after Thanksgiving, and we find ourselves at that same point in the calendar again. It has been about a decade, maybe 11 or 12 years, since we had horrific wildfires on the Sunday after Thanksgiving and had to fight hard to keep those fires from burning through the town of Thackerville from two directions (west and east) simultaneously. We don't need a day like that ever again! We had our Thanksgiving at our house on Wednesday with Jana, Chris, the girls and us since Chris had to work on Thanksgiving. Then, on Thanksgiving Day we went down to Texas for Thanksgiving at my sister's house with siblings, their spouses, our adult nieces and nephews and their partners/spouses, kids and grandkids. Oh, and an assortment of friends. So, we had a mob of people and it was fun, and three of us siblings were together for the first time since Mom's funeral (with 4 of us kids, it seems like we always can get about 3 of us together at once, but hardly ever all 4 at once because there's always someone who's gone out of town to visit in-laws or kids/grandkids in another state, or whatever). It was a lot of fun, but I have to confess that I looked around the table and missed all our grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles and several cousins who no longer are with us. We had such huge, fun, family gatherings when we were children, and I am sure none of us ever looked down the road to the point in time decades ahead of us when all the ones who were the "older ones" back then would be gone and we kids would find ourselves in the strange role of being the older ones now, with children, grandchildren and one great-grandchild gathered around the kids' table where we once sat. Time marches on rather relentlessly. I enjoy sitting at the adults table, but also think it would be fun to be an innocent child one more time, sitting at the kids' table laughing and eating while wondering when we finally would be old enough to graduate to the adult table. Somehow that happened a few decades ago and, being busy with life, we really didn't even notice it. We still try to fix the same dishes we remember in the same way our grandmother, mother, and aunts made them, but at the same time, nothing tastes quite the same way as we remember it from our childhood. Have a good weekend everyone. Just think---tomorrow is the last day of November! Dawn