Claire, It was lovely here today as well, up into the mid-50's. I went for a walk near one of the oxbow ponds and although the water still had ice on about half of the surface, the birds were enjoying the entire area. Ravens and gulls walking on the ice, geese, ducks, and 2 kinds of mergansers in the water, and chickadees and a mockingbird in the shrubs on the margins. There was also an eagle overhead, but I didn't have a camera with me. Do you put the lawn dragon in the same spot each season or does he migrate around a bit? Jane, your chipmunk looks about set to pop with all that seed in his cheeks. I love the kestrel photos. Kestrels are another favorite bird of mine; they are quite common in Ohio, and their rarity here was one disappointment when I moved to New England. I love the feather patterns for both sexes, and also like watching them fly - they can hover to look for potential prey.

I'm so far behind I'll never catch up but I did read everything and I'm keeping my response minimal since it is time to start this week's new thread. Amy, Time off from a garden can be good. We all work too hard at this time of the year. Hazel, The best way to dig is with a special potato fork that has rounded edges on the prongs so they don't stab the potatoes, but I'm too cheap to spend money on a tool I'd only use a handful of days per year, so I used a transplanting spade with a rounded edge. Start further out than you have been and proceed slowly and with patience in order to avoid cutting into potatoes. Just use the cut ones first as sometimes they do not scar over and heal (though sometimes they do) and the ones that don't scar over will not store for long. A tomato knife is essential for someone who grows and processes as many as I do, and I did find one yesterday. I had to buy an entire cutlery set to get it, but it was an inexpensive set so I didn't mind. I wanted that tomato knife. I am going to go online one day and order a couple more. It is just I have tomatoes piling up everywhere now and need to be able to quickly cut them and use them and the tomato knife makes it easier. Melissa, Don't worry about being behind. Some years are just that way. We all have to work with whatever weather conditions we get. I am so sorry about your niece's injuries and will keep her in my thoughts and prayers. What a horrible way for her summer to start. I saw the story on the news and was horrified at the thought of those kids being in that bounce house when that happened. Jerry, That is an amazing corn story. Sometimes plants can be so resilient and I think often that many gardeners are too quick to write them off and either yank them out or plow them under instead of letting them recover on their own. Nancy, In your case, because of all the rain you have received, it is a good thing that the tomatoes are not closer to harvest. If they were, the excess moisture likely would ruin the flavor. Flavor is best if they are kept pretty dry as they approach harvest. So, for me, as much as I lament the lack of rainfall down here, it isn't really a bad thing for the tomatoes as it means their flavor compounds won't be watered down and they won't be suffering from cracking and splitting either. The first time I grew Mexican sunflowers, I wasn't prepared for how big they'd get. I space them much better nowadays so they don't crowd out everything else. Our dear, sweet Mary normally grows a ton of veggies and cans all summer long, both of which are a huge amount of work, of course. She is trying to take off this season in order to recover from what I'd describe as a major cardiac event so hasn't been posting here much. I was so happy to hear from her the other day and to know she is going to have a few plants. I think plants can be great therapy as someone recovers from a medical issue, as long as you have the self-discipline not to overwork yourself while tending those plants. Mary, if you read this, I keep you in my thoughts and prayers and hope you make a full recovery so that next summer you can be back to your usual growing and canning. Amy, It is odd that cabbage refuses to cooperate with you. It is about the easiest thing I grow. I just plant them and forget about them, which is easy to do if you grow your brassicas under netting to exclude the cabbage worms and such, which I do. When they're ready, I harvest. I do plant cabbages with short DTMS in the 60s-low 70s so that they finish up fairly early here. That's more because I want to put a sucession crop in their place before the weather gets too hot than anything else. When I've grown varieties with longer DTMs, they've done fine too and I've almost never had a head of cabbage try to bolt. Rebecca, I'd just cut off all the damaged leaves and let the Brandy Boy put out new growth. It likely would be fine. Nancy, Cucumbers planted late will do fine. I planted my pickling cukes late on purpose (just last week I think, or at the end of the week before), except for 2 early plants I planted in late March, so that I could spread out the canning load. The cucumber plants from the seeds I just sowed will not be producing a harvest until I'm through canning tomatoes, which was my goal. Having too many things that need to be canned all at once can be a real problem, so I try to control the canning workload by using planting dates to spread out the harvest. You even can get a good cucumber harvest from cucumbers planted in July down here, and I expect it is the same up there. My honest opinion is that if you want more sun, get your sweet husband to cut down that tree now. As time goes on, the shade situation just worsens. I speak from experience. Now that you two both are enjoying gardening so much, it will be important to maintain sunny areas for your veggies, fruits and sun-loving flowers. There is a place in each landscape for both sun and shade, and too much shade (though shade is highly desirable in our hot summers) is not a good thing. Okay, it is Monday moring and I'm headed off to start this workweek's new weekly garden talk thread. Dawn

Nancy, I used to wonder aloud, even here on this forum, how it was that 10 of our 14.4 acres are heavily wooded and yet we rarely saw a squirrel. It wasn't that I was complaining, but it just seemed odd. I suppose the dogs we had in our early years scared them away. Well, the old dogs don't scare them and this year we have tons of them. I agree they are just rodents with bushy tails. I have been ignoring them in the yard, but if they start getting in the garden, they are going to be in trouble. Long, long ago we raised a baby squirrel using kitten milk replacer and the tiny bottle that comes with it. We never knew what happened to its mother, but had had a vicious thunderstorm and this baby probably fell out of a squirrel nest and she didn't come find it. It was so small that Chris, who was probably 13 or 14 at the time, walked around wearing a pocket t-shirt with the squirrel riding in the pocket. It spent the rest of its time in a hamster cage or being bottle fed. Later on it transitioned to a nut/fruit/seed blend meant for birds. Finally, when it seemed large enough to release, he'd put the squirrel outdoors in the morning for ever-lengthening periods of time (just like hardening off plants, lol), but whenever he went outside to check on it, it would run to him and come back indoors. One day, it didn't come back and we knew it had successfully gone back into the wild. That was a relief. I didn't want to have a pet squirrel in a cage in the house forever. Nowadays, I don't know if anyone in this family would want to get up at night to bottle feed a tree rat. Y'all do seem heavily overpopulated by squirrels this year. If the nut-bearing native trees up there produced as heavily last fall as they did down here, that's the reason why. We had so many acorns from the oak trees that walking in the yard was like trying to walk on marbles or golf balls, depending on the oak variety. We swept and raked up and composted acorns by the thousands all autuman and winter, and those were just from the yard, not the entire woodland. If the hickories, walnuts and pecans produced as heavily in the woodland as the oaks did, I'm surprised we don't have 1 billion squirrels. I'm afraid your battle with the voles and moles (and do you have gophers too?) will be constant, but I'm glad you're seeing fewer of them. I haven't found much vole damage in the garden yet, but they've been in there. Every now and then Pumpkin catches one and brings it out of the garden to play cat-and-mouse with it in the yard (endlessly) and I rarely see a dead vole, so I'm worried he is doing catch-and-release when we gets tired of playing with it. The good thing is that vole populations cycle up and down in roughly 2 to 5 year cycles, so some years will be better, though other years may be worse. Kaida sounds absolutely so precious and it touches my heart so much that she clearly adores you and trusts you and will sit and open her heart up to you and share all her thoughts, dreams, feelings and more. Someones when somebody remarries later on in life, the family is not so accepting of/loving towards the new spouse, but clearly they all have embraced you as their own and that is special too. Kaida herself sounds like she is such a precious gift and I know you surely treasure her in your life. I'm glad you're a sucker for kids. I know you will not regret one moment spent with her this summer and, hey, now you've got two more hands available for weeding! You certainly inherited a fine bunch of folks in the younger generations when you married Garry, so surely your life overflows with many blessings. I know it doesn't make you miss your son and his family back in MN any less, but it is nice to have the new kids, grandkids and great-grandkids geographically closer to you, isn't it? Millie, I didn't know that. What a horrible thing to use around edible plants! I do know that many, many products that once sold and widely used have been banned. When I was a kid, they sprayed DDT as the solution to everything. I always hated that stuff, but we were stupid kids, and when the big tanker truck was driving up and down all our local streets spraying for mosquitoes in the 1960s, we idiot children road our bicycles behind in the mist coming from that truck. It is a wonder we aren't all dead. My dad never used many chemicals, and as he got older, he progressively used them less and less until he was almost to the point of being organic by the time Alzheimer's Disease stole his mind and he gave up gardening because he no longer remembered how to do it. The few chemicals he used, he kept in a chest in the garage and we knew we were not even allowed to open the door to that thing. Our government does a lot of crazy things, and I just try to ignore it and them as much as possible. The tobacco thing is perplexing, but it is what it is--a sign of how dysfunctional our federal govenment has become, not that our state government is any better either. Hazel, If I had to choose between garden time and internet time, the garden would win every time. Since I'm home all day, I usually have time for both. Peppers are prone to sunscald in our climate. The plants can produce more fruit than their foliage can cover. When I see that happening, I try to remember to give them some extra nitrogen and extra water to push more foliar growth. When you first notice sunscalded peppers, if you bring them inside, you can cut out the bad part and use the rest of the pepper. If you don't notice the sunscald until later on, often the fruit will begin rotting inside from the damage. I harvested a laundry basket full of peppers last week and threw away maybe 3 bell peppers that had sunscald so badly that they were unusable, but was able to salvage and use most of several others that were only mildly sunscalded. I'm sorry to hear about the SVBs. It seems to be happening a lot in your part of the state over the last week or two. I keep thinking every morning as I walk down to the garden that today will be the day that I lose my first squash plant to an SVB, but it hasn't happened yet. It will happen any time though. There's some squash bugs and I'm trying to control them, but it is an annoying and time-consuming task. Hand-picking squash bugs and drowning them is effective, but while I'm doing it, there's a little voice inside my head screaming "ain't nobody got time for that". lol. It is true, but I take the time and do it anyway. Right now the temperatures are cool enough that I don't mind spending some morning time on squash bug destruction, but the deeper we get into summer and the hotter the weather gets, I know I will mind doing it and at some point I'll just stop doing it. We just do not have enough good natural pests of squash bugs, leaf-footed bugs, blister beetles or stink bugs, so keeping a garden free of them is virtually impossible. Well, maybe people who use chemical pesticides can do it, but that's not me and I won't go that route. In my newly open spaces, I'm planting fall tomatoes and more southern peas. Always, always southern peas because we like them and because they tolerate heat so well. I've already got too much okra, winter squash, watermelons and melons, so southern peas it will be. Is there anything you want more of but haven't planted yet? If so, that's what I would plant in your newly available garden beds. You could go ahead and plant green beans now for a fall harvest. It is a touch early for them down here, but I've had good luck some years from a late June planting of them. At the worst, they'll start blooming in hot weather and not produce much until the weather cools in late August or early September, but if we get periodic cool and rainy spells, sometimes they will produce all summer long. I hope rain finds y'all soon. It is ridiculous how long your part of the state has gone now without meaningful rainfall. Here's the map that illustrates it pretty well: Consecutive Days Without 0.25" of Rain It is shocking that the month of the year that generally is the rainiest has brought central OK somewhere between nothing and next-to-nothing in terms of inches of rainfall. The end of May wasn't much better, was it? We slipped into Moderate Drought 2 weeks ago, then two good rainfalls brought part of our county back out of it and back to Abnormally Dry last week. Oops. I never did the Drought Monitor post last week, so here's the latest Oklahoma Drought Monitor map: OK Drought Monitor And, for forum members who live outside of OK, here's the US Drought Monitor Map: U S Drought Monitor Map Honestly, as a gardener, by the time that the powers-that-be show us as being Abnormally Dry, we already are so dry that I almost cannot water enough to make a difference so to some extent, it doesn't matter to me what stage we're in each week, because they're all bad and all challenging to the garden plants. However, once we hit Severe Drought I stop watering everything but the perennials because I can't water enough to push production out of annual veggie plants once we are that dry. Even in Moderate Drought, sometimes it feels like the watering is only keeping plants alive, but not really keeping them in production. The good news is that summer is actually here now, and it doesn't last forever, so we can start hoping for an early autumn cooldown and the return of more plentiful moisture. Keeping plants happy in July and early August in OK surely is incredibly challenging even in just a normal run-of-the-mill year, much less in a drought year. Dawn

I think I have a bad cold, not the flu. I need to kill my husband but love him too much to kill him. We have to put our fire radios on a charger every night to recharge the batteries. Apparently he did not set his radio on the charger, so it started beeping very loudly at 4 a.m. to let us know the battery was almost dead. It was like having a fire alarm going off in the house. Can anyone say "Wide awake?" We had another big fire today, but had spent the morning buying supplies---prepackaged snacks, gas cans, bungee cords, gloves, zipties (no, I don't know why---but the firefighters said they needed them, so we bought them), etc. and cleaning up/reorganizing all the trucks and tweaking minor mechanical issues and such, so we were ready. We had already done all the basics last night, like gassing up all the trucks and refilling all the water tanks. Today was spent fine-tuning everything else and cleaning up the trucks because they were dirty and sooty from last night. We also picked up about another dozen cases of bottled water and Gatorade. We were trying to be ready for anything that might happen. Two big multi-alarm fires in two days concerns me. Today was supposed to be a "low" fire danger day, but eventually our Fire Danger status for our county was showing "High" fire danger, so I guess our weather overachieved. The forecast high was 70 and we hit 77, which I think is a bad sign. By then, we had six VFDs, including ours, out at a combination vehicle fire (a Winnebago with a full 50-gallon tank of gas) and grass fire/wildfire (because a burning vehicle is going to ignite the grass beside it). So, for the second day in a row, our attempt to lay floor tile in the mudroom fizzled out. Maybe tomorrow will be our day. Or, maybe we'll finally get it done sometime in 2018. I feel out of sorts, Jennifer, and have for months. I blame the weather. I feel like, at least lately, we have all four seasons of weather every day. You wake up in the morning and it is cold, so you dress for Winter in sweats, a coat, boots and gloves and go out into 30 or 40 degree weather to take care of the animals. By mid-morning, it has warmed up a lot and you shed the heavier clothing because it feels like Spring. You start thinking it might turn out to be a really nice day after all now that it is no longer cold. Somehow, then, in the early afternoon the house is starting to feel hot, so you decide it is Summertime and turn on the air conditioner. Summertime isn't too bad, as long as you watch out for snakes hiding in the leaves when you're out in the yard with the animals but at the same time, you know that it isn't right to have 75 or 80 or 85 degree weather in November. Then, as soon as the sun starts to set, the temperatures fall rapidly, you turn off the air conditioner and a couple of hours later, make sure to turn on the heater before you go to bed because, now it is Winter again. Stack a bunch of these days on top of one another and it is enough to make anyone feel out of sorts. And...there's dust, pollen (weed and tree pollen here still is at moderate levels) and smoke in the air, so you really don't even want to be outside during the prettiest part of the day, especially if you're coughing your head off. I just want some normal weather. I want it to be cold when it should and hot when it should, and getting rain would be lovely, but I'm starting to think it isn't going to rain ever again. Or, at least it isn't going to rain again in 2017. Other than the above, everything is just peachy keen here. Rebecca, I like JetStar as well as all the other hybrids you mentioned. They all perform really well for me here. In our garden, Jet Star is more productive, but Big Beef has better flavor, so I tend to just grow them both. I think Big Beef is the best-flavored red hybrid available today, and Brandy Boy is the best combination of hybrid vigor, flavor and productivity available in a pink tomato. Amy, Yes, movies were expensive and herding a bunch of kids was a chore, but those still were sweet times, and I cherish the memories. I think the kids had as much fun seeing second-run movies at the $1 theater as they had seeing first-run movies at the bigger, more expensive places. I don't miss those days though---they were great at the time and now they're over. (grin) Now it is those children who are the adults taking their kids to the movies and they can do it without me and I'm not offended at all. I really enjoyed going to movies as a kid in the 1960s and 1970s. We had a little local theater that was open through at least the late 1960s (with a drugstore right beside it that had a lunch counter, stools and a soda fountain) and we went to a local drive-in a lot in the 1970s. I do love Gary 'O Sena. In fact, I like all of Keith Mueller's varieties, though Liz Birt is a more tart flavor so it appeals more to people who like old-fashioned flavor than to those who like the sweeter types of tomatoes. It is conversations like these that make my tomato grow list spontaneously expand and get too long. Nancy, I think it is an age thing. When I'm with my brothers and sisters, I don't want for the gathering to end. Perhaps it is partly because we're at the age now where we've buried at least some of our parents and their siblings and spouses, our grandparents are long gone, and we've lost a cousin here or there far too young, and we're becoming more and more aware of how quickly the time flies by. You look back and wonder where the decades went. It seems like just yesterday we siblings and cousins were the kids, and now a lot of us are the grandparents. How did that happen? Tomorrow we start the last week of November. Where did the month go? Dawn