Suzie, You never know, she might get a thundersnow storm. We've had a lot of them in recent years. I grew up in Texas just about 80 or 85 miles south of where we now live in Oklahoma, but I'd never even heard of thundersnow until we moved here. I won't say we have thundersnow here at our house every year that snow falls, but probably about every other year. We had it last year, and we've already had it this year. Jim Cantore was very entertaining the other night. I'm sure a lot of that is part of the "show" he puts on for the camera, but I also think he was shocked to see thundersnow that far north. The other weather phenomenon we have here that I don't remember having in Texas is derecho winds. The first one we experienced here came during the night with 60 mph winds and hit the house so suddenly and so hard while we were sleeping that we thought a semi-truck or an airplane had hit the house. I also had about 20 flats of plants on the screened-in porch (so it must have been April) and we had to run out and bring them all into the house because the temperature plunged probably 30 degrees in 10 minutes when the derecho wind hit the house. I think we've experienced 3 or 4 severe derecho wind storms at our house since then. The one I remember best, the local met on the TV news at noon told us it was coming and told us if we went outside 5 or 10 minutes before it was due to hit our area, we'd hear it coming like a "mighty rush of wind". Of course, Tim and I went outside 10 minutes before it was s supposed to hit and went down to the road so we'd have a clear view of it coming by looking up the roadway (too many trees around our house). Sure enough, a few minutes later it came roaring towards us like a freight train (we could hear it for a minute or more before we could see the blowing of the vegetation begin) and we went from clear skies to dark grey ones in about a minute as the wind blew through and the temperatures plunged. The other one I remember was a severe derecho squall line with multiple bow echoes accompanied by tons of lightning. This time, the TV met kept cutting into regular programming to warn that anyone working outside needed to get inside by a certain time. Our barn-style detached garage was being built then, and the buys working on it were welding steel beams together. I talked with them about the weather and convinced them to heed the warnings, get down off the structure, put up all their tools and head home. They literally were driving down the driveway when the derecho hit here and the first raindrops started falling, and we sure did have lightning! I was glad they weren't up on that metal framing when it hit. You've got to admit, Oklahoma's weather is never, ever dull. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: Facts About Derecho Windstorms

Sounds wonderful! I'm glad you enjoyed your dinner party. See, if your ever worried about a dinner party again, just put those chocolatinis on the menu! I should have mentioned martinis when you were worried. A friend of mine was having a dinner party and made a big batch of appletinis to go with the appetizers. They were such a hit she made a couple more batches. At 9:00 she realized that she had never started dinner, and wasn't actually sure she was capable of cooking at that point, so she made more appletinis and had her husband call for pizza. All the guests spent the night sleeping on various chairs, couches or the floor. They thought is was they best party ever.

Hi Paula, We're having a great onion year. About half the short days are harvested and curing but the other half acts as though they are not interested in flopping over at all. Meanwhile, the necks on the intermediate types are just beginning to soften, allowing the foliage to flop over. The three long day varieties stopped new growth long ago at the 12 to 15 leaf range. I suspect they cannot make more leaves than that, so they are just sitting there waiting for the right daylength or whatever to occur that will let them finish up. They are starting to bulb. I think that we'll have either 7 or 8 of our 9 varieties harvested before the end of June. The ninth one, Copra, tends to run a bit later than the rest. Since that one is for prolonged storage, I'm not in any hurry to harvest them anyway. I've noticed from various FB photos that lots of folks far north of me are harvesting onions already, and to my eye, a lot of those don't look like they even reached the softneck stage before being harvested. Some of them have had such thick necks that they resemble leeks! That sort of drives me crazy, but I don't say anything because they are not asking a question like "did I harvest my onions too early?" or "would my onions have been twice as large as they are now if I had waited until the proper time to harvest them?" I just bite my tongue. When someone does ask about when to harvest, I do tell them about the soft neck stage and proper curing for the longest storage possible. I'm not sure I understand the urge to harvest things far too early, other than perhaps they are eager to put a succession crop in that same space if they have limited gardening space. Well, I understand when farmers or market growers harvest earlier to get the onions to market because early onions are money in the bank, but I don't understand when home gardeners do it. I planted too many onions as always, but we use so many in cooking and canning that I suspect we'll use up every one of them. Because we never got really cold after the onions were planted, they grew like gangbusters and most have 12-15 leaves, so we're going to get nicely sized onions even though our rainfall this year has been only about 60% of average. I'm glad your plums are ready. Ours froze while in bloom or shortly after bloom so there won't be any new plum jelly this year, but I made two years' worth last year so we won't run out any time soon. Chickens do complicate one's life, and I love them anyway and always will have them. They are so adorable. Our chickens get used to me coming out of the house with the compost bucket in my hand (especially when canning is producing tons of waste material) and follow me right to the pile, happily clucking away as they dig and scratch through whatever yummy stuff I just tossed on the pile. Sometimes in the afternoons when I'm in the garden working, the chickens stand outside the fence as close to me as they can get and work through the grass looking for bugs. I think they are hoping I'll toss them a tasty caterpillar or something every now and then (and I do). Since chickens are not garden-friendly, they are not allowed in the garden when there's crops growing, but they loiter around its fence constantly. If I walk up to the house and forget to close the gate, the garden is full of chickens when I come back. Apparently they watch very carefully for such opportunities to infiltrate the fenced compound. Luckily, they aren't in there long enough to do any damage---mostly they just dig and scratch in the mulched pathways, searching for bugs. We also have one chicken who loves canned cat food. She'll hear me call the cats to come indoors, which I often do while beating on a cat food can with a spoon...because nothing makes the cats come in quickly more than the prospect of being fed. That chicken comes running with the cats and tries to come inside with them every day. Sometimes I'll take her a spoonful of canned catfood just because she loves it so, but I'm not letting her come into the house. Dawn

Luckily my DH actually took Home Ec at school and is a fairly decent, if plain, cook. I taught DD to cook by the time she was 9 and while she wasn't a keen cook when she was younger, over the past few years she's really branched out. I think it's partly because her DH is a very good and adventurous cook (make his own naan bread from scratch, makes Vietnamese rice paper for rice paper rolls etc) and spurs her on to stretching herself. But, in a local restaurant where I once worked, we had a waitress who was completely clueless. She was supposed to be circulating an afternoon tea crowd with a tray of fresh scones with jam and cream. She came in announcing, "No one was taking any so I put them on the table out there so they could help themselves." I looked. Yep, there they were in full sun on a summer day. Another time we had a very busy night and I had a bunch of salt and pepper squid appetisers almost ready to go, but other stuff that needed attending to. I handed Miss Clueless the pepper mill and said, "Could you please finish this off before you serve them?" She stood there shaking the pepper mill and wondering why nothing was coming out. But I nearly choked when she suddenly said, apropos of nothing, "Do you only get chicken breasts from girl chickens?"