Congrats Betty. I'm sure you'll be seeing those Monarch's around the garden over the next few days. I got to release about 8 monarchs today that came out yesterday. I usually won't release them the first day that they eclose as they really don't need to feed that first day. They will feed the second day and if you release them out into the garden and they can immediately sense the nectar they may "imprint" your garden as a good place to dine at a later date. Mind you the above is just a theory, but my Monarchs, and other species I raise always seem to be hanging around day after day. Mike

Dr. Forbes released updated TorCon Index numbers a few minutes ago. Today's updated TorCon Index numbers for Oklahoma: Northeast 6 South-central 6 North-central 4 For Kansas Southeast 4 For Missouri: South 5 Northeast 4 Northwest 3 For Arkansas North 6 Southwest 5 Southeast 4 For Texas: North-central 5 Northeast 4 Watch the weather if you're outside in the garden or yard today! Dawn

Martha, that is an excellent point. When I released my last adult, it was at the beginning of October and it was getting rainy and cold then. I didn't look for any more cats. Since then, we've had a few cold nights, but basically it's been pretty nice and downright balmy, expected to be that way maybe until Halloween now. So any late cats would have survived and been able to metamorphose into butterflies. I still have plenty of milkweeds growing, too.

Jennifer, I'm glad you got rain. I know that you needed it. I was looking at our tomato plants in pots around dinner time last night and thinking they needed water. Since heavy rainfall was in our forecast, I didn't water them but promised the plants I'd water them Saturday morning if the forecasted Friday rain missed us. It didn't miss us, so I won't have to water today....or for another week....or month. Larry, Water coming into the house? Wow. That's not good. I hope you find the source and can stop it from coming in. In terms of weather, we had it all last night and to a lesser extent it continues this morning, just without the wicked wind. There's been a ton of rainfall, thunder and lightning, wind gusting into the 60s, etc. The storms have been widespread but patchy, so some folks have more rain, and more damage, than others. We have roofs torn off buildings, trees down, power poles snapped in half, power lines down, power outages of course, and water, water, water everywhere. The hardest-hit areas for power outages seem to be to our south. Our power went out momentarily but came right back on and, of course, as with every single time it rains hard here, we lost the DirecTV and the internet for a while. I don't know what it looks like outside at our place because it still is dark, but we are surrounded by an ocean of water. I'm betting at least 3" of rain fell just based on the huge amount of water surrounding the house. We feel fortunate as there were tornadoes to our southwest, in particular just across the river a bit and down in Montague County, TX, where my dad grew up, which sits catty-corner to Love County's southwestern corner. The Bowie, TX, area got hit by one or more tornadoes, and the Burkburnett, TX, area had some of the largest hail I've ever seen--I don't even know how to describe it, perhaps cantaloupe-sized. The stones certainly were significantly larger than grapefruit sized. These hailstones in some instances punched through the homes' exterior roof and then came through the ceiling and into the actual rooms of the homes. Can you imagine? My parents had that exact same sort of damage to their roof and home when I was either 20 or 21 and living in my first apartment. I was there in Fort Worth at the time, but not at their house, and I remember taking my sister home to Arlington with me to spend the night because my parents' house was such a mess. They got essentially a whole new interior (drywall, insulation, carpet, drapes, bedspreads, etc.) and exterior (windows, siding, roof, etc.) after their baseball to softball sized hail pushed through their roof, walls and ceiling and some flooring that year after the interior suffered damage from water and debris. The issue was that everyone else was in the same boat, so it was hard to find roofers and construction workers and many people's homes went a year or more before they were fully repaired and restored to normal. Last night, down in Texas they had ridiculously slow-moving storms and heavy flash flooding to our south, and then more damage on the TX side of the river to our southeast that could be tornado damage or straight-line wind damage. Some people in our county think their storm damage came from a tornado, and maybe it did, but I never saw anything on our radar that looked like a tornado, at least not after it crossed the river into OK. We had a lot of storm spotters out and some of them reporting some lowering of the clouds and also rotation in various places, but I don't know if any of them reporting a tornado on the ground. If they did, I missed it. Last night wasn't even supposed to be our best chance for heavy rainfall, but we got it anyway. Our best chance for heavy rainfall, if the forecast doesn't change, is Sunday. I don't know where we'll put more water. Dawn