Thanks to Alfie for clarifying the difference between catmint and catnip; saved me the trouble! Since I have to fence my catnip to allow it to survive the depredations of my own and the neighborhood cats, I have but one plant. However, since the cats care nothing for lemon catnip, and because it self-sows with the same gleeful abandon as the regular sort, and because I much prefer its aroma and taste in tea to the standard (which to me smells like skunk, although I confess I do not find that scent--at a reasonable distance!--terribly off-putting), I have masses of that around, duking it out in one wild corner with the lemon balm, equally enthusiastically self-sowing calendula, and several mullein plants that I encourage for their medicinal properties as well. ANYhow--my point is this: if plain ol' catnip is a good 'skeeter repellent, seems my lemon catnip would be even better, as it has that citronella-like scent, same as lemon balm. We, happily, have not too many mosquitoes this year, but I will sure give it a try tomorrow for the ravenous black flies that have plagued our area the last couple of summers. I have little hope, though, since the lemon balm did not faze them...CK

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Jay, I'm so glad y'all are getting rain. The cold interfering in planting is unfortunate. Hopefully it will be the last really cold night. Bon, That's a lot of rain at once after y'all went without good rain for so long. I hope the ground doesn't stay too wet for too long. Ours is still just mud, mud, mud but I think that today's high temperature in the lower 80s with strong winds means we'll see some drying. They've dropped our chances of rain today and tonight down to 20% and I'm hoping the rain misses us so we can dry out a bit more. It is too bad we can't save this rain for June, July or August. Dawn

Nancy, I love the painting that tells your life story and find it interesting your foretold your own happy golden years with Garry. I think deep in your soul you somehow knew that the golden years/decades would be blessed ones. Everyone I know who has retired finds themselves so much busier than they ever were when they worked---and it is the good, happy kind of busy because they're doing things they love to do. Megan, I thought of you when I heard hail was falling up there, and told Tim "I think Megan is going to beat our hail record". I was hoping I was wrong about that, and just hate that y'all got hailed upon yet again. I am glad the hail wasn't any bigger than it was. Is it NWS tweets that are slow to arrive? I've noticed their computerized systems are having a lot of trouble these last few months---I'm guessing they have massive issues. Back in May when we were having all those storms, the NWS webpage was so slow to update that often we weren't seeing warnings pop up on the webpage map until they were about to expire. I was seeing them more quickly on FB and Twitter though. Our local Emergency Mgmt officials still were getting them directly from the NWS quickly and posting them in our GroupMe pages (one for first responders and another for SkyWarn Spotter network personnel) so I would see them twice on my phone long before they ever showed up on the official NWS webpage, tweets and FB posts. I think I might have been incredibly frustrated on those severe weather days if it wasn't for my GroupMe groups though. Oh, and during that time, our NWS radio transmitter that serves southcentral OK was out of service on a couple of crucial days, so warnings couldn't come that way either. They got it fixed as quickly as they could though. I'm sorry you're ill and wish you a speedy recovery. Chris came down with something a couple of weeks ago and ran a persistent fever for a couple of days. The fever just wouldn't break and finally he went to the doctor, was tested (we all were guessing it would be bronchitis) and had Type A flu. He was so frustrated to be sick with the flu in late May/early June, but he is a firefighter and runs a lot of medical calls all day long when he works his 24-hr shift, so it would not be surprising that he caught the flu (despite having the flu shot). The CSA battle sounds crazy and I hate that you got dragged into it. Why do people have to make everything into such a battle nowadays? Why can't people just be nice and get along? Jennifer, His little bird, Sunny, which is one of the parrotlets, is fine. She had some sort of ear infection. They had a hard time getting to the vet....made it to north Texas and discovered all the power still was out, more than half the traffic lights weren't working, etc. The vet's office had no power and had sent out a FB notice saying so, but Chris and Jana never checked FB that morning on their way down, and hadn't called the office because they left here well before office hours began. Personnel were in the office, awaiting the return of power, and checked her and diagnosed her by flashlight. The vet is wonderful and has told them that when they have a sick bird, because of the long commute involved, they should just hop in the car and head down and they'll work them in any time, but usually Chris does call them and let them know they are coming---it was just that it was so early in the day he knew no one would be in the office yet. There are not many vets that specialize in tropical birds so this vet office seems to stay busy all the time, and I cannot imagine what bird owners would do if this vet retired without finding someone to replace her in her bird practice. Luckily, she's nowhere near retirement age. Sorry, I must have missed you said they were cutworms. If you have SlugGo or SlugGo Plus, just a sprinkle of it on the ground will take care of the cutworms. I never have used it specifically for them, but just learned that when I used it for pill bugs and sow bugs (which are having a massive population explosion at the present time) that I often saw no cutworm damage either. I have had LBPs pop up in unexpected spots. For several years I grew them in a bed beside the old garden shed, which is up by the house and greenhouse, not down here near the garden, and I'd find random bunches of LBPS in odd spots....in containers nowhere near their bed, in a separate garlic bed about 15' away from where I had planted them, in the driveway, etc. I am thinking maybe birds plant the seeds because some of my LBPs that volunteered were in places where I don't think the wind or rain runoff could have placed them. Have a safe trip and enjoy your vacation. It always is good to get away, though I do not like leaving during the growing season either. I worked hard in the garden yesterday, multitasking in each bed as I worked my way through the garden. So, I was simultaneously weeding, deadheading, harvesting and planting Magellan Ivory, White Profusion and Polar Bear zinnias in each bed as I worked my way through the garden beds. I got 2 and 1/2 flats of plants tucked into just 4 raised beds. I harvested more beds than that (beans, tomatoes, peppers, onions) but only got the weeding, deadheading and planting done in 4 beds. I also weeded each path as I worked on the adjacent beds. This rain is keeping new weeds popping up daily. It would drive me crazy if I thought about it for too long. I'm hoping to get another 4 beds done today, but awakened to rain that is expected to last through at least 10 a.m., so I won't be getting an early start. Today's flats include more zinnias (Benary's Giant white zinnia, Oklahoma white zinnia and one of the tall white cosmos, though I don't remember its name). I have three kinds of cosmos growing from seed in flats, and think the tall one is Double Click Snow Puff. When I decided in May to use flowers as succession plantings instead of succession planting veggies, I wanted easy stuff that would blend in with existing flowers and herbs already planted, so I ordered and sowed seeds of several kinds of white zinnias and white cosmos since white goes with everything. It also was sort of a strategic move based on the prospect of a cooler summer. Often, white zinnia flowers don't last as long in the heat of an OK summer as other colors of zinnias do, so I figured a cooler, wetter summer would be the ideal time to plant a lot of the white ones with a reasonable expectation that they'll be happier in our summer weather than they normally are. Time will tell. They'd better be happy because we're certainly going to have a lot of them. Our tomato plants are at peak production right now, and in sort of a stunning way. None of the plants really look good, except the ones in containers where I'm better able to control both moisture levels and soil splash, but they're all producing well anyway. I picked a 5-gallon bucket of tomatoes yesterday and I only harvested half of the plants. Today I will do the rest after the rain stops. I really am not ready to have to deal with processing tomatoes every night after working in the garden every day, but here we are.....it is that time. Once I get enough ziplock bags of frozen processed tomatoes for salsa, I am going to start yanking out plants right and left. I already have enough tomatoes in the freezer for at least 6 batches of salsa and 3 batches of either tomato sauce or soup, and enough tomatoes sitting in rows on the table to at least double that, so the tomato plant yanking will commence very, very soon. I told myself that I would not be a slave to canning and dehydrating this summer, and I meant it, so once my salsa and sauce goals are met, the plants can come out and go onto the compost pile. Even if I keep nothing except the 12 plants in pots (six in the garden, six up by the house), we'll still have more tomatoes than we ever could eat fresh, so I can use the excess ones at that point for making tomato sauce, etc. I love tomatoes but when you plant far too many of them on purpose as I do, the excess harvest gets old quickly. The upside is that when I have too many plants, I can get all the preservation done in a really compact time frame---certainly well before the end of June. By the time the heat arrives later in the summer, I won't be a slave to a hot, steamy kitchen because the tomato preserving will be done. Since our rain largely stopped here a couple of weeks ago and we've only had a couple of small rains since then (half an inch one day, 6/10s another, and only very light rain so far this morning), the flavor of the tomatoes is getting better. The early season tomatoes suffered too much from rain watering down the flavor, although even with watered-down flavor, home-grown tomatoes still are better than those from the grocery store. The heaviest producers in the garden so far are Early Girl, Bush Early Girl, Early Doll, Cherokee Purple, Cherokee Carbon, Compari OP, Heidi, Mule Team, Chef's Choice Orange, Sun Sugar, Barry's Crazy Cherry, Black Krim, Jetsetter, Juliet, Aldi Orange, and Stump of the World. You know how some people will utter that phrase "I regret nothing"? Well, that's not me this year. I regret planting such a huge number of tomatoes. I'll add that I always get this same almost-panicky feeling when the first huge harvest rolls in...like....what what I thinking and what am I going to do with all these tomatoes? Usually I get over it. This year, though, I am going to get over more quickly---not by killing myself trying to process them all for weeks and weeks on end but by yanking out the plants one by one after I've harvested as many tomatoes as I want from each variety. I'm very close to yanking out plants now. Actually, I pulled out one Bush Early Girl yesterday after I harvested its last two fruit. It was the first plant to produce a harvest and it produced a lot of tomatoes over the last 6 or 7 weeks, but it is done now and happily (I assume) decomposing on the compost pile. I could have left it and it would have bloomed (it already had begun another bloom cycle) and set more fruit, but I'm at the stage where I don't want more tomatoes. We have been eating them daily since the start of May and are starting to tire of eating them constantly. I love tomatoes but am starting to feel like I'm overdosing on them. More plants are likely to follow the Bush Early Girl to the compost pile today, assuming the rain moves on out of here and I can get out into the garden to work. Have a great day everyone. Dawn