Post it on the plant trading forum.

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

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

Nancy, Having cats is about like having small children at times, isn't it? I imagine you blasted all the aphids off before monarchs really have begun much egg laying up there. They're laying eggs down here, but we're always a bit ahead of those of you further north. With QAL and hemlock, the purple streaks on the stem usually are a very obvious indicator. If you look at your plants, you can check the main stalks for very tiny, fine hairs. QAL has those very tiny fine hairs running up and down the stalk, and hemlock's stalks are smooth. My favorite way to tell them apart is that the seed heads of QAL will curl up into a bird nest type shape as the seeds dry. So, if in doubt about any plants that might be QAL or hemlock, just watch the seedheads. We have QAL, but I keep it pulled out of the garden and adjacent areas. I don't mind it elsewhere, just nowhere near where I'm growing anything on purpose because of its invasiveness. This year we have a lot of hedge parsley, especially in the neighbor's pasture due south of us. We've cut it down on our property so it cannot reseed here, but their seeds will wash downhill to us. I don't mind it---it is a host plant for the swallowtails, but at the same time, I don't want it invading my garden and taking over. I'm guessing all the moisture we've had since last Sept. has made every seed that was in the ground germinate and grow. When we moved here we were in our early 40s and this was intended to be our forever home, so I've always had that in mind as I garden---not wanting to create more than we can maintain as we age. Our nearly constant recurring droughts help me a lot in that regard because I cannot create more growing beds than we can irrigate throughout the summer months, and that reins me in more than anything else. We were in the second consecutive year of awful drought and a huge grasshopper infestation when we moved here in 1999, so that helped too---you cannot go crazy creating beds and planting when the ground is rock hard and the grasshoppers are eating every plant in sight down to the ground. You could say that Mother Nature reins me in from going overboard with plantings. Rebecca, That's a lot of rain. We have had less than half than much over the last two weeks. I hope your plants are okay. Larry, It is a hard garden year and the deer are not helping. They keep coming to my garden in broad daylight trying to chase me out of it so they can come in, and they just stand and stare at me like "who do you think you are?" I try to remember to close the garden gate behind me when I go in there so they cannot follow me into the garden. I don't know what their problem is---there's tons of natural food or them. I am pretty sure they want my okra plants, and I don't intend to share them. Jennifer, Sometimes zinnias just do that. I am sure it is some sort of genetic defect or mutation. I don't see it often---just a couple of times ever 4 or 5 years. Echinaceas do it too. What would eat a toad's body? Snakes of many different kinds, hawks or raccoons for sure. Probably other things too. Don't worry. Your kids always will need you, just in a different way. I enjoy the company of our adult son (and nieces and nephews) so much now---it is awesome to see them continue to grow and develop as adults. Then, someday, they'll likely become parents and you and Tom will become grandparents, and that is its own kind of awesome. If the demand for your eggs is higher than your supply, maybe you can refer some of those folks to the Conscious Community Co-op. There's almost always pastured eggs available there. Nancy, It sounds like your water table is coming up pretty high underneath your plants. Hopefully with less rain falling, that water level will begin to fall. I cannot complain about our tomato plants at all. We are reaching the I-cannot-bear-to-eat-another-tomato stage because we've been overdosing on them for 5 weeks now. A lot of my plants look sickly with foliar diseases (not unexpected because I've grown tomatoes in the same soil for 20 years, and they were supposed to be in the back garden this year.....), but they're still producing like crazy. I give the early planting all the credit for this, because I don't think my plants are setting any new fruit now and I don't think anything but the cherry and paste types have set new fruit in the last 2 or 3 weeks. I think the high humidity might be holding them back, because we've only barely been into the 90s at all, and certainly not enough to (theoretically) impede fruit set. I don't even care. Since we've been gorging on all the tomatoes we can eat, if I walked out to the garden tomorrow and all my plants mysteriously had died, I think I'd shrug it off, pull them out and replace them with zinnias and cosmos. Why not? I have 8 beautiful and healthy tomato plants in large containers near the garage that are producing very well if you don't count the minor herbicide drift damage from the neighbor's fence line herbicide spraying. I could be happy with nothing but the fruit from those 8 plants. I'm at the grumpy tomato stage where harvesting them, washing them, sorting them and processing the extras by freezing, drying or canning is annoying me. Life really is a lot easier if you don't grow too many tomatoes. I clearly grow too many, and that is nobody's fault but my own. Every year at this time I swear that I will take off next year from growing tomatoes, but of course, I don't do it. I do wish I had the self-discipline to only plant 6 or 8 tomato plants. My garden is not nearly as weed-free as yours, but I am making good progress. I still have three or four raised beds to weed, and several pathways. I think I have a good chance of getting all that done on Mon-Tues as this is a grandchild weekend and I'm not stepping foot in the garden at all. The tomato-like fruit on the potatoes is the potato fruit (remember, the part we eat is the tuber) which is not edible but contains seeds you can allow to mature on the plant and then sow if you want to try growing potatoes. Some people refer to them as seed balls to make it clear that they are not edible fruit. Google True Potato Seed if you want to read about growing potatoes that way. I did it one year just for fun to see if it could be done (it can!). You won't always get the potato fruit---just like your potatoes do not/will not always flower. I only get potato flowers/fruit in years when the nights stay cool for a prolonged period and those cool nights have to coincide with the potatoes being at about the right stage to flower. I don't have a lot to add about our garden. Although the tomatoes look sickly, I could nip that in the bud if I was willing to spray them with a fungicide, and I don't think I am. Y'all know I hate to spray anything at all on my plants ever. I think I'll just harvest the fruit and yank out the plants one by one whenever I get tired of looking at them. At least the heavy rainfall stopped here a couple of weeks ago, so the tomatoes taste much better now because excessive rainfall is not watering down their flavor. All the beans and tomatoes have spider mites, though not at huge levels yet. Either the predatory mites and lady bugs and other beneficial insects will take care of the spider mites, or they won't. If they do, great, and if they don't, I'll yank out heavily infested plants after the beans are done producing. It is rare for the spider mites to kill tomato plants as the predatory mites usually catch up, population-wise, by July and start knocking back the spider mite population, at which time the tomato plants put on a surge of new growth and rebound. I am concerned about the plethora of grasshopper nymphs I'm seeing and the fact that they are chewing holes in every single leaf on every single plant in my garden. The issue, really, is that our two organic grasshopper bait type control products---Nolo Bait and Semaspore are not available this year, so that is a big problem. I have a bottle of beauveria bassiana and I could use it to control the grasshoppers, but I worry about the effect it would have on other insects inside the garden. I think I'll just try to wait out the grasshopper damage. Or, if I start feeling really desperate about the grasshopper situation, I could spray the beauveria bassiana in a wide band around the outside of the garden fence and hope it kills the grasshoppers as they make their way to the garden. That might be a reasonable compromise. I really don't want to use it inside the garden because it can harm some beneficial insects (not all, but I don't want to sacrifice any of them). Earlier this week I noticed the caterpillar of the Variegated Frittilary Butterfly on my pansy plants. I was getting ready to yank out the pansies and replace them with Profusion zinnias, but now I'll leave the pansies until the Frit caterpillars are done with them. Lillie has been here for a couple of days and nights now and we're about to take her home to spend the rest of the weekend with her family. We tie-dyed 12 t-shirts and 2 pairs of shorts (half for herself, and half for her little sister) so my hands might be looking a little blue, purple and green (and pink, orange and red). lol. I've scrubbed them pretty hard and think most of the dye is gone now. I did wear gloves while tying and dying, but not when I was taking the rubber bands off the t-shirts to rinse them before running them through the washing machine. That is what gets me every time. Now that I've washed the t-shirts and shorts twice in the washing machine with those SHOUT dye-catcher things in there with them, I think they won't fade in a normal laundering, but I'll send the rest of the box of dye-catchers home with her today so they can protect the next few loads of laundry they wash. That worked out well for all of us last year, and now that we have tie-dyed t-shirts for 2 consecutive summers, Lillie has declared it to be "our family tradition". I'm okay with that. Hope everyone is having a good weekend. It is 88 degrees here and starting to feel a little bit toasty. Dawn