Yeah, from one Bad Self to another. Keep up this thread as it's motivation for us DIYers to get something done this week. I finally have something to report! This week I ordered my new garage doors and commercial grade railing for a back elevated concrete deck. Still shopping for the hammer drill masonry bits, though. The rail will be delivered Tuesday then it's a race to get the concrete drilled for install before the weather converts to hot. Next up in the kitchen is floor renovation of about 900 square feet of hardwood. Uh, let me re-phrase that. My kitchen is not 900 square feet, but the hardwood in my kitchen is also on most of the first floor and it will all be refreshed at once. But first, yesterday I got around to fixing an "ugly" in a bathroom. This bathroom is undergoing a facelift with a new frameless glass sliding door, soon. The tub is a 42 inch wide tub that doubles as shower pan, so you have a roomy shower, but only ONE fixture to clean. : ) The tub had a false front panel that originally matched the tub, but over the years has yellowed from UV exposure, you can see how it's more ugly yellowed on the left where the window throws more light, than on the right. Kohler wanted $300 some bucks for another panel with the same problem, so that's ridiculous and I nixed that solution. Time to get out the tools, and a visit to the store. So yesterday I made a new panel using PVC bead board strips and trim, and PVC cement (no primer as I needed the cement to stay clear) and my handy-dandy chop saw. I'm really pleased with the result. Cost was about $25 for materials, including a $6 new can of multipurpose pvc cement (which I had to buy because it wasn't tainted with purple from primer as my other cans were. I plan for now to leave it uncoated and let the white mimic the white of the tub, but I could paint it the wall color. As it is, it is virtually maintenance-free - always a good thing in this house. Here's the ugly problem:

I am so far behind on this week's news that I feel like I cannot catch up. First, the mudroom report. Knocking out the north wall so we could expand into former sunroom space was very hard. Amy, if you'd been sitting and watching, I believe you would have heard a curse word here and there. Apparently when Tim and Chris sectioned off the mudroom from the sunroom about 4 years ago, they built that wall to last forever. It had a gazillion nails and screws to hold it all in place forever, and there was a thick wall there. From the mudroom side, we had to remove the following materials in the order listed: beadboard wainscotting, drywall, 1/2 inch plywood, insulation and then, on the sunroom side, more drywall....and all the framing to which all of that was attached. Tim started demo while I was cooking a big breakfast of bacon, eggs and grain-free pancakes (made with almond meal and I think I like them better than regular pancakes, too). After we ate breakfast, he continued demo while I cleaned up the kitchen, did laundry, etc. I think the demo alone took until a little after 12 noon. Oh, and he removed the flooring from the part of the sunroom that is becoming part of the enlarged mudroom. Then, in the afternoon, we built the new west wall of the mudroom, getting the framing up, the internal window put in (it will allow the sunlight from the sunroom to enter the mudroom and help keep it light in there), the drywall put up on the sunroom side of the wall, and a new light fixture installed. I love the new light----it is a gooseneck style barn light. Then the fire pagers went off (for three grass fires) and that was it for Saturday's mudroom work. On Sunday, we put up the insulation and the drywall on the mudroom side of the wall and framed in the closet and cubbie storage area at the north end of the new mudroom area. We tried to intermittently watch part of the Dallas Cowboys game---we had the TV on in the living room so we could walk into the house and check on the game periodically. After the Cowboys seemingly gave up in the second half, we quit trying to watch the game and just tried to work on the room. We stopped for dinner around 5 pm after cleaning up all our construction mess, and put the mudroom furniture back into the mudroom so the room is functional, though nowhere close to being done and it is a good thing we did because about as soon as we had finished eating, our fire pagers went off for back-to-back wrecks on the interstate. I was hoping the mudroom would be a 2 or 3 weekend project, but based on how busy the fire pagers are all of a sudden, I fear it may be a 4 or 5 weekend project. That's okay. We'll get it done in October and will have a much more useful space. Part of the storage area is a garden closet where I can store my seed box, which doesn't really have its own spot inside the house so it tends to float from room to room, and my garden tool bucket, which I tend to leave in the mudroom year round. At least now I'll be able to hide it away behind a closet door. Nancy, We have gazillions of deer here along the river. They come to the compost pile daily to eat whatever I've tossed on it that they find edible. I probably see 8 or 10 visit at a time, multiple times daily (not necessarily the same ones in the afternoon or evening as we had in the morning). They often cruise along the fencelines of the two enclosed gardens and eat bean vines and such growing on the outside of the fence. However, they don't like to go inside an enclosed area if they cannot see what is inside of it, so they tend to not step foot in the garden at this time of year, even if I leave the gate open, because they cannot see beyond the plants growing on the garden fences. They'll go into the garden as soon as frost (or lack of rain) kills the plants growing on the garden fences. I put out deer corn and other goodies for them in winter, and every day/night of the year, they scarf up any hen scratch or sunflower seeds that the wild birds and chickens don't devour during the course of the day. During canning season (they know exactly when canning season is) they often stand out by the compost pile waiting for me to bring my compost bucket out to empty out all the waste product so they can gobble i t up, I have to yell at them to go away just so I can walk out to the compost pile safely, It is a wonder I get any compost at all because the deer and other wild critters love to feast on stuff that I think I am going to compost. One reason we moved here was that we wanted to live surrounded by wildlife, and we have almost everything imaginable here---whitetail deer, cottontail rabbits, skunks (striped and spotted), possums, raccoons, armadillos, snakes, turtles, frogs, skinks, lizards, coyotes, beaver, bobcats, ringtail cats, ferrets, feral hogs, squirrels, moles, voles, field mice, pack rats, all kinds of birds--including eagles (which is the coolest thing!), and an occasional cougar (they stalk the garden a lot when they are around), and more. I think we got more wildlife than we bargained for, but you learn to coexist with them and to avoid the dangerous ones. Occasionally there is an alligator spotted in the area, usually in a farm pond when the Red River is low during drought, but we've never had one on our property, as far as we know, The nearest one we know of was in a farm pond about a half-mile from us. We don't have ground hogs this far south or bears either, though they've been seen this year as close to us as Pontotoc County. which is closer than usual. Kim, I am sorry for all your troubles and especially for your poor head. I hope you don't have a concussion. Take care of yourself. Your tomatoes would be growing fine here as we have abundant sunshine and mostly a lack of moisture. Yesterday was hot, today is supposed to be even hotter, and then I think we cool down again, though the heavy rainfall in the forecast this week is expected to miss us for the most part. I think we might get a half-inch or inch. We'll see. I'd say the autumn fire season started up here this past weekend, despite most areas getting close to an inch of rain last week. Sadly, an inch of rain is not much when you have waist-high dried, cured grasses filling pastures---the August rainfall caused rampant growth of grasses and brush, but the almost total lack of rain in the month of September allowed everything to dry out and become fuel for fires. Tomatoes, peppers and beans are exceptionally happy thought. My squash plants died suddenly over the weekend---not sure if it is SVBs (I'll look for signs of them next time I step foot into the garden) or if disease hit them along with last week's rain. Amy, I hope you can just take it easy this week and recover from the draining effects of your mom's surgery last week. Dealing with aging and ill parents can be so exhausting, and I think the strain is every bit as much mental/psychological as it is physical too. You just need some down time to chill and relax and not feel so stressed and worried. Nancy, When sweet potatoes fail to form tubers, there can be several different reasons. One is that the soil is too rich and they plow all their growth into foliage. Similarly, too much fertilizer can cause the same issue even in poor soil. Another is too much shade. It also can be a variety thing---there's a few varieties that need really, really long growing seasons, but in my garden, even those will produce tubers by October if I planted them in May. Sometimes if you let the long runners root into the ground, that can prevent you from getting large tubers---I believe it diverts the energy from forming tubers and keeps the plants overly vegetative. One way to prevent that is to use a stick or garden tool to move around the rambling foliage every few days so it does not root into the ground all over the place. Rebecca, Where Tim is from in Pennsylvania, those brown marmorated stink bugs have been invading homes in the autumn for years now, and they show up by the hundreds and by the thousands. (I hopt that is not what you are starting to see up there now.) They do sell traps with scent baits to draw them in so that people can (hopefully) trap them outdoors before they find a way indoors. Kim, Roselles usually bloom most heavily in October here (sometimes they start blooming in late September) but it can depend on exactly which type you have. Some bloom later than others, and all the ones I've grown have been daylength sensitive. I seem to have more blooms from the ones I grow at the shady west end of the garden as the afternoon shade may trick them into thinking daylength is shortening a bit more than it actually is. Some years, when I have had tons and tons of calyxes on the plants in October or early November as the first frost approaches, I have had to cut off the limbs (the plants are too huge and too deeply rooted to pull up) and take them into the garage or the house to keep them from freezing. Then, as the calyxes dry out a bit indoors and the blossoms fall, I can harvest and use the calyxes. If frost threatens before you can harvest enough roselles, since you don't have a lot of indoor storage space, you might be able to cover the plants with frost blankets or even regular blankets to keep them alive long enough for you to harvest an ample supply of calyxes. Not only are the great for tea but they also make a wonderful jelly---I like it better than any other fruity jelly I've ever made. The rat snake in the camper is horrifying. It is that time of the year when they are looking for places to den up for winter, and also looking for food to gobble up before they hibernate. I am so very careful in October to not leave a garage or shed door open because I don't want unwelcome residents. I do leave the greenhouse doors open so that cool nights will push snakes out of the greenhouse just in case they are thinking of overwintering there...poor Ryder! His daddy played such a mean trick on him. Nancy, To fill up raised beds, use anything and everything you can get your hands on---logs (preferably partially rotted ones, a la hugelkulture style), chopped/shredded autumn leaves, twigs, grass clippings, animal manure (local farms or rabbit raisers often offer it on Craig's List or Freecycle), hay, straw, wood bark, mushroom compost from eastern OK, etc. If you fill up the beds with all that stuff from now throughout winter, then by Spring you'll have a surprising amount of decomposition and it will be ready for planting. I have built our garden bed soil the same way the woodland builds its own soil----by piling up organic matter of all kinds and just letting it decay in place. I raked up and used lots of leaf mold from our woodland in the early years here because it is so good for the soil, but I can only collect stuff in the woods after we've had several very hard freezes. Otherwise, I have snake encounters even in winter (I learned that years ago with a pygmy rattler encounter during what should have been the snake-free season). You can add layers of cardboard to attract earthworms. Earthworms love cardboard. They'll come to eat it and stick around to devour everything else. I have to go now---Jet is demanding his morning walk whether I'm ready to go now or not. Dawn

Thanks, Amy and Nancy. What a year it has been, though in all the wrong ways. I'm looking forward more than ever to 2020, or even to October, which at least is coming soon. Amy, Do you know what stripped the kale? Have you seen any cabbage loopers or anything? Maybe fall armyworms? Sadly, at our house, when the kale is being stripped, it usually is our own chickens feasting on our kale. I love Beck's Big Buck, but its size does stun a person when they are new to it. I like to slice them and oven roast them. You can sprinkle the sliced with a little olive oil and seasoning and create okra chips that are (to me) much tastier and obviously healthier than potato chips. With the cucumber plants and as moist as it has been, I'd suspect disease more so than pests. I hope y'all have a good weekend too. Nancy, There's three kittens and they all look just like their mother except they are going to be bigger than her. They are growing fast now that they are eating regularly. I think they are about five to six weeks old and beginning to get a little bit more used to my presence every day, but it is going to be hard to tame them. Still, I am making progress. One of them no longer runs and hides immediately when it sees me---it sits and waits to see if I am bringing food. lol. With cats, you can develop a friendship over food, so I'm off to a good start there. I need to spend a lot of time trying to tame them over the next several weeks and it likely will involve putting a large cage in the garage and moving their cat food dishes into it. Once they are used to eating in the cage, hopefully I can catch them in the cage and bring them indoors to start working to tame them. It needs to happen while they are pretty young, or they'll be impossible to tame. As soon as we get them caged, their mom will go to the vet to be spayed so that she won't have another litter of kittens. If I can't tame them, they can become barn cats/garage cats, but I'd rather tame them so they can enjoy being around humans. If we let them remain feral, it will be hard to catch them in order to take them to a vet for shots and medical attention as we'd have to trap them and then they'd be upset, hysterical wrecks. I'd like to avoid trapping if at all possible. I guess I can spend the non-gardening season taming feral kittens. I'm amazed they've survived living outdoors this long because we have raccoons in the yard every night and coons will kill and eat kittens (or even adult cats). This kittens basically have survived by climbing up into the engine of our Dodge pickup truck to sleep at night. You have to lift the hood, check for them and make sure they aren't in there before you can start up the engine....every single time. They also like to hide on top of the tornado shelter, which is covered by a large trumpet creeper vine that gives them lots of cover, so if we can peer into that mess and see them, at least we know they aren't under or in the truck. Have fun with the church group tomorrow. I'm sure the house and yard look simply splendid. I love our house when it is perfectly clean and tidy, which generally doesn't happen nearly as often as I'd like! You know, there's a level of everyday clean or family clean but then there is holiday/visitor clean. I love it when I take the time to get it all holiday/visitor clean BUT I don't love it enough to keep it that spic and span every day of the year either. I hope you get a good night's sleep so you do not feel exhausted tomorrow! Today there were new monarchs in the garden. I don't know if they hatched here, but they were enjoying nectaring at various plants. It is too soon for us to be seeing migrants here, so these are local more or less, one way or another, though they could be regional or local butterflies beginning to mass prior to migrating. All the butterflies and bees are why I don't rip out any plants too early....any more, it is all about them in the garden, not us. I looked at the plants at Home Depot today (inside the garden center, I forgot to look at the ones outside on the sidewalk) and they are starting to compress them down into a smaller area, probably in order to make way for holiday merchandise. They still had some shrubs and perennials, and some fall annual warm-season color, but nothing new for cool weather yet, and I forgot to check to see what Wal-Mart had. They had a lot of tropical plants that would look lovely indoors if only we didn't have cats and dogs that would destroy them. We were buying paint at HD to paint the house, a job which has been on our To Do list ever since we got the new roof put on the house, which I think was in July. We totally changed the shingles from light colored to dark colored and wanted a new paint color that would look better with the new color of the roof. We've just been waiting endlessly for cooler weather to arrive because who wants to paint when the heat index is 108 or 110 or 112? We cannot wait too long now that it is almost October or the nights will start to get too cool for the paint to dry properly, so we are going to start painting Saturday. I would have started tomorrow but Fred's funeral is tomorrow afternoon, and I don't want to go to the funeral with paint in my hair or anything. I'm seeing a definite pattern change in the behavior of the hummingbirds over the last week or two. Several weeks ago, hummingbirds were flocking to the feeders all day---flying back and forth from blooming plants to feeders in a dizzying whirl of activity that went all all day long. I knew they were our locals eating extra food to put on the fat they need to help sustain them on their journey south to Mexico. It was amazing to watch and then it ended, and I knew at that point that the males were headed south, though we still had females and juveniles feeding all day long but not in such a crazy frenzy---they seem a bit calmer. Over the weekend and at the start of this week, it appears the females and juveniles too had headed south, and we had a day or two with practically no hummingbirds. Now we have migrants. One way you can tell is that they appear suddenly at the feeders early in the day, feed like mad, and then pretty much disappear. I assume these are migrants eating as they travel south. Then, in the evening you'll see more of them. I don't think it is the same ones that I saw in the morning. They seem tired, and content to sit on the feeder perches and feed a long time before drifting away before dark. Then, in the morning, they probably feed again and leave on the next leg of their journey, and then new travelers come in, sometimes in the morning hours, and sometimes in the early evening hours and repeat the process all over again. They're definitely spending more time at the feeders, and somewhat less time at the plants in the garden or around the house. There's nothing feeding in between the morning crowd and the evening crowd. It is fascinating to watch it all happen. Oh, and also at Home Depot today, there was one lone hummingbird who was visiting all the flowers and was so thrilled. It was just happy and chirpy and the whole nine yards and not at all bothered by being in very close proximity to people. I forgot to ask if it is a regular visitor there or just passing through. The garden is full of sulphur butterflies, and some of the candletree leaves are being devoured, so we may have sulphur cats. I just haven't had time to check. The partridge pea plants in the pastures still are in bloom but there's much fewer flowers on them now, so I think they are about done. I'm glad we have the candletrees to fill that niche of time in October after the partridge peas finish up because their blooms won't last much longer. Helenium, goldenrod and and a few other fall bloomers fill all the fencerows and any pastures that aren't regularly hayed or grazed down low, so butterflies and bees have all the flowering plants they possibly could want right now, and that's such a good thing. Our weather was slightly cooler today, but still hot, though our heat index did not break 100 today---yay! The HX was 99 but that is am improvement and we'll take any improvement we can get. Have a great weekend, y'all. Maybe cooler weather is coming next week. Dawn

Amy, If there is anything worse than looking for the glasses (or two pairs of glasses) perched on your head, it is doing that same thing while also looking for the set of keys that you actually are holding in your hand as you search for your keys and glasses simultaneously. Some days I wonder how Tim and I manage to get out of the house at all. It is almost a given that I leave the house last when we are going someplace because I am looking for my keys or glasses....but then, I finally make it out to the vehicle, and he remembers he forgot something and has to go back inside. Every. Single. Time. We decided we just have to laugh about it together or it would drive us bonkers. A sense of humor is a valuable part of aging. HU, I've been watching the precipitation forecast, and am not happy about it. Then I drive myself nuts by looking at the 6-10 day outlook, the 8-14 day outlook, etc. I am trying to stay calm and not freak out over the coming rain, but of course, I am not happy. Maybe we'll get lucky and it will miss us. No, I don't really think that will happen, but I am going to hope it will. Just when I think the soil will dry out enough to be workable, here comes more rain. The temperatures are lovely though. It was 77 degrees here today at our house, and that's an awesome temperature for the last day of February. The trees know it though---leafing out and blooming and looking so happy. Tomorrow should be equally nice, but the high temperatures and wind will combine to give us High Fire Danger again, which we've had every day for the past week, I think. It is that time of the year. Hopefully there won't be many fires on Sunday. Jennifer, Inoculant is interesting and how much it does or doesn't help depends on what your soil already is like. If you've already grown peas and beans in the area, the necessary rhizobia bacteria might already exist in your soil, so if it does, you don't really need to inoculate. It never hurts to use it though. Think of bean and pea inoculant as a sort of probiotic for your plants. Generally you will get growth that is more lush, green and productive if you've used it because it helps the plants fix nitrogen. Jen, I'm glad you found a chow rescue. Jennifer, I agree with dbarron that one blackberry plant would be fine as almost all modern-day blackberry varieties are self-fruitful. I cannot think of a single variety available nowadays that needs a separate variety as a pollinator. If there was one, the native berries likely would take care of it. With just one plant, though, you shouldn't expect enough berries at one time to make jam or anything like that. Learn about proper pruning because the berries that produce on a plant in a given year come from either floricanes or primocanes, and the plant must be pruned at the right time accordingly. Most blackberry varieties produce on floricanes, but there's some newer varieties that produce on primocanes. Also, do your research and know if the variety you're being is erect, semi-erect or trailing so you can put up the appropriate kind of support. Then, prepare to fight the birds and other wild critters for every single berry. Here's the OSU Fact Sheet on Growing Blackberries in the Home Garden. It will tell you everything you need to know to get started with blackberries. Blackberry & Raspberry Culture in the Home Garden I grew them for 12 or 14 years here in three different locations on our property, and then the voles began eating their roots and I finally gave up. My gardening life was so much easier when the garden had a shorter fence, the bobcats patrolled the garden and the voles stayed away from the garden. Of course, the tradeoff was that the deer jumped the fence and got into the garden, which is why the shorter fence wasn't the best choice overall and was replaced with a taller fence. At the time we did that, I had no idea what a problem the voles then would become. And, yet, the voles don't eat the roots of the native dewberries (trailing blackberries) that invade my garden every year. Dawn