If you want a compact sweet potato, Amish Bush Porto Rico does pretty well. It is a variant of the old Porto Rico. My personal favorite is Bradshaw aka Mahon. It is a a very good general purpose sweet potato that produces a good crop even in short season areas. Most important, they are much better flavored and have better texture than Georgia Jet. I've also had very good results with Covington which is a recent release that produces much higher quality sweet potatoes than industry standards like Beauregard. Sandhill's business is first come first serve. This is why it is important to order early. It is not a matter of being on a waiting list, you will be on a waiting list if you order from virtually any sweet potato supplier. Get your order in early and Sandhill will almost always ship slips in a 2 week window timed for your location. Mahon is also available from Johnny's this year so if you are ordering from them, consider getting sweet potato plants too.

Here is a bit of info from the Onions document, www.extension.iastate.edu/Publications/PM1889.pdf Published online by the ISU Horticulture Department. Harvest bulbs after the leaves fall over and begin to dry. Cure bulbs in a warm, dry, well ventilated location for 2 to 4 weeks or until the outer scales are papery and thin. Remove the tops one inch above the bulb, Inspect and discard any damaged of decayed bulbs. Bulbs with thin necks should be used quickly as they will not store as well. Store where air can pass easily in a cool 32F to 40F dry location. Avoid freezing. If it is too warm bulbs will sprout. Occasionally inspect and remove bulbs that are rotting. Personally I store them on strings, and use the ones that are looking like they might have issues. They are kept warmer than is perhaps ideal. But the onions I raise are short day so when it gets a bit cooler they sprout. Then I either eat them or replant them. Bob

Pam, I am working on my grow lists but, ironically, the garden is taking so much time lately that between it and VFD stuff, I haven't had time to finish my grow lists. I'll try to get them done sometime in the next few days if I can. In my garden Piricicaba has been very cold tolerant and very heat tolerant. The odd thing about it? Aphids just love, love, love it. I rarely have aphids at all, other than sometimes seeing them on sugar snap peas or southern peas, but Piricicaba is an aphid magnet. I watch carefully for them and as soon as they show up, I spray the plants with Neem. I can have four rows of broccoli, with each one being a different variety and with the rows right beside one another, and Piricicaba will get aphids and the others won't. However, if I don't control them on the Piricicaba, they'll disperse to the other varieties after several weeks. Our forecast for the next couple of days includes highs in the 80s and lows in the 60s. Then, a cold front hits and we'll have highs in the 50s or 60s and lows in the 30s or maybe even the 20s. Around here, the weather is yo-yoing like mad. At times like this, the floating row cover certainly is worth the time it takes to put it over the plants because it keeps everything producing. I feel for the folks in NY and NJ. From what I have seen on TV, some areas (if not all?) had a really wet snow and/or freezing rain and/or sleet that was coating trees and power lines, bringing more power outages. They just cannot catch a break. As for the blooms and green tomatoes.....as long as the plants get some heat and some light and do not freeze, they tend to sporadically set fruit here. For several years, I'd keep a tomato plant or two in a container and drag it into the garage on freezing nights or freezing days, and then drag it back outside as soon as the temperatures were above freezing. I did the same thing with peppers. Both continued to flower and set fruit all winter, or at least until the garage itself got down to 18 degrees inside and they froze. Then, almost immediately thereafter, the pepper plant (but not the tomato plant) that had frozen back to the soil began putting out new growth and was growing again right away and setting fruit about 6 weeks later. The only issue I have with winter peppers and winter tomatoes is that they grow very slowly, stay smaller than the same variety in hotter weather and have poor flavor. I think that even though it is hot enough at times for them to flower and form fruit, it isn't hot enough and there is not enough hours per day of sunlight to make them perform the same way as they do in the warm season. This year instead of having the plants in the garage, they're in the greenhouse and I expect they'll freeze to death soon---perhaps as early as next week. That's okay. I preserved so many tomatoes in so many ways this summer that I do not feel like going to a lot of trouble for winter tomatoes. We have at least a two-year supply of every tomato product you can imagine...canned, dried, frozen, etc. We like sun-dried tomatoes (actually dehydrator-dried, lol) so much that they keep us happy enough in winter that we don't miss fresh tomatoes as much as you'd think we would. I normally only put the winter row cover over winter veggies if I'd expecting the low temps to drop below about 25-26 degrees. I haven't covered up any winter veggies yet, except for the lettuce in the cattle trough, and that's because I am not sure how it will be affected by having cold air underneath it. This is one of those modern day cattle troughs with steel-tubing legs and frame and black plastic tub-like material that holds the cattle feed...or in my case, it holds the soil-less mix and plants. It sits a bit above the ground with about a foot of air space between the ground and the bottom of the trough. I ought to stick a soil thermometer in that soil and see how cold it is dropping on cold nights. The broccoli and cabbage have some freeze-burn on a few leaves from the night we went down to 26 degrees, so I guess I should have covered them that night--but the forecast was for 34 or 36, so I didn't. My experience with winter lettuce is about the same as yours. If I plant it early enough, it will produce from October through March. This year I sowed the seed in August, and we were harvesting by October. It was really hard to keep the tiny little lettuce plants happy (or even alive) in temperatures above 100 degrees, but I managed. We have two dozen chickens and I cut a couple of pounds of lettuce and other greens for them daily, and we still have oodles of it. If a tub of plants starts slowing down and I want to replace those with new plants in the winter, I start seeds inside on the light shelf in bathroom sized paper cups in a flat (not a real flat, I use those disposable aluminum lasagna pans that I buy at CostCo or Sam's in large packages) and get the plants a couple of inches tall indoors in the warmth and then transplant them into the tubs or into the ground. Since they get off to a good, warm start indoors, they tend to grow faster in winter than plants from seed direct-sowed in colder soil outdoors in fall through early spring. I harvest using the cut-and-come-again method and it amazes me how quickly the leaves regrow to a usable size---in mere days. The chickens love fresh greens so much and I was worried that I hadn't planted enough to keep them happy, but the plants regrow so fast that I think they'll have an endless supply of all-you-can-eat lettuce. With the heat we've had, I've been worried the lettuce will bolt. We've been in the upper 80s and low 90s a lot this fall, but the lettuce hasn't bolted like it does in spring once the hot days arrive. Maybe it is because most of the day's weather is mild and we only sit at that high temperature for a relatively brief time. I have lettuce in the ground, in the cattle feed trough, in an old rusty, leaky wheelbarrow, and in big plastic tubs in the greenhouse. I probably have enough lettuce and mesclun mix growing to feed all of southern OK. I planted in several different areas because it has been such a rough weather year and I was hedging my bets. Well, you know, all of it is doing great, and we have far too much. That's a great problem to have, though. The last couple of years, we have discussed "the new normal" here a lot. For me, the new normal began around 2005 or 2006 when we began having persistent late freezes the first week in May instead of the last week in April. When it happened once and froze my whole garden, I was flabbergasted. Then, it happened the next year and the next and the next. Sigh. This was the first year since then that we didn't have a freeze or frost in May, which is a good thing because I put tomato plants in the ground around the first week in March (it was hot, hot, hot). So, we had what I think of as fairly typical weather for this region from 1999-2005. Since then, a lot has changed and we seem to swing from one extreme to another consistently, much more since then than before then. I see it in fire weather too. Before 2005, we hardly had any grass fires or wildfires here. Since then? About every other year we have a horrific wildfire season. What can you do? You have to go with the flow, so I work a lot harder now at extending the season with row covers, etc., and grow in containers to get around the heavy rainfall periods (which are a lot more rare now than they were just a few years ago). I don't know what else we can do. We have to adapt to whatever weather we are getting in order to succeed as gardeners. For 2 or 3 years I kept waiting for the weather to go back to normal, and then I decided that this must be the new normal and I just have to deal with it. That doesn't mean I like it though. Dawn

I like that broccoli salad, too, but I've never made it. We're starting to pick broccoli...may have to try it. I bet there's lots variations. I agree about frozen broccoli, Terri, but I do blanch and freeze a few packages for soups and casseroles. Last year I rolled it in a towel and let it dry well, froze it on trays, then vacuumed it in the foodsaver. It wasn't bad. If the kids like broccoli cheese soup and you have freezer space, it's easy to do a soup base. I simmer the broc and some onions, barely covered, in chicken broth, then blend and freeze. I've steamed and dried it, too, even though the books say the quality isn't good. It comes back really well...we use it mostly in vegie chowders. When I need a fast side, I'll steam it in a skillet, drain and toss some shredded cheese on top. These are really good. From the Victory Garden Cookbook and called broccoli balls at our house. Be sure and chop the vegies really fine...the balls hold together better. * Exported from MasterCook * Broccoli or Cauliflower Morsels Recipe By : Katie, from Victory Garden Cookbook Serving Size : 6 Preparation Time :0:00 Categories : Amount Measure Ingredient -- Preparation Method -------- ------------ -------------------------------- 2 large eggs 2 cups blanched broccoli or cauliflower -- chopped fine 1 1/2 cups fresh bread crumbs 1 cup shredded mozzarella cheese (can use Swiss or Parmesan) salt and pepper 1 teaspoon garlic -- minced (I use more) 1/3 cup vegetable oil Beat eggs and combine with everything but oil. Form into 1"-1 1/2" balls. Cook in hot oil until browned on all sides, about 5 minutes. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - NOTES : Good as a side dish, or make smaller for cocktail tidbits, or serve cold.