At my old place in the country, we had to do raised beds with hardware cloth, but the little buggers still smelled the veges and came looking! We started using the mole/gopher "chatterers" and in about 2 weeks they realized that the annoying noise wasn't going to go away! The only time we would have trouble after that was if the batteries went dead. We have since moved into town and still there is gopher action! We had some mounds show up, and noticed a lot of activity in the neighborhood. We installed a chatterer in the front yard, and a couple in the vege beds......nothing! Our new neighbors next door were over run with the suckers. We told them about these things, he bought several......no gophers! Several neighbors have since bought them and.....no gophers! When people pooh pooh these things they don't realize that it does take a couple of weeks for the critters to figure out that the annoying noise isn't going away!

Carol, You know, we lived here for about 5 years before I saw a single pasture fire that burned more than a small (maybe front yard-sized) amount of land and a couple of bales of hay. I guess those must have been good rain years, because since 2005 the wildfires have been unbelievable. I was out before sunrise setting up and turning on sprinklers, and pruning up limbs on a couple of small trees. (Part of firescaping is that all limbs be pruned up 8' above the ground so fire cannot climb up into their canopy. It is hard to do this on very small young trees that are only 8' or 10' tall themselves.) Later today, I will cut back the cannas near the house all the way down to the ground. Then, I am going to cut back all the half-frozen (top half froze, botton half didn't) four o'clocks on the north and northeast sides of the house and the ones under the pecan trees too. I'll spend the rest of the day cutting pasture grass and weedeating fencelines, edges where the forest meets the grassland, and the bar ditches. I'd rather cut it now than risk having it burn later. I was walking the dog Saturday and noticed our trees are about as colorful and lovely as they get here in southern OK, but my neighbor's pastures are that dry, tawny-gold wheat color and I am hoping they will cut down all that dry grass before it burns. If we learned anything here at all these last few years, it is that tall dry grass burns a gazillion times faster than very short grass. I think all of today and tomorrow will be just doing yard maintenance and clean-up, but maybe by Wed. I can get into the fenced garden and clean it out. I still have snakes in there, though, so I'd like to do that on a colder day. I do need to clean up all my containers as well, removing the dead foliage and putting it on the compost pile, and stacking up the pots for the winter. The white squirrels in Texas make the news every now and then. They have a couple of them on the campus of the University of North Texas at Denton and they cause quite a commotion on campus. The students feed them, take their pictures, etc. They even have a calendar of photos of "their" white squirrels that they sell to raise money for something on campus....maybe the library. Some years they have only 1 and other years there are 2 or 3. When one of the white squirrels was found dead a few years ago, they had a funeral or memorial service for it. I guess it gives the college students something unusual to be interested in while there at school. All of our squirrels here in Love County are just run-of-the-mill squirrels--no exotic white ones! I have a small tomato plant--maybe 8" tall--in one container on the garage/barn's concrete slab. It must have reseeded from a cherry tomato growing in a larger pot nearby. I thought it would freeze when everything else did, but there it sits, lovely and green, though not blooming. At times I am tempted to put it into a larger pot and try to keep it through the winter, but I know from experience that winter tomatoes don't get enough heat to develop good flavor, so doubt it would be worth it. A snake and trees in the roof gutter! Well, now you know why you haven't seen snakes on the ground....they are living up there in the penthouse on the roof. Personally, I'd rather NOT see snakes at all. I have gone back and looked at our rainfall totals for all the years I could find them, and all I can say about our rainfall here is that it see-saws erratically, from 36" to about 40" in a good year and then from 19" to 24" in a bad year. This is a bad year, but it actually started in August 2007, so it is also a long year. Some long-time residents here who are in their 80s and 90s tell me Love County used to regularly get annual rainfall totals in the 40s and 50s, but it began changing in the 1970s or so and the years keep getting drier. I think there was one year in the mid-1990s when we had over 50" of rain here, but that seems long ago. When we first moved here, everyone raised something: wheat, pecans, peanuts, watermelons, muskmelons, etc. And, in just the 10 years we've been here, most of those crops have been discontinued. For a long time, though, many of the ranchers raised winter wheat, planting it in late August to late September and counting on the autumn and winter rains to make it grow. If they have cattle, they can graze the cattle on it for part of the winter, then pull the cattle off of it in spring, let the wheat head up and harvest it in May/June. Since 2005, there's less and less wheat planted every year, and an article in the Marietta Monitor a few weeks ago said almost nobody was planting wheat this year---input costs are too high, and with no rain falling, there's no guarantee the wheat would grow. Our main crop around here anymore is just native hay which hasn't done all that well in this rain-challenged year. For weeks now, one of our local TV weather guys has repeatedly referred to our "desert-like weather conditions" and it is the most accurate description possible. We're having very cool nights, very hot days, and very dry air with low humidity. Even when cold fronts come through, all they bring us is wind and cool, dry air. We need some warm fronts from the south with warmer, moist, humid air. Oh, well, there's always the hope that next year will be better. In the meantime, all we can do is try to keep the place from burning down. Dawn

Keep in mind that chiles cross-pollinate freely. This is why you may often have chiles from the same plant with varying degrees of hotness. I had a buddy of mine give me a bag of habaneros...'cuz he said that they were WAY too hot. Got them home and asked one of our sons if he'd like to try a really hot pepper...cut him off a piece and he chewed on it. He said "Not hot at all...nice flavor but definately not hot". So I cut a piece from another pepper...he tried it...same reaction. I tried a piece, no hottness at all. So the next day, I chopped up a bunch of 'em to add to my eggs...HOLY MOLEY! Good God...get me some milk, now!!

In my opinion the peppers aren't to blame. You used too many for your tastes in heat. Since you seem to like the flavor you got in your recipe just cut down on the hot peppers as far as ratio goes. Also if you find to get the right heat you want but lost the flavor by cutting down on the peppers ,as suggested above use other strains or varieties of peppers. Try Jalapenolite,Jalapeno M and if you like the Chinense flavor try any of the Aji Dulce-Trinidad,Tabago,Costa Rican or Venezualian Seasoning Pepper Strains. There are Suave Orange and Red Habaneros developed by the N.M. Chile instatute too. I like some of the Super Hots a whole lot-Mostly the Trinidad Scorpions and 7 Pot varieties ,but I use them in moderation. I'm not a masochist,I like their flavor but don't eat them by themselves. Like with a campfire.I like a nice bed of coals for cooking but a bonfire to keep warm.