Rebecca, Stink bug or leaf-footed bug damage on the tomato. I was wondering about C. diff too. My younger sister had it once a few years ago and had to be hospitalized for quite some time. Nancy, We've been hearing occasional fireworks for about a week already. I'm tired of them....and we aren't anywhere near the actual Fourth of July holiday yet. It makes the dogs crazy. Everyone is out mowing grass down short today. Between the heat, lack of rainfall and the fireworks craziness we always have out here in unincorporated parts of the county, people know the grass in the fields needs to be short in case fireworks set their fields on fire. Heavenly Blue is one of the latest MGs to bloom at our place, and they do better in full sun and poor soil than in part shade and good soil, so it helps if you choose them a 'bad' site to grow and don't baby them too much. Otherwise, they can just go on making new foliage forever and forever and forget to bloom for the longest time. Once they start blooming, though, they are so spectacular that you'll forget how aggravating it was to wait forever and forever for them to get their act together. Most of the basil I grow is for the beneficial insects. I ignore it and don't harvest it much, and just let it bloom for them. Our weather is awful again today. It was supposed to be around 97 degrees with a heat index of 103, which certainly sounded better than previous days. So, what have we had so far? An official high temp of 98 (so, very close to forecast so far) at our Mesonet station with a max heat index so far of 109 (oops, they were way off on the forecast for this). At our house is it 100 degrees right now. Our weather refuses to behave. Everything outdoors is just roasting. They had our Mesonet station (and Kenton's, I think it was) down for a while today, and when they brought them back online, both stations changed from a 16" soil moisture level of 0.14 to 0.40, so they either changed malfunctioning moisture sensors or they adjusted the data. Now I don't know what to think, but no matter what their data shows, the ground is miserably dry. The rain is bypassing us, moving from SW towards central OK, so some of you are likely to get rain. Hopefully, you won't get the hail. Jennifer, I hope the dinner is fun and that the animals do well without valium. Megan, There's so many neonics in use that I mostly just grow my own flower transplants from seed nowadays. I tried to buy some plants at HD this past spring, and they had Neonic tags in them (sort of hidden behind the standard plant tag, so if you weren't checking for them you might miss them) so I put them back on the plant racks. At least they are labeling theirs, which most places do not. I used to buy flats and flats of annual flowers in early to mid Spring for maximum impact, but don't buy many now. If I cannot grow them myself or find them at an organic nursery in the DFW metro, then I just live without them. It is hard for me to give flower seedlings the attention they need when I'm wrapped up in growing veggie transplants, especially during winter/spring wildfire season, but I'm getting better at giving them the appropriate amount of attention since buying them is less and less of an option because of the heavy reliance in the bedding plant industry on nionics. For me, growing transplants is easy if I'm not rushing off to fires every day, but almost impossible if we're having a bad fire season. We've been harvesting and eating tons of tomatoes for two months now, so you will not hear any whining coming from my lips. The fruit that set in March-April is mostly all harvested now. We had very little fruitset in May, but those are the ones that are still green now. With the heat cranking up, no rainfall in ages and tons of wind this week, the spider mites are flooding into the garden every time the wind blows and hitting the tomato plants hard. I'm now at the point where I look at the plants and think to myself that I'll be glad when each plant has ripened its last fruit and I can yank it out of the ground, thereby putting it out of its misery. I've been doing a pretty good job killing stink bugs and leaf footed bugs with citrus oil, but normally wouldn't spray it on the plants because it tends to burn the foliage. (Orange oil, at a high enough concentration will strip paint and varnish, so I have to be really careful to mix it up properly and to not spray it on any plant I don't want to risk losing.) It is just that with the plants declining so rapidly and drought officially in parts of our county now, I just do not care. I wouldn't spray it on the leftover tomato plants that I planted at the northern fenceline very late (to serve as host plants for tomato and tobacco hornworms found on the fruit-bearing plants in the main tomato rows) because they have not been hit by herbicide drift or spider mites yet, so they look ridiculously good and might survive until fall if the grasshoppers would leave them alone. I also wouldn't use it on the 8 new tomato plants for fall. They are in containers at the NW end of the garden, in as much shade as I can give them and still expect them to grow any at all. They can have more sun later after they grow and are established. I'm no longer dealing with tons of tiny grasshoppers in the garden. Now I have big huge ones flocking to the garden from the non-irrigated fields around us---thousands of non-irrigated acres. The differential grasshoppers are a huge issue as they really prefer forbs to grasses at this time of the year. I've started letting my Kong sunflowers wilt on purpose, which I'd rather not do, because the differential grasshoppers, which love sunflowers, will usually avoid wilting sunflowers. (Maybe the wilting impacts the leaves in some way the differential grasshoppers do not like?) So now, the dog's sunflowers that are self-sowing natives which border their dog yard are much more appealing to the differential grasshoppers than my garden sunflowers because I am not watering the garden sunflowers but am watering the dog yard sunflowers to turn them into an appealing plant for the differentials. Whatever it takes...... Tim just came in from the Great Outdoors and informed me it is hot out there. Thanks, I told him, I hadn't noticed. I think being at work 5 days a week somewhat skews his perception of the heat here because by the time he arrives home near 7 pm, we usually are a lot cooler than we were just 2 to 4 hours earlier. Today, for the first time in ages, instead of working on something at home, we went to the fire station and worked on various projects. I cleaned the kitchen, filled up the fridges with additional bottled water and Gatorade, inventoried firefighter snacks, etc. I noticed that, in our neighborhood between the fire station and our house, areas that are heavily shaded or that get shade at least half the day still look half decent. Areas that are in full sun? They look pathetic. My garden needs trees in it to shade the plants in hot weather, but I don't want the trees there all the time. Dawn

Vapovac -- It seems like years. And for so very many reasons, this rain was welcome, and blessed. Lisa -- More next week would be the cherry on the ice cream sunday.

Julia and Sherry, I thought RFK looked really good, this is its 3rd year here, 2nd bloom year, but it is taking off well now. I am very pleased with it, just surprised it is blooming so early. It does seem like mid season and later bloomers are scaping early. Maybe I just think so because early ones running late. Brad, I do not think Blue Breasted Bee Eater is labeled correctly, but I am going to let the other fan bloom to see what it looks like and contact the seller. BBBE has more ruffling on the edge, really more Blue, although I see plants posted that have sorts similar color. The seller sent me Celtic Butterfly accidentally, instead of BBBE. Would not have minded that too much but BBBE was the main plant I was wanting on my order. I hate to contact her again just to find out the name of this one.

z5 is about half the US and very divergent.. give us a big city name... not all JMaples are winter hardy in my ground freeze z5 .... not sure thats a pine at this distance.. but that is beside the point... is your only goal.. anything but green??? when you can affirmatively state your goals... and then add in the cultural variables.. then it should be easy to make a choice... sand is great for trees... never amend soil.. see link for timing.. and a general guide... july and august is not tree planting time... https://sites.google.com/site/tnarboretum/Home/planting-a-tree-or-shrub getting a new transplant tree fully established in front of a bunch of large older trees.. can be tricky if those trees are water hogs... do not rely on lawn irrigation ofr the first 2 years... and it should need no more water from you after 2 years... why do you care how big it gets???.. the trees behind are not so small they will be dwarfed... the classic part sun smallish understory tree is a redbud... not sure i would recommend the non green variations.. as you move away from all green.. then you need more sun... may we have a very succinct list of your goals.. and your location... ??? ken