Mostly people who seem to have trouble with sowbugs are out in California. If I were to guess what they were doing under the potato plant it would be that they were helping clean up the rotting piece of seed potato from which the plant sprouted. You likely only found two baby potatoes because you pulled the plant way too soon. Just flowering is generally a sign that the first potatoes are beginning to form. When the vine dies back, then the potatoes are ready to harvest.

It's natural latex. It probably just needs a little abrasive. Salt. Lava soap. Kitchen cleanser. Even dampened cornmeal. Or really smudge flour into it real hard. The flour will take bind with the latex, then you should be able to wash it all off.

Carol, That poor woman! A snake outside is at least somewhat expected, but a snake inside would be a shock. One of Chris' friends in high school lived on a horse ranch and found a rattlesnake in her bedroom one night when she was barely a teenager. I cannot imagine that happening to me when I was a teenager. I would have been hysterical. I don't care for the snakes, but the only ones that upset me are the venomous ones, and then also the rat snakes and chicken snakes that get into our chicken coops and eat eggs and half-grown or smaller poultry. I even kinda like the Rough Green Tree Snakes, but from a distance....not up too close and personal. As a side not, if a snake dies in your garden, you wouldn't believe how quickly it can stink up the place! Generally you'll find it by smell long before you see it. We do live in an area that has wildlife that is far too abundant and I don't think that will ever change. There's just too much wild river bottom land around us that hosts all sorts of wildlife, and drought drives them up here to higher ground....and so do floods....so we're gonna have them around either way. We need them, unfortunately, to control the rodents that live in the wild, but that doesn't mean I want to be stepping on them when I'm in the yard or garden. I am not surprised snakes seek refuge indoors, but to find a lot of them in a house would be terrifying. One of our neighbors told us a few years ago about someone he knew who finally cut down a really big old tree that had been dead quite a while and likely was hollow. When they cut the main trunk near the ground, dozens of rattlesnakes came slithering out. The way he described it, some of those people likely set a new land speed record in their haste to run as far away from the snakes as they could and as quickly as possible. Lisa, What an awful story (and a stinky one too)! Back in the awful wildfire year of 2008-09 (not be confused with the awful wildfire years of 2003, 2005-06 or 2011-12, lol), we were at a fire in the river bottom lands east of I-35 fighting a huge fast-moving fire when we abruptly were paged to a fire well west of I-35 because a fire there was very close to a house. Tim and I raced to that new fire as fast as we could, and when I opened the fire truck door to jump out, there was a very stinky big pit bull waiting there for me. Not being particularly fond of pit bulls that smell skunky, I froze where I was until the resident came and got the dog. She said the dog had cornered a skunk under their house and a pitched and prolonged battle between the two ensued. Apparently her house smelled as much of skunk as the dog did, and then they had the added complication of a fire making everything around smell smokey. Hurray for the leaves! Of course it is a fancy hugelkultur bed in your yard. lol I've never yet seen a fancy one, so maybe you and I are taking liberties with the English language. Every hugelkultur bed I've ever built basically looks like a brush pile with soil and compost and chopped leaves piled on top of it. Not fancy, but a great way to improve soil and recycle 'waste' material that otherwise would either be burnt or hauled to the dump. You never can have too many leaves. The very first hugelkultur bed I built in Fort Worth was beautiful. I spend far too much time digging little trenches and vetically lining up tree branches about 4 to 8" in diameter in rows in those trenches. Then I backfilled with soil to hold them upright. Once the bed was filled, the outer row of branches looked a gorgeous wood edging a flower bed, but really the whole bed was wood too with just some compost and soil added. The flowers I grew there forever after were gorgeous. I was so excited. When I built a hugelkultur bed here in our earliest years, the snakes moved in before I even could finish it. That was the last one I built for a few years. I have continued building them on top of eroded spots in order to fill in the gullies and get something to grow in a gully's bare ground, but have stayed away from them to start garden beds because well, you know, I don't like rodents and snakes! I don't regret moving here to this specific piece of land. It is gorgeous here and I love seeing most of the wildlife. However, we do have about 1000 times as much wildlife as I expected before we moved here, and I expected to see a lot. We also have had some wildlife I never expected to see here. Life is full of surprises. The last couple of weeks the wind here has been bringing down the autumn leaves from the native post oaks. Those leaves normally cling to the trees until at least February. Since we have a winter rye grass lawn that I have to mow anyway, when I mow I end up with a grass catcher full of grass clippings and chopped up oak leaves and the two of them together are wonderful to use as mulch or to add to the garden's compost pile. When I mowed on Friday, I dumped all those grass and leaf clippings into the hay bale beds I'm building north of the barn. I'm going to grow winter squash and pumpkins there so they can run wild and cover every square foot of ground. You know what monsters some of those squash vines can be, so I am relieved to be getting them out of the big garden and into their own spot. I cannot imagine gardening without chopped or shredded leaves. They make the best soil amendment and mulch. I heard rain early this morning. We had about 2 hours of strong thunder and lightning and about 15 or 20 minutes of nice, steady rain. It only left 3/10s of an inch in the rain gauge and I was hoping for more, but we never seem to get that "more" nowadays. We just get a couple of tenths here and a couple there. Larry, I agree with you. I wish we could do that, but it just doesn't work out that way. I've noticed your rainfall comes in inches and mine comes in tenths of inches. No use in me pouting about it, but I'll just say how unfair it is! : ) A lot of us have snow in our forecast for Tuesday, and what I expect will happen is that a lot of y'all will get more snow than we will get down here, if we get any at all. Dawn

It's been a while since I've grown potatoes, but this year I'll have some. My question, though, is when to dig them. I seem to remember that they could be dug when they had bloomed and the stalks were falling over...if this is correct, it still doesn't help me! My bloom stalks were knocked off by the hail, and the rest of the plants were kind of messed up, too. Any thoughts? I don't want tiny new potatoes, but golf ball to tennis ball sized ones would be ok by me :) Thank you, Sharon