Funny how different areas of the country can be. I can picture them all, even without a cool picture of lichen. Lichens are so wondrous! There was one when out on a nature hike last month that looked like stairstep ruffles. And bright orange. It was glorious. Ah herb gardens; I love to pet the herbs and sniff deeply. 'cept I can't think of citrus trees without picturing a friend's house where I was visiting (not where I lived! too cold in Monterey) in Calfornia, covered in something stinging-bigger than ever bees, at least in my mind. Y'all are painting some pretty neat pictures! _________________________________ IâÂÂll try it from memory (I may have the measurements wrong, and/or the seasoning). OhiomomâÂÂs Fish Stew Ingredients 2 T butter Onion 2 stalks celery 4 carrots 4 potatoes 1 pound fish (cod, scallops, crab, whatever. Meaty is best as it holds up better) 1 cup water 1 cup milk 1 cup cream Salt Pepper 1/4 t cayenne 1/2 t thyme 1/2 t basil Directions Chop up onion, celery, and carrots. Soften them in the butter. Chop up potatoes (I used rounds, but she uses cubed) and add it to the vegetables. Cover it with water. Simmer for 30 minutes until itâÂÂs tender. Add fish and seasonings. Cook until fish flakes. Add milk and cream, warm through. _______________________ What I do differently: I add 2 T flour or corn starch to thicken it up. I add it when the veggies are softened. While the veggies are getting soft, I boil the potatoes. I add the potatoes after the flour is incorporated, and then move on from there. Because IâÂÂve already gotten the potatoes fork tender, it just needs to be warmed through. I also use the starchy potato water, dumping the whole thing into the pot, rather than adding water and simmering all of the veggies in it. Also, you could probably just add 2 cups half and half instead of the milk and cream, but I always have milk, so I just buy cream for this and follow what she has

Thanks.. yeah, the new sprout has grown about 6" in the last week and is growing more and more by the day.. but it is kind of laying out right now because it's so weak it won't even stand up straight.. so I'm going to have to stake it.. but I don't want to break it and set the tree back even further. Many of my bur oak saplings (I think they're 3 years old before transplanting) are just sprouting now... so I'm thinking the big one really just got shocked. The reason I haven't worried is that it hasn't sent up any sprouts or anything from the base and it's still juicy green under the bark... so I'm at a real loss. I've been out doing lots of watering and fertilizing (our soil is classified as a Psamment Entisol, which basically means Sahara Desert sand.. though with a little black soil in the top foot).. it is very deficient of all nutrients.. and I had never fertilized until this year. The white pine given to us as a housewarming present in 1999 was growing about 4-6" per year... two years ago I mulched around the base and last year and again this spring I fertilized it and it put on about 2 feet of healthy growth to the top.. so I think I'll continue to work bone meal into the soil in the falls and regular slow release stuff in the springs. The same goes for the apple tree given to us.. half of it died and for a few years it only grew about 1/10th of an inch... but I fertilized it last summer and again this spring.. it's put on over a foot of new growth and it looks healthier than ever. I've learned in this soil, you can't over fertilize (in the burning sense... but not in the 'running down to the water table' sense) and you can NEVER over water. I accidentally let the sprinkler run all night once... there wasn't one puddle.. the only response was a nice flush of lush green growth on the grass there. I have to water the vegetable garden every day it doesn't rain... it's a challenge... but anything will grow in it since the roots can grow unfettered.

We had our first real freeze last night. Crap. I wasn't expecting it and didn't move the house plants back inside. I moved them once when we were supposed to freeze but didn't really...not completely anyway. But we did freeze last night--water in both the dogs' bowl and chickens' waterers were partially frozen. Sigh. And it was the plants we received when my mother in law passed last February. And the watermelons that are growing right next to the house froze too. Yes, I have "bush" watermelons growing in a narrow bed right next to the house on the west side. It's weird, but weird is what I do. And I"m trying to be okay with that. How many eggs per person do y'all use each week. I'm curious. My sister and niece were out tonight and as it was getting dark they were looking in on the chickens who had put themselves to bed. They were peeking into their window. As soon as I came over to them and started talking the chickens all came down their ramp. They (sister and niece) were amused that the hens know my voice. It was warm today so we put the outside lights up. My job was to put those plastic hanger things on the light bulbs (Yay for not have to staple strands of lights to the roof [Clark Griswold]) and the chickens kept pecking at the red lights...I was sitting on the ground and they couldn't resist. They've been obsessed with the front yard lately. I was just glad to be home. I love being home. And I even baked cookies while my son and daughter played Christmas music on the piano. Could life get better?

Jennifer, I hope that Finbar came in. Our cats must have felt the weather coming because when we got home late Friday afternoon, they all came right indoors, including the one who usually stays out after dark and makes me worry. Larry, I know people eat the tender vines/shoots of regular English peas and sugar snap type peas, so I don't know why you couldn't do the same with Austrian winter peas. I hope you and Madge can catch up on your rest and stay healthy while you're busy taking care of sick folks. dbarron, Pouring down snow? Like thundersnow? That would be so cool. I love thundersnow. We have two dogs who bark and howl at the thunder, and one who goes into the bathroom and hides from it. Currently our 2 barkers/howlers are howling at the sound of emergency sirens because there is a serious motor vehicle accident near our home (not really close, but close enough that the dogs can hear the sirens from the fire trucks, police cars and ambulance). Tim is gone to that, so they are watching out the window for him to come home and, in the meantime, doing their howling thing. It is impossible to sleep through anything in this house. Once the sirens stop, the two dogs will stop. Or, I can tell them to stop howling and they will stop. For a minute. Then when they think I've gone back to bed or whatever, they start up again. They try to be good but they love to howl. We used to have a dog named Biscuit (RIP, sweet doggie) who howled along with opera music and truly loved to sing along with it, but other than that, he never howled at anything. These two blue heeler mixes we have now believe they were put on earth to howl at everything---sirens, the howling of coyotes, the howling wind, etc. When the fire pagers woke us up around 3:40 a.m., I looked out the window and heavy snow with big, wet fluffy flakes was coming down like crazy. The temperature, which was around 58 degrees right around midnight, now is sitting right there at 32 degrees at our house, but shows 33 degrees at the nearest Mesonet station. The snow covers everything....the ground, the evergreen shrubs and trees, the lawn furniture, and even my greenhouse. I don't know how long it has been falling. What the forecasters had said was that if any snow fell this far south, it likely would be mixed with rain and would not accumulate. Well, there's no rain mixed with this and it is accumulating. Our ground is pretty warm (the mesonet map shows our soil temperature is 47 degrees at a depth of 2 inches) so I would think the snow will melt away pretty quickly---perhaps even before sunrise, so people here might miss seeing it unless they're awake in the middle of the night for some reason. So, I got the longed-for snow. I don't think we'll be outside tomorrow building snowmen or anything but I am enjoying watching those big flakes coming down. It definitely is not Spring yet here, notwithstanding yesterday's official high temperature of 69 degrees. I checked our weather just now, and the NWS extended the Wind Advisory, which had excluded southern OK, to us at 3:13 a.m. I had been amused by the fact that the Texas county that surrounds our part of our county on three sides had a Wind Advisory and yet we did not. Was NWS-Norman thinking the wind would just stop at the Red River? Even before I went to sleep last night, we had wind gusts as high as 40 mph, while the folks near us with a Wind Advisory had wind gusts in the mid 30s. So I suppose after several hours of those higher wind gusts, NWS-Norman finally decided to add us to the Wind Advisory. Better late than never, but who is awake at 3:13 a.m. to notice such things? NWS-Norman always does this, by the way, adding us later on to Wind Advisories long after NWS-Fort Worth put the Texas counties surrounding us under one. This is a persistent thing here, and I don't know why it is that way. When the Fort Worth Stock Show folks last evening cancelled the scheduled Saturday morning Stock Show parade for only the second time in its history (and people on FB instantly were outraged by the annual parade being cancelled), I knew that they were expecting snow or sleet down there because someone mentioned they didn't want the horses to slip and fall on the dangerous, slick roadways. I had explained to Lillie earlier in the day that Friday was the opening day of the stock show and we'd try to take her and her younger sister down there to the stock show one day during its run if we didn't get the traditional Stock Show weather of ice and snow. While they had a gorgeous sunny and warm day for the opening day, it appears they have snow/sleet/ice for the first night of the show. I doubt it will last for the three week duration of the show. Dawn