I sent in the "Santorini of Greece" tomato to the swap. After flooding, extremely high humidity, heat, etc. last summer, the Santorini was one of a handful of plants (out of 40+ varieties) that never showed a hint of disease and when everything else stopped producing during the worst of the heat, it continued to pump out tons of fruit. It definitely was the workhorse in my garden and will certainly be considered for another spot in the garden this season. The fruit is ribbed, probably around 4-6 oz. and was meaty like a paste but much more flavorful than most paste tomatoes I've tasted.

For more information on the drought in the state, than a person can really stand :) , I would recommend subscribing to the OCS Mesonet Ticker. Send an email to this address.... ticker@mesonet.org ... and you will become subscibed to a daily email from Gary McManus, our state climatologist. Its filled with data on rainfall, drought, and the weather in general. And Gary presents this in an entertaining way. Im gonna try to copy and paste today's email, so maybe it will provide an idea of what Gary does .... ========================================================== MESONET TICKER ... MESONET TICKER ... MESONET TICKER ... MESONET TICKER ... April 8, 2014 April 8, 2014 April 8, 2014 April 8, 2014 Whither tornadoes? The folks at the Norman NWS office sent us pretty interesting today concerning the dearth of severe weather we've seen since last year, tornadoes in particular. I'll just shamelessly cut and paste what they sent me. Lazy? I prefer "practical." Keep in mind this info is strictly for the NWS Norman forecast office, so it does not hold true for the entire state (I've adjusted the dates to account for today as well). - The last tornado warning we issued was at 810pm on Friday, May 31, 2013. It expired at 900pm. - If we get through today, April 8th, this will be day 312 without a tornado warning - The previous longest streak was 293 days - June 1, 1990 to March 20, 1991 We talked about this previously, and since then, there still hasn't been a tornado touch down (at least a reported tornado) in the state since August 7, 2013. If we count today, that brings the consecutive day total to 244 days. That still ranks as the third longest period on record, at least dating back to 1950 when accurate statistics began, but we're quickly closing in on #2 (248 days from 7/16/1990- 3/20/1991). This info also comes from the NWS Norman office, but this data is for the entire state. -***- Top-10 Consecutive Day Streaks in Oklahoma Without A Reported Tornado Rank Days Period 1. 292 05/17/2003 - 03/03/2004 2. 248 07/16/1990 - 03/20/1991 3. 244 08/08/2013 - 04/08/2014 4. 234 07/04/1976 - 02/22/1977 5. 220 08/24/1977 - 03/31/1978 6. 200 08/08/1955 - 02/23/1956 7. 193 09/06/1978 - 03/17/1979 8. 189 10/11/1969 - 04/17/1970 9. 188 09/27/1967 - 04/01/1968 10.(t) 187 08/16/1952 - 02/18/1953 08/29/1962 - 03/03/1963 09/22/2006 - 03/27/2007 -****- If we can make it to Sunday, the current streak will move into second place. Right now (AHEM!), that appears to be a decent bet. There will be a chance for some storms this weekend, apparently, but I can't see too many forecasters gearing up for any bigtime severe weather event. BUT, it is April and so things can sometimes pop up (or pop down, in this case) unexpectedly. Here's a bit of info from our friends across the hall at the Norman NWS office. http://ticker.mesonet.org/archive/20140408/nws-norman.jpg "MANY HAVE ASKED ABOUT SEVERE WEATHER CHANCES. THE ANSWER... IT IS STILL TOO FAR OUT TO MAKE ANY CONFIDENT DECISION OF ANY VALUE WRT SEVERE WEATHER. WITH DIFFERING SOLUTIONS... AN EXACT ANSWER IS NON-EXISTENT. AS WITH EVERY FORECAST... CONTINUE TO CHECK BACK AS WE GET CLOSER TO THE WEEKEND FOR UPDATES AS GUIDANCE IMPROVES AND CONFIDENCE INCREASES. WHAT YOU CAN DO NOW IS BE PREPARED... NOT JUST FOR THE WEEKEND... BUT ALWAYS." And from our friends across the, uhhhhh, state, up in the Tulsa NWS office. They're screaming it just like Norman, so they must be serious. "THE CHANCES OF SHOWERS AND THUNDERSTORMS RETURN SATURDAY NIGHT AND CONTINUE ON SUNDAY AS A COLD FRONT MOVES THROUGH THE REGION SUNDAY INTO SUNDAY NIGHT. THERE ARE EARLY INDICATIONS THAT THE STORMS ON SUNDAY COULD BE STRONG TO SEVERE. THE SHOWERS WILL END ON MONDAY AS THE STORM SYSTEM DEPARTS TO THE EAST." With that possible threat of storms comes rain, which is needed more and more each day as the sun climbs higher into the sky along with water stress. http://ticker.mesonet.org/archive/20140408/7day-rainfall-forecast.gif More important also because the state needs the moisture to start greening up so we can start to reduce some of this fire danger we see every few days (for days at a time as well). The Amarillo NWS office, which has gotten accustomed to high fire danger these days, is apparently so happy to have a day without blowing dust they're going with a nice "Little House on the Mesas" theme today. http://ticker.mesonet.org/archive/20140408/nws-amarillo.jpg http://ticker.mesonet.org/archive/20140408/nws-norman-fire1.jpg http://ticker.mesonet.org/archive/20140408/nws-norman-fire2.jpg http://ticker.mesonet.org/archive/20140408/nws-tulsa-fire.png Nevertheless, much of the Oklahoma Panhandle is under a Fire Weather Watch for today. Plus, I'll bet they get blowing dust anyway. By the way, if we want to beat that top tornado-less streak of 292 days, we'll have to make it until May 27th. Make it so. Gary McManus State Climatologist Oklahoma Climatological Survey (405) 325-2253 gmcmanus@mesonet.org April 8 in Mesonet History*: Record Maximum 94 F at ALTU in 2011 Record Minimum 17 F at JAYX in 2007 Record Rainfall 3.22" at BIXB in 2008 * - Mesonet History = since 1994 ================================================== The OCS/Mesonet Ticker http://ticker.mesonet.org/ To subscribe or unsubscribe from the Ticker or for questions about the Ticker or its content Phone or Email the Ticker Manager at OCS Phone: 405-325-2253 Email: ticker@mesonet.org --------------------------------------------------- -C- Copyright 2014 Oklahoma Climatological Survey ===================================================

LOL... one word... CATNIP! Lots of it! I think I've contacted everyone that I needed to today. If not, someone drop me a note. We're forecast for severe thunderstorms today through tomorrow night, so my computer time may be limited. I don't like being on when there's lightening even though we have cable internet. Fran, please let me know ASAP whether you hear from Carrie. That will be the deciding factor in what I set up for Joan. By the way, Jamie emailed me and is still trying to get in touch with Kim. I let her know that officially, I'd dropped them from the swap, but if they complete it, both of them, and send me DCNs and post contents, it will have them clear for the group with the condition that they will have to send first in the next MNF swap they join. I felt this was the most fair way to deal with it, if they both complete the swap. I invite her to hang about and get to know folks and she's assured me that she will :) I'm very happy about that! Oh, and I called the company I ordered from and they're putting a rush on the order, and I found out that it's always best to call the order in and request a rush. Have a really nice conversation with the young lady I spoke with. We discussed my theme gardens and she's going to be checking into GW. She's interested in seeing my Gargoyle bed and Naughty Garden and I'd bet she'd be interested in seeing some of the other Goth type beds and any of the themed beds. She was really interested in the possibilities of those. I told her she'd need to check back in a couple months to see pics of mine since they're still pretty dormant at the moment and it will take some time for the kids and DH to get everything tended to, especially in the new beds that we just started working on. Anyway, she was a really sweet young lady and we had a nice conversation and she tried to see if there was more she could do to get my order here quickly. The rush was all she could do, but I should have my order here sometime late next week or early the following week. So I'll be able to have Nikki's box to mail out then. Everything else is ready and packed. Or ready to be packed :) Though the longer I have to wait to mail it off, the more seeds I find to tuck in ... for cushioning, ya know? Kathy

Nancy, As long as the new week isn't the first week of summer, I'll be okay with Spring starting over or whatever. I just don't want for us to skip Spring, so we can reset and start Spring over every week if we wish. Friday's high temperature of 84 (which was not at all forecast) reminded me that some years we also go from winter to summer overnight, and I don't like years like that. I don't think this will be one of them, but I'd sure hate to be wrong about that. Rebecca, If y'all only go to 31, I wouldn't be worried about much. I just feel like I cannot trust my forecast to be on the money because it so seldom is. They've already dropped our forecast low from 33 to 32 to 31, so I need to stop looking at it because every time I check it, it has changed again. And, just because I said that, I felt compelled to go look at the forecast again, and now it is showing 30 degrees for us. This is nuts. If I check it in another hour, will it show 29? Jennifer, I'm glad the power wasn't off for too long. We had sunshine on and off really late in the day, but not that much of it. About the time I got used to the sunshine, the clouds came back and blotted it out again. Nancy, I think we're all coasting.....too many plants inside waiting to go outside again and then into the ground. I couldn't start more now if I wanted to. However, once the plants start going into the ground and I have empty flats and empty shelf and table space, then starting more seeds (this time for the back garden) is a definite possibility. Jennifer, It feels like time to get the poor things in the ground, doesn't it? They've been waiting for so long and the weather has been so uncooperative. Jacob, I cannot speak for anyone else, but the coldest nights (after tonight) left for me are Sun @ 40 degrees and Mon @ 41 degrees. Being rural, we get frost more easily than folks in town where the heat island effect from all the concrete often helps hold temperatures up a couple of degrees, so I've seen frost often at 36 degrees, occasionally at 37 and a couple of times at 38. (This has a lot to do with official temperatures being recorded at 5' above ground level, and frost on plants basically occurring at ground level or just a foot or so above it, where air temperatures likely are colder than they are at the 5' level.) Having moved here from the city, it took me a while to get use to these unexpected frosts that occur when the air is several degrees above freezing. However, we've never had them with lows in the 40s, so I'm hoping our forecast lows are correct. Regardless, I have frost blankets enough to cover the whole front garden if a big disaster were looming, though I hope I never have to do that. I hadn't used row cover at all this year until last Sunday night and now I'm sick to death of looking at it. However, having it on the plants does make killing mosquitoes easier, so at least there's that. They land on the white fabric, I see them, I swat them and another skeeter bites the dust. Is is odd that we have mosquitoes out at the same time frost blankets are in use? Sadly, it is not. I've noticed mosquitoes seem to be becoming cold hardier all the time and we see them here in every month of the year, even when temperatures are in the single digits. This goes against everything I once believed about mosquitoes. By the time you're hitting the 70s, I should be hitting the 90s. Is that nuts? We've already hit 88 once or twice this year, so hitting the 90s in April isn't unheard of. We hit the 90s Easter week in 2011, which maybe should have been some foreshadowing of the summer heat that was to come, but I was hoping those hot days were an anomaly. For that year, they weren't. It was the worst tomato year ever because we were hot enough to inhibit fruit set before all the tomato plants even went into the ground. So, when you see the risks we take with putting tomato plants in the ground so soon after a big cold spell, it is because of past years like that. Long before you were born, Jacob, there was indeed an over-the-counter pesticide made from nicotine. I want to say that the one I recall was called Black Death, and it wasn't even that unique or new. Compounds containing nicotine sulfate were used as a pesticide as far back as the 17th century. What Ruth Stout was doing was basically her version of that sort of product, though the commercial products were sprays, not burning cigarettes. (grin) As I recall, the nicotine products fell from favor in recent decades because of hazardous side effects, but nowadays modern science is giving us neonicotinoids, which I haven't used, and never will. Do you mean to use just a fire with no tobacco? I don't think it will work. I think that for Ruth Stout the fact that it involved tobacco was the key. I go to many wild fires and grass fires every year, and they are not that good at driving away the insects (or the snakes) during the summertime. One of the things that drives the gardener in me totally insane is that I'll be standing near or even walking through a blackened, burned area that is still smoking and smoldering, and there will be grasshoppers everywhere. Live, unharmed grasshoppers, clinging to a fence post, or a tree, or hopping around in the blackened area. Sometimes they are clinging to the top of unburned prairie grasses, usually in an area where a strongly wind-driven fire raced through the area so quickly that it hopscotched its way through a field, leaving unburned patches here and there. Were I not used to seeing grasshoppers in these burned areas, I'd think the fire surely drove them all away. It simply doesn't. I do remember hearing tales of back in the olden times, before I was born, where farmers, in desperation, would set fire to a field, hoping to kill or drive away the grasshoppers. They were sacrificing one particular area in the hope they could save everything else. Now I'm wondering if that even worked for them. Some people make a similar homemade concoction (similar to the nicotine compounds) from tobacco leaves or from the leaves of any nightshade, but most often tomato plants, and use that to try to kill pests. You're hardly the first person here in this group to drop a flat of plants. It happens to everyone sooner or later, and it has happened to me many times. Luckily, sometimes we can salvage the dropped plants, although sometimes we cannot. Kohlrabi has an unusual flavor that is hard to pin down and hard to describe. Mostly, I think that it tastes quite a bit like the stalks or stems of broccoli plants, but not exactly like them and the flavor is a bit milder, and just not so strong and assertive. There's some hints of something else. Perhaps a little bit of a turnip flavor, or even a bit of radish. I always think it tastes weird, but I think that's because it looks weird....like an alien version of an turnip or something. Or the vegetable version of Sputnik. The first time I grew it, I had no idea how to use it or even if I wanted to. I just had to try growing it because it was so different. Cabbage plants can last surprisingly long in to the summer here, but eventually our extreme heat tends to make it bolt and send up a seed stalk. Still, you can usually tell when that's about to happen and can harvest it and use it before it bolts. In your summer weather it might not bolt in the summer at all. Eileen, Of course you should try them if they sound appealing to you. That way, you'll know if it is worth growing them. The current issue of GRIT magazine has an article about growing them and even tells you how to make a slurry of actual morel mushrooms in order to start your own patch of them, instead of ordering the morel spawn or culture from a mushroom company like Fungi Perfecti. Around here, mostly all you have to do is cut down a very old, half-dead elm tree (or wait for it to fall in the woods on its own), wait for it to rot, and eventually you'll have morels there. I need to go back to bed before the dog wakes me up wanting to go outside again. Dawn