He probably got into a fight with somebody. Even hens fight at times when they are bored. I'd put some bag balm on his wounds. Frost bite is black or white. The flesh actually freezes and dies. The dead tissue scabs over and falls off. As long as you can keep the others from picking the roo will survive and be no worse for the wear. Usually the comb looses it's points and the wattles get trimmed by it. Roo will almost look like a dubbed fighting cock. Having had frostbit finger tips it does hurt. Took a long time to really heal and my hands do start to freeze easier than they did before the frostbite. Mine was a little nothing that didn't require medical attention but it was still a bummer. It was -40 out one morning and I had to disconnect my car battery and bring it inside to warm so I could start my car and get to work. Only took the gloves off for a few minutes but at that temp it was all it took. Some of that anti-picking goo will help. Thicker and less melty the better. Vaseline on large combs and wattles helps. You just don't want to get a thick coat on that will melt into the feathers and mat them down. It's the loft of the feathers that holds the warmth.

as others have said, my house suffers, too, because i want to be playing in the dirt. well, plus i wasn't ever the best housekeeper, but... any excuse will do. lol ! and, like some others, my love of gardening probably started with my grandma (mom's mom). she was amazing- had a veggie garden, fruit trees, lots of flowers and shrubs and didn't mind pesky grandkids messing in them. my granpap also liked to garden, but i think she was the prime gardener in that family. i fondly recall popping the seeds on her balsam, playing with johnny jump ups, picking her lily of the valley and being fascinated by the ants on her peonies. oh, and stuffing myself to bursting with prune plums. mmmm. i didn't really do any gardening then, but it fascinated me. she gave me my first plant, a green dracanae that i still have. at first about all i could keep alive were cactus and that dracanae. i steadily got more housplants as i killed less, and was lucky enough to live for 2 years in her house after i got married (after she was living with my folks). i appreciated all her work outside while i was in college firsthand, and with new eyes. unfortunately, the people who bought the house after she passed away and we moved tore out most of her life's work, much of which was very old and carefree. my dad was a big veggie gardener, and couldn't understand why none of us were much interested in helping. i tried to grow a few things at home- mostly flowers, which baffled him. then, as i got older and out of the house and 3 states away, veggie gardens were the one thing he and i could discuss at length on the phone. he was a quiet man, and it was about the only thing we discussed without him falling asleep on me. :) how i miss planning our gardens together- i still think of him as i get my new seed catalogs and plan out each year. i spent idyllic childhood days playing in the woods appreciating all the green stuff- ferns, trees, jewelweed, trilliums, sweet williams, violets, sedum, iris, daylilies, periwinkle and all sorts of treasures i found in our woods. it was an old homestead from 100 years before and in addition to the wildflowers, much had survived in the woods that they'd planted. my love of wildflowers and ephemerals doubtless springs from those halcyon days. we moved a bunch of houseplants south in '91 with us, and then at our second apartment, i began to do balcony gardening- i think that's when the bug bit hard. i was ecstatic to have my very own yard when we bought our house and immediately began messing in the dirt to plant things. we've been here since '93 and i have a nice sized garden in the front & the side. now my big plans are for our shady back yard. not real sure what i'll do when i fill it up, but i think that'll take me a long time. my dad's sis played a big role, too. as a preteen i spent one summer with them because of my mom's health issues and i learned much about edible landscaping. i've always loved fruit, and it seemed that they had yummy stuff tucked in every corner of their yard. when i began to plan my own garden many years later, it was the memory of her garden that inspired much of mine. she was touched and surprised when i told her that. i'd be remiss if i didn't mention the 4th big influence and that was lady i met while volunteering at mordecai shortly after we moved here. she was in her 70's and had such spunk! she has an amazing garden at her husband's homeplace in louisburg with oodles of old roses, daylilies and iris, among other gems. she was a huge contributor to my garden in its infancy, and my knowledge bank. i consider her my mentor, and my adopted grandma, since one is gone and the other is far away. i love passing along her plants, and helping to spread her influence far and wide. garden webbers have played no small role the last few years, too, and i look forward to learning much more from you guys and making many, many new friends! i feel like my love of gardening came from so many sources and feel very lucky to have had all of them in my life. i consider it a duty to pass along plants to anyone starting up. it's the very least i can do in memory and gratitude to those who helped me so and fed such a great obsession.

Emma, We always have had snakes here in plentiful amounts, but then our back property line sits only about a quarter-mile from the Red River, so it would be shocking if we didn't have oodles of snakes. I can link the rise and fall of our snake population more to the river itself than to the weather. After a big rainfall year like 2007 when there was widespread flooding, we hardly saw any snakes at all whatsoever for the next year.(it was terrific!) Then,after almost 13" of rain in one day and widespread flash flooding in April 2009, we didn't see many snakes at all until thef following spring. I suspect the flooding had made a big dent in their population in both 2007 and 2009. 2010 seemed normal. In 2011, we saw relatively few. Perhaps the heat had a negative impact on the survival of their young. In every summer, as it gets hotter and drier and the ponds and creeks dry up, the snakes we do have will move to any available body of water, including a bird bath or small water lily pond, but I don't think we have more....I just think they venture closer to us humans out of necessity. I always think that we have too many snakes, but then the one neighbor to our W/NW whose home sits between us and the Red River has vastly more snakes than we do. I am glad his property is there as a buffer between our place and the river. He can sit on his front porch and shoot snakes night after night after night and still more and more keep coming. Bre, With repeated efforts, the kids will learn. Country kids learn at an early age that there are some things they need to be really careful about. Sometimes, though I think we forget to look at things from their perspective. When our son was dating a young woman who had a little girl who was then just a toddler, she and I built a Peter Rabbit potager garden. We spend oodles of time playing in the dirt, reading the simplest versions of The Tale of Peter Rabbit, and planting similar crops in our Peter Rabbit Garden. She was so excited, and so was I, but for different reasons. We had a darling little picket fence, but we had completely different attitudes towards the fence and the Peter Rabbit Garden. I wanted to close the gate to keep the real cottontail rabbits out of the Peter Rabbit Garden, but she wanted to leave the gate open at night so that Peter Rabbit and his friends could come into the garden and eat! Clearly, we had different ideas about the purpose of the garden, and this experience taught me to remember to look at things from a 2 or 3 year-old child's perspective and not just my own. Be sure your hoe is sharpened so that it will chop a snake in half. A dull hoe won't do the job and you do not want to have an angry snake that feels threatened coming at you. We see brown snakes all the time here. They just turn and run. I believe they are as startled by seeing us as we are by seeing them. Oops, I forgot to link the website earlier that has photos of snakes of Oklahoma....I'll link it now. Occasionally we have lost a cat to snakebite but not a dog, and my little cat, Spots, who is sitting here on the couch beside me as I type this has been bitten twice. She rarely goes outside any more....though it is hard to guess if her love of sleeping on the sofa in the air-conditioned house is related to past bad experiences with snakes or not. One cat almost died, but then survived. He was almost comatose for almost two weeks from a copperhead biite to his groin area, and still bears the scar. He is the only cat we've had that had the copper rash in the area where he was bitten. One of our neighbors who was bitten by a copperhead had a similar rash near the site of her bite. One of our neighbors had an old little dog named Rascal when we moved here. He might not have been a full-blooded rat terrier, but his appearance was somewhat like a rat terrier. That was the bravest little dog I've ever seen. He completely hated snakes. When he saw one, he'd catch it, shake it a certain way to break its neck, and then would skin it and eat it. He was a completely amazing little dog. He lived to a pretty old age and then just disappeared. We always assumed a coyote or something got him. The cougar encounters were quite unsettling at the time. I always thought it would be cool to see one "in the wild" until I actually sow one. When we were in our pickup truck going someplace and saw two walk across the road in front of us, that was cool. Having one roar at me? Not cool. Having one in the yard twice in one year, and right by my garden. Not cool. I have to be honest and say that for a couple of months after those two incidents, I only went to my garden to harvest and then immediately came back inside. Being out there made my skin crawl. For a couple of years after that, every time I walked down to the spot where I saw the second one, which was about 12' from me when I first noticed it, my body had an involuntary reaction.....heart pounding, fear, that fight-or-flight feeling. I was worried that my brain would never "get over" that experience and always would feel creeped out, but eventually I got to where I could be in that area without having the feeling of fear. Your location sort of guarantees you'll see lots of wildlife and most of it will be a wonderful experience. I love seeing all the wildlife as long as I am in a location where I don't feel like they can get to me. Just today we had a turtle laying eggs under the plum tree (she lays her eggs there every year) and a wild turkey walking up and down the driveway and all around my garden. The turkey has been here for weeks. It is a male looking for a female and apparently can't find one, so it does the mating dance for my chickens who stand in their fenced chicken room and stare at it like it is an idiot, why their roosters just all puffed up and upset and stomp around trying to scare off the turkey. Usually one of our more bold cats will start walking towards the turkey and it then will vanish into the woods. I enjoy having that sort of wildlife around, but don't like seeing the predators too much. Nothing flusters my son, who is a professional firefighter or my husband, who is a cop, but the cougar incidents came close. Of course, they were inside the house either watching TV or on their computers each time and missed the really exciting part. Both of them have shot their share of snakes and skunks. The gators are rare, but not unheard of. Sometimes they are found in or very near the Red River. Sometimes they have made themselves at home in a stock tank. It always makes the news specifically because it is so rare. The year before we bought our land, which was 1997, a gator was found in a stock tank on property about a half mile from ours. On the day I drove up from Fort Worth so I could be here on the day that the electric co-op guys were installing our poles and electric lines and our water co-op was putting in our water line, the guys working here warned me that two different people----one in town in Marietta and one right here on our road---had been bitten by snakes that day. With one of them, the snake wouldn't let go of the person, so the medics had to cut the body off the snake and take the person to the ER with the snake still attached to the person's body. That was a creepy image. Those utility workers wanted to be sure I understood just how many snakes we have around here, so that I would be careful. I appreciated so much that they were so concerned. (I also was horrified when I thought about how we had walked all over that property with the real estate guy when we were considering buying it....we walked through Johnson grass in the bar ditch that was head high, we walked all over the woods, the fields, up and down the creeks, etc. We went places I never go now because there's always so many snakes there! Live and learn..... We have bats every summer. I love seeing them. They are one thing you do need to teach your kids not to touch, for obvious reasons. They usually come out around twilight and, at least at our place, they always flock to the outdoor security light looking for bugs. I love to sit out in the lawn chairs and watch them. Discovering the bat activity here was a really neat surprise. Feral hogs are very dangerous and can kill a person. A couple of ranchers west of Marietta had some very close calls with them and narrow escapes from them a couple of years ago. I usually hear them before I see them, and I always go inside when I see them. Well, once I did go into the woods looking for them (what was I thinking?) and found them in the creek....they often travel the creeks, which often have only very shallow water in them....and then I hightailed it right back to the house. The first time a feral hog ran out into the road in front of me, it was so big that I was sure I was seeing a hippo. I see them more often when we are out at wildfires in remote locations than when we are at home on our own property. I don't like seeing them. They tend to be really aggressive. I see coyotes a lot, and have had our dogs get in fights with them, which scares me. My dogs are pet mutts, not livestock guardian dogs and pet dogs often get the worst end of the deal when they tangle with coyotes. There is nothing worse than hearing a fight to the death between a coyote and dog and thinking that it might be your dog. It wasn't....but the sound of it all was so terrifying that a neighbor came running from about 100 yards away to check on me because he thought the coyote fight was on our property....it might have been, but it was west of the house in a dense woodland....and he and I both knew all our dogs were home and accounted for. You cannot be a gardener and avoid wildlife because it will be out there with you and your children. Most of the time, you'll love seeing it. Even the animals I personally find frightening are still something that it is thrilling to see....after you get over the fear. Most coyotes turn and run. I've had more trouble with deer that want to pick a fight with me than with coyotes. About 90% of the time, the coyotes turn and run. We had trouble with a couple of coyotes for a few months that looked like cross-breeds between coyotes and domestic canines. A neighbor called them coyote hybrids and warned me that they had enough domestic dog in them that they didn't fear humans like normal coyotes do, and I sure did learn that for myself. I love living here but I've told Tim many times that if I every encounter a bear near my garden, I'm packing up and moving back to Texas. I wouldn't actually do it, but at that point it would seem like a great idea. We rarely have wildlife in our garden any more because we kept raising the fence higher and higher to keep the wildlife out. Now both the front garden and the back garden have fences 8' tall, and both have two gates....because you need a way out if a wild thing comes in one gate. The worst sound I've ever heard is the rattle of a rattlesnake. I always freeze in my tracks and try to determine which direction the rattle is coming from so I can go in the opposite direction. The closest I've ever had a venomous snake to me was a pygmy rattler about two inches from my hand. When I saw it, I instantly and instinctively did a backwards somersault (I was crouching low to the ground before I saw it) to get away from it....and I was glad no one was around to see that odd movement. It was in late February or early March when the snakes usually are not out and about. I have seen snakes out in every month except January, though we usually see them only from about March or April through November. Some breeds of snakes are very aggressive, but others are a lot more passive and would rather flee than stay there and fight you. I try to give them a chance to flee and get away. All my neighbors will come over and shoot a snake for me, and sometimes more than one will come and I will think to myself "they are having too much fun with this.....:". I appreciate them though, and think we have the absolute best neighbors in the world. It is one of the reasons I love living here. On the page linked below, click on the photo gallery to see the various snakes featured there. There are 46 kinds of snakes in OK, but only 7 of them are venomous. At our house, brush piles and compost piles are prone to have snakes lying around them in the summer months, so I pile on the compostable materials, but I never turn the pile and I only remove compost from it in winter. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: Snakes of Oklahoma

"But those are some big cucumbers! What kind are they?" I just checked the plastic marker, and unfortunately all it says is "cucumber". They were from Kube Pak, if that helps at all. I'm guessing the latin name would be something like Cucactus Ouchus. ;-) "you might enjoy reading the $64 tomato - short memoir, funny as hell about a man's venture into "gentleman's farming" I especially enjoyed the chapter on "superchuck" " Thanks for the reminder! I stumbled across that title around the same time I bought Mel's SFG book. I read every one of the Amazon reviews - the book sounds hilarious. I'm going to have to order that soon. BTW, here's an interview NPR did with the author. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5360768