My pony hasn't even left the barn yet LOL We have agreed to limit gifts to $10.00 per person, surprising how much - edible, candles, plants - are available for such a small sum. DS and DIL live in Idaho, we have agreed a long time ago not to exchange gifts, for some reason it's very stressful for them to give and to receive, so a phone call and a card is welcome. Sometimes during the year for no reason we will send something we think the other party may enjoy. All of us have too much stuff, anyway. Tomorrow Joann and I will meet with Linda for lunch, at a restaurant between her and our home and we will exchange packages then, to be opened on Christmas. Some things are either of no value or priceless, and I have a perfect set of depression glass dessert dishes that I shall wrap for Linda as an extra - call it "unloading" as I never use them. As the Holidays consist only of Joann, Ron and me I don't do a lot of baking, just as well, as I have Maximus and Jasmyn, who want to check everything out, even threatened with the water-squirter - they are so young yet. We do plan to have some Dungeness crab on Christmas eve and maybe ham on Christmas day. Used to have Swiss fondue Christmas eve when there were more of us, hard to make a small one - and the cost of the fine Swiss cheese is getting ridiculous! That brings up decorations, a big question. I may put a few out at the time, when the cats are outside, and perhaps they don't notice. Think so? Anyway, I can get in the mood with music and a pretty screen-saver, and the scenery outside it getting really pretty - everything has greened and the madrone and the pyracantha berries are bright red and shall soon be decorated with robins. So I shall be merry -

Jay, I think the bolting has to be related to that weather in the 40s, but that's just my best guess. I am not sure if hail would trigger bolting. I don't know how hot it was there, but it hit 100 here and that's too hot for me. From now on, I'll hibernate indoors in the air conditioning as much as I can. I try to get out to the garden as soon after sunrise as I can, and back inside before it gets too hot. At this time of year, I often only harvest....and when I carry everything inside, I always intend to go back out and weed, mulch, water, deadhead ornamental flowers, etc., but once I hit the air conditioning, all that garden ambition flies out the window and I just stay inside so I can stay cool. I don't know of any sure-fire way to get the birds to leave the tomatoes alone, other than Surround or maybe by putting red Christmas balls in the plants a month before your fruit breaks color. The birds peck at the Christmas ornament, determine that your plants' fruit is not edible, and train themselves, via association to leave it alone. This works for some people, but not for others. Sometimes I've used bird netting, but a really persistent bird finds a way underneath the netting anyway. We did have some pecked fruit in May, but not much since then. That may change with the arrival of summer heat. We don't have grackles here at our place, though I see them in town a lot. Sometimes, though not often, we have starlings. As long as the Purple Martins still are in residence in the purple martin houses, they'll chase off the starlings. Once the martins head south, the starlings become more of a problem. Carol, I'm sorry your tomato plants are not looking well. It sure is a disease-y year for tomatoes in our good too. Some of my plants look pretty bad, and some don't look too bad yet, but have started going downhill. I don't care. I am tomatoed out and have no intention of doing anything to/with/for the tomato plants except harvesting the fruit for as long as it lasts. If a storm took out all my plants tomorrow, I'd shrug and say "oh well, it was a great year" and then I'd move on. I've already preserved enough tomatoes to keep us happy until next year's crop is coming in. Of course, I'd miss having fresh ones daily, but I'd get over it. Dorothy, My favorite salsa is Annie's Salsa, from Annie on the Harvest Forum. She developed the recipe, but worked with her state's extension service to get it tested for safety. One thing I really like about it is the texture--you added canned tomato paste and sauce to give it incredible texture. Also, you can substitute a like amount of ReaLemon or ReaLime or both for the vinegar in the recipe. I make it different ways...sometimes all ReaLemon or all ReaLime hut never all vinegar because we don't like salsa with a real vinegary flavor. Sometimes I use 1/3 each of vinegar, ReaLemon or ReaLime, sometimes I use 1/2 each of ReaLemon and ReaLime. I keep mentioning them by brand name because they are the only bottled lemon or lime juices that consistently test at the pH needed for safety reasons. Store brands of bottle lemon juice and lime juice test at the right pH range much less consistently so could be a safety problem. I'll link the recipe below. We used to make 6 or 7 different salsas and didn't especially love any of them. Since I started making Annie's Salsa, it is the only one we make. Like you, I'm moving from crop to crop, putting up as much of the excess harvest of each one as we can after we've eaten all we want to eat fresh. Here's my garden report: Clearly 2012 is the year of the tomato. I've been canning and dehydrating for at least 3 weeks now, or maybe 4. I'm starting to run out of ways to use up tomatoes, and my paste tomato harvest just started, in terms of a good quantity of fruit, in the last 4 or 5 days. Most of what I had canned prior to that was from slicers. All the warm-season crops are producing great, so in between processing tomatoes, I am just trying to stay caught up on everything else. The hot peppers are producing like gangbusters and each plant is very heavily loaded with fruit. My first big pepper harvest was just about 7-10 days ago, and now I am having to pick them about every 3rd day. So far, I've been using them in salsa and eating them fresh. I am about to start roasting and freezing them beginning tomorrow, and am just starting to get enough cukes to make pickles, which was on the schedule for today and tomorrow and likely will be done only tomorrow because I'm about to run out of time to do it today, and I am too tired to start a batch now. The sweet peppers are not producing well yet, but that's normal when May is hot like it was. I feel like the May heat wave/drought really hurt them and they'll be later than usual this year. We have far too much yellow squash and zucchini, but that's hardly news to anyone who raises either or both of them. So far my plants remain pest-free and disease-free. I just started harvesting okra this week, so right now there is not enough of it to freeze--just enough to eat fresh. We're getting a good pole bean harvest after having had a very heavy bush bean crop. We have muskmelons but none are ripe yet. The onions and potatoes, and all other cool-season crops, are done, done, done. The early corn is harvested and processed or in the fridge for fresh eating. We're waiting for the mid- and late-season corn to be ready to pick. The pickling cucumbers are producing well, but are heavily infested with spider mites so I am not sure how long they'll last. The watermelons and winter squash are taking over every available square inch of unoccupied space. The herbs are fine, but basil keeps trying to flower in this heat and I keep pinching it back. The Armenian cukes are all over the place. They're such big monster plants! I pick produce in the morning, and then spend however long it takes to process the portion of the harvest we won't be eating fresh. Some days I spend a lot of time in the kitchen. The garden looks really good, although the tomatoes don't look nearly as nice and healthy now as they did a month ago. They still are producing heavily. As near as I can remember, here's what I've canned/frozen/dehydrated so far this month: Plum Jelly: 92 half-pint jars Strawberry Jam: 8 half-pint jars Blueberry-Lime Jam: 6 half-pint jars Bumbleberry Jam: 6 half-pint jars Catsup: 21 pint jars Chili Base: 5 pint jars Annie's Salsa: 90 pint jars Tomato Sauce: 32 quart freezer boxes (stored in the deep freeze) Dehydrated Bite-sized Tomatoes: 3 gallons (stored in the deep freeze) I have other veggies in the deep freeze from May, but I didn't keep a list of what I put up. It seems like there was 23 quarts of beans, and each quart usually makes two meals for us.In the freezer There's also sweet corn and sliced yellow squash, and shredded zucchini. The yard-long beans, lima beans and southern peas are just beginning to produce because all of them went into the ground pretty late. I was trying to spread out the harvest so that all of the above and the pole snap and bush snap beans would not be producing at the same time. So far, the bean harvest has been spread out pretty well so I'm not snowed under a big pile of beans yet on any given day, though there were a couple of days in May when the bush bean harvest was huge. However, at that time, I wasn't harvesting enough of anything else that required a lot of processing so I had time to deal with the beans. All the flowers are gorgeous and the gourds (birdhouse and mixed decorative gourds) are climbing all over the place, as are all the various winter squash varieties. I hope to add a lot more tomato products and other veggies, but we are starting to have fires, so how much I will be able to harvest and process will depend on whether we have a slow start to the summer fire season or a fast start. The garden looks as good as it ever has and everything not only looks pretty good, but is producing really, really well. We're about to harvest our first butternut squash. It seems impossibly early to harvest butternut, but I planted early and it stayed so hot that it grew like mad and flowered and fruited early. This is the most productive garden year so far that we've had in quite a while, and I am loving it, even though all the canning is wearing me out. At least it gives me a good excuse for spending lots of time indoors. Of course, as Tim points out to me every day "this kitchen sure is hot and steamy", but I still think I'm better off in the hot, steamy kitchen than outdoors. At least in the kitchen, I can stand under the AC vent and it cools me off. Today will go down in history as the first day I ever found a snail eating a plant in my garden. For so long, we just didn't have any snails at all, most likely because they don't thrive in dense, red clay soil. I guess we finally have improved the soil enough that the snails are coming to the garden. Tomorrow I'll scatter Slug-Go under the okra plants since it was feeding on an okra plant. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: Recipe For Annie's Salsa

After what I thought was compulsive checking for lily bugs (and squishing them), I just discovered 3 lilies whose lower foliage is being devoured by the larvae. YUCK!! I hand picked off what I could (double YUCK) and sprayed the area with neem oil. I hate these bugs!

Well I will post a couple from today later. Texas Carnival Dance was not impressed with the weather. but Fighting Fire took a bit to more or less open up. all early and most mid-season bloomiers have scapes now. I noticed that Rose F Kennedy has the first scape up and Clown Parade has a dozen and they are quite tall. Even cool it is exciting to see what might be blooming eeach day and the clematis are also putting on a nice show. And it was just under 50 this morning but unually cool temps are forecast through the fist week in May. At which point, we will go straight to hot summer so I don't want to fuss too much. kay