Seed catalogs come out around December/January, so that's the time to order seeds. You can make a wish list before then and also write down what you already have. For me, I like to shop in the stores, too, so I buy some off the rack in late winter. Ah, springtime...

Telow, We have a Santa Rosa, an Ozark Premier and several native Mexican plums. I try to keep the Santa Rosa and Ozark Premier pruned to about 12' in height. They are pruned in a nice bowl shape so they are about as wide as they are tall. The native Mexican plum I have planted beside them is more upright because I don't prune it. While the native plums are small, they make wonderful plum jelly. However, in a good year, the other two plum trees make so much fruit that I just leave the native plums for the wild birds and other wildlife. Because plums tend to bloom early in warm winters and then get hit hard by freezing weather, I only get a good crop about once every three years. The last good fruit year was 2010(and it was the best plum and peach year ever here in Oklahoma), I harvested about 130 lbs. from the Santa Rosa, 139 lbs. from the Ozark Premier and 85 lbs. from the peach tree, which I think is a RedHaven. The next time I plant fruit trees, I'll write down their names because my memory is worse and worse every year. For a long time I thought I'd planted Methley, but when it fruited, the fruit was not Methley and I finally figured out it was Ozark Premier. Obviously a family cannot eat approximately 350 lbs. of fresh fruit quickly enough before it goes bad, so I preserved a lot of the plums and peaches and gave some of them away. That summer I froze about 20 quarts of peaches (we're enjoying the next to the last quart this week), dried some plums and turned them into prunes, and made every kind of peach and plum preserves, jams, jellies and spiced butters you can think of....around 175 jars plus another dozen jars of freezer jam. We gave away a lot of that as gifts, but still have some of it in the pantry. Even better, I extracted and froze about 15 or 20 batches of plum juice and it still is in the freezer. Each batch of frozen plum juice, when thawed, will make one batch (about 6-7 pint jars) of plum jelly. Thus, even if this year's plum crop freezes, I'll still be able to make oodles of plum jelly just as if we'd had a great crop. I have the pectin, sugar and jars and will start making plum jelly soon so I can refill the canning shelves with jars of jelly, and empty out a portion of the freezer. It is a bummer when we get a small crop or no crop because of freezing weather or hail, but in a good year, we preserve enough to last us a good long time. Also, in a good year when the harvest is plentiful, we eat them until we are almost sick of them. Someone looked at my plum trees in 2010 right before I began to harvest and commented that I "should have" thinned the fruit. I told him I had removed about 96% of the fruit when I thinned and we still had that many hundreds of fruit left. To me, the hardest thing in the world is the thinning, but if you don't do it, you get plums the size of grapes. I thinned and thinned for days and removed thousands of tiny plums from the trees. His trees produced well also that year, but not nearly as well as ours, and I think maybe he had fewer bees around pollinating when the trees were blooming. We always have a gazillion bees here, likely because we don't use broad-spectrum pesticides. Dawn

Hi Okieladybug! I wanted to share a lettuce tip that hubs and I discovered quite by mistake: a variety called Winter Density. Some years back it came in a French lettuce seed mix. It grew well that spring and summer, but it wasn't our favorite. We ignored it and it went to seed. That winter, and every winter since, we've had Winter Density volunteers to sustain us through the winter. It's still not our top favorite, but that doesn't mean it's not a good lettuce. Kind of like getting a homemade apple pie when you really prefer fudge brownies. There is something quite satisfying about growing your own lettuce nearly all year round. We've never even covered it and the only time we ever lost it was when we had ice on the trees (and lettuce) for two weeks. You could grow it in containers during the winter, moving it in for extremely severe weather. Winter Density also goes by a couple of French names. You can find it at Johnny's Select Seeds. Welcome aboard! Seedmama PS The OSU fact sheets have been extrememly difficult to access lately. I finally broke down and ordered some paper copies this week. The recommended planting dates for head or leaf lettuce, plants or seed, are February 15 to March 10.

Amy, Unfortunately it is about to start feeling like July. The good thing about the rain is it has kept us cooler. There's no rain in my 7-day forecast, so I expect we'll dry out a lot over the next week, and we're expected to hit the upper 90s early next week. Can 100 degrees be far behind? Bon, Yay for the rain. You did need it and I'm glad you got it. You may feel stormed out, but it will be a fleeting feeling. We are about to feel the wrath of July heat + high humidity from all the moisture in the ground, so I think it is going to feel worse for a while before it feels better. Carol, Well, Grove was overdue for some heavy rainfall and apparently it finally happened. With all the accidents on the lake over the July 4th weekend, I hope people will be exceptionally carefully out there on the water now that there's all the runoff from all that rainfall. I have about half of my garden weeded and more or less under control---the upper half that dries out more quickly. I got a lot of that weeding done in the two hours I was out there this morning. I quickly harvested the one row of tomato plants that I hadn't harvested from prior to the storm, and then I weeded, weeded, weeded as the sun climbed higher in the sky and the temperatures began heating up. The fence lines are a mess, though, and I have to go slowly and carefully with them because that's one of the favorite hiding places of the timber rattlers. I do the same thing with rain gauges. I've noticed that even the radar-indicated rainfall this year has rarely matched what I've recorded in my rain gauge, and neither does our mesonet station's. It's why I try to keep an unbroken rain gauge (and occasionally a slightly-cracked one that manages to record most of the rainfall) out in the yard at all times. I left the one that cracked in the winter and put a new one beside it. There is only about a 0.10" difference between the two, so the broken one is almost recording correctly. Dorothy, For so long this year, I was worried y'all weren't getting enough rain, but I can see now that you're getting plenty. Last year was perfect for us in terms of rainfal, beginning in mid-June, and once the rain started, it's hardly stopped at all. Prior to mid-June, the drought was so bad I was about to close the garden gate and walk away, so the rain began falling in the nick of time. It can stop now if it wants. After the drought years of 2011-2013, I am just thrilled to have plenty of rainfall and (so far) not too many grasshoppers. It has been a struggle all year to keep up with the bare minimum of mowing, trimming and hand-weeding, but we just keep plugging along, doing what we can when we can and not worrying or fretting about what we can't get done. You can only do whatever the conditions, weather and time available allow, so I try not to worry about the rest. Eventually we'll get it all done. Sandplum, I weeded all I could this morning and was happy with what I got done, but some of those weeds were so big already that I had to dig them out rather than pulling them out. I'll get out there in the cool early morning hours tomorrow and try to work on it for another 2-4 hours. In June and July the harvesting and canning keeps me too busy to focus too much on weeding, and the rain this year has made weeding even harder to accomplish, but the tomato canning is winding down now, so I should get to weed every day for the next week, especially with no rain in the forecast. I think that with a week of weeding every morning, I should catch up on the backlog of weeds waiting to be removed. Y'all, I don't remember exactly what our all-time record rainfall is, but I believe it is around 59". I need to look it up and see. I am fairly certain we'll break that record this year, as Burneyville is sitting at 54" right now. Never, ever, even after 2007, did I think we'd see that sort of rainfall here. Dawn