In addition to donating his beautiful garden plants to the Karen Cronin Memorial Garden, Bob is donating copies of some of his best pictures of plants and butterflies to the Meadowbrook Library who conceived of the memorial garden and have funded a beautiful bench, a memorial plaque, and permanent plant labels for the garden. These pictures will help us further the enjoyment, therapeutic and educational goals of the memorial garden. The entire community, the library directors and I are so thankful to Bob for his generous contributions to make Karen's Memorial Garden such a special place! mike

Jan, It is too bad the coons got the corn. It happened to me too this year. The coons get my corn about every other year. In 2008 I beat them to all of it, in 2009 we split it, and this year they got it all because they were willing to harvest it 4 or 5 days before it was going to be fully ripe, and I wasn't! Tim said he'd build me a fully enclosed 'corn cage' similar to our fenced chicken runs that are attached to each chicken coop, so maybe we can foil the coons once and for all. With the Red River to our west, south and east, we have raccoons the way some people have butterflies or birds....just all over the place. Our first year here, they'd sit on the lawn furniture on the front porch and knock on the windows and make faces at us. They can be quite vicious and are only 'cute' from a distance. I hope your kids are feeling better. That MRSA is nasty stuff. Tim came home from a housefire one day with a little black spot on his calf and told me he thought a spider had been inside his boot at the fire station and had bitten him. He went to work that night and his leg started heating up and feeling inflamed. He went to the doctor and found out it was MRSA. It took it quite a while to clear up, but he was lucky because it didn't grow larger or spread and a simple course of antibiotics cleared it up, just slowly. Zucchini time is one of my favorite times of the year. With all the various veggies that can be slow and stubborn to set and ripen veggies, it is nice to have plants as enthusiastic as squash plants! Here, we just sneak bags of zukes into people's cars when they leave them unlocked downtown. About 5 or 6 years ago, Tim's best friend's son planted his first garden. He planted a whole row of yellow squash and a whole row of zucchini, and gave away tons and tons of that stuff...but never ripened a tomato at all, which was perceived as quite a tragedy. So, what he learned from his first garden was to plant less squash and to plant more tomatoes, and to plant the tomatoes earlier. That was a really good summer for zukes here, and I ended up 'feeding' a lot of the ones he gave us to our compost pile because our own plants (and everyone else's) were producing well and you can only eat/can/freeze so many zukes. As far as the grasshoppers go, we have the most I've ever seen, but the only damage I'm seeing so far is that they are eating holes in the leaves of all my large-leaved herbs, sweet potatoes and beans. They did a lot more damage in the early 2000s when we had the last really huge outbreak. I think the difference may be that we had severe drought then so there wasn't much for them to eat, but we've had adequate rainfall this year so there's lots of green forage in the pastures for them to feast upon. Susan, You're welcome. As soon as I saw the name Pokemon, I felt pretty sure you had Li'l Pump-ke-mon. I've grown it here before, but only used it as an ornamental autumn decoration and didn't try it as an edible. I've never tried dehydrating in the car, but cannot imagine it would work with our humidity. Tomatoes are just so high in water--around 90-95%--that the air has to be incredibly dry in order to dry them down to the proper percentage of water (8-16%) for them to be considered properly dehydrated. In a dehydrator, you have a fan blowing warm air to help dry them out, and in a car you wouldn't have that. With a dehydrator fan blowing, it still can take from about 12 to about 36, or sometimes 48, hours to dehydrate tomatoes to the right dryness level and that's at a constant temperature. With fluctuating temperatures and no fan to circulate the air, there's no telling how long it will take. You also wouldn't have any control over the temperature reached in the car. When you dry tomatoes in a dehydrator, you use a specific temperature that dries them out evenly so they don't become too dry on the outside while still so moist inside that they will mold. Depending on the outdoor temperature, the size of the car, and the area in which the car is sitting, you actually could get higher heat inside the car than the recommended temperature for drying tomatoes and that would give you the mold. Finally, with a dehydrator, you have constant, even temperatures. In a car the temperatures likely would go too high during the hottest part of the day and too low after the sun goes down in the evening. I just don't see it working for tomatoes. You might be able to dry the leaves of some herbs in a car, but not a high-moisture fruit like tomatoes. Inexpensive dehydrators are easy to find at big box stores in spring through at least mid-winter. Gardeners tend to buy them during the spring and summer, and hunters buy them in fall and winter because a lot of them use dehydrators to make jerkey. That was why I purchased my first dehydrator in the 1980s or 1990s---to make jerkey from venison given to us by Tim's deer-hunting coworkers. As far as your green tomatoes, I don't think there is anything wrong with them. Some tomatoes have that sort of color variation as they go through the ripening process and it is perfectly normal. Blossom drop is common in the heat and there's no way around it. That's why planting as early as possible in spring is so very important--so you can get the maxium fruit set before temps get too high. Unfortunately for much of the state, temps got too high about 6 weeks earlier than usual so a lot of people did not get good fruit set early and have had to battle the temps and diseases since then. Hopefully, new fruit sat during the cool spell. I know I had good fruit set during the week or ten days that we had lower temperatures. I'm still harvesting from the fruit that set in May, but it is nice to know small ones have formed and are coming along that I'll be harvesting sometime in August. In that respect, the cool spell was perfectly timed. I'll be canning salsa every week for the rest of the summer if the tomatoes continue ripening at the current pace, and I prefer that to having a huge number of them all at once. I had my largest tomato harvest during the fruit harvest/canning marathon and gave many of them away because one person can only preserve so many batches of food in one day, but I've still got several dozen jars of salsa put up already and feel like I'm ahead of where I was at this time last year in terms of canning salsa. I could have frozen them and canned the salsa later, but DS and his family and the guys at the fire station were wanting to do some salsa-making of their own, so I passed those tomatoes on to them so they could have a little fun too. I cannot imagine Tess's grown in a container, so if you're planning to grow it, I hope you'll put it in the ground. In my garden, Tess's Land Race Currant usually climbs to the top of an 8' cage, and cascades back down to the ground again. Once the cascading branches are beginning to touch the ground, I cut them off to keep them from having constant soil contact and develop diseases. In a large enough cage, the plant gets about 5' wide. Diane has a photo of her Tess's on her blog and it is huge. I'll go find it so you can see what a jungle one plant would be. My only 'complaint' about Tess's is that you can spend hours just picking all the fruit off one in August when it is a maximum production. I love it though because it gives me tons of small tomatoes to dehydrate, plus I can eat them all day long in the garden (a gardener's form of Gatorade, lol) and still have more ripe than I care to pick daily. Jay, For me, Indian Stripe sets just like Cherokee Purple (only maybe a little earlier and a little heavier in spring), meaning it sets a great crop early if I get it into the ground early enough, then sets nothing for ages during the heat, then sets again in August for the fall. If I get it into the ground late, or if heat arrives early, I don't get great numbers of fruit from it until fall. Amazon Chocolate, by contrast, set heavily all summer long last year. I had AC and IS side by side and AC set fruit evenly all along, but IS set just as many...only it formed them all at once in the spring and the fall. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: Photos of Tess's at Diane's Blog

"The new visitation sounds so much better! What made the GAL agree to that?" Actually, the GAL did not really want to do week by week during the school year it turned out. He wanted it week by week in the SUMMER but then during the school year, he actually wanted to do: STBSS with his mom Mon/Tues one week, and then us Wed/Thurs, then his mom the weekend, then US Mon/Tues, then his mom Wed/Thurs, then us the weekend. It was REALLY confusing. Thank GOD both BM and my fiance did not like the proposed schedule. They both feel that it's better for STBSS to have SET DAYS with each parent that don't change. That way if we want to sign him up for karate on our nights, or mom wants to sign him up for swim lessons---it's easy and everyone knows what days they have available. So the GAL told them to come up with a schedule and they came up with the Mon/Tues with mom, Wed/THurs with us and EOW for each.

Thank-you, thank-you, thank-you!! So here's what I did over the last couple days - stuff I never would have spent time on in the past. I went to the mall to try to use my Talbots coupon, bought some new "everyday" earrings, picked up golf tees and a glove at the golf store, went to the range, bought a couple perennials, did some work on the terribly overgrown and hideous perennial garden that came with this town home when we moved in four years ago (more work to do on that), put a couple herbs in a pot, explored the community and found a great new walking trail that I immediately took advantage of, went to an open house (I keep saying I'm never moving again but maybe that's not true) and otherwise goofed off and lounged around. I did realize today that I have to figure out my two day a week work schedule at DHs company. I have a lot of other stuff going on this summer (including extended time at the lake place) and needed to make sure I reserved two unscheduled days a week for my "retirement job". Got that noted on the calendar through July. Next week I'll be at the lake a few days during the week - getting together with my college professor friend who spends her summers there - another thing I never had time to do before.