CROP ROTATION: There is no problem with planting brassicas after tomatoes. In fact, if you work on keeping your soil healthy by adding organic matter annually, I think that in a home garden, crop rotation tends to be over-rated, especially in our climate. The exception would be if your soil becomes infected with diseases specific to a certain family of crops--like the solanacea family--in which case it would be more important to rotate crops. In some parts of the country where broccoli diseases persist in soils, they have to rotate or they have trouble with those persistent diseases, but I've never heard of those brassica diseases becoming an issue in Oklahoma home gardens. We are more likely to get some solanacea family diseses established in our soils, but usually are high temperatures help keep them in check for most of our growing season. I add lots of organic matter to may soil every year and that does make a difference, so I don't even attempt crop rotation unless I had a specific problem in one area of the garden in the current year. Then, if I did, I rotate that specific vegetable to a different place. About the only crop I deliberately rotate to a new area is summer squash and I do rotate it to a new area whether my garden got hit by SVBs or not. I try to plant summer squash on a 4-year rotation starting from the south side in year 1, then moving to the north side in year 2, the west side in year 3 and the east side in year 4. Everything else gets planted wherever it gets planted. BEANS: You can plant beans wherever and however it pleases you. You do realize that in order for them to be effective as a soil improver the bean plants need to be rototilled into the soil and allowed to decompose there? That's how they put the nitrogen back into the soil as the plants decay. PESTS: Even if insects had found your garden this summer, this is the time of year that the pest populations are dropping anyway. At our house, the spider mites, grasshoppers and blister beetles in the gardening areas have peaked and are dropping. I'm also seeing more and more beneficials like green lacewings, which means they've been rebounding pretty good after having low levels earlier this season. I'm still seeing tons of grasshoppers migrating in to the pastures, but the wild birds hang around the garden a lot (because I put some bird seed there) and they've been doing a pretty good job lately of eating grasshoppers in the garden at least. DIRECT-SOWING: Most things can be direct-sown anytime and they will sprout. There is no technical problem with direct-seeding brassicas in the spring or fall. In much of the country, that's how it is done, but in much of the country they only get one broccoli crop a year---direct sown in spring or early summer and harvested in summer or fall. We are different here and can plant two separate seasons of brassica crops, but have to work around the weather to get a harvest from them. The reason that OSU recommends starting from plants is that we have to work around the early arrival of heat in spring and the chance arrival of early hard frosts in autumn. Brassicas grown from transplants in spring have the best chance of producing a harvest before the heat arrives and makes the plants bolt. In the fall, OSU recommends starting with plants because it gives you the greatest chance of getting a harvest before temperatures drop into the mid-20s and freeze damages the plants, perhaps ruining your chance of getting a harvest. It isn't that seeds won't sprout or that you cannot grow brassicas from direct-sown seed--it is that with seeds direct-sown in August, the odds are lower than you'll harvest your brassicas before it gets too cold for them. (Some years it never really gets too cold for them if you cover them up any rare night we're going below the mid-20s. Other years, cold weather arrives early and stays.) Harvesting success from brassica plants direct-sown from seed for fall is highly variable. Some years there will be a night or two with a very hard freeze at the end of September which could kill your plants before they produce. Other years? November is the more normal time, and at least one year since moving here, and possibly two, we didn't have a hard freeze until mid-December. So, if you start with 5-week old plants, you're likely to harvest well before the first killing freeze in fall, but if you start with seeds, the odds are higher that you won't. Your success with fall brassicas often hinges on the days-to-maturity of the varieties you're growing. If you chose brassicas with DTMS in the 50-65 day range, then even direct-sown seed can grow plants that will produce before hard freezes hit. If you choose brassicas with DTMs in the 70-90 day range, then the odds of harvesting before sub-freezing temps set them back are higher. Some brassicas won't hardly freeze anyway, but some are very sensitive to temps below the mid-20s. Obviously if a person put 5-week old brassica plants in the ground today and the person next door sowed seed today, you'd expect the person who started with 5-week old plants will have a better chance of harvesting before sub-freezing temperatures arrive. However, this is Oklahoma where the weather does all kinds of crazy things, so I am never going to say something is guaranteed to work or guaranteed not to work. Our weather here doesn't allow us the luxury of guarantees, not ever. OSU-RECOMMENDATIONS: With everything that OSU recommends, there are research-tested scientific reasons for each and every recommendation. In real life, our gardens experience such wild swings from too cold to too hot and too wet to too dry that we can take risks and not necessarily follow all of OSU recommendations. Remember that recommendations are just what is recommended. That doesn't mean you cannot grow in other ways. Sometimes you can ignore the recommendations and it pays off, but other years you'll be wishing you'd done it OSU's way. Dawn

Melissa, I've only lived here since 1999, and I'm not sure I have seen a "normal" spring yet. I am starting to believe (and fear) that what is normal for us is to have wildly erratic weather. I do think that at our house, the weather from 2006 to now has been more erratic than the weather the first few years we lived here, with freezes coming later and later and later into the spring. I've also noticed Love County gets hail about once a year, and it is almost always the day AFTER I set out my tomatoes. It drives me nuts. Last year was a very hard year for most people's tomatoes, so don't feel too discouraged by it. The weather simply did all the wrong things at all the wrong times in the spring and it got too hot too early and that affected fruitset. Then the high humidity brought a lot of diseases. A lot of folks did have a good fall crop though, which helped make up for the spring/summer difficulties. Hopefully in 2011 the spring and summer weather will be a bit more cooperative. With your gourds, you can dry them inside or out. Outside on the vine is fine if they already were pretty mature when frost hit. Outside is fine if you aren't getting tons of rain. In the years when I grow gourds, I let them dry on the vine as much as possible but if it is raining a lot, I move them inside. I think letting them dry outside as much as possible is good because there's normally better airflow outside. Because your gourds already have been exposed to freezing temps, it isn't going to hurt them if you want to move them inside to dry. It seems like freezing temps hasten the maturing/drying process a bit and also makes them easier to peel, which is another reason to consider leaving them outside a little bit longer if you want to do that. I imagine they'll dry and cure just fine either way, indoors or out, so do what feels right to you. Or, take some inside, leave some outside, and see which ones dry/cure faster and better. We miss you when you're not here but, you know, sometimes life is just too busy to spend much time on the computer. The seed swap is going to be fun. I like that it is coming after Christmas this year as it will give us something to look forward to in the normally dismal, cold, gray month of January. Dawn

I'm too far south so almost never feel them, but felt 2 of them about 6 weeks apart a few years back. My husband and son never are home when we feel them here, so they were feeling kind of left out, and then earthquakes starting happening in Irving, TX, close to where they work. Now they have felt more earthquakes than I have, although the ones down there are much weaker, so I retain bragging rights for feeling the stronger earthquakes. I read somewhere a few months ago that Oklahoma is having more earthquakes than California in recent years. Thankfully, all of ours are relatively small ones.

Bon, I agree with you. I didn't pay a lot of attention to the quakes years ago when they were 2s and 3s, but then there started to be some 4s, and then some 5s and then more 5s. The 5s certainly get a person's attention much more than the 3s do. I hope we never have any that reach the magnitudes of 6 or higher, but you know, that 5.8 was a wake-up call that the magnitude of some of the quakes seems to be drifting higher and higher over the years. I hope it doesn't happen to Pawnee or to your area or anywhere, but it seems to feel almost inevitable. Stockergal, Exactly! Let one quake do moderate damage in someplace like Bricktown and just see what happens next. I believe that quake would awaken the politicians and state employees who ought to be fighting to stop the quakes. I feel like a lot of what they do now is that they do only the bare minimum in terms of shutting down disposal wells. This incremental closing of some wells and slowly cutting back slightly on the volume of water injected into other wells would fly right out the window if a place like Bricktown had building facades collapsing into the streets. Every life matters. Every person's home and other personal property (including the businesses that are their livelihoods) matters, but it doesn't seem that way when the powers that be fail to protect the little people, does it? I am truly appalled at how little the people in Pawnee have received in assistance after the damage from the quakes. I'm not sure if Bon's area will fare much better. Insurance companies spend a lot of time denying claims, after all. I hate it that the rural areas and smaller towns are not considered as important by the politicians and by the bureacrats paid by our tax dollars, but we all know that it is true. Until a quake hits a well-developed urban area, many people will more or less ignore the quakes and will remain in denial about the danger they pose, including the very people who should be trying to help end them. Remember the horrible wildfires that swept across our state in 2005-2006 and then again in 2008? The volunteer and professional fire departments were hurting. Financially, it was costing so much more to fight the fires for months than any department had available. We had volunteer firefighters taking money right out of their own pockets just to put gasoline in the gas tanks so they could go fight the fires. Our communities statewide responded with all kinds of fundraisers and donations. Our legislators passed bills to buy each volunteer department at least one new brush truck for fighting fires. (Well, they bought each VFD a new flatbed pickup and the VFDs had to come up with additional tens of thousands of dollars to convert the flatbeds to firetrucks, but at least they had the truck part provided.) This was a major expense for the state and one they hadn't planned for but it was necessary, and just having that one new truck helped each volunteer department a great deal once they could raise the funding to pay for the fire equipment (tanks, pumps, hoses, lights, etc.) to turn a flatbed pickup into a brush fire truck. We also got additional state funding that year to pay our general operating expenses. The rampant wildfires put the firefighters in a financial crisis, and everyone responded. It also seemed like more grants to buy additional equipment were available for a few years. It was a wonderful thing to see. So, my question is, why isn't this state responding to the earthquake crisis in the same way? The only answer I can come up with is that it is because the earthquake crisis is only hitting certain areas, mostly rural and more lightly populated, so the politicians can give it a little lip service and otherwise not do much. The people in the earthquake-affected areas deserve a better response and more help than they're getting.