If genius loves company, Morph, I think I'll just tag along with you. Don't bother, I'm no genius. I just read a lot. Pennsylvania's weather, with some maritime influence, is a lot warmer than Michigan. :-) I also have three trees, all very young, so the leaves are minimal and I can pick 'em up by hand. :-) Did you add something as a starter fert? I'm going to put Milorganite down, just before I seed. Yes, alfalfa. Well, it was guinea pig food and one bag of chinchilla food to even out as I bought all their guinea pig food... Call it 65% alfalfa, 35% a mix of soy, corn, and a touch of molasses. For the benefit of our readers, August 22 would have been more consistent with conventional practice. I keep reading "but by the way" whenever I see any given date... First frost for me is circa October 15, so this now has three full months to work on it before growth slows. And pray that we donÂt get hit with the hottest August on record. Tell me about it. The next fifteen days look good, though, with high temperatures holding in the eighties. Evenings in the sixties to upper fifties. This is just about perfect.

wbonesteel, I am thrilled y'all have had rain recently. I've just been wishing and hoping we'd get some too. We finally did last night during the tornado warning. I crept outside right before bedtime with the flashlight and checked the rain gauge and it had a half-inch. A little after midnight another thunderstorm hit. It was mostly thunder, lightning and wind for the longest time and then finally more rain fell. This morning there is a total of 0.95" in the rain gauge from yesterday and last night. The skies are darkening up and it is beginning to thunder, so maybe we are about to get a little more rain. So, our month-to-date total at our house for May rainfall jumped from 0.04" to 0.99". That's a nice improvement. I haven't watered any more than the bare minimum to keep everything a little happy. I've been holding out for the rain we should be getting at this time of year. We have completed one new garden area out back (our original garden is in front between the house, which sits 300' back from our rural road, and the road) and another new area is in process. My goal with the two new areas is to be able to grow everything at once, instead of relying on constant succession planting. I get great results from constant succession planting, but the water bills in 2011 and 2012 were off-the-charts and I'd like to grow the same amount, but get it all to finish up by the end of July, more or less, so I don't have to water heavily all summer during drought. This year most of the big garden out front is cool-season crops, and all those are clustered together. When they come out, if I think it is too dry to succession crop without extensive irrigation, I'll sow their areas with a cover crop and let it be. The portion of the big garden in warm-season crops is only about 30% of the total area, so at least I'll only have to irrigate that portion of the garden if the rainfall remains below the needed levels. The entire back garden is warm-season plants, so the majority of the irrigation needed will be done back there. I'm planning to lay out the drip irrigation lines this weekend, as soon as I get the last little bit of that area planted, which likely will occur today....or tomorrow if it rains all day today. I have a corner of that garden with Johnson grass regrowth and I need to hand-dig all those clumps out before I plant southern peas and sunflowers there. The third garden area that still is under construction could have been completed this week, but we got sidetracked (willingly) by other tasks, mostly shopping for butterfly plants and putting them in. I had half-way made up my mind that I wouldn't even finish that 3rd area and plant anything there this spring if rain didn't start falling. Now that rain is falling, maybe we'll work on it next week. There's lots of storms in the weekend forecast, so maybe I should say we'll work on it if the weather allows. This 3rd area is mostly for several varieties of C. moschata winter squash and summer squash that need room to roam. I am trying two varieties of C. moschata avocado summer squash that are new to us this year, and then I have about a dozen rozelle plants to put in that area too, but they are still small and in the greenhouse. Since the new garden area out back is new and I don't have any sort of image in my head of how it has to be or should be planted, I have been having fun with it. I don't have to stop and think, "okay, tomatoes were here last year....so this year they need to be moved over there...." That has left me free to just put stuff wherever I want, which is sort of liberating. With the rain that fell in the last 24 hours, we are up to about 9.7" for this year at our house. That still is way below average, but it is better than the 8.7" we were stuck at for the last few weeks. I can remember good years here (2002, 2004, 2007 and a major portion of 2010) when I hardly had to water at all. The drought years have been tough ones. Our spring-fed pond no longer is spring fed and stays empty most of the year. Our overflow pond that catches the runoff from the big spring-fed pond, hasn't has any overflow water in it since 2009. Our spring-fed swamp in a different area no longer is swampy. Our big creek is empty most of the time, and our smaller creeks are empty all the time except during a rainstorm with heavy runoff. We used to have tons of little ponds, spring, pools of water, creeks, etc. all over our acreage, and now we don't. We're lucky though, because we aren't ranchers. Many ranchers around us have reduced their herds to almost nothing the last few years, and others have spent a lot of time and money putting in new stock tanks, hoping to be able to catch and hold enough water to get the cattle through the summer. When I look at all the challenges our ranching friends face in these recurring dry years, I stop whining about how dry my garden is. Early in the year we had decent rainfall and I thought it might last, and I was so excited. Then it pretty much stopped. We had made it out of severe drought and back to moderate drought, but only stayed there about 2 or 3 weeks and then slipped back into severe drought. When you are in severe drought before summer even arrives, you know it will be a tough summer. I have been wishing for a nice wet year like 2007, minus the flooding, but I guess this isn't going to be that year. I'm going to go find a year-to-date rainfall map and post it, and we can look at it and see how the state of Oklahoma is doing overall. I know some parts have had great rainfall but many others are still hurting. One problem with early spring rainfall is that it causes a lot of plant growth. Then, when the rain stops, there is more fuel in grasslands and woodlands to feed the wildfires that have become increasingly common here in the summer months. It used to be our big wildfire season was winter when everything was dry and dormant, but in recent years, the summer wildfire season has been almost as bad. It is so dry here in our county that green grass has been burning, which freaks out a lot of people because they think green grass doesn't burn. Here in OK when the grassfires and wildfires start up, everything can burn....and that is what I'd hope we can avoid this summer. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: Rainfall Summary Maps

Book club and authors - first we pick a place we'd like to go, then we do some research on a local author. We look for someone who lives there, uses that location as the setting for a book, and is not a bestselling author. Bestselling authors are not terribly interested in meeting a group of middle aged women from California, though I do think the group met someone fairly well known before I joined, which was about 8 years ago. This group has been established for quite a number of years. Anyway, when we find a likely prospect we write to them and ask them if we can take them out to lunch to talk about their book. Sometimes they say yes, and those are the ones whose books we buy, read, and then go to visit. We have had wonderful discussions with a number of authors, none of whom are famous. There are some accomplished writers out there producing well-crafted books that do not become well known. Anyway, it ends up being a mutually enjoyable experience, and along the way we explore a city we might otherwise never have seen. It is fun!

I've read two of Anita Shreve's books, neither of which impressed me greatly. The first was The Pilot's Wife, but I can't recall a blooming thing about it. The second, The Weight of Water, was more interesting since it was about the Smuttynose Murders where a couple of Norwegian immigrant women were killed and a third escaped by hiding from the murderer on the tiny island where the killings occurred. I like historical true crime accounts (this happened in the 1870s), but Shreve's book is a fictionalized story which automatically makes me value it less, even if it is very well written which it must not have been or I would have remembered it better. Strange Fits of Passion doesn't sound very appealing to me. Vee, the U.S. law that you referred to is part of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution which states (among other things) that there will be no "abridging the freedom of speech, [or] infringing on the freedom of the press..." It is the right of the American people to know of criminal actions and for journalists to inform them of developments in any criminal case that is considered for trial. As for jurors' names and identities, those are not published until after a verdict is found or a mistrial is declared if no verdict is rendered. Jurors have the option, then, after the conclusion, of talking to the press. Some are very willing, for whatever reasons they have. The freedom of speech and freedom of the press are much cherished rights in the U.S., but they are not without controversy: namely, for criminal trials there can be the danger of 'trying the case in the press/media' and the worry that a defendant cannot get a fair trial and a change of venue may be asked for. With today's media saturation all over the country, venue changing is not as effective as it once was. Sub judice drives American journalists and news followers nuts in countries where the practice of investigations and trials is to keep everything opaque, under wraps, and as impenetrable as possible.