Staring me in the face every morning in the garden are 500,000,000,000,000 viola tricolor aka Johnny Jump Ups. A few years ago I tossed out a packet of seeds and for the first couple years, they were just delightful. In the last couple of wet years they have self-sown themselves everywhere - the lawn, the dry stream bed, under and in every perennial out there. Who knew something so dainty could be such a monster?

Michelle

A few years ago, I stuck a small mint plant in my raised strawberry bed. I had never grown it, and it was an "impulse buy". Of course, you know what happened. It took over EVERYTHING. I pulled, I cut, and I finally gave up. I actually sprayed it with that stuff that kills everything for a year. After a year, I pulled up the frame, and tilled it all in. It is finally growing grass/weeds in that spot again, but no more mint.

Michelle, Maybe a hot, dry, droughty type year will take care of the violas. Mine pretty much go away after a period of severe drought, though sometimes new ones sprout a year or two later in the same place after the drought has ended.

Mary, I had out-of-control mint once, planted on purpose to fill a bare space and then it sort of, you know, overachieved and ran wild. I thought I'd be yanking it out forever, but the drought of 2011 killed it all and it never came back. Sometimes drought is helpful, though most of the time it is not.

Dawn

We didn't know it was stupid at the time, but in retrospect we sure wished we hadn't believed the "Organic propaganda" so many years ago about rotenone being a "safe" insecticide. When my husband developed Parkinson's and I researched causes of the disease, I learned that the use of rotenone had been implicated in its development. He was also exposed to Agent Orange so it wasn't the only factor but it has made me skeptical about using anything.

Dear Mulberryknob: I read this, and I realized I had to sit on it. So many things to unpack.

Dear Mulberryknob: I sometimes don't think about the full impact of pesticides and herbicides, but obviously they are dangerous. They are designed to kill living things. As I've gotten older, I do give more thought to the things I use. I find I use less and less of things that may make a horrible impact on the environment and/or humans. I'm not "organic" quite yet, but I'm getting there. I'm working at it. I am so sorry to hear about your husband having Parkinson's, and I'm assuming that Agent Orange was Vietnam? I had to google rotenone, because I didn't know the name, or what pesticides might contain it. It looks like it might be in quite a few of the major brands of garden dusts! Although it probably won't do much to me at this point, I have to think about my grandkids that help me in the garden. Thank you for pointing this out to me.

Dorothy,

I think of you and Glenn whenever we get on the topic of organic (or synthetic) pesticides. I always hope and pray that his health remains as good as possible considering the circumstances.

I hope that you do not beat yourself up with guilt over using rotenone. At the time, you evaluated what information then was available and made the best decision you could make at that time. That is all that anyone can do. Hindsight is always 20-20, but there's no use in looking backwards. We can only look forward and go on from here.

I'm grateful we know more now than we once did about the dangers of some organic pesticides like rotenone or sabadilla or whatever, but I also wonder we do not yet know about other organic products that we currently "believe" to be safe. I wonder what surprises lie down the road a decade or two from now. What will we learn is dangerous only after it has been used for decades? It is scary to think about.

I always urge people to look beyond the "organic" or "synthetic" label, and to understand that some organic products are just as dangerous as some synthetic ones, and there's probably some organic products that are more dangerous than some synthetic ones. We cannot fall into the trap ever again of automatically thinking that organics are safer, because they are not necessarily safer. Just because something is derived from an organic substance doesn't make it automatically safer than something derived from a synthetic substance, and I think that's what a lot of people (especially newly organic people) don't understand early in their gardening life.

I remain committed to gardening in the most natural, most sustainable and most organic way, but I am using Daconil (alternating with Neem and Serenade) this year to keep tomato diseases at bay. I don't like using it, but suspect I'd like having dead tomato plants even less. Sometimes the decisions we have to make about the garden and what to do or not do are not easy decisions.

We have a huge grasshopper problem developing and the Semaspore I spread from mid-April to mid-May only made a small and temporary dent in the population. I'm dreading the time this summer when I'll have to spray something to kill the grasshoppers, or just let them win and have the garden. I think I am more likely to let the grasshoppers win this year than to spray my garden with a synthetic pesticide like I did in 2014. That year, I vowed "never again". It was, I hope, my first and last time to spray a broad-spectrum pesticide in the entire garden. It saved the plants, yes, and the naked tomato stems grew foliage again and flowered and produced, but I didn't even like being in the garden after I sprayed because I could smell that pesticide for many weeks, so to me, it really wasn't even worth taking the risk and using it. Lesson learned.

Dawn

Dawn, you said it better than I could. You are absolutely right. Many things that we do, we've done with good intentions and the best information available to us. That applies to not only gardens, but medicine, child-rearing, and life in general.

I can't help but wonder about diatomaceous earth. Is it really inert to mammals?

Dumbest thing.....planting Jerusalem Artichokes in NE Oklahoma. I grew them in a corner of my garden in Denver and they behaved pretty well and I liked the taste. I know longer like them, and I am so, so, so, tired of pulling them and digging them up.

You need some voles to come eat them. They love them.

Ahh! One more thing. I am freaking out because the mums are blooming! What's that about!? :)

NRW: The mower! My dad (when I was in 9th grade) did the same thing. I will never forget that. He was 66 years old at the time, and reached down to clear some grass from the chute. I thought he would bleed to death before we could get the ambulance there. His hand was a mess for a long time. As for the pygmy rattler, I have a family member in Florida who (ok, she's a bit of a dingbat) saw one in her yard and thought it was cute. So she picked it up and talked to it and then put it down, and as she put it down it bit her! Yep. She nearly lost a finger over it. On the mums, I've had them bloom both spring and fall, although I don't grow them anymore.

Mary

Nancy,

Welcome to Oklahoma, where if you don't like the weather, just hang on to your hat because some years it changes every few days and never really settles in to a consistent pattern. You're incredibly fortunate because last year was one of the rainiest years ever in OK, and gardening (except for folks whose gardens were under water from flooding) was about as easy as it ever gets here. So far this year, the persistent rainy pattern has continued in many parts of the state, but not in all. These two years have not necessarily been typical Oklahoma weather, so don't expect for every year to be as mild and wet as 2015 was and as 2016 has been in much of OK so far.

We didn't really have much winter weather at all in the winter of 2015-2016, so many plants stayed green all winter since it never was cold enough to freeze them back. I had Verbena bonariensis (native to Buenos Aires and a heat lover) stay green and in bloom all winter, which certainly is not normal. The same type of thing was observed in many Oklahoma locations. In a more typical winter, we do have snow and sometimes lots of ice---the kind of ice that brings down trees and power lines, so there again, don't assume every winter will be like the one we just had. It won't.

Self-seeding annuals are one of the great joys of living in Oklahoma. I have had poppies, larkspur, zinnias, moss rose, marigolds, four o'clocks, datura, nicotiana, verbena bonariensis, 'Laura Bush' (heat-loving) petunias, cleome, cosmos, and other annual plants, including many herbs and some vegetables, self-sow and reseed for up to 15-17 years now in some cases, and it means I spend a lot less money on bedding plants than I used to. Now, I just wait to see what comes up, and then I transplant tiny transplants around to places where I want them. I try to have all the transplanting done before the end of May (and before the end of April in hot years, which this year hasn't been) because in a more typical year the heat really cranks up here in June, or in May in the worst years. You'll see an ebb and flow over the years as some plants reseed better in hotter and drier years and some reseed better in cooler and wetter years, but that keeps things interesting because you never know for sure what you are going to get.

Down here in zones 6 and 7 in OK, we get a lot of intense sunlight, especially in the summertime months, as we are closer to the equator than you were in Minnesota so many, many plants are much happier in part shade to dappled shade than they ever would be in full sun. It will vary from one year to the next since our weather's most consistent feature is its very inconsistency. In the hottest weather years, the plants will love the dappled shade and part shade even more than what you already have observed in 2015's and (so far) in 2016's mild weather. A lot of us who grow vegetables even erect shade cloth over some plants that "love" full sun in many parts of the country, like tomatoes and peppers, to shade them during the hottest part of the summer (often from sometime in July through August). I always deliberately plant some tomato and pepper plants at the west end of my garden where a pecan tree shades the area beginning about 1 pm and still get very respectable yields from those plants. Extra shade here is very helpful in the hot summers, and not needed in the mild summers like last summer.

I am much further south than you, so far south that Texas sits to my west, east and south, and nasturtiums usually do start burning up in May if they are in full sun here in zone 7b. In a hot year they can start burning up in April once we are hitting high temps in the 90s. I grow them as living ground cover type plants underneath taller vegetable plants in the garden and, in a hot and dry year, they burn up in May and are gone by June (because I yank the pitifully ugly things out in June) but in a wetter and milder year they sometimes make it all the way to July, or very rarely, they survive the whole summer if in enough shade. In a year when the weather is kind to them, I let them stay and when it is not, I take them out and let some other reseeding annual that was lurking nearby just take over their space. Since the weather can be so variable, we gardeners have to be more flexible and just go with the flow.

Rudbeckias have been very inconsistent for me, but that might be largely because our soil has a high clay content that doesn't drain well enough for them. I don't bother with them much any more because of that. They tend to like our spring weather more than our mid-summer heat, but some years they do surprisingly well if you have the right soil for them that drains well enough. My experience with mums is the same as Mary's, and it takes a lot of pruning/pinching back after they bloom in spring to keep them from getting so tall and leggy over the course of the summer that they flop over. I don't grow them here any more either because they don't like the frequent summer droughts in southern OK that are the rule more than the exception.

Gardening here is wonderful some years, and incredibly hard other years, so the most important thing to remember is that every year will not be the same. In a hot dry summer, at our house, we often are in the 100s for days on end and there's not many plants that like those high temperatures, especially when little to no rain is falling. The heavy rainfall of 2015 ended 4 years of persistent drought at our house, and we were overjoyed, but we know that the drought conditions will return, in not during the late summer of 2016, then in 2017. In our very first summer here (1999), we hit 111 degrees the first week of August and not only did all the plants in our young landscape wilt, so did we....and so did some of my husband's relatives who were visiting from Pennsylvania. One of our neighbors that I met while our house still was under construction in 1998 told me that not only would the weather be hotter here than in was in our hometown of Ft. Worth, TX, but that it also would be colder. I was so disappointed to hear that, but he was 100% correct (and he came here in the early 1900s so he had based that statement on a lifetime of experiencing the weather here). When we lived in Ft. Worth (and I was a lifelong resident of it), we thought a really, really hot day---the worst day we could imagine or ever had experienced---was one when the high temperature hit 105-108. Imagine the shock of having some summers here where the high temperature routinely hits 108-115. I'll never get over that. A human body, and most plants, just are not happy at those high temperatures, especially if high humidity accompanies them.

As for the snakes, we are in a big bend of the Red River with the river to our west, south and east and a lot of wild bottom lands and wildlife management areas along the river, and we have venomous snakes galore. We finally took out our ornamental lily pond (oh, how I miss it!) a couple of years ago after water moccasins moved to it during the drought of 2011 (when all the creeks and ponds dried up) and never really left. Because there is a walkway from our house to the detached garage that runs alongside the lily pond, it was too risky to keep the lily pond there once the venomous snakes moved in. No matter how many we shot and killed in the pond, more showed up. It is exceedingly common for us to have encounters, sometimes with multiple snakes in one day, with copperheads, timber rattlers, pygmy rattlers and diamondback rattlesnakes. By far, the most common are also the deadliest---the timber rattlers. Someone on one of the GW forums once told me they were very rare, which made me laugh. They may be rare in some places, but here they are almost as common as the ticks....and we live in a wild area on acreage so we have a lot of ticks. I never get used to encountering the snakes, especially the venomous ones, and hate them with a passion. The real wonder is that I have so far managed to avoid being bitten by one. Our next door neighbors have had two people bitten by copperheads on their property, and that likely has made me even more cautious than I otherwise would have been anyway. Long, long ago, in the hot and dry summer of 1998, I drove up from Ft. Worth one day so I'd be here while the electric co-op guys were installing our power line to a temporary pole set up for the construction workers who were going to build our house and while the water co-op guys were installing our water meter, water line and an outside faucet for the construction workers to have running water on site. On that day, since those guys all have radios that enable them to converse with the local law enforcement/fire/EMS folks, I learned that two separate people, one of whom lived on our road, were being transported to a hospital after being bitten by venomous snakes. The utility workers told me over and over how careful I would have to be each and every day in order to avoid that fate, and it was a lesson I took to heart. Still, when we moved here, I was not prepared for the huge snake population. It is never ending, and when the Red River floods (usually once every 10-20 years) but about every 2 or 3 months in 2015 and so far in 2016 too), all the snakes come up out of the bottom lands to higher ground and those of us living on higher ground near the river suddenly have a whole lot more snakes (and all other wildlife) than usual. This year the river has already flooded at least twice (maybe three times, it all is running together in my mind) and we have had some types of snakes this year (thankfully, non-venomous) that I've never seen here before. I guess it keeps life interesting, but I'd be happy if I never saw another snake in my yard, garden, greenhouse, chicken coop, garden shed or garage.

Dawn

Dawn, as I read your post, I was thinking it hasn't been as windy in the last year and a half as it "normally" is. I remember in 2014 the wind was blowing all the onions down. It has been a pain sometimes, but March most years I think is windier. And of course, the only time the wind doesn't blow is when it's 105 in the shade.

Urrrgggh, Four o'clocks. Love them, but they're everywhere! I should have planted them in a more isolated place, but I'm learning to be ruthless. I have vinca vine that has almost swallowed some iris and is moving on to the neighbors. Hoping vinegar/salt solution may help me tame it. Oh, and before I realized how thuggish it was, I didn't stop husband from filling a planter with it! One of the stupidest things I've done is not marking or losing markers for bulbs I planted. Then, digging that spot, thinking nothing was there.

Carol

Markers...plants should grow with husband and grandchild proof signs. Even if the wind blows a tray off the greenhouse shelf.

Dorothy, All I can repeat about DE is what they tell us, so we are trusting that they are telling us the truth. We know how that turned out with Rotenone (and many other things). They tell us that as long as we are using food-grade DE meant for use around food products, animals and people, that it is perfectly safe. DE is even added to some foods as an anti-caking agent, and is used in some livestock and pet feeds as a natural dewormer. So, the question is, do you trust what they say?

The other kind of DE, the one sold for use in swimming pools, is processed a different way and is not safe for use around edible crops or living beings. If inhaled, it can harm the lungs.

For a while, one company was selling a form of DE that had a synthetic pesticide added to it to increase its efficacy. I do not know if that product is still around, but it really bothered me that somebody might buy it thinking it was organic and 100% safe, and might use it not realizing it had a pesticide added to it.

Honestly, by the time I weed out all the things I've stopped using, there's not a lot left in my arsenal any more.

Dawn

Yes, the DE we bought was food grade.

While walking by the garden fence today, I was reminded of a dumb thing I did. I found trumpet flower vine growing wild in our woods and thought "How lovely that would be on the garden fence. NOT. It got humongous and heavy and WAY too long. I've been trying to get rid of it for the last few years.

Carol: I bought 4 o'clock seeds and almost planted some this year, but I got side-tracked. Maybe I lucked out there. I planted some morning glory seeds last year, and I'll be; they are coming up around the fence, and even into the yard. I was out there surveying where I could put these Ambrosia melons that I have under the lights. I guess I'll cut down the emerging morning glories and use the fence for the melons.

Mulberryknob: If I had found trumpet flowers I'm sure they'd be in my yard, too. I'm all about the "impulse".

Amy: I have one whole row of tomato plants that I completely messed up in terms of identity. Instead of plant markers in the garden (I am not good at that), I made a master list that I keep in the house. For whatever reason, I just messed up that last row and the list for that row was marked through, scratched out, etc. I can identify some of them based on leaf shape, or the look of the fruit, but not all of them.

Mary

Haha, re markers. I had a bunch of seeds planted in my little peat pots. . . the markers got waylaid and/or wet. . . after I set them all out, I noticed I have 6 beautiful tomato plants coming up in one of my flower beds. I mistook them for marigolds. They look really healthy--I could leave em, but then I'd have to take out all the flowers that are in there! I had to laugh, though. I'll get them moved one of these days, over to the tomato raised bed.

On DE. . . I'm with you, Dawn. Frankly, if I can't grow stuff naturally, I'll just not grow it. Once one starts down that path of chemicals, hard to know where to end it. I have a lawn full of weeds, except for a spot of grass here and there. Looks good as long as I keep it mowed. Of note is that no one out here in our area has a decent lawn, unless they're on property where most of the oaks have been cleared. It's very rocky land--lots of run off across the properties; most of them slant slightly downhill toward the east. Lots of moles (by the way--anyone have the magic answer to moles?), surrounded by oak forests. I'm not willing to spend lots of money on sod, or even sowing grass seed and keeping it watered, and certainly not weed killers or fertilizers. I know the weeds suit the birds better anyway. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. AND having said that, we DO spread tick/slug/chigger pellets out twice a year--which I'm not happy about, but honestly, with the prevalence of tick diseases, and the agony of chigger bites, it's the one concession I'll make.

As long as this topic is dealing with dumb things we've done. . . I have a funny story.

When we got married and moved me down here. my husband (who was my school-girl crush 50 years ago) had a dog pen, 20x20, but no longer had his huntings dogs, so he brought up the idea of maybe I'd like to have some vegetables in there) Also, few of the people I know down here grow vegetable gardens, and I don't think most folks use their oak leaves; lot of oak leaves burned every fall. Well, I was so excited seeing my new home on 2 acres, with about 100 oak trees. I told him just to throw the oak leaves in the dog pen until I got down here (I had to wrap up my work for about 3 months before I could move down). So he did. By the time we got my belongings and me moved down, he had a stack of oak leaves in there that was 5 feet high. We just let them sit on the gravel base, and by summer, they were only about 8 inches high. Just on a lark toward the middle of July, he bought some seed potatoes and put them in the leaves. They grew beautiful bushy plants. So then I poured a 20 lb sack of potting soil on top of the leaves a few feet away, and plunked in a tomato bedding plant. So it was growing in about 6 inches of potting soil and 4-5 inches of leaves. By September, we pulled up the potatoes--they all had potatoes, but little ants had devoured them--ants everywhere. But the tomato. It grew to be 10x10 feet in diameter, and by Thanksgiving, I had harvested 5 5-gallon buckets of mostly green tomatoes--about 5 gallons of red--from one tomato plant. I was excited, husband was flabbergasted.

So pumped up by our "success," we somehow started talking and before we knew it, we had bought over 300 cinder blocks (no fly ash) and a big leaf mulched (Worx). We made 3 raised beds in the pen, and one more alongside our shop. And we ground up tarpful after tarpful of leaves. Enough leaves to fill all four 4x20' raised beds. And then we topped them off with about 6 inches of potting soil. I knew the leaves wouldn't be broken down by spring, but my attitude was to go forward with what we had. Not that much of an investment in seeds. No labor, with raised beds. GDW even built a drip irrigation system of PVC for the pen beds. Could not find any source online who thought growing veggies in nothing but mulched oak leaves and a bit of potting soil was a good idea. :) And frankly, I was going to be very surprised if anything at all worked out.

Now was this one of my dumber moves in gardening? Perhaps. But everything is growing--the potatoes, the onions, the tomatoes, the zucchini and squash. . . I'm attaching pictures we took today of GDW's first potatoes (he was so excited!) and our pen garden. Do many people post photos here? Is there a reason not to? And we'll see if my oak leaf mulch garden is the subject of many jokes in years to come!

Perhaps it is because we spend most of our years in drought, but I love trumpet creeper vine and have it everywhere. A huge one covers our tornado shelter. I keep it pruned back from the doorway, so all you see of our tornado shelter is the doorway in the midst of this giant mound of green. Even in the worst drought it doesn't show damage and just keeps on blooming. I also have two on an arbor down near the driveway gate---a 'Madame Galens' and the yellow-flowered 'Flava'. I also had American Crossvine down there but it died in 2011, so it clearly is not as drought tolerant (when planted in horrible clay and not watered) as the trumpet creeper. I have been working hard to remove trumpet creeper that we planted near the porch. It used to look nice climbing the porch posts, but as the trees and shrubs grew, it started looking less good because it wasn't getting full sun. We have cut it back and cut it back and cut it back and have a lot less there than we used to, but I think it will take a brush killer painted onto the stump to maybe get rid of it. More likely, we'll have it forever. We haven't used a brush killer in about 15 years so I'm probably unlikely to go buy a bottle of it and use it now.

I love four o'clocks and we have a forest of them underneath the pecan tree that sits west of the fenced garden outside the garden gate. They've actually been a bit slow to get started this year, but are beginning to bloom now. I actually give them a lot of the credit for the fact that I grow 100 or so tomatoes each spring/summer with virtually zero hornworm damage. Four o'clocks supposedly repel hornworms. I don't know if that is true, but even though we have the white-lined sphinx and other sphinx moths around all the time, we don't have tobacco or tomato hornworms on our tomato plants or pepper plants. Because our four o'clocks grow in morning sun/afternoon shade, they get leggy and tall sometimes, as they stretch for more sun. It all works out. Once they are leggy and tall, they give the chickens a place to hide when a hawk is hunting for something to prey upon. I noticed last night that the first four o'clock had begun blooming and was happy to see that. Their fragrance is so beautiful and it perfumes the entire yard and garden at night. They do come up everywhere, but I don't mind that too much. If they pop up in the garden where I don't want them, I yank them out. If they pop up outside the garden, I leave them wherever they come up. It is almost impossible to remove an established one without tons of digging because they form large tubers the size of a human head, so I have to be careful to yank out unwanted seedlings as soon as I notice them.

Mary, I love morning glories but they reseed so vigorously along the garden fence that I don't love them as much as I once did. I planted them maybe 15-17 years ago and have had them pretty much ever since. I just yank out most of the seedlings that sprout and let only a select few stay. Otherwise they cover the fence on the southern side of the garden to the extent that the plants growing near the fence don't get enough sunshine. One year I did plant Heavenly Blue along the eastern garden fence and they were so gorgeous in bloom in the summer months that they stopped traffic. Again, though, if I leave them there, then they shade the veggies, herbs and flowers growing inside the fence a little too much. I'm more inclined to leave the morning glories in dry, hot years when the plants can use more shade than in wetter and milder years like last year and this year.

Nancy, There's not much I'll use in my garden, but both last year and this year I have used Daconil (alternating it with copper and Serenade) to keep the tomato plants alive. Otherwise, Early Blight takes them all. I have fought Early Blight organically since moving here in 1999, and it just is at the point where using only organic products isn't controlling it in a wet year. Last year was our wettest year ever with a bit under 80" of rainfall and everything was flooded, wet and pitiful, and fungal diseases ran wild. Our normal rainfall would be about 38", and in many drought years we only get 18-25", which isn't enough when accompanied for months by temperatures in the 90-110 or 115 degree range. So, the almost-80" inches of rain that fell last year (a little over 24" in May alone, with 12" in one day) brought us a whole new set of challenges quite different from those we have in a year when we get 20" of rain.

I can several hundred jars of tomato products a year and also freeze and dehydrate a bunch of tomatoes, so there's just no way I'm surrending the crop to Early Blight. That doesn't mean it was easy to decide to use a synthetic fungicide, but I made the decision to do what I had to do to save the plants. And, since I didn't spray it until the plants had been in the ground a couple of months, it won't save them from the Early Blight anyway. It will just slow down its progression, hopefully long enough to get me through the June/July canning season. Once I've canned, frozen and dehydrated all the tomatoes we want and need, I can yank out any plants that are too sickly and just keep a handful producing tomatoes for fresh eating. I picked 19 tomatoes yesterday, so the first batch of salsa is just around the corner, but I want to finish up the making of plum jelly, cucumber pickles and sauerkraut (or at least get the last few batches of sauerkraut started) before I start getting into canning tomatoes daily. That means I need to finish up everything else but the tomatoes as soon as possible. I have a busy food preservation week planned for this week, but it is supposed to rain every day, so it will be a good week to be in the kitchen since it is likely to not be a good week to be out in the garden in the pouring rain.

I also have a new motorized tomato press (Tim apparently got scared when I said I was going to cut back on how much salsa I can, so he tried to find a way to streamline the process, lol) and a new food processor (mine was very old and getting cranky) so maybe I can shave some of the hours off the canning marathons that way.

Moles? Maybe mole traps. Our cats killed all our moles and gophers, but we have about 10 acres of woodland filled with pine voles that venture up to the garden and eat root crops and other things, and the cats cannot seem to control them. Instead, we are slowly redoing raised beds one by one, adding hardware cloth to the bottom of the bed to exclude the voles. I hope to get another couple of beds lined with hardware cloth this winter so I'll be able to rotate the potatoes as they've had to grow in the same two hardware cloth-lined beds (a third was added just this spring) since 2012.

We live in a fairly rural area where everyone, at least at our end of our road (the other end has a small housing development with homes on smaller lots, though the lots are still much bigger than regular city lots) is on acreage and most people have cattle, goats, horses, chickens, guineas or whatever, or they have all of those. That means that most folks' time here goes more into caring for their animals than their lawns, and I think that's okay. Lawns are overrated. It seems crazy to me that people feed and water a lawn so it will grow, and then they have to cut it, and then then that cycle goes on forever. I'd rather have beds filled with flowers, herbs, fruits and veggies than spend time tending a lawn. We do not have a lot of rocks on our property, but some of our neighbors on higher ground do. We do have standard, rock-hard red Oklahoma clay that we've slowly but surely turned into a wonderful, brown, humusy loamy soil by the addition of copious amounts of amendments every year. The garden soil is so nice now that the terrible memories of the first couple of years of dealing with red clay are beginning to fade. In the beginning, we broke the handle of every shovel, mattock, digging fork, etc. that we had while trying to dig rock-hard clay, and the rototiller just bounced off the ground. Now, finally, the soil is much different, but it sure took us a long time to get it improved enough to consider it great soil.

I use oak leaves for everything, from the compost pile, to mulch in the pathways and in the garden beds, and even dump tons of them in the fenced chicken runs in the winter to keep the mud level down. Oak leaves are my favorite thing on earth in terms of building great soil. I do have to be careful because so many of our venomous snakes here blend in with the leaves just perfectly, so I tend to add the oak leaves to the garden and compost pile in the winter when the snakes are not active. Then, every time Tim mows during the growing season, he catches the grass clippings in a large grass catcher that he pulls behind the riding mower, and I dump the grass clippings into the pathways as mulch and also use them to add new layers of mulch to the garden's growing beds. Since he mows a large area, I get tons of grass clippings almost every week (except when it is too wet to mow). Between the grass clippings and chopped/shredded leaves, we have beautiful garden soil now, and I mulch heavily enough that I don't have to do much weeding in the summer months. Nothing I've added to my garden, other than homemade compost from our compost pile, has improved the soil as much as the oak leaves do. People who fail to appreciate them are missing out on a great soil amendment. I do realize that in some cooler, milder climates the leaves might not work as well as they do here in Hotlahoma.

Because we have an abundance of leaves in autumn, some years we overseed the lawn with annual rye grass for the sole purpose of having something green to mix with the oak leaves in the compost piles in the winter months. The two of them in combination break down over the winter and give us tons of compost to add to the beds in the late winter and early spring before we plant. It does mean we have to mow all winter, but since we tend to use the rye grass to give our home some winter fire protection in drought years, we don't mind mowing it. It isn't that green grass won't burn, because it will burn and it makes the fire hotter by releasing oxygen as it burns, but it won't catch fire and burn as easily as dry and dormant grass will, so we don't have to worry so much about our house catching fire and burning on bad wildfire days while we are away from home fighting fires.

Some folks post a lot of photos here, but I almost never do. Between maintaining a large garden and property, taking care of a lot of animals, and doing tons of food preservation, taking and posting photos doesn't fit into my schedule. On rare occasions when I have had a huge tomato harvest I'll take a photo of the tomatoes and my son will post it for me, but for me that's about the only photo anyone ever will see. Every winter I always tell myself "I will take and post photos this year" but then the garden year begins and I get insanely busy and it never happens. I always enjoy seeing other folks' photos though.

Dawn

I allowed my husband to help me garden. Never again. He can handle my soil all he wants during the winter. After spring and my gardens are planted, he best stay away.

This year alone, he killed half my plants. He decided that he and my year and a half old grandson needed to use weed killer. I have no idea on what since all the work had been done already. I had tons of milk jugs full of ws'd plants (those that came up anyway) and with one flick of the wrist, they were gone.

As if that wasn't bad enough, 3 weeks later he decides to fertilize every single one of my gardens. I cannot tell you how badly I have wanted Queen Red Lime Zinnias in my garden. I took the plunge and did it this year. I have an entire section in my front flower bed planted along with nigella, strawflower, snaps, and a couple of other things. Dead. Graveyard dead. I told him when we got fertilizer, honey, do not use this on my flowers. My flowers cannot take what my vegetables can. Please, did he listen? No.

It all cost him. I promptly walked inside each time he killed something and ordered new seed. He hates spending money worse than he enjoys killing my plants, lol. He also had to buy me new plants, which included roses that I wanted. Hmmm, maybe I ought to rethink letting him in my garden?

Dawn--I have been delighted by your posts! Busy gardening yesterday and today.

Karen, I know just how you feel. My husband has been banned from the garden for years, he's not even allowed close!!!!

Karen,

Welcome to the No Husbands Allowed In/Near The Garden Club. I love my husband. We've been married for 33 years and I think I'll keep him, but he isn't allowed to use herbicide anywhere on our property and he isn't allowed inside the fenced garden (where I grow all the flowers, herbs and veggies together to keep them safe from deer and rabbits) with anything that is considered a power tool.

He once was trying to cut out a tree sapling that sprouted in the middle of one of my Pink Lemonade Honeysuckle plants. I had one honeysuckle on each side of an arbor with a gate that serves as the entrance to the fenced garden and they covered the arbor and looked spectacular. As I hovered anxiously nearby and told him to be sure to only cut the aggressive tree sapling (a mulberry that had been hiding inside that vine for several years and was quite large), he cut off the entire honeysuckle right at the ground. To say I was angry would be putting it far too mildly. I wanted to kill him but I didn't. It's been about ten years since that happened and that honeysuckle never really recovered and remains roughly 1/4 the size of the other honeysuckle that covers the other side of the entrance arbor.

My DH also doesn't do the fertilizing of anything. I do it all, which prevents mishaps from occurring inside my garden, or even outside the garden but close enough to hurt it. We have an agreement that he doesn't touch the garden and, in return, I don't have to kill him. He will come into the garden to look at things or to pick a tomato or pull an onion or whatever, but he is very careful not to harm anything therein. This is why we still are happily married. See there, stockergal and I have figured out how to have a happy marriage when a garden is involved---just ban the husband from the garden!

I'm sorry to hear about all your husband-related garden troubles and understand just how you feel. Hitting your husband in the wallet with plant replacement costs probably will make him be more careful about "helping" you in the future. I'm not sure how he killed flowers with fertilizer. Did he overfertilize or did he use a fertilizer that was a weed-and-feed product? I know that none of us gardeners ever would feed a plant we wanted to keep alive with a weed-and-feed fertilizer, but I know plenty of clueless husbands who have done exactly that.

Nancy, Thanks!

Stockergal, See there, great minds think alike! No child, pest, disease or animal ever has hurt my garden the way my husband has even though it has been unintentional on his part, so keeping him mostly out of the garden is what works best for me too, but I drag him in there to show him things. And, of course, he graciously carries load after load of grass clippings in there so I can spread them as mulch.

Dawn

I had a soapwort plant that I had been growing for 2 years. DH got his cement mixer and was going around dumping pots in it to mix fresh potting soil. It was a new toy and he wanted to dump all into it. He cut the leaves off the soapwort so he could dump the dirt out. After that I had to mark all the pots I wanted to keep. He isn't allowed to weed anything but crabgrass and bermuda. My salsify drove him crazy because it looked like grass as a seedling. And of course he can destroy any thing with a weed wacker. He doesn't understand my intensive planting. Apparently he told someone at work about my jungle. The guy said it was just companion planting. So now he thinks its ok (though it grinds against his OCD), because someone besides me told him it was okay. Husbands.

Hey Amy: I went to Atwood's today and bought myself a pretty pink bucket, and a pink camo spinseat ;). I'm stylin' now.

Mary

I love mine. DH bought me a cart with tractor seat on it last year at Sam's, but mine has no pulling handle and no way to steer it. If you're going to be in the same place for awhile it's ok, but it weighs a ton to try and drag around and has to be manhandled into position. My bucket has my tools inside, is light enough to carry and turns easily in all directions. The seat makes it an extra 2" taller which is just about right for me. I have artificial hips and technically I'm not supposed to sit lower than a 90* angle at the hip. Most garden seats are lower than that and a bucket is maybe a little low, too. Just make sure you don't sit on the bucket handle ;)

Amy, I fell off my bucket yesterday! Ha-ha!!! I must've looked like a giant fat worm trying to maneuver and roll to my front side so I could use the bucket to get myself back up. I was in the tomato jungle so nobody saw me, thank goodness!

Y'all crack me up. I don't like to sit down in the garden at all because if I do sit down, I get lazy and don't want to get back up. Now the garden is too wet for me to throw down my kneeling pad and kneel in the pathways and pull weeds, so I won't be pulling weeds this week, just harvesting, or possibly spraying the tomato plants with copper and the corn silks with Bt. It is that time of the year anyway---the time of the year when I start seeing so many snakes that I stop weeding the weedy edges of the garden where weeds creep in from the areas outside the garden fence. Once that happens, I cannot just stick my hand into the midst of all that and pull weeds. It is unfortunate, because then the areas like that just get wilder and woolier and even less likely to get weeded and the whole cycle just perpetuates itself.

Mary, I'm grateful for tall plants that hide some of my garden antics too. If you've ever been accidentally standing in the middle of a fire ant mound in the garden and suddenly discover this because ants have swarmed up your legs inside your clothing and then begun biting you, you want for tall plants to hide you as you start stripping off clothing trying to escape the biting ant swarm. Jungles do serve their purpose.

Dawn

My first year to teach I was invited to watch students send off hot air balloons they made, and I eagerly went even though I was wearing a skirt that day. All went well, until I apparently didn't notice a bed of red ants that began crawling up my legs. Ran behind a parked vehicle and was furiously brushing them off me. Even that was okay, until my principal came to check on me...he stopped, hurriedly turned around, and walked off.

Oh, Mary I'm sorry! You know I know your pain! I can't kneel (artificial knee). I really have problems if I fall to the ground (artificial hips), when I fell I had a sturdy T post to help me up. I was chastized by my daughter for not carrying my phone. I guess I need one of those buttons you wear around your neck with a panic button.

Amy, I understand. I was in a bad wreck many years ago, and was ejected thru the windshield into a concrete bridge embankment. I have 2 titanium rods in my back, multiple plates and screws in my hips, pelvis, and ankles. If I manage to get on me knees, I'm not getting back up without help or a walker, or anything I can use to pull myself up. I sometimes will sit and scoot, and then when I'm done, I have to scoot or crawl back to something sturdy so I can lift myself. The wreck left me partially paralyzed from the waist down...only about half the muscles work at all.

I am grateful to even work in the garden!! :) It brings me such happiness to be able to do things that nobody thought I'd ever be able to do again. But ....I do look pretty silly sometimes! lol

Sandplum, I hate red ant bites but love red harvester ants, so it seems like I get bitten by one or two randomly over the course of the summer, but I've never been bitten by a huge swarm of them. There's a huge bed of them in the middle of the gravel driveway right beside my garden and I love to watch them carrying the carcasses of dead bugs out of the garden all day long. Without them, the garden and I might be knee-deep in dead grasshopper and cricket (and other) bodies all summer long. It is a shame that such a useful insect has to bite us and lessen our appreciation of them the way that they do.

Amy, Oh, it does sound like you need one of those. I think they are great for people of all ages who have mobility issues. A long time ago---I'm guessing it was 10 or 12 years ago---a neighbor of ours fell by her mailbox around mid-day and broke her pelvis. She wasn't all that old---maybe in her 70s and really fit and active, but you know, once she hit the ground she could not move at all because of her injuries. If she'd had one of those Med-Alert devices she wouldn't have had to lie there beside the mailbox for hours until someone came driving by and saw her. And, of course, she didn't have one of those because she was in good health until that momemt and didn't need one. Because her house was on a private road with only 1 other resident, she was out there a long time before she was found. Luckily it was not an excrutiatingly hot or cold day, but she was in pain a long time and it easily could have been avoided. In our county, the Medic Alert monitoring folks will call whatever phone number you've given them of a family member or neighbor who can come help you get back up, and if that person cannot be reached, they'll call the 9-1-1 Dispatch Center and they'll send a law enforcement officer, medics or firefighters to assist you, depending on who's available the most quickly and also depending on you just need assistance getting up or if you need medical assistance as well. I cannot imagine anything worse than falling and being down on the ground, unable to get up and not having a cell phone of Medic Alert thing handy.

I read something the other day that now some of the fitness trackers people wear are coming with that sort of medical alert feature, which I think is cool. Anyone can fall and get hurt...or someone out walking can get hit by a vehicle that speeds away without stopping to render aid or whatever and it helps to have one more way to call for help.

Mary, I don't know how your battered body was able to heal well enough so that you can garden again, and I wouldn't worry about how silly it might look to someone else! Who cares what they see or think they see? Silliness is in the eye of the beholder. It takes courage to fight to regain normalcy after horrific injuries and I admire you for doing that, even if your new normal doesn't exactly resemble your previous normal.

One thing I have noticed since moving here nearly two decades ago is that the people around me who live the longest are the ones who fight hard to stay active. You know, they keep on farming and ranching long after their similarly-aged neighbors have retired. If they cannot walk as well as before, they use their pickup truck and tractors more, and they buy little utility vehicles that they can use to move around the property. Some of them, once they get really advanced in years, may hire someone to do the ranch and farm chores, but they keep their own little garden going near the house just so they can still partipate in the joy of growing. Maybe they switch to containers set up on picnic tables or ledges or whatever so they no longer have to bend over (often because metal rods in their back or new hips or new knees do not allow that sort of bending or stooping) or they grow plants in galvanized metal stock tanks with holes drilled in the bottom for drainage. They do whatever they have to do in order to keep gardening as long as they can. Some of them keep ranching longer than they should and often don't give up active ranching until they get thrown off a horse or fall off a tractor and their adult children and sometimes grandchildren "make" them stop riding their horses or stop driving the tractor.

A gentleman who lived and gardened near our fire station just changed his garden to suit him as he aged. He planted his rows further apart so he could take a folding chair out into the garden and sit in that chair and hoe his weeds. It made him happy even though it wasn't the same way he always had gardened, and he did it until he went into a nursing home. Once he went to the home, he didn't last long but he got to stay in his own home and have his garden up until a very advanced age. We have neighbors who have continued farming and ranching well into their 90s, often over the objections of younger family members, and they inspire me because they have to overcome a lot of physical issues every day just to get out there and do things that are much easier for folks without the challenges that come with age or with injury or with failing health. Those folks are the 'lifers' who seem to live forever, while a lot of the ones who retire early and sit in the rocking chair on their front porch don't live nearly as long---and I think there is a lesson in all that. We even had a neighbor who lived into his mid-90s and went out every morning in his motorized wheelchair and collected the eggs from his henhouse. He didn't care that he couldn't walk out there like he had done for decades. He just adapted and kept on keeping on. I want to be just like him and keep on going forever, or for as long as possible anyway.

When we finally get around to building raised beds in the back garden, I think we will build the beds much taller than the ones in the front garden, and we will make the pathways 4' wide. That will make gardening back there much easier as we age. It will be a whole lot easier to build the back garden for ease of use to begin with, than to have to come back later and modify it the way we will have to modify the front garden.

I already find the bending and stooping, the constant getting up and down, etc. is harder on my joints than it was 10 or 15 years ago, so it seems like we should work now on making the garden more accessible instead of waiting years and years longer and wishing we'd done that sort of thing earlier.

I always tell Tim that when we reach a certain point I could be happy with a deck garden of 10 or 20 Earthboxes, but I don't know if I really could be. It is more that I think I could tolerate that more than just simply giving up having a garden altogether.

Dawn

Mary, I don't know how you managed the bucket to begin with. I can't imagine what you went through after your accident. I think it is Larry who has a hand rail built into a trellis in his garden. I want to do something like that. My son is going to take down a chain link fence and I'm thinking about those top rails and how many ways I could use them in the garden. There is an Accessible Garden Forum here, but it is not nearly as active as this forum. We will have to share ways to make gardening easier for those of us who have challenges. I could not do it without my husband for the heavy work. I keep hoping when all the beds are built it will be easier. But then I keep making him build more.

I giggled at 20 earth boxes Dawn. Going to be a big deck, LOL.

I've been wanting a fitness tracker, but I don't want monthly monitoring charges. My dad, who turns 90 in Jan has had the fire dept come out twice to help him up. I'm so glad they do that. He won't carry a cell phone either. They don't own one. I had one for them for years on my plan and they couldn't figure out how to use it, so they didn't carry it. Did you know any cell phone, even those with discontinued service can dial 911 and be connected? I told them to keep that old phone charged just for that possibility.

I don't know what I would do,with out my big pots out in the garden, it's the only way I can get up!!! I,crawl around pulling weed and spreading mulch but when it is time to get up, it's crawl over to the tallest pot and get up.

i keep my cell phone on me at all times. Hate it but need it. I have taken a few bad falls and wondered if I was going to get up, that scared me enough to keep my phone on me. I guess it's just a fact of life as we age. As long as I am able to get out of bed and do my chores, garden and stay up with my 5yr old grandson I thank god!!! We may all need to cut back at some time but as long as we are doing what we enjoy then all is well.

Gardening gives many of us such joy! I enjoy this forum for that very reason! I don't leave my house very much, and when I do, it is to get a few groceries, or something that I need for my yard/garden. I have a good (ex) son-in-law, who came by this evening to have supper, and he hauled some heavy items to the garden for me. I have a neighbor who, if he sees me struggling with something, will come and help me. I'm really lucky. I try to do as much for myself as I can. I have a riding mower, and self-propelled push mower, and battery operated weedeaters and blowers (which are very light). It may take me all day, or sometimes a couple of days, because I do a little and rest a little, until I get it done! I'm still working on those weeds, but it's looking pretty.

Dawn and Amy: The idea of a lawn chair in the garden is actually a pretty good idea. My neighbor brought something home from work one day, hoping it would help me in the garden. It was too heavy to maneuver, but it was a nice gesture. I can't even truly describe it...sort of a cross between a heavy duty wagon, and it had a seat on it...I don't know what you would call it but they had used it in his plant and it wound up in storage. Very heavy. I thought about a shower chair. lol Anything that works!

My youngest grandson has always helped me in the garden. He stays with me quite a bit, and the garden is where we enjoy ourselves. I told him today, as he was sitting on that spinner seat examining HIS "San Marzanos", that he would always remember working with me in the garden...long after I'm gone. After supper, he took his dad through every inch, and his dad got some great pictures of him being a little gardener. These are the times and the memories that no amount of money can ever buy:)

Mary

Amy, Of course it will be a big deck when I get old enough that a deck garden is the best option. We'll need to build the big deck with space and the structure to hold 20 Earth boxes and with space to manuever a wheelchair if we get to the point that we need one. You know me, bigger is better when it comes to gardening. If I am going to grow things, I still will have to grow a lot. Well, maybe not if I give up canning, and I'll give up canning probably long before I give up gardening.

Regarding cell phones: I did know that. Do you know how many stupid 911 calls our dispatchers get because parents give children old, de-activated cell phones to play with and the kids continually dial 9-1-1, whether accidentally or intentionally. Sometimes it is quite a problem because they have to treat each call as if it is real, so often they have to send police to the address linked to a deactivated phone just to check and make sure it is kids playing, and not someone who really needs help.

stockergal, That's a great point. The older we get (and we're not all that old yet, right?) the more help we need getting up off the ground. At least since we all are avid gardeners, our family and friends know the first place to come looking for us if we turn up missing.....we'll be lying on the ground in the yard or garden.

I try to keep my cell phone on me at all times, but every now and then I forget it. I even bought a garden apron with a lot of pockets because I thought that if I consistently wore it and consistently kept my phone in one of its pockets, then I'd be less likely to forget and leave the phone inside the house, or less likely to lose the phone in the garden. So far it is kinda working. I also keep a fire radio with me, again if I can remember it. I could use it to call for help. I don't necessarily keep it on my person, but it usually is pretty close by. Recently I read a story about a woman my age (57) who fell on her concrete garage floor and broke something, either her hip or pelvis. Her cell phone was indoors. No one was home. She called and called and called for her dog, and he came to her. She grabbed on to him and, little by little over quite a long while, he pulled her indoors so she could get to her phone to call for help. What a great dog! After she was out of the hospital and home again, I hope she gave him a big steak for dinner.

Mary, Gardening sure does enrich our lives and I cannot imagine my life without it or without all the wonderful folks here on this forum.

My dad, a lifelong gardener, had Alzheimer's for the last 12-15 years of his life. It really progressed very, very slowly for the longest period of time and he could sort of hide it from people who didn't know him well. He was able to keep gardening for a very long time despite a failing memory. In the year when he had tomato plants that I had raised for him and had taken to him, and which he forgot to plant, (I had offered to plant them before I left that day but he said "no, I'll do it"), that's when I knew he didn't have much time left here. About 2 years later he was gone. Once his ability to get up, get out and do things was gone, he went downhill so much more quickly. I truly think gardening kept him going and going and going for as long as he was able to do it.

I agree with you about your grandson's garden memories. I remember doing things with my grandpa in his garden and on his ranch when I was probably 4 or 5 years old, and I remember it in detail....being in the pickup with him, or on his tractor, or out with his sheep, or on the tire swing, or in the stock tank (with leaches on my legs!). I remember his popcorn, and his potato storage in a lean-to behind his little garage after they sold the ranch and moved to town. I remember his big garden when I was a pre-teen and he lived in a small country town, and his lovely city garden when I was a teenager and he had moved to a larger town to live close to his two sons. All those memories still influence me as a gardener. I always want to grow the same fruits and veggies he grew. On my dad's side, he lost his parents young so I never knew them, but he had a whole bunch of gardening brothers, brothers-in-law, sisters and sisters-in-law so I grew up with tons of gardeners around me and it was a terrific way to grow up. Mostly the men tended the gardens (though the women sometimes did) and mostly the women did the canning (though my dad and at least one of his brothers liked to can their produce). When you grow up like that, your memories of your childhood are all wrapped up in the cycle of the garden life, from planting to tending the plants to harvesting to processing and sharing the harvest. Even in my childhood neighborhood, everyone had either a veggie garden or fruit trees or both, and everyone had flowers. A few folks had herbs, or extensive collections of tropical plants in pots. Some folks had chickens, and one had rabbits and one had sheep and yet another one had goats. (Probably all grandfathered in because they existed before our suburb wrote anti-livestock restrictions in the 1970s or so.) At the time I didn't think there was anything special about the way we grew up, but now I know how lucky we were to be surrounded by people who grew things, who kept animals and who knew how to preserve and share their bounty. It was special to grow up that way and I never for one minute take it for granted. Your grandson is making memories with you that he'll still be remembering and will be talking about when he is a grandfather himself.

I agree that what you two share in the garden is priceless and its value cannot even be estimated in dollars and cents.

Dawn

Dawn, thank you. You have such a gift for writing. As I read, I was "picturing" everything:) It brought back a lot of memories for me.

Well, it looks like a beautiful day outside. I am gonna sit on the patio, drink my coffee, and listen to the birds for a bit.

You're welcome. I hope you enjoyed sitting on the patio, drinking your coffee and listening to the birds. I noticed yesterday that the hummingbirds are back after sort of disappearing for a couple of cool, cloudy, rainy weeks. This morning there were blue jays and cardinals, mourning doves and even brown-head cowbirds, all lurking around the garden. I hope they are eating grasshoppers.

I watched a robin pull a worm out of the beans and wondered if it was the one pulling up seeds. Poor germination there and something ate the tops off some that did come up. I saw a bug today and thought "I've seen your picture recently, but I don't remember if you're good or bad." I have conversations in my garden, too. I grew up a city girl, and mom is amazed that I'm in to gardening. Of course, since I didn't play with baby dolls she thought I wouldn't have kids and I had 4. I didn't know my grandfathers well. They died the same year when I was in 3rd grade. Dad's father was a farmer, though. I was impressed with grandma's garden. Mostly her hollyhocks which I made into dolls. (Grown up dolls in ball gowns like princesses).

Hollyhock dolls are so adorable.

For anyone who thinks Amy and I have lost our minds, here's how to make holluhock dolls:

How To Make A Hollyhock Doll

Or, you can Google Hollyhock Doll images and see tons of them.

Now, Amy, that surely is a walk down memory lane!

Let chives self seed in ground cover because I thought a few would look pretty. I bet I dug out 5 bales of chives before it was over with.

It happens. I did the same thing. Then, with all those chive plants everywhere, I wanted to use them. I dug them up and replanted them all along the lumber that lined a big raised bed that was abour 40' long and 4' wide. From the road about 100' away, when they were in bloom, they looked like long rows of lavender. From inside the garden, though, they were huge garden thugs that took over that raised bed and encroached on the tomatoes growing there. The chives got taller and taller and spread out far and wide. It took me years to dig them out and get rid of all of them because more chive plants kept coming back after I was sure I had gotten them all. My garden then went mostly chive-free for a few years and I never let the few I had bloom. This year I started a whole lot of garlic chives and onion chives from seed and they already are too big and too crowded. It seems like I don't learn from my mistakes.

Note for dumb things dogs do-- Our dog. I forgot to tell HIM to watch out for snakes! He got bitten by either a copperhead or a pygmy rattler (since those are the only two venomous snakes I've seen in our yard). Stayed up with him all night while he was in extreme distress panting and drooling. We weren't even sure it was a snake until the next afternoon when we saw the two little puncture marks on his muzzles near his nose. He is a big dog--shepherd/husky mix and 75 lbs. Young, 1 1/2 yrs and tough. We were going to take him to the vet first thing the next morning (I went to bed and thought my husband would take him unless he was dramatically better--well he was dramatically better--had quit panting and drooling.) He didn't eat or drink the second day and slept all day; the next night he woke up and came to life, drank, ate, and trotted around happily. Third day he seemed fine. It's been four days out now and he is acting totally normal. The skin doesn't appear to be necrotizing, so we think all is good. Not sure if the snake didn't have much venom or whether he's just tough. I suspect the latter! Lucky escape for him and us that time, I think.

I'm so glad your dog is doing well and seems to be well on the road to recovery.

We've had several cats bitten by copperheads and rattlers, and most of the dogs survive (even without a trip to the vet) and most of the cats do not. When we have a dog bitten on the snout, we immediately give it Benadryl (we keep the children's liquid type on hand so we can squirt it in their mouth with a medicine dropper) to prevent swelling. We do the same thing with a bite on the paw, where swelling could cut off blood circulation. Our big Rottweiler/Retrieve mix, Duke, was bit on his snout just above his nose by a timber rattler one day while Tim was at a fire on the interstate. He weighed 115 lbs. I managed to get him up close to the house, which was about 300' from where he got bit, but couldn't get him up the steps as he was getting glassy-eyes and woozy. I called Tim and he said he'd rush home as quickly as possible after they got the fire out and he told me to try to hold Duke upright because he felt like if Duke fell over, we'd lose him. I agreed because it seemed Duke was going into shock and fading fast. So, I sat there with that big dog leaning on me until Tim got home and gave Duke the Benadryl. Within a few minutes, you could see an improvement in his condition. He didn't eat for several days, but we got water into his mouth (with a turkey baster) and he slowly recovered. I had been so afraid that the swelling near his nose would interfere in his ability to breathe.

We still have one living cat who survived a snake bite from a copperhead more than 10 years ago. It probably was closer to 12 or 13 years ago. His name is Shady (he had a brother named Slim and their mother was named Emimem after her father Emmit, lol) and after he was bitten, a circular copper-colored rash formed around the area on his body where he was bitten. That rash took months to fade, and hair never has covered over the scarred area. We never thought at that time that Shady would outlive his brother and his mother because his health was just pitiful for the longest time. He couldn't or wouldn't eat, and when he ate he didn't gain wait. Ultimately he made a full recovery but I bet it was a year or longer before it seemed like he was finally eating normally and gaining wait again. He's about 15 years old now and has no problem gaining weight at all.

After Duke's rattlesnake bite, he was suspicious of anything snakelike for the rest of his life, and he was very cautious, so he did learn from it. He hated water hoses because he thought they might be snakes. He hated to walk past the place where he was bitten and would make a wide circle around that spot instead of walking right past it. I loved Duke and he was a great, faithful companion for many years. , We lost him to heart failure earlier this year, but he lived at least another 8 years after the snakebite and I was grateful for that.

We had one cat, Spots, survive being bitten twice by a copperhead, about two or three years apart. The vet said a second bite likely would kill her but it didn't. A couple of years ago our mama cat, Ranger, got bitten in the head/face area and was nearly paralyzed. There is no reason she's still alive except that we had a cat specialist vet who simply would not give up on her. He kept her at the vet hospital for about a week and did everything under the sun to save her. He worked a miracle with her and saved her life and restored her health. I am so grateful for him, and it was worth every nickle because she's a very good cat who means a lot to us. He also did not charge us an arm and a leg for all the careful, time-consuming care that he gave her. Even after he finally let her come home, her face was paralyzed for weeks and she couldn't close her eyes. He told us he thought that the paralysis would fade, but he wasn't positive it would as he'd never seen a case exactly like hers. Eventually it did fade, though. For a while, she looked kind of like one of those Hollywood people who'd had a facelift that arched their eyebrows way too high to be real, you know, , but eventually the paralysis faded and her face returned to normal and she no longer looked like an aging Hollywood star with a face that is, um, abnormally tight. She'd go to into a closet so she could sleep, eyes open, in relative darkness, and I wouldn't let her go outside since she couldn't blink her eyes. I think she stayed paralyzed for at least a month, and didn't go outside until late fall after the snakes were hibernating for the winter.

We try to teach our animals not to stick their heads into tall weeds or something where they cannot see if there's a snake there, but you know how animals are...the minute you turn your back, they are off in the tall grass in the fields where they shouldn't be.

One year I walked outside and there was a timber rattler coiled up underneath the big pecan tree, with five cats sitting around it like Cub Scouts at a campfire. It was a horrible sight and I thought all 5 of them were about to get bitten. I got as close to them as I could and started throwing whatever I could find....a chicken feeder, a bucket, sticks, etc. at the cats to drive them away from the snake. I was calling them by name but they were mesmerized by the snake and were totally ignoring me. Then a neighbor came over and shot the snake. By then, I had the 5 cats safely indoors. How we got through that incident without a single cat being snake-bitten amazes me, and I felt bad for the snake....it had restrained itself and not harmed anyone but had to be shot anyway so it couldn't come back another day and maybe bite someone that time. It wasn't off in some obscure spot where you'd never encounter it again. It was right in the yard where we all spend a lot of time.

Having venomous snakes around is just a nightmare. If I could change anything about living here in such a natural, wild location, it would be getting rid of the venomous snakes.

A great local remedy for feeding an ailing pet after it is snakebitten is to mix together a raw egg and bacon grease and feed it to them. The family that farmed the land we now own used to do that when their animals were snakebitten. I try to feed it to the cat or dog as soon as possible after they are bitten. I don't think anything about it saves them from the venom or anything. Rather, it seems more likely that the bacon grease merely tempts them to eat the egg and the egg provides protein for them at a time when they don't feel like eating very much. I have noticed that if a snakebitten animal won't eat the bacon/egg mix, they are less likely to survive the snakebite, but then maybe that's just because their reaction to the venom is so strong that nothing would save them anyway.

We have had friends whose expensive competition dogs have been bitten by rattlesnakes and they did not survive even with veterinary care. Sometimes the bite is just too much for the pet to overcome, the venom too strong or in such quantity, the location of the bite, etc, being something that cannot be overcome.

One friend of ours, many years ago, took her two dogs to a snake aversion course offered at a local junior college near her. They used shock collars to train dogs to stay away from snakes. That may seem cruel to some, but its goal is to save the dogs lives by teaching them to avoid snakes. Her two dogs were her babies and she lived in a rocky area filled with snakes, so she was doing what she could to keep them safe.

Thanks for the story, Okiedawn--we did learn about Benadryl and now have it! Scary about cats--now I have her to worry about! Like your dog, ours is pretty savvy. I am betting he'll not be bothering snakes. I certainly hope that'll be the case!