Eric, How did you obtain your Great Yellow? I'm not finding any information for sources on the web. I'd like to add that to my small collection (Stanley, NY9,Imperial Epineuse, Empress, and Pearl) I really appreciate the table you posted. One thing that could make it better would be to list relative ripening timing. While my E plum experience is shallow, I'm not sure I concur with the low marks for Stanley by Eric and Hman. Perhaps it simply favors the hot dry summer climate in UT, but the fruit has been outstanding for me.

Larry, I agree that I wouldn't risk a fire for onions. When it is very very cold I will put a regular incandescent light bulb in each of the two chicken coop and it keeps them a little warmer, but we won't even use a heat lamp in there unless we are going down into the single digits. The chickens can handle pretty cold temperatures as long as they are acclimated to them and have adapted to them, as ours have. Your mower sounds like my equipment. It only breaks down at the one time that I really, really need it to work. It works fine on days that aren't critically important. OSUEngineer, I keep my hoop house style greenhouse pretty warm just with a whole lot of buckets of water. Just this past week, the overnight low dropped to 14 degrees, but the Min-Max thermometer showed it only dropped to 29 in the greenhouse. That was even a little better than I expected. Today I left it closed up to heat up the water as much as possible and it hit 97 degrees in there so far today. There's nothing in there that cannot handle the 97 degrees. The tomato plants will be moving inside the house tonight though. I'm not taking any chances with them and this approaching cold weather. They are sunning themselves on the patio this afternoon. I have the greenhouse full of seedlings later in spring, but all that is in there right now is some zone 7 and zone 8 plants in pots. Some years I've already moved all the seedlings out to the greenhouse by now, but this year they all are stuck inside on the light shelves unto the weather stabilizes a little. I've had some nights in recent springs when I threw floating row cover over the tables full of seedlings because the temperature was dropping into the low 20s, and one kinda scary night when it dropped to 19 and I thought the greenhouse would drop below freezing, but the greenhouse always stayed at least 33 degrees and I've never lost seedlings in there. I have a space heater I can put in there if I think that I need to use it, but so far I've never used it. Tim suggested I use the space heater to keep the plum trees warm tomorrow night, but short of building a giant hoop house over them, I cannot imagine how it would be possible. Even for plums, which we like so much that they are worth the extra effort, there's only so much you can do when you're facing temperatures in the mid-teens. Today the peach trees are trying to bloom, and the first plum tree blooms are open today. Why wouldn't they bloom? It hit 80 yesterday for the second time in a week, although one thermometer showed 80, another 79 and a third 78, so it is possible the peach trees only experienced a 78-degree day. Regardless, they said something like "It's spring! Let's bloom." I wish we'd stayed cooler this past week so the trees would have maybe slowed down a little. The little honey bees are happy though. Today they've had their choice of dandelions, henbit, chickweed, tomato blossoms and plum blossoms. I hope that will make up for the fact that they won't have anything tomorrow. I need to get back outside shortly and put the row cover over the onions. I have wanted to let the ground soak up all the sunlight it can while we've got it, but it looks like it is trying to hide behind the clouds, so our sunshiney part of the day may be ending. Dawn

I actually had a year when a tremendous amount of fruit set (for Oklahoma) on Brandywine, probably in 2001 or 2002. I had six plants, and each set about 6 to 8 to 10 fruits in spring and then set more in fall. We had so many ripe BWs at one time that I gave several Brandywines away to friends. They've all been begging for a second Brandywine tomato since then, but I haven't had that kind of production since then. I remember I planted very, very, very early and covered them up on plenty of cold nights. I'm guessing we had a long, mild spring because I remember having very high fruitset on all my tomatoes and peppers that year. So, I think it likely it was 2002....because DS graduated from high school that year and I remember the May weather was so 'cold' that Tim's dad came from Pennsylvania for Chris' graduation and was expecting hot weather and instead had weather here just like what he had back in PA. He was very disappointed in our Oklahoma weather that year. The following year he didn't come to visit until July and it was dry, drought year and beastly hot and he loved it. (The tomatoes, however did not, although they had great flavor.) Jay, I could have sworn I read your post yesterday! I guess the garden gremlins ate it. My BW crosses are producing nice big tasty tomatoes and more of them per plant than BW ever did. It is still early in the season, but I'm thinking Gary O'Sena and Dora are keepers. JD's Special C-Tex is also producing well and its fruit are somewhat larger than IS's and CPs although it seems very similar otherwise. All of them 'meet or exceed' my flavor requirements. Dawn

Bon, I'm glad he's feeling better, even if he is bouncing off the walls. I hope it is warm and rain-free today so maybe he can play outside and enjoy feeling better. (In my perfect world---the one that exists only inside my imagination, it would rain only at night so we could work outside during the day). Thirty-five degrees is awfully cool. Have y'all reached your average last frost date yet? Lisa, I've been watching the 5-day and 7-day Qualitative Precipitation Forecast all week. A few days ago it was showing really great rainfall totals over much of OK, especially central OK, and every day for the last 2 or 3, the amount it is showing is dropping. I still think y'all will get some good rainfall, but I'm not sure it will be as much as the forecasters once thought. The same is true for much of the state. For all my complaining the last few weeks about wet soil, we have had a lot of drying in the upper few inches of the soil during all the hot, windy days when the rain kept missing us. There's still good moisture about a foot down. I know this because I removed the low tunnel from my onion bed (the leaves were hitting the netting, which meant it had to go) and when I pulled the rebar out of the ground, there was a giant sucking sound from that deep moisture. Unfortunately, up in the raised bed where the onions are growing, it is a lot drier. Now I'm worried our wet-so-far year may be changing back to more skimpy rainfall. I have been watching the soil moisture measurements falling on the Mesonet map and felt they did not reflect our reality at our house until, suddenly, now it seems like they do. I hate that. On the other hand, the reason I've gotten so much garden work done lately is because it has dried up. Now, I guess, I need for it to rain again which will help the plants but probably will put me behind schedule on the back garden, where I hope to get a lot done before the heavy rain arrives, which is expected to be Sunday here, though maybe not until Sunday night. We never seem to get the rainfall we need when we want it or need it, but maybe y'all are finally going to get a break before Lake Hefner turns into a desert. I think Lake Texoma is down about a foot, but that's not too bad all things considered. I've been on a sapling-killing binge too---mulberries, hackberries, elm and oaks. I can blame the oaks on the squirrels, I guess. On these windy days the adjacent woodland has rained down tree seeds, flowers and pollen on me and the garden all day long. I mean the stuff is swirling around in the air like snow. I don't ever remember being showered by so much tree debris in the garden before while working. I pick up every elm seed I see lying on top of the soil when I'm weeding, figuring I can pick up the seeds now or pull the young trees later. Carol, I bet you're right about your soil generally staying too wet for herbs. I have found that most of the ones I grow really like to be high and dry within reason. My soil still is too heavy for thyme to grow, even in raised beds, since we sometimes get really heavy rainfall. I just grow what I can in the ground and put the rest in containers. I have transplanted all the big tomato plants that I'm going to plant into the ground and am holding the rest for the Spring Fling. Those are the ones started from seed on Super Bowl Sunday and then in the second round about two weeks after that. I have tiny plants from a third round that have not done as well. They just won't grow. It is vexing. I don't know whether to blame it on the constant cool, cloudy weather they had to grow in virtually from the day they sprouted or if it is the growing mix (I potted them up into Miracle-Grow Moisture Control, which worked great for the earlier seedlings, but not for these....and I think they went into mix from a new bag which might explain why they are underperforming). Most of these plants are only 2-4" tall, but Ildi is only 1" tall and has been for about 3 weeks. Their color has been off, which isn't unusual for very small seedlings, but usually by the time seedlings are 5 weeks old they are much bigger and have great color. I think something in the soil-less mix is out-of-whack but haven't had time to do anything about it. I'm contemplating planting some of these tiny plants directly in the ground to see if they will grow better in real soil and then potting up the others into soil-less mix from a new bag. I was busy with so many seedlings during seed-starting and potting-up time that I didn't want to mess with chasing down all the ingredients and making my own 5-1-1 mix, but now I kinda wish I had taken the time to do it. I don't regret breaking the tomato list into thirds and planting in three rounds as it helped me feel like I could take my time transplanting tomato plants into the ground at a slow, steady pace instead of rushing to get all of them into the ground quickly before they got too big. I just wish the third round had grown as well as the first two. Since we have had some sunny days lately, the tiny tomato plants' color has improved somewhat but their growth hasn't. If they were the only tomato plants I had, I'd be losing my mind worrying about what is wrong with them. Instead I'm just taking a reasoned response that "sometimes this happens" and will see if I can get them to start growing better and looking better. I've had mixed results with peas. Of the batch I pre-sprouted and started in paper cups, some are doing great in the ground and others are struggling. They're in a bed that runs west to east and all the happier plants are at the west end. The garden runs downhill from west to east, so I'm wondering if the plants at the east end are staying too wet even in their raised bed. I noticed while weeding yesterday that the east-west running onion bed, which also is a raised bed and sits even higher in the garden is exactly the same. At the drier west end, the ground is hard and crusty at the surface and I couldn't just pull weeds out---I had to use a small weeder to break the soil surface and then I could pull the weeds out. About midway down the bed as I moved further east, though, the soil became progressively wetter at the surface and I could yank out those weeds there quite easily. Even in my pathways between raised beds you can see where the garden effectively changes from drier to wetter soil. In the drier areas the mulch is a lighter color and in the wetter areas it is darker and even looks wet. I really enjoyed yesterday's weather. It actually felt like April when I walked out the door. Our high was only 73 compared to the previous day's 87 and it was so much more pleasant to be outdoors that I was out as late in the day as possible. I have to be in before dark because so much of the night-roaming wildlife is not something I want to run into, but I just barely made it in before dark. An hour or two later I was out on the front porch calling the name of a cat who apparently decided to stay out all night and saw the biggest skunk in our driveway that I've ever seen. It was bigger than any coon I've ever seen and we have had some fat, corn-fed coons some years. I joked to Tim that if the cat doesn't come in this morning, we'll know the skunk ate him. It was a really, really big one. We've also had some really huge possums this year, so I guess the mild and wet weather we've had the last few months really agreed with them. Now, I'm headed out to the garden in a minute for what I hope is a full day of getting things accomplished before the rain arrives. Dawn