pn, I do have rich clay loam that is lower ground than average. I have heavily amended more than half of it to a sandy loam. All of my soils are infested with purslane. Without it, ny weeding would be nearly nil. With it [purslane] weeding is necessary after rains. I don't like weed infested gardens and I add/grow organic matter in other ways. Let's face it, if you are comfortable with weedy purslane, you are not likely to go around removing all other weeds and leave just the purslane! Out in a lower area in the adjacent field one year after heavy ponding and the crop was drowned out, the purslane grew to mammoth size.

Man, we've had a crappy summer this year. Nights were too cold for good growth, the rain and sun were too segregated. You know, the perfect growing weather is sunny during the day, rainy at night, instead it was sunny for two weeks but cold at night, then rainy for two weeks and cold at night. Crap! Oddly my corn is doing nicely, but I think its the new OP variety I tried: Painted Mountain Flour Corn from Fedco. It's only a couple feet tall, been molested by a guest dog and still nicely set up with corn on every stock, usually multiple corn sheaths... Squash--yep, uniformly slow performer this year. I stuck with a couple 8-ball relatives this year, and they are doing well for me, but I have them in a mixed densely planted display bed while I rework the yard this year, so I think my comparatively better performance than both sets of inlaws and my friends is due to companion benefits and weed suppression combined with moisture conservation and a very protected site. Don't usually need all that crap to get zukes! I didn't plant onions and carrots this year, thank goodness. Reports from friends say brocs and cauli went straight to seed. I planted late for those, mine seem fine. On average crops are yielding about half normal. Except beans. Go figure. My scarlet runners and favas are dense and vigorous after a slow start. Father in law's are yielding heavy loads of Haricot vertes ( I feel a little silly writing all this, but I record it in the gardening book anyways, so I might as well share it :-) )

I need to add something about Fire Ant bites, because my adverse reaction wasn't to my first FA bite. I had been bitten on at least three prior occassions, my parking place at work had some near the front of it. Pesky things. Painful. Then I bought my house in the Houston 'burbs. I was working in the yard and felt a single sting to one of the smaller toes on my right foot. One bite. Then I started itching, said to myself it was psychosomatic, because of getting dirt on me. Where ever I had hair, I itched. Then I went in to shower and when I came out of the shower and saw welts all over me.....I was able to say it wasn't psychosomatic. My new next door neighbor took me to the emergency room where five other folks had FA reactions, most worse than mine. I did take the desensitizing shots, and I keep benadryl on hand at all times. I also have an epipen whenever I'm where Fire Ants are. They can be very, very bad and very lethal to all kinds of animals, including us.

Carol, You are planting Teot Bat Put and Early Blum, which are the green, avocado-shaped C. moschata summer squash that are virtually impervious to squash vine borers. The other one you are planting is Meot Jaeng I Ae, and it is the one shaped like a zucchini, also a summer squash and also virtually impervious to SVBs. Of course, you're only planting them if you want to----I'm not trying to force you into it. (grin) You're on your own with the growing, harvesting, eating and preserving of the harvest. I'm just the person who put together the seed order all those months ago. downplay, DE is notorious for not working when wet, so wetting down the plants and sprinkling with DE seems like a mistake to me since wetting it down kind of ruins the sharp edge of the diatoms. The better solution would be to spray with Surround WP, a microfine kaolin clay product. However, the very light film it leaves on the plants can be difficult to clean off some kinds of produce. For example, you could scrub the film off plums, but not off peaches, so you have to be selective in how you spray it. I would not, for example spray standard beans with it because I doubt you could get it off the bean pods after harvest. The second reason that I would not use DE on plants like that is because the edges of the diatoms also can harm the beneficial insects all of us count upon to help control the pest guys. I don't know if either of the 2 above reasons are why Carol doesn't like the plan. We'll have to wait and see what she says, but I'll warn you that Carol and I are practically sisters, and consider one another long-long sisters "from another mother and, lol, from another father too" so we do often think on the same wavelength. If I wanted to keep caterpillars from eating a plant, I'd spray the endangered plant (but not the whole garden because I love the butterflies and moths almost as much as I love the plants) with Bt 'kurstaki' because it is much more narrow in spectrum in that it only affects lepidoptera. The problem with Bt is that it breaks down quickly in sunlight so you have to respray probably every 3 days to maintain effective control. I generally don't use Bt 'kurstaki' at all because I don't want to harm the desirable lepidoptera, but one year (likely 2010 but it could have been 2012) I had to spray almost my entire garden with it, once a week for three weeks in a row because cutworms were everywhere in the thousands and were eating entire gardens down to the ground repeatedly. You couldn't even find any Bt 'kurstaki' here in this region anywhere for about 2 months because it sold out the day they stocked it on the shelves. I think that was in 2010 but it might have been 2012, and if I had paid attention to the huge population of moths hanging out by the back door porch light at night in February and March, I would have known the cutworm outbreak was coming. I knew there were tons and tons of moths, but didn't realize until midway through the spring that all those moths were the originators of all the cutworms. What I remember best is that when I walked across the lawn in the very early morning or late evening, huge clouds of moths would rise up out of the grass. Now, that's the main thing I watch for in order to "get a clue" that it is going to be a bad cutworm year. I'd never seen a cutworm year like that before dating back to my childhood in the 1960s and not since, but this winter, while cleaning out garden beds, I have found tons and tons and tons of cutworms overwintering in the mulch---probably 6 to 9 per square foot. I'd been collecting them in a big yellow plastic bowl and feeding them to our poultry. When they see me coming with the yellow bowl, they get real excited. The natural world is amazing. No matter what pest was a problem in the previous year, it will be something else entirely in the current year. I rarely have the same major pest issue (except for traveling hordes of grasshoppers) twice in the same decade. Squash vine borers and squash bugs are the exception to that. They probably are a pest in 8 or 9 years out of 10. The last year in which we didn't have trouble with either of them was in 2011, and I remember it well because we repeatedly went up to 113, 114, an 115 degrees and I was out at wildfires day and night. It didn't rain for 80 or 90 days. Maybe it was too hot and too dry for squash bugs and SVBs. I tried to make it out to the garden as often as possible if only to harvest, and always was surprised to find my squash plants (including pumpkins, which usually fall prey to SVBs) alive, well and producing. So, I can remember the years by whether they were the year of the squash bug, leaf-footed bug, Colorado Potato Beetle, etc. I cannot imagine what life would be like in a year when we had them all at the same time. I don't worry much about spraying for anything. I just work hard to make an ecosystem that is very attractive to predatory insects. If I do my job well, my garden will be full of all kinds of predatory insects feeding on pest insects. Unfortunately, I don't know of anything that feeds on squash bugs or SVBs quickly enough to save those particular plants. I'm toying with the idea of investing in Proteknet Biothrips insect netting. I've wanted to do it for a long time so I could grow actual pumpkins again, and not just C. moschata squash, but the price of a roll always makes me drop the idea. If I told Tim "I need this", he'd absolutely agree I should order it and get it, but I'm awfully thrifty so it is hard for me to spend that sort of money on something for a home garden. I can ignore most any garden pest for a long time because as long as we're harvesting plenty, I don't care if the pests get some, but you cannot ignore squash bugs since they spread disease, and you cannot ignore SVBs because they'll kill the plants, often before you harvest anything. I have become more laid back about pests over the years, having learned that often if I do nothing at all, the beneficial insects, turtles, frogs, toads, birds, snakes, lizards, etc. take care of the pests for me. It has been hard for me to let go of my tendency to be a micromanager or control freak, but it has happened. In order to have all those garden helpers, though, you have to have enough pests to attract them, so there always is that point where I feel like the garden is on the verge of becoming overrun by pests, and then the garden helpers kick in and the pest population falls. One year I was almost distraught when all my green lacewings that had filled the garden just up and disappeared. They were here today, and gone tomorrow. I couldn't imagine why. Slowly a light bulb when off in my head (guess I was having a blonde moment) and I realized the green lacewings had moved on because they had devoured all the pests they like to eat that we had here, so they had to move elsewhere, following the food, so to speak. The next year they were back again, working their magic. Now, if only I could find gigantic green lacewings that like to eat grasshoppers. Nosema locuste is a great grasshoper control when the hoppers are in the younger instars and while the weather is cooler. Once the hoppers hit the larger instars (about anything over 1/2" in length) and the heat sets in, the Nosema locuste is not nearly as effective. It helps control hoppers in March-May, but not so much thereafter. For me, the bad hopper years peak in July-August, and there is not a good solution then. One year the hoppers were incredibly bad. It might have been 2003, which was really dry, and all the ranchers sprayed heavy-duty pesticides to save their rangeland. The sad result of that? All our bluebirds disappeared, likely killed by ingesting grasshoppers turned poisonous by the pesticides, and we didn't see a single bluebird for three years. Be careful with pest control books because sometimes the info in them isn't as good as it sounds, especially if it is lots of home remedies. You can do as much harm as good when using them. I have found that, overall, the less I interfere, the fewer pests I have, so it is best when I proceed very cautiously. When nature is in balance, pests don't get out of control very often because for almost every pest insect we have, there is a beneficial insect, reptile, amphibian, mammal or bird (or maybe a marsupial like a possum!) that controls it. Sometimes we have to stay out of Nature's way and let it work the way it is supposed to work. In your part of the state, Japanese Beetles can sometimes become a big problem (just ask Carol about that) but at my end of the state, they usually aren't. Some people in NE OK have ground hogs. We don't have them down here, but we have billions of vicious fire ants (for which the best organic solution is an organic ant bait that contains Spinosad in a granular formulation). The organic fire ant baits work so well that they are almost magic. I like magic. That reminds me. I need to buy Slug-Go and/or Slug-Go Plus. I think armadillos are cute, until they are in the yard and garden plowing it up. Nothing we have tried works on voles, except lining beds with quarter-inch hardware cloth. By comparison, moles and gophers are relatively easy to exterminate (cats, cats, cats). Honestly, if I am in the garden 10 hours a day, I bet I don't spend a total of 10 minutes on pest control a day, and most of it is just hand-picking and killing various pests.