Jay, I'm so glad y'all are getting rain. The cold interfering in planting is unfortunate. Hopefully it will be the last really cold night. Bon, That's a lot of rain at once after y'all went without good rain for so long. I hope the ground doesn't stay too wet for too long. Ours is still just mud, mud, mud but I think that today's high temperature in the lower 80s with strong winds means we'll see some drying. They've dropped our chances of rain today and tonight down to 20% and I'm hoping the rain misses us so we can dry out a bit more. It is too bad we can't save this rain for June, July or August. Dawn

Amy, Our dogs do adapt to Tim's shifts which is great on the days he's working, but on the days he is off, they start whining and making noise because they want to go out at 5 a.m. whether he is awake and getting up or not, so guess who gets up and let them out? They wake me up, so I let them out, naturally. A tornado hitting our house wouldn't wake up Tim, so he sleeps through it all. The sleepyhead dogs also go to sleep early like Tim does, so at 9 pm last night they were all confused that I wasn't turning off lights and putting everyone to bed. I think we were up until about midnight, and the dogs were getting grumpier and grumpier but wouldn't go to sleep until we did. Tim was gone most of that time, either working at the EOC or running on fire calls, and you'd think the dogs would clue in....they hear the fire truck sirens going down the road and howl right along with them. I wonder if they know those sirens are affiliated with Tim's absence from our home? Turnips will store from 4-5 days to maybe 2 weeks in the fridge depending on how wet or dry they were when harvested. I remove the greens, clean and dry the turnips, wrap them in paper towels to absorb excess moisture and put them in ziplock bags. For longer term storage, you can store them in sand or sawdust in a cool, dry location like a cellar (good luck finding a place that stays cool enough in summer, but it is possible with a fall harvest). I am not sure why yours molded. Perhaps the really rainy spring just made their moisture content too high, and there's nothing you can do about that. In some parts of the country, folks leave them in the beds over the winter, harvesting as needed, but you have to cut off the foliage and it helps to turn each turnip a half-twist in the ground to make the roots stop trying to continue growth. I don't know if it would work here since we don't get all that cold in winter any more. I do believe the plant you identified as tansy is tansy. My regular tansy started blooming a couple of weeks ago, but the silver tansy hasn't bloomed yet. Nancy, I agree that Willie is in a class of his own. He won't live forever and it will be such a sad day when he departs from this earth. I like even his oldest stuff better than what passes for modern day country music (so much of which seems more like pop to me). I guess it hardly matters because I hardly listen to to the current country music. I love old, classic country....including Waylon, Willie and the Boys...and Johnny Cash....the Highwaymen...George Jones....Don Williams....George Strait (he's still alive!), and the women....Loretta Lynn...Tammy Wynette....the incomparable Dolly Parton....Kitty Wells....Reba....Emmylou Harris....Patsy Cline. And, of course, having grown up in Texas, I love western swing and know that Bob Wills is still the king! Practically everyone I used to listen to is either dead or well on their way, and that is sad. Poor Kaida. Well, at least they know what it is and solutions for it. I hope she feels better quickly. It seems like the kids have such a short summer any more, and I hate that she's feeling to crappy to really enjoy it. Stores here have had 'back to college' and 'back to school' crap for weeks now...and I keep saying to myself that summer just began....why ruin it for the kids and parents by pushing back to school in June???? I suppose the retail world will start putting Christmas stuff on the shelves on July 5th. (Actually, Hobby Lobby started putting out Xmas stuff 3 or 4 weeks ago and I was not even ready to see that yet.) Before our trees got so tall we could see three or four distant fireworks shows without leaving our property, although we often would go up the road a little bit to a friend's place on higher ground than ours for an even better view. We could see the fireworks from Lake Murray in Carter County, from the Falconhead area in western Love County, and from the WinStar Casino east of Thackerville. Then sometimes we could see more distant fireworks shows from other places in Texas. Now that the trees are so tall all around the house and yard, I don't think we can see any of them.....and I don't much care. Been there, done that, blah, blah, blah. Usually on July 4th itself, Tim is at work and I am in the kitchen canning. He's off this year so I probably won't be in the kitchen canning, but I'm hoping for a quiet day/evening at home with no actual fires. I don't think we've had enough rain to keep fields from catching on fire when folks set off their own fireworks so my wishes for a quiet day and evening might not come true. Our first couple of years of living here, we'd go up to Lake Murray and spend the day at the lake and attempt to stay to watch the fireworks and that was a really long, hot day and we came home with Chris and his cousins asleep in the car and us adults all worn out. It was fun, but I don't miss doing that now. The older I get, the happier I am to just be at home at what Tim jokingly calls "The Compound". There's more than enough to keep me busy here all the time, and other than the weekly shopping and errands, if there's anything I want to buy (other than plants), I can just order it online and have it delivered. I think I could have lived 100 or 150 years ago and been a pioneer and would have been perfectly happy---except for the snakes. My grandmother was born in 1898....and I think that would have been a fascinating era in which to live, though life certainly was much harder back then. When we first moved here, I met a neighbor who came here in a covered wagon before statehood. I remember being both horrified and fascinated when he mentioned that his uncle made them a dugout home in the bank of the Red River. Maybe that would have been a tiny bit too rustic for me. We stayed cloudy and cool until mid-afternoon and it was so pleasant, and then the sun came out and ruined everything. At least one half or almost 2/3s of July 1st had really pleasant weather. Dawn

Add me to the list of a slightly disappointing onion season. I'll end up somewhere around 50 lbs of cured onions from the over 300+ plants planted, which turns out to be a small ~3 oz per bulb average. I had a couple nice baseball sized ones though - I think the biggest was 13 oz or so. I had an opportunity to test out the kitchenaid strainer for tomato sauce this weekend. Wow it is amazing! It does a little better if you run the 'waste' through the system twice but that is no big deal compared to the time saved not having to boil/ice bath. I did about 5-6 lbs of tomatoes and the sauce was turned into a marinara/pizza sauce that I used Saturday night. Cant get any fresher than that! Picture of that massive giant garden paste - finally sliced (piece of bread for size comparison). This one went into a bruschetta that my wife made. I'd share the recipe but she honestly doesn't remember what all went into it. Tomato plant progress. I applied a heavy dose of TTF on Saturday. My mind is probably playing tricks on my but I swear I see more blossoms already. The septoria was pretty rampant so I did heavy pruning and then sprayed with mancozeb Saturday night after picking any fruits that were showing any blush at all (since I have to wait 5 days to harvest after applying the fungicide)... Brandywine still holding out - the last to blush. ^^ The big beef sucker experiment looks like it will be a success as long as I can keep it disease free. It looks mangled and ugly because I just wrangled it into the cage before taking the photo. There are a few fruits set already. Habenero and Ghost Chilis. Some of the habs are just starting to 'blush' orange. Not a fox like babushka, but our canine garden protector. We used to have the invisible fence line ran right through the garden so he wouldn't come in. I've since re-routed it around the outside and trained him that its okay to come in and help scare off pests for us. Broccoli (~20 plants) and cauliflower (~8 plants) after a pot up session. They have some crinkly leaves due to me missing a watering but should bounce back hopefully. Im in the same boat as Jack - I plan to plant these in spaces that are likely still going to be producing finely for me for a while (cucumbers, eggplant, and squash beds). I may end up planting them at the foot of the cucumber vines and pruning the bottom leaves - the vines still have a little while to go before they are fully supported on the trellises. Might also just rip out the squash bed (yellow, zucchini, and spaghetti) as they are all pretty engrossed with powdery mildew right now.

Rebecca, I do not believe it is your yard. I think it is this year. The early heat let a lot of pests, and in particular cucumber beetles, get off to an early start---both cucumber beetles and squash bugs, which have been around in huge populations this year, spread tons and tons of diseases. The only thing I can add is that sometimes container plants are a magnet for pests and it can become a vicious cycle. Here's how it most often happens here with container plantings: Container plants need more frequent feeding, as we often discuss here, because of the way irrigation and rainfall wash away the nutrients. More frequent feeding tends to give plants a burst of nitrogen here and there following a feeding. Excess nitrogen (and I am not saying you are feeding them excess nitrogen on purpose---it is hard to balance it just right in containers) causes plants to make more carbs. More carbs attract more pest insects. Pest insects carry diseases. Diseased plants look bad. You cut off diseased leaves and feed the plant to push new growth and recovery. Right? Right. I'd do exactly the same thing. Plants recover, make new growth, and pests hit again. There's your vicious cycle. It is worse in very dry and very wet years than in a more normal year. So, don't blame yourself. Blame the crazy insane weather that gave us drought, early heat, extreme cold, early pest outbreaks, snakes out in winter, rain, and floods....and that was just in January-March. It isn't like the weather has changed much. It has been nuts all year. It started crazy. It has stayed crazy. Jacob, The Oklahoma Climatological Survey says Nov. 7th for us, but based on the 19 years we've been here, I'd say our average first freeze tends to be around November 20th. We have been having a long-term trend since at least 2003 of warmer and warmer weather, so our old 30 year averages probably will change a bit when they redo the new averages at the end of this decade. Our average last freeze of Spring is, officially, March 29th, I think, but some years it has happened as early as the end of February. However, for 7 or 8 years, we kept having a late freeze every year around May 3rd. It was maddening. Rather than push planting later and later, I bought DeWitt Ultimate Frost Blanket Row Cover that gives 10 degrees of cold protection. Now, I plant when I want, usually around March 10-17 for tomatoes, and cover up the plants if cold weather threatens. This issue never has been our soil temperatures---our soil down here doesn't get that cold and it warms up quickly this far south, but our air temperatures are all over the place every year. So, nowadays, and I've done this for about 8 or 10 years now, I plant whenever I feel like the soil temperatures are stable and when the 10-day forecast looks pretty good, and then I can cover up the plants with frost blanket type row covers if cold threatens. Some years I end up covering up the plants about once a week for a couple of months. Other years I only cover up the plants once or twice in that first couple of months. It is incredible how well they grow if I can just protect them from that occasional late cold night. We have to push hard down here to beat the heat, and row covers as needed do that for me. That makes my main tomato harvest run from late May through late July usually, but our earliest tomatoes from in-ground plants usually are ripe in April from an early March planting (from plants that had blooms on them when planted), and this year we had our first ripe tomato in March, from a plant grown indoors in a large pot in a sunny south-facing window. I bought the plant at a Wal-Mart around the second week of January and its sole job was to give us tomatoes as early in the year as possible. Think about---we were harvesting and eating those tomatoes when most folks in our neighborhood didn't have plants purchased yet, and at about the same time I was putting our home-grown plants in the ground. It was awesome. Did it taste like a summer tomato? Nope. Tomatoes grown indoors in winter don't get enough heat or strong enough sunlight to develop full, rich in-season tomato flavor, but it still was much better than a grocery store tomato. In case no one else has mentioned this, I'll say it: I am a tomato maniac. Mary, It is the weather. There's not much we can do about it. I hate all the diseases this year. It is what it is. Surely next year will be better. (And, if you can steam clean things inside your house, why oh why isn't this steamy hot weather killing these plants diseases instead of making them worse?????) Rebecca, No, but it would be better than nothing. I've had butternuts run 20-30' when they are happy....sometimes I let them climb the 8' fence, cascade down the other side and then take off into the trees. Maybe in the future, you might want to grow some of the ones bred for containers. I've grown several and they still get fairly big but they are much more controlled/less rampant than regular butternuts. Nancy, I hear you on the big city stuff you don't need. I grew up in Fort Worth when it was considerably smaller than it was now...and so was Dallas....and the whole metroplex. Eventually it got to where it was getting too big and we moved here and found the rural living we desired. Then, Fort Worth-Dallas began undergoing phenomenal growth that is mind-blowing (the DFW metro area now has a population of 7.1 million compared to the roughly 5 million it had when we moved here in 1999). Other than having family there, and occasionally shopping there, I can't handle it any more. Everything is all concrete and endless development and growth and huge highways. There is nowhere down there I want to visit badly enough to get on a 14 lane highway.....who needs 7 lanes each way, even if only briefly, before they drop down to 6 lanes each way? I just need to stay home and wait for them to build a CostCo in Denton or Gainesville. Tim says he does get home more quickly now that the DFW Connector Project (multi-highway, including the 14-lane thing we were on yesterday) is done, but I wonder how long that big highway project lasts before continuing growth makes it obsolete and they build some 18- or 20-lane highway? Hopefully Tim will be retired by then and won't have to deal with that mess. The computer stuff is frustrating. I think they all can give you trouble from time to time, and getting someone to troubleshoot them and fix them is just as aggravating as can be. Good luck finding a nice back-up that is reliable and dependable. Amy, Augustus used to poop on the steps and patio, but I scold him and wash it right off when he does and he is (despite the general perception that turkeys are dumb) smart enough to know he shouldn't do it there. Now he seems to go out of his way to poop in the driveway, where you see big giant blobs of it there. I don't know why the driveway and not the yard, but I also don't care why. I'm glad Honey had a play date. Seems like it left her feeling more content to chill a bit more than usual afterwards. Hmmm. Maybe Honey needs her own puppy to play with. (Go ahead and pelt me with produce for saying that, but please, no rotten tomatoes.) I saw the first Harlequin bug of the year last week, about 5 months later than usual. I killed it and I just hope there aren't any more. I'm sure there are, but I haven't seen them. It has been too hot to do anything. I have seedlings to plant but I don't want to go out into the heat and plant them. I'm waiting until Wednesday, when our high is supposed to be in the 80s instead of the upper 90s. Enough of the side/back yard and dog yard are mowed that we can walk through those areas with no fear of not being able to see a snake. Mowing the front yard is on the agenda, probably for right after dinner this evening, when the sun is far enough west that temperatures are falling but when there also is still daylight. That's dependent on fire calls---we've only had 1 today and I hope our good luck holds. Dawn