Hi Otis! I always try to check any threads that are active 'cause you never know what will pop up! It is really hard to define how much water is 'enough' without it being 'too much', but I'll try. You want your plants to get enough water that they grow and produce melons. Beyond that, you want to give them as little water as possible. I water the vines more early on in the growth cycle when they are actively growing and flowering. Once the flowers set fruit I try to water little, if any. Of course, in a drought year like this one, I will probably have to water some just to keep the things alive. How can you tell if your melons aren't getting enough water? Once fruit has set, it should develop in the proper watermelon shape....which, of course, is long and oval for many melons, but short and round for some of the smaller melons like Sugar Baby and Black Tail Mountain. If the melons are misshapen, maybe curving like a gourd, for example, they need more water. By the way, once you see a fruit form on the vine, you can expect to have a ripe melon in approximately 45 days. So, if you noticed when the fruit formed, you can water during the first 25 days or so, and cut back the watering to almost nothing during the last 15 or 20 days. Sometimes that works. How to know if you watered too much? The flavor of the watermelon will be "watered down". I think learning how much water is enough is really a process of trial and error. Muskmelons, by the way, don't like excess water any more than watermelons do! It is actually easier to get good melon crops in dry years, because then you are in control of the moisture they get! I hope your melons are doing well and taste yummy when you get to harvest and eat them! Dawn

Squash Vine Borers are very hard to control and you have to take a multifaceted approach in order to achieve good control. Most people don't give Squash Vine Borers a second thought until they see their plants wilting and dying. To outwit the SVBs, you have to engage in year-round practices that harm them. With squash vine borers, it is always preferable to be proactive and to do everything in your power to prevent them from getting to your plants. Once they are inside the plant, there is little you can do except slit open the stem and remove them. Some research has indicated that infested plants can have up to 100 SVBs inside them, but I usually only have a couple in any given plant, so slitting the vine open and removing them is pretty easy for a home gardener, but imposssible for someone growing acres of cucurbits. At the broadest level, you want to use garden system practices to combat SVBs. This can include timing plants very early to try to get a harvest before SVBs arrive and kill the plants, and using succession plantings to give you a harvest after Oklahoma's two separate generations of SVBs are through doing their dirty work. You also can use cultivar selection. Squash Vine Borers prefer Hubbard Squash above all others. You can use this knowledge to your advantage in a couple of different ways. 1) If you want to raise Hubbard Squash, give it extra attention using Level 2 and 3 practices mentioned below; OR 2) Plant Hubbard Squash outside your regular veggie garden and use it as a trap crop. Hopefully, the SVBs will be drawn to it and you can find them/destroy them on these plants before they move on to the other types of cucurbits in your regular veggie plot. If you are using Hubbard Squash as a trap plot, you shouldn't expect to harvest any Hubbards since they are the 'sacrificial' plants that may give your other plants a better chance of survival. Another systemic practice that can reduce SVB populations is to manage your garden plot well. This includes prompt removal/destruction of all infested plants, late fall rototilling of soil where cucurbits grew in order to expose overwintering pupae/larvae to predators and weather, and deep incorporation digging or plowing or tilling in spring just before planting. Deep incorporation helps by burying any surviving larvae/pupae very deep in the soil which may prevent them from emerging. Another systemic practice is to rotate your cucurbit plantings to a new bed or area of the garden each year. This may help some because the newly emerged SVB moths will have to 'travel' to find plants to attack instead of emerging from the soil right there in the squash patch. However, research shows newly emerged SVBs can travel up to 1/2 mile to find squash plants, so rotation may help reduce their numbers or slow them down, but it isn't a 'cure'. During the SVB season, as soon as you realize a cucurbit plant is dying and cannot be saved, remove it promptly from the garden and destroy it. You can destroy it by burning the plant debris if you are in an area where open burning of brush is not prohibited by burn ban laws or local ordinances, or you can bag up the plant debris and dispose of it with household trash. You also can destroy the SVBs inside the plants by hot composting of the debris. All of the above systemic practices can help limit the SVB population's ability to survive in your soil and emerge, but those practices won't prevent them. To do that, you need to use another level of good gardening practices: physical and mechanical prevention practices. At this level, you're trying to keep SVBs that appear in your garden (whether locally hatched or migrating ones) from getting to your plants. For this, you can use any/all of the following: A barrier product on the ground to keep emerging SVBs from traveling to the plants. You can use newspaper or cardboard on top of the soil surface, or you can use landscape fabric. On top of this type of barrier, place a thick layer of hay or straw mulch or whatever else you have handy. The layer of cardboard/paper/landscape fabric beneath the mulch just makes it harder for the SVBS to emerge easily. To prevent flying SVBs from landing on your plants and laying eggs, you can use a lightweight (sort of gauzey-looking) floating row cover like Agribon or Reemay but it MUST BE tightly secured to keep the SVBs from getting underneath it. Also, it must be used over beds where cucurbits were not grown during the previous year. Otherwise, you're likely to have SVBs emerge from the soil under the floating row cover. When you use floating row covers, you either have to remove them when it is time for pollination since they will exclude bees and other pollinators, or you'll have to lift the floating row cover and hand-pollinate. If you hand-pollinate, watch very closely for the SVB moths while doing so because they are likely to get on the plants during that few minutes that you are conducting hand-pollination. One way to protect your cucurbit plants from SVBs is to raise seedlings in containers and transplant the into the ground. At the time you are transplanting, wrap the stems to protect them and be sure your wrapped portion of the stem extends an inch or two underground. Continue wrapping as the plant grows so that you have 6" to 8" of stem above the ground that is protected. You can use aluminum foil to wrap stems if you want, or you can use the legs of panty hose (and they are great because they stretch and expand) or you can use strips of floating row cover. While you want to wrap the entire stem, leave the wrapping loose enough that the stem can grow and expand so it will not become girdled. Stems wrapped in this manner generally exclude small larvae from penetrating and getting into the stem. Another good practice is to heap dirt over a section of vine every 3 to 4 feet as the vines grow. This will encourage the plants to root into the soil at those spots and that will help the overall plant survive even if you lose a portion of it to SVBs. Other practices you can employ at this level is the use of moth traps (available at online companies that special in organic gardening solutions), barrier products like Surround (kaolin clay) and the planting of insectary plants to attarct beneficial insects. Finally, your third level involves the use of certain materials and practicers to directly 'attack' SVBs that are already present in/around your garden. This includes the use of botanical insecticides like BT 'Kurstaki', spinosad, pyrethrum and DE. However, for the most part, these are only effective if you use them before the larvae penetrate the stems. Once they are inside the stems, you have to slit the stems and remove them and destroy them. Then you bury the slit portion of the stem and water well the next few days so the stem can heal and re-root and hopefully survive. You can apply beneficial nematodes too. You can mix them with water and apply them to the ground following package directions (they are most effective if applied in early to mid-Spring) and they should attack and kill any pupae/larvae they find in the soil. You also can inject them into infested plant stems. You can inject Bt 'kurstaki' in the same way. You can spray your plants with Bt 'kurstaki' weekly, and you can spray weekly with insecticidal soap to smother eggs before they hatch. You also can rub a damp cloth up and down the plant stems once or twice a week (I wear disposable latex gloves when doing this) to remove eggs before they can hatch. You can spray the plants weekly with a botanically-derived pesticide like spinosad, pyrethrum or neem but if you use these, be careful with your timing so you don't hurt the bees and other pollinators. You can use rotenone but its use is strongly discouraged because of research that links it to health problems. You should watch your plants carefully, checking them every couple of days for SVB eggs. Be sure to check the leaf stems because often they are laid there. Remove any destroy/dispose of any eggs your find. To a certain extent you can control squash vine borers by selecting plants that are less susceptible to them. In order of preference from highest to lowest preference, the SVBs prefer C. maxima, C. pepo, C. moschata and C. agrgyrosperma (formerly known as mixta). The C. maxima group includes the following kinds of squashes: hubbard, buttercup, Australian blue, turban, banana, zapalito, mammoth (giant) exhibition squashes and a few miscellanous ones that don't fall into any of those groups. Some common maximas include Jarrahdale, Queensland Blue, Triamble, Guatemalan Blue Sibley, Pink Banana and Blue Banana, any variety of Buttercup, Golden Hubbard, Green Hubabard, Red Warty Thing (aka Victor), Dill's Atlantic Giant, Jaune Gros de Paris, Cindarella (aka Rogue Vif d'Etampes) Turk's Turban, Marina di Chioggia, Lumina, Valencia, Fortna White, Georgia Candy Roaster and Galeuse d'Eysines. C. pepo includes virtually all summer squash (crookneck, straightneck, scallop), acorn squash, Halloween-type pumpkins, nonedible ornamental gourds, zucchini and vegetable marrows like spaghetti squash. The C. pepo group includes Howden, Lady Godiva, Jack-B-Little, Connecticut Field Pumpkin and all other orange pumpkins, Winter Luxury Pie, Table Queen and all similar acorn squash, all Delicata squash, all scalloped/pattypan squash like White Bush Scallop and Benning's Green Tint, Early Prolific Straightneck and all other straightneck and crookneck types, Spaghetti Squash, Golden Zucchini, Costa Romanesco, Cocozelle, etc. C. moschata includes all the tropical pumpkins, cheese pumpkins, neck pumpkins and japonica pumpkins. Some of the more well-known moschatas are Seminole, Long Island Cheese, Musquee' de Provence, Lunga di Napoli, Golden Cushaw, Japanese Black Futtsu, and Yokohama. Here in Oklahoma, none of the moschata I've grown have been bothered by SVBs. C. Argyrosperma (formerly known as C. mixta) includes squashes grown primarly for their seeds and includes most neck pumpkins. These include Green-Striped Cushaw, Jonathan, Japanese Pie Pumpkin (which isn't actually used for pies, by the way), and Tennessee Sweet Potato (which, despite its name is a squash and not a sweet potato). There is a class of wild squash (C. foetidissima) that SVBs generally ignore. I've never had SVBs attack my melons or cucumbers although some people say they do. I would assume the same practices used to control them on squashes and pumpkins could be used on other cucurbits. In my garden, the SVBs always seem to go for the yellow straightneck or crookneck squash and don't bother the zucchini types nearly as much. In the C. pepo group I usually grow Golden Zucchini, Costata Romanesco and Cocozelle and rarely have SVB issues with them. Dawn

Hi all! Been meaning to post here for a while, but it seems there's always something conspiring to divert me anymore. If it isn't diabetic neuropathy and its minions, it's my MIL's medical problems, my SIL's frustrations, overall negative attitude, and lack of empathy, it's our autistic son's recent mystery gastric affliction with attendant vomiting and inability to keep down his meds (can we say "grand mal seizure") and yet another ambulance ride to the emergency room for IV meds, etc. - Yeah,...it definitely hasn't been boring around here lately, although we absolutely, totally wish it were otherwise. Anymore, Elly & I are thinking our son, Roy, may very well be suffering from constipation. Headache, stomach ache, nausea, lack of appetite, etc. Hospital tests couldn't find anything specific. No high temperature or elevated white blood cell count. --shrug-- To add to this, I have yet to properly acknowledge at least 4 wonderful individuals who have traded with me lately. OTOH, our container grown "Little Finger" carrots are doing nicely, and we've harvested some nice shallots, not to mention a continuous bounty of "Ever Bearing" and "Alpine" strawberries. So, I guess, it all kind of evens out, maybe, in a weird sort of way. - Looking forward to fullfilling the seed wishes of others! Totally jazz's me! :)

Happy Friday.... I have not been around to open Jeannes Christmas in July package, which arrived a few days ago. And she also included my poetry prize....very cool! And here are the 12 days of Christmas from Jeanne.....how fun! *Christmas card and inside a 12 days of Christmas word search game *Partridge in a Pear Tree.....Jeanne sent Pear preserves and a mug mat (made by Jeanne....love it) and in the pocket of the mug mat is American Classic Tea. The tea is the only tea grown in the U.S. and is grown at the Charleston Tea plantation in SC. *Turtle Doves...a white bird with a clip so I can attach to my Christmas tree, a gift ect *French Hens...Puffy Pancake recipe which uses eggs....a family favorite. *Calling Birds....CD with Christmas songs "Home For The Holidays"...the birds not only call, they sing....LOL! *Golden Rings...."Extra Golden" California Poppy Seeds *Geese a Laying....an artificial egg and the egg layed "Interesting and Amazing Information On Geese"...................a got educated on Geese! *Swans a Swimming.....a white wash cloth which reminded Jeanne of a swan.....and it is a soft one too! *Maids a Milking.....Milky Way candy bars *Ladies Dancing....They are dancing to the music on the CD....LOL! *Lords a leaping...Star package tie ons.....leaping to reach the stars. *Pipers Piping....A bookmark with Jeannes horse Piper.....How cool!!! *Pipers Piping and Drummers Drumming.....A steno pad....and on the cover of the pad are pipers piping and drummers drumming..... Jeanne, thank you so much! I absoloutley love my 12 days of Christmas......very, very clever. And thank you for my prize! Your surgery was on Tuesday. Thoughts and prayers......be well. Annie