Dawn, what recipe do you use for roselle jelly?

I remember 2012 as the year I got new hips (and lost a gall bladder). I could use a good tomato year! I am sure DH didn't even have a tomato plant that year. We did pretty good in 2013 and 2014. 2015, considering how many plants I had was not good (the year of spring deluges). Last year might have been okay if the chickens hadn't eaten so many. I would like to can tomatoes this year. I am tired of them being lost in the bottom of the freezer. We'll see. ;)

I THINK my forcast for Friday's low has gone up? Maybe I remember wrong. Currently a low of 30. It looks like March 1 will be sunny and warm. The old saying is if March comes in like a lamb it goes out like a lion? I'm becoming more determined to just expect to cover things.

Amy, Travis Meyer says we will be in at least the mid-20s Saturday morning, if not a bit lower. Then back up to the 60s, but rain on Monday. Yeah, I don't get it either.

Lone Jack, Our frogs have been busy croaking here for at least a couple of weeks, but our forecast is for 33 degrees in a couple of nights, so that will shut them up....for about a day or two.

I threw tons more mulch on our asparagus last year when it woke up early, and it really has worked and kept it from waking up early this year (so far). I hope it works for you too.

Y'all do need rain badly. We have had too much....and if it keeps up, this will be an unprecedented third rainy year in a row. It seems like I'm always out of step with most others here....if we are having extreme drought, the rest of the state usually is not as bad off as us. If we are having a very wet year like last year, the year before and this year so far, the rest of the state is in drought. The last time I checked, only 4% of OK was not either in pre-drought (Abnormally Dry) or some stage of drought, and I'm in that 4%. It is bizarre that far SC OK seems to always be out on a limb on its own somewhere. : )

I'll be watching the Drought Monitor tomorrow to see what changes for you (or doesn't change or whatever). Are your driest months normally January and February? Down here, those are our driest months. Maybe the three driest are Dec, Jan. and Feb. So, a dry winter doesn't alarm me, but if the Spring rains fail to show up on time, that does worry me.

Our soil temperatures have been all over the place too. Based on soil temperatures alone, I could have planted tomatoes about a month ago, but because of those pesky sometimes cold air temperatures, I didn't do it.

Amy, I no longer remember what recipe I used. It seems like it had roselles, water, sugar and maybe lemon or lime juice. I'll try to find a similar one and link it in a couple of days after we get past the fire danger. There are plenty all over the internet, but a lot of them add stuff like ginger. I know I didn't do that. I was going for the most pure roselle flavor. Once completed, it was hard to tell a difference in the flavor of blueberry jam and roselle jam. To me the roselle jam was even fruitier and tastier than blueberry-lime jam. I might have used Vivian Pang's recipe, or the one that UNT has online (it is a digital page from an old publication).

I hope this is your year for a plentiful tomato season with lots of canning done.

Our forecast for Friday night's low has dropped from 37 to 35 to 33, so I'm expecting anything from 26 to 29. I'd like to be wrong about that!

There were a couple more fires after we got home from ours and I listened to the other fire departments on the radio before finally craving quiet and switching the radio over to the paging function. I have to tell y'all my favorite line of the day from the firefighter giving the scene size-up of the last fire: "The swamp is on fire again! The swamp is on fire again!" Don't you love it? Where else but in Oklahoma can the swamps be burning in February in a year when our local year-to-date rainfall has been near 200% of "normal".Does this even make any sense? Why aren't the swamps too swampy to burn? I think this whole swamps are on fire thing sums up everything that's wrong with this winter in Oklahoma. Well, that and the fact that winter hasn't been very wintery.

Our weather is easy to understand. Are we having weather we hate? If so, it won't change. Are we having weather we love? If so, it won't continue. That is Oklahoma weather in a nutshell. The good thing is that whatever weather we are having right now....it will change in a couple of days...and then in a couple of days it will change again. That sums up all the months except maybe June-August, which generally are an unchanging sea of hot and dry weather. Except when they're not.

Dawn

Y'all have me worried. My asparagus isn't waking up. It's only it's second year. Hoping I didn't kill it.

There's something making a weird noise out here and I thought it was possibly frogs, but it seems too early.

And we've had an eventful past 24 hours. I mentioned on another thread that the coyotes were really loud last night around 10 pm. My dogs started barking and howling like mad around 1:30 this morning. I tried to ignore them because I knew I had a busy, busy day today. Finally, I got up and didn't see anything. They sleep in the utility room and the door has a window in it. I wonder if the coyotes came up to our house. Anyway, the rest of the night was unrestful. Then, I wondered if it was our across-the-street neighbors' grandson's spirit. He tragically died a couple of nights ago--sad story. He was only 19 and had been very sick. Died at home. But whatever it was, caused for a restless night. And, a neighbor said we have a bobcat in the neighborhood. I don't know. I do know we had a fire today about a 1/4 mile from our house IF that far. Luckily they kept any buildings from burning but the entire field is burned...and smelly. I just got in from work a few minutes ago and I'm tired and I'm going to have a glass of wine. Grapes! I need to grow grapes.

Hahaha, Hazel! That's what I said to GDW last week--we could grow grapes at one end of the dog pen raised beds! Well, we drove to Bixby a couple weeks ago, and there's a winery on the way--we saw the get-up for the grapes. We most likely will not get into the grape-growing business right now. . . but maybe we could (Garry could) construct an arbor for the yard and we could give it a go..... good idea, don't you think?

I am so tired tonight I can barely lift my arms. I started out this morning wanting to put some amendments in all the beds and then realized I didn't have any leaves. . . SO I spent the next 3 hours blowing leaves; Garry raked leaves from rock wall corners, and then I turned them into double-mulched piles here and there. Always amuses and amazes me that I can have a 3-4-foot high, 20x20 feet pile of leaves and they mulch down to 3 little piles. We DID get a handy dandy new rake that allows for better raking of some of the tons of little pieces of leaves on the lawn, and I was able to eek out 2-3 more little piles to add the existing ones.

I love love love having these 100 or so oaks here! Still, could use more. I think I'll visit the across-the-street neighbors and offer to take their leaves off their hands. Heck, I'll even gather them. . .

Tragic, the young man who died. So so sad. But the restlessness of the pups was likely coyotes or a bobcat, or some critter they weren't happy about.

Dawn, I can't even process all the good stuff you post . . . the famed Annie's salsa--is that your recipe? I can google it, if not, I guess. Goodness knows, we do love tasty salsa. Most of the salsa I made 2 years ago was green tomato salsa--that was pretty good. I just couldn't stand to get rid of the green tomatoes, and they were far too green to even think about ripening inside. They were about the consistency of a tomatillo--speaking of which, I forgot to get and have to order. Immediately. Our onions are looking good--gotta get some straw on them before next freeze coming right up.

I guess Oklahoma is prime gardening for okra? I will confess that I'd never tasted okra until my move to here. I didn't dislike it, but wasn't enamored, though liked the pickled ones I had more than plain okra. Do you all grow okra? And if so, any really tasty ways to fix it?

And yes, Dawn--we really only eat fresh or frozen veggies, never canned--except for tomatoes, of course. And we love cabbage and love the idea of making sauerkraut. We have no fruit but am thinking we'll get a couple pear trees and an apple. . . . and of course I'll have to give the hard-to-grow blueberries a try--what other great berries grow well here?

I guess Oklahoma is prime gardening for okra?

Straight up.

Breaded and fried. I like to chop, bread and freeze them and put them in serving-sized baggies in the freezer. I fry or bake them up and we eat them like popcorn.

They sell whole okra at Wally World for more than $3 a lb!

But but but . . . chickencouple (Bon, right?). . . I am needing to watch calories! You are not helping! Are there any less fattening ways to fix it that are good? LOL

Hazel, The coyotes and bobcats are increasingly hungry and hunting increasingly close to homes here, so it wouldn't surprise me if that's happening close to your place too. And, I wouldn't rule out a restless spirit. There's so much that we don't know about the spirit world after someone departs this earth. When we have restless nights, it usually is because of the full moon. It seems like Tim and I always toss and turn on the night the moon is full, and often on a night or two before it is full and a night or two after it is full.

The fires we're having now are different from usual February wildfires. They're creating more smoke than usual (and that's saying a lot), so it can be hard for firefighters in the middle of a field to see the flames due to the dense smoke. This makes fighting them harder and more dangerous. They also are moving very fast even in relatively low wind speed. If fires are this bad now, I dread seeing what they will be like in March with March's stronger winds. Our last two fires have been so smokey that you couldn't look at them from the perimeter and guesstimate their size because the smoke blocked your view of how far the flames went. I'm guessing it is the green grass and plants which contain water (our relative greenness this week is 29%) burning along with the dry, cured vegetation because green vegetation produces more smoke and heat due to the release of oxygen as it burns.

We had a large fire yesterday and our big brush pumper that carries 1200 gallons of water got stuck in the mud. Once you're stuck, it is a dire situation. Now, I've had a tiller stuck in mud, I've had a trowel or shovel stuck in mud. I've even had a pickup stuck in mud on our property, but I've never had a 5,000 pound truck carrying almost 10,000 pounds of water stuck in a field in a fire. Can you imagine? Chris went to aid the guy driving the truck, with its tires deeply mired in mud. He got out a shovel and dug out all the mud around the tires in no time (all those hours in the gym have paid off!) but it still was bogged down. A friend of ours brought a bobcat over (he's a truly wonderful man and always helps us when we are in his neck of the woods) and the property owner brought his tractor and hooked up a chain to the truck. The bobcat pushed, the tractor pulled from behind and they got the truck out of the mud. Luckily, our firefighters had extinguished the fire in that area before the truck got stuck so neither the truck nor firefighters were in danger from fire while the truck was stuck. This whole incident highlights how hard it is to fight wildfire on very muddy ground. And, if I had been at home trying to dig in the garden, I might have bogged down in mud too. It is just that wet! Very wet soil and very dry vegetation are a bad combination. Throw in record to near-record heat expected today, low relative humidity values, and strong wind and you have a recipe for an Extreme Fire Danger day, which is what much of the state faces today.

Grapes: because of our high humidity here, growing healthy grapes can be challenging. If you choose to grow them, always, always, always prune heavily as the growing guides tell you to. If you leave too much foliage, the health of the grapes and the plants themselves will be seriously compromised because poor air flow will contribute to disease issues. I've watched over the last 10-15 years as several people near us have tried to put in small to mid-sized grape-growing operations. None of them have succeeded. In the drought years, the dry weather gets the plants, in the wet years, the humidity and disease get them, and pests are a constant problem. You have to really, really, really spend a lot of time and effort maintaining grapes properly to get a crop here. It is too much work for too little return for me.

Nancy, Yes, the recipe I used to make salsa is the famed Annie's Salsa recipe. To Annie herself goes all the praise and glory because she came up with this recipe. I just follow her directions! You can find it here on Garden Web on the Harvest Forum, where Annie herself posts regularly. It is the best homemade salsa recipe ever. Everyone who tastes it insists we should can it commercially and go into business selling it. (It seems to me that if anyone is going to profit off Annie's Salsa that way, it ought to be Annie herself!) Annie worked with her extension service to get the recipe tested and approved for safety years ago (something that budget cuts likely preclude ever happening again, I imagine) so it is a safety-approved recipe. My favorite way to make it is with 1/3 ReaLime Juice, 1/3 ReaLemon Juice and 1/3 vinegar instead of 100% vinegar because when you make it that way, you really cannot even taste the vinegar. For most home-canned salsa, the vinegar is the deal-breaker, taste-wise, for most people, along with a watery salsa, and Annie solved both of those issues with this recipe.

Okra is best when dredged in corn meal and fried in bacon drippings in a cast iron skillet. That is some mighty fine eating right there! My dad used to make a dish (sorry, no recipe follows as this is just one of those dishes you make up as you go along) where he'd slice up the okra, dice or slice potatoes into fairly small pieces, chop up an onion, celery and some bell pepper and then would mix all those together in a cast iron skillet filled with bubbling lard/bacon fat and would fry them together. If he was lacking one of the ingredients like onion, celery or bell pepper on a given day, he'd make it without that ingredient. When they were a couple of minutes away from being done, he'd scattered handfuls of cornmeal over the top of the mixture, sprinkle on salt and black pepper, and keep stirring the whole mess with a wooden spoon until the corn meal was golden-brown and crunchy. I could make a meal out of a plate of that concoction. Another way I like to prepare okra is to slice it into 1/4" rounds as if I was going to fry it, but then I just put it on a cookie sheet and put it in the oven with the convection oven set on 'dehydrate' mode. What you end up with is essentially okra chips, instead of potato chips, and you can salt them and eat them. I can eat them endlessly. A friend of mine uses okra in gumbo. Another traditional okra dish is stewed okra and tomatoes cooked together, and that is one of the healthier ways to prepare okra.

I make sauerkraut every year, usually about 30 or 40 pints. I could make more, but we wouldn't eat it. Last year I had something fermenting in my kitchen all summer long---progressively, one after another, not all at the same time. I made regular sauerkraut, I made a hot pepper-carrot type sauerkraut, and then I made multiple batches of Linda Lou's sweet pickle chunks (recipe also over there on the Harvest Forum) followed by multiple batches of end-of-the-cucumber-season Mock Apple Rings. I always intend to make kimchi but then get bogged down in canning tomatoes and pickles and jalapeno peppers (candied jalapenos are the best thing in the world!) and my plans to make kimchi never come to fruition. Normally the last thing I can in the summer is Habanero Gold jelly, a beautiful and tasty jelly made with dried apricots and habanero peppers. It also contains diced onions and peppers. You dice them up small so they look like confetti floating in the apricot-colored jelly. It usually is the last thing I can because habaneros are late to mature. Sometimes a friend of ours who has an apple tree gives us apples in late summer or early autumn and if that happens, then the last thing I can is Apple Pie Jam. I can a lot of extra stuff just for the sheer pleasure of giving it away. We give away hundreds of jars of home-canned food every year. Everyone loves Annie's Salsa so much that they beg for more of it year-round. Some of our friends offer me money for a jar of salsa, but I won't take their money. I don't let anyone give me money for fresh produce shared for our garden and I won't let them give me money for the canned goods I make from garden produce either. The way I was raised is that your friend's money is no good with you for this purpose...you give from your garden purely for the joy of giving.....so, that's what I do.

I need to get off this computer pretty soon and get downstairs to the kitchen and start cooking for the firefighters. On a Red Flag Fire Warning day like today, when it is at all possible, I try to bake cookies and make snack-type finger food (sausage balls, bacon cheese crisps, bacon-wrapped chicken, and sometimes even mini Cheddar Bay biscuits, etc.) in advance. That way, if we are stuck outdoors at fires for hours, I have finger food for quick snacks. If the fires are prolonged, we usually end up making gazillions of cold cut sandwiches which we try to serve with bagged chips and fruit, or, more rarely, someone goes to town and brings us back hamburgers or pizzas (but that gets really expensive really quickly if you're out with dozens of firefighters). Sometimes if we're expecting an epic fire day (like April 9, 2009), Fran and I will make chili, chicken tortilla soup, chicken noodle soup, taco soup, chicken and dumplings, etc. in advance and take those dishes to the fire already hot in crockpots (we have an inverter so we can plug in things in our truck). That is especially true in March and April when the winds can make the weather feel bitterly cold.

Today, however, doesn't seem like a soup kind of day as it just will be too hot. It might be a sweet tea day. Sometimes in the worst weather we make them sweet tea to go along with the bottled water and Gatorade. I think they've upped our forecast high to 86 now, and have lowered our forecast humidity and increased our wind speed. It is looking much worse for today's fire weather in our county than it looked at 3:30 a.m. when I woke up and checked the weather. The newer forecasts that came out shortly before 5 a.m. with all the new numbers are depressing. We picked up 10 more cases of drinks yesterday and I think, in combination with what we already had, we can cover anything that happens in this county today. We're about as ready as we can be.

I hope everyone enjoys this pretty weather today. By tomorrow night/Sat. morning we'll all be freezing and the 80-90 degree highs will be just a memory.

Dawn

Nancy, you can eat okra raw. Pick them small and put them in your salad. You can roast them in the oven as well. Cut in medallion slices or lengthwise drizzled with olive oil and just salt and pepper. Or oven fry by dipping in cornmeal and then roasting. Of course, it goes in gumbo, too. Over on the Harvest Forum there are threads about whether or not to blanch before freezing and oven blanching. (Sorry to start another addiction, the Harvest forum may be the next best thing to OK Gardening) Okra is surprisingly nutritious, too.

Yes, Amy! I spent about 90 minutes early this morning checking out Harvest. Thank you Dawn and Amy! LOL Okay. If I'm going to live in Oklahoma, I better get some okra planted this year. (Besides, I LOVE cajun; gonna make me some gumbo! I wanted to make gumbo in MN--yes, I could find okra at the store, but could NOT find file powder ANYWHERE in the stores. Finally found it on Penzeys (which IS in Mpls-St Paul). I asked many different grocery clerks about file, and none had any idea what I was talking about. Same with tasso--no one had heard of such a thing! ) Thanks for the okra help. I liked the pickled okra I had last fall. It was kind of hot and spicy.

BTW, that Harvest forum is amazing, isn't it! Wow. My head was spinning. And I can hardly wait to make sauerkraut! I hope my cabbages grow. This is all a little new to me. . . . but I forge on with cautious optimism (I'm kind of an optimist, anyway, so not a big change for me), understanding anything can happen--THAT much I know from gardening! And sometimes it's even good stuff that happens.

Nancy RW, I like okra canned like a bread & butter pickle. This is almost to good. What to remember is that okra has few calories so that makes it healthy no matter how it is fixed. wink! wink!

Okiedawn, Your Dad knew what was good. A cast iron frying pan, bacon drippings, chopped up potatoes, onions, bell peppers, cornmeal sprinkled on top and just when this is about done break an egg right in the middle and stir all up until every thing has a little scrambled egg mixed in. Breakfast or brunch.

I must say, this firefighting is another whole new thing to me! First, I had no idea there are so many fires (probably in most areas of the country, here and there, and thus, didn't appreciate how very busy the volunteers are! I better make cookies and drop them off at the fire department doorstop (which is only about 3 miles from us on the way to town. I guess the trick would be finding someone there at the time of the cookie delivery. Well, the lady across the road from me is a volunteer--I can just talk to her about it.

I agree with authereray, Dawn--the potato skillet affair sounded amazing. I often fix the potato skillet with peppers and onions and whatever else I can think of to throw in it--but the corn meal would have to take it to a whole new level. I am going to try that, for sure!

Oh yes. For Okra, smaller is best. They toughen with age. Don't do anything but toss tough okra or your taste buds will be ruined for eternity for Okra.

I also put them in goulash.

cornmeal breading:
cornmeal or flour
garlic
salt
paprika
white pepper
sometimes cayenne or parmesan

egg/milk dredge, just enough for adhesion

placed breaded okra piece evenly across a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper until frozen. Place in ziplock bags. Continue as many times as needed.

The cookie sheet method is good to simulate flash freezing.

If you don't eat much okra, one or two plants will do.

bon

Good to know. Small is best. Toss tough okra. I'm going to buy some when we get groceries today. . . time to venture out.

Back in the old days When I could eat tomatoes I would cook sliced onion and okra together in cast iron skillet until well browned and then add diced tomatoes. Garlic salt and whatever other spice and heat through. If you do it fast okra is still crispy and ssooooo good.

And I suppose low in calories ; )

hahaha I've never used bacon grease. when I bake them, it's with drizzles of olive or corn oil. I think you're right about "fast". When I'm freezing them up I work quickly after cutting and no cutting until I'm ready to freeze. Tastes fresh.

Bacon grease is the best second day is tallow. It's all I use anymore.

We did it, Amy! We got Nancy addicted to the Harvest forum. I confess I don't go there and read any more, I only go there to search for recipes. Just not enough hours in the day.....

authereray, My dad did know good food. Real food. The kind of stuff his grandma and mother would have made in the early decades of the 1900s. He was born in 1919 and your food was what you raised or could obtain by bartering. I'm sure they ate better than we do---lots more real food, almost all from their farm---and no junk.

Large okra is not always tough okra. It can be, but it doesn't have to be. Some varieties can get really long (cowhorn, for example) and not get tough, and that's just a part of that variety's genetics. Other varieties can produce long pods that don't get woody and tough as long as they have plentiful moisture. However, if you let the plants get too dry, all the pods will be woody. And, some varieties that are very popular can get woody very fast, so I generally avoid those. Why put up with woody okra if you don't have to? My favorite for making okra chips is Beck's Big Buck (a snapping okra) because the pods are large in diameter.

You can see some pods on a BBB plant right here. Look at how big around they are in relation to their length:

Beck's Big Buck Okra

If you harvest pods every morning and every evening, they'll never stay on the plant long enough to get woody or tough.

Kim, I mostly use okra grease too, or sometimes coconut oil or olive oil. I avoid corn oil because it is inflammatory, though I'll use it in a cake recipe if that is what the recipe specifies. I don't use margarine ever. I've long hated fake fats and do my best to avoid them and to use real fats.

Dawn

hahaha. . . yes it is one of the more amazing places I've been online. I will have a great great time reading through it.

LOL, Dawn, except morning and evening at leat ONE pod will hide, like pole bean pods, until it's huge and you wonder how the heck you missed it. Added BBB to my things to try list. I like Green Velvet, because it doesn't seem to get woody as fast as some others. Slated to try Stewart Zeebest this year. IF I decided I needed more from SESE I could get BBB this year...trying to resist temptation to go look...

I know it was a typo, but okra grease made me giggle. My best friend from high school lived in the oil patch near Ponca City in the early 80s. Though her dad was a gardener, I think she was a city girl like me. Someone gave her a bunch of okra and she sat cutting it up over a paper bag while watching TV. She was shocked to find a bagful of snot upon finishing. I don't know if she could even bring herself to cook it.

Okra grease. lol. I am sure I meant bacon grease, or bacon fat or bacon drippings. Okra isn't greasy unless we make it so. I agree sometimes those pods hide. I try to look at them when they bloom and remember where they are so I can harvest them a couple of days later, but with the way my memory malfunctions these days, it might be a wonder that I even remember to harvest them at all. I agree Green Velvet doesn't get as woody as fast. Really, I don't think anything turns woody more quickly than Clemson Spineless, which is a long-time favorite of my dad, his entire family and all the gardeners I can think of in my mom's family. When I was a kid, I thought Celmson Spineless was the only okra in the world. I believe Stewart's Zeebest was derived from Louisiana Green Velvet.

Okra slime or okra goop or okra mucous, which I think is actually referred to by refined persons as mucilage, is a real thing, and I don't much care for it, which is why I like my okra fried or dehydrated/roasted into okra chips. I know there is a reason for the slime, but I no longer remember what it is.

Here's our latest signs of spring: the peach trees now are blooming, joining the plum trees that have been blooming all week. Since we're supposed to get down to freezing Friday night/Saturday morning, it seems like we may lose some of the fruit crop, if not all of it. The sand plums are a day or so away from blooming. If we only go to 32, that's not too worrisome, but since our microclimate often goes much colder than forecast, I don't know what to expect----but it probably will not be good.

In the laundry room this evening, I found a crane fly. We used to see them, albeit outdoors, in May, or occasionally in April. Then, in a couple of weirdly hot springs, we had them in mid- to late-March. Now, in February. It is mind-boggling.

RIP to Dawn's fruit trees.

Dawn, you were talking about pecan trees getting occasionally fooled by early spring weather? Mine are budding out.

Well, my trees won't die, but the baby fruit and blossoms might, Bon. It would be okay if the plum trees died. With the way our winters are veering warmer and warmer, they're probably always going to bloom too early and that will be that. The peaches usually are a couple of weeks later, but then nothing is normal this year. Maybe climate change is really setting in and this is the new normal. We won't know for a while, but I do wonder if someday we'll look back at 2017 as the year we realized the climate is changing and getting warmer and warmer faster and faster and faster. It isn't that we're having the occasional really hot day in January or February. We've always had those. It's that we're increasingly having more of them. Time will tell.

Rebecca, Is it a native pecan? Mine are, and the one in the yard must be 50 years old so it isn't fooled often. Maybe twice a decade. I looked at it this morning and it still looks fully dormant. However, we hit 87 degrees this week and I think we hit 88 last week...or the week before...so the tree certainly should be reacting to all that warmth.

Today I also noticed grasshoppers all over the place. They aren't even new nymphs. They're about an inch long so they've been around a while. I'm not happy to see them.

I feel like Springtime this year is a runaway train rolling down the track, and there's nothing we can do to stop it or even slow it down. So where does that leave us? Is the cool season going to end before we even can get our cool-season crops in the ground????? I am seriously re-evaluating my 2017 Grow List and may slash the quantity of cool-season plants in a huge way. There is absolutely no point in devoting a lot of space to cool-season plants if we're not going to have much of a cool season. This whole thing is so vexing.

So, we cool off and have a couple of cool nights and then right after that we warm up again. I have fought and fought and fought the idea of an early Spring inside my head. I don't want it. I want a nice cool season with loads of kale and collards and lettuce and everything else. I don't want for us to be abnormally warm in March and April, but I fear we will be. I'm not ready to deal with a hot anything. Don't want a hot March, nor a hot April nor a hot May. Can't we have some mild and normal Spring weather before summer type weather arrives? When plants bloom too early and freeze or their flowers fry in abnormally hot weather, it hurts the whole ecosystem. Little insects and other creatures need for their food supplies to be available at the right times. When things start happening too early, it hurts the whole system in ways we cannot always see. That bothers me.

We always look at the weird weather through the rose-colored (pun intended) glasses of gardeners. We think early warmth is great because it lets us plunge ahead with our desire to get out in the garden and do things early. We also have to look at it through the eyes of the birds and the bees and the crane flies and the butterflies and every other living creature that shares this world with us. We don't want for their world to be turned upside down and inside out because the weather is doing odd things. As discombobulated as all this early heat has made all of us feel, imagine what it does to them. We can just adjust planting plans and schedules and what have you, but once the heat wakes them up and causes them to become more active, it is imperative that they find the food supply they need. We can't be sure that's happening when all the plants are blooming early or out of sequence or whatever.

When geese are flying north (they've already made it to Jay in SW KS) in February, something just is not right! It is starting to drive me crazy.

Dawn, I'm sure it's a Native. The house is about 65 years old, and the trees are so huge it's possible they were here before the house. So big that two of me couldn't reach around it.

Does anyone hear that screeching sound? All this nice warm weather coming to a halt. The weather people are calling for a freeze this week end and maybe one by next week end.

With all this talk of a freeze I have several shrubs planted last year budding out as well as some voluntary hollyhocks that are about two inches tall. Should I try to cover them? My knockout roses are also budding out, really hoping not to lose everything! Also I have cool season lettuce, spinach, and beets which are in monster containers, not movable, should I cover them also?

Authereray that's funny.

I do hear it. My plants are hearing it too. Our predicted 36 went down to 24 and all my babies are in the car lol.

My apricot tree is blooming. I do not think it got down to 24 like they say because I did not have my heaters on and it was only down to 50 in here. I will see when I go out to the car. I put the min max therm in there.

Thought I submitted this yesterday! While the convo was on the topic of okra! Oh well here it is.

I can't help but be reminded of Forrest Gump's Shrimp List when it comes to Okra! So many ways to fix it!

One of my favorites is to toss chopped okra in olive oil, seasoned with roasted garlic and herb and grilled. I use a non-stick grilling bowl. We often add chopped yellow squash, zucchini and onion or any combination of the three just to change things up. If the slime bothers a person, simply grill it a little longer.

Most of the okra I freeze is chopped for frying. It's unbreaded to allow flexibility when we cook with it. If we want it breaded, I simply dust the semi frozen okra with flour, dip in milk and then toss in cornmeal. This makes a nice thick coating. If we don't want the thick coating, we skip the flour and milk.

The screeching sound of the cold front slamming into the state is real. The wind! But, it doesn't last. Down here, we'll have a high of 68 Monday and 75 Tuesday so the cold is fairly fleeting. I don't mind the cold nights. They feel normal and nothing I have growing in the ground will be harmed by cold nights in February, except for the fruit trees that lost their minds and bloomed too early. It is the warm days that are the problem. They need to stay cooler to keep cool-season plants happy.

Rebecca, We'll see if this cold front makes your pecan tree slam on the brakes and slow down a little. I won't be able to see its impact on mine since it hasn't even budded yet (and I'm glad).

Kim, We have had a couple of nights like that lately where the cold fell much lower than was forecast. It happens. We've also been having a lot of highs get higher than forecast. I think that the established weather models are "off" more and more these days as our climate patterns change and they haven't caught up with the changes. How could they? Our weather is so goofy.

Bruce, I agree there's many ways to fix okra. It is really a lot more versatile than most people think.

Now that the first crane flies are appearing here, I'll be watching for the first June bugs, which always have arrived here in May. Then they started arriving in April in warm years, and for the last couple of warm winters, we've even had them in March. I'm starting to wonder if I'll see one in February. We still have a few days to go. I'm tired of all the February wacky weather and hoping the weather settles down into a more consistent pattern in March.

I see Mesonet is calling it spring with occasional wintery days.

I found it interesting, Bon, that Gary was posting phenology photos from the National Phenology Network on the Mesonet ticker. Some of the OKC TV mets have been posting them on FB as well for quite some time. I've been looking at those weekly this entire year and wondering what in the world is going on. You know, it is not so odd for Texas or Oklahoma or any other southern state to have an early Spring....but to see it happening so much further north is astonishing, and the rate at which it has proceeded north is almost mind-blowing.

I feel the description of it being Spring with occasional winter days is quite apt. A lot of our springs are like that down here, but it is odder for this to be happening significantly further north. If it wasn't for that once or twice a week wintery night in March and often in April as well, we could plant warm season crops in late Feb or earliest Mar of most years.

I do hate that for the second year in a row we have had snakes out in Jan and Feb. That is just wrong, wrong, wrong. I hate losing two of the few snake-free months where I don't have to watch my feet and worry about stepping on a copperhead or rattlesnake. A snake rattled at me near the greenhouse yesterday, and I froze in place and looked and looked and looked for it, but couldn't find it, so I just backed away from the greenhouse and went indoors. A few hours later, I heard a rattle coming from (apparently) beneath the chicken coop. At the beginning of February I told Tim it already was Spring here at our house and dared the weather to prove me wrong. It hasn't. It isn't going to.

Our bird population was huge all winter. It is like a lot of the ones that usually migrate just didn't, or maybe some of the migrating flocks made it this far and just stopped and went no further. Either way, since we feed the birds, our place has been like a bird sanctuary all "winter" and I've had a hard time keeping the feeders filled. Since moving here, we've had two winters with a lot of hot days in February and March. Both of them were accompanied by some pretty wicked summer weather....I mean, more wicked than our usual hot, dry weather.....not that the summer weather isn't always wickedly hot, because it is.

I was thinking today might be a nice day to work in the garden because maybe all the heat had dried up the mud some. Then I went outdoors to feed birds in a wind chill in the 30s and decided to work on some tasks that need to be done indoors.

I have a lot of seedlings. A few times I've begun a question regarding these seedlings for this forum only to delete it. I realize nobody has an answer. Because of the weather. All I can do is move all the seedlings around to the greatest light source all day ever day endlessly until the weather becomes consistent. Essentially, I'm following the sun all day long. I suppose that's appropriate for a gardener. I do this ever year. It's tiring, but it works because as most all seedlings survive, but it's tiring.

I talked with my husband about lighting and accommodations the other night. Our conversation spilled over into an all year long gardening set up which we both think is ridiculous because the most logical idea is to move though I think everywhere in the US the weather is acting odd.

I don't think this is going to get any easier. In fact, I think it might get worse. I remember when I first joined the forum. Warm weather would show up in February and you were quick to reign us in from our temptation to believe it was time. The weather would prove you correct in a matter of days. Then, weeks. Now, you don't know. Nobody knows. The only thing we really know is what the seedlings need and we somehow manage to provide it for them save the occasional sunburn or cold wind burn when we cannot move fast enough or become distracted with other things.

Outside, today, it is too cold. My toes are cold, but it's only because of the wind. The sun is bright and warm.

I'm very tempted to light a fire and take the chill off the house. I've yet to wake the kids because I don't want them suffering the jarring cold. I won't burn - not if It isn't absolutely essential to health. As with most winters, we study late into the evenings, especially now with seedlings needing care.

I first lied to myself when looking at the tips of the pecan trees. Oh, they're good. My eyes are bad. Self-admittance forced me to go outside and get close. sure enough, the buds are there. What about the sweet pea vines? Growing. The honeysuckle? Surely it's not ... It is. The daffodils, grape hyacinth, burdock, naked ladies, Austrian cover crop peas, yarrow, hooting owls, active hawks, my kids riding bikes and scooters with red hot faces and probably more that I'm missing all spell spring.

I understand it less than you which doesn't say much, but I'm worried. I'm worried that I need to do all that I can to encourage the growth of some warm weather vegetables before it becomes outrageously hot.

I told my husband to expect outrageous water bills this summer and to buy hay. I don't have a system in place. I'm even considering some synthetic nitrogen in some places. I don't want to and I won't prolong its use, but I've got to start somewhere. Anything requiring nitrogen cannot grow. It either can't grow from the ground or when it does, it reaches above ground and gets eaten before it can establish itself. I had to top the comfrey plant with a milk crate to keep the rabbits off. Dang rabbits, I plant Austrian peas for them!

The birds are already investigating the disturbed soil from me working in the garden yesterday. The doves are there and I hope they're not picking my onion plants. I need more mulch. I'm considering weed eating the neighbor's 5 foot patch of spent Johnson grass weeds, snipping any seeds off and chopping it up for mulch. I don't think he has a trimmer and I don't think he'd mind. It's in the back alley including the back side of all the houses which bill and I tend mostly to ourselves.

I don't want to admit it. I'm two weeks behind you. I'm always two weeks behind you, but everything here is screaming spring, as well.

I am propagating mulberry trees. I can no longer procrastinate on trees. My intent is to allow the trash trees to shelter pecan saplings. I'll take it from there.

Trees can help stabilize microclimates. That's all I've got.

Bon, This is one of those years where all you can do is cope with what is happening. We sure don't have any control over the weather in the first place, but at least most years we can make decisions about seedlings based on what "normally" is happening. The problem is that things are not happening in the usual way any more. Who even knows what normal is? Someone who had just moved to my county last year or the year before, based on the weather we've been having, would think that it rains all the time and that winter barely occurs at all, and only for brief little hit-and-run cold spells. They'd probably think it is okay to put warm season crops in the ground any time in March. Why wouldn't they? We've been in the 80s so much that a newcomer could be forgiven for thinking that we really don't have winter here.

Where's a person going to move to? Climate change (and I am not trying to start ANY kind of argument about why it is occurring, but just noting that every year we are having tons and tons of above-average temperatures recorded worldwide and very few below-average ones recorded world-wide, relatively speaking) is real. It is happening. We are seeing exactly the kinds of wild weather swings (even wild for OK where wild is the norm) and extreme weather events that climate change groups and scientists/researchers have been saying would occur in a warming climate. So, I think there's no place to move to that is not being affected. We just have to attempt to learn the new patterns and adapt to them. Adaptation is an important part of survival for any and all species.

I read an article this week about the sugar maples budding early in some northern states and how it affects the sugar maple industry. Once the trees begin to bud, the sap that they are collecting to make sugar becomes less sweet, and it can take a lot more sap to boil down to make a gallon of maple syrup. So, early budding just almost ruins the sugaring season. The difference in the amount of sap needed in early hot weather versus normal weather is astonishing. This is not something I'd ever even thought about, but it is something that has maple tree farmers and the maple syrup industry guys tossing and turning at night. What are they going to do? Move to Alaska? Ooops. Maybe not. Alaska has been having abnormally warm winters for several years now. We all just have to learn to adapt and to deal with our plants as they adapt.

I agree with you that we don't really know how to proceed at this point. My gut feeling is that I will plant substantially fewer cool-season crops, plant warm-season crops earlier, and try to push hard to get a lot harvested and a lot of food put up via various food preservation methods early. Then, if we get insanely hot and/or dry this summer, I won't have to fight the heat or drought so much. Will is work? I have no idea.

One Spring about 10 years back we were really warm and I had tomato plants planted and even had pepper plants in the ground. With about 4 or 5 days warning, we knew a very cold, sleety-snowy spell was returning very late in the season. I quickly built low tunnels over all my beds (and some pretty high low tunnels over the caged tomato plants). By pretty quickly, I mean it took me at least 3 days to do it, fighting strong wind all the way. I gathered every container I could find that would hold water, and put water filled containers in each low tunnel to serve as solar collectors. I finished barely in time. I didn't have hoops, so I just attached the plastic to tomato cages, stakes, fence poles, whatever I could scrape up. (This was in my pre-row-cover days, for the most part.) My plastic-covered rows of plants survived 3 weeks of very cold temperatures, cold rain and sleet. They grew. The tomtaoes and peppers even bloomed there in the tunnels. There never was a day where I felt confident they'd survive. It always seemed like we were on the verge of getting too cold for their tunnels to protect them. When that long cold spell was over, I resolved I'd never be surprised like that again. That's when I started buying row covers in different sizes and weights, slowing accumulating more and more over the years. I started just automatically putting low tunnel hoops over rows as they are planted. That leaves me in the position of only having to drag out the row covers and use them if a change back to very cold weather is imminent. It still takes time to put covers over each bed and to weigh them down to the ground, but not nearly as long as it takes to start from scratch.

You can only do what you can do. The same is true of all of us. Sometimes Mother Nature...the climate, the weather, etc.....are hard on gardens and gardeners. Really, there's not ever a year that is just a piece of cake. Maybe 2012 came close to being that way, but we don't get a spring like 2012 very often.

Everyone wants a gardening formula to follow...you know, like this: If you do A + B + C (-d + f), you've followed the proper equation for success and will have a beautiful garden and great harvest. The problem is that there is no proven formula. There are no guarantees. Sometimes you do A + B + C(-d + f) and have a struggling garden and poor harvest anyhow because there's too many variables involved.

As bad as we have it now, always fighting the weather and the climate and trying to jump over all the hurdles thrown in our way, the truth is that we have it easy nowadays compared to folks here in this region in the Dust Bowl days. That is why I reread the incredible book "The Worst Hard Time" every single summer. I use it to remind myself that even with all our challenges there have been worse times, and mostly people survived them (clearly dust pneumonia got a lot of folks, and I'm not ignoring that, but many others survived).

I do wonder what the future holds. Maybe someday, the most efficient home garden will by a hydroponic garden set up inside a shop building or greenhouse where you can totally control the climate within which you're growing your plants. That will be a shame, because I feel like gardening is all about the soil, the sunshine, the circle of life in nature, etc.

You've got this. Every year you're working to improve your soil and to find the techniques and methods that work best for you in your location and your climate. That is all anyone can do.

Dawn

Chickencoupe, Oklahoma Gardening on ch:13 advises to use Blood Meal to improve nitrogen deficiency in soil. Have you ever tried it ? I haven't but they say it works.

I have 4 kinds of lettuce, mustard, turnips, radishes, spinach, broccoli & onions planted and coming up so hope it doesn't get so cold it kills any of it. I also have a rabbit grazing on my onion plants, I let it go last year because it was a little baby bunny but he is not a baby this year and grown so if I get a chance to it will make supper this year.

tx autherray I've heard of it, but never allowed myself to buy any. haha I think of trying urea on non-veggies. And divide that one comfrey plant that I have.

Be careful when putting urea on flowers because it can burn them if not placed on the soil and worked in. I know because I have killed many flowers over the years, trying to make them grow.

Thank you. Will do. Yeah, I've never done it before. Should be interesting. ha

I have my blood meal, bone meal, along with my rock dust, peat, kelp and alfalfa meal, Espoma organic fertilizers, leaves leaves and more leaves (but never enough), straw, cardboard and newspapers (and a bit of compost). Feeling better armed this year, marching on to help the plants! LOL I'm just wondering if any of you have noticed the blood or bone meal or urea might help just a teense as pest deterrents.. . have my castor oil pellents, big containers of chili powder, cinnamon, and a big bottle of hot sauce to add to my rotten egg, garlic liquid mixture. AND will get my fishing string fences fortified with 5 strands this year for the non-fenced beds. I'm getting the idea down here that mulch and more mulch and heavy mulch is a must for all the beds. And I love the mulch!

Dawn always writes that the biggest pest deterrent is healthy plants that have the ability to fend off pests. If it takes these types of ferts to help them be strong, so be it.

:) I'm IT, Kim! LOL. BTW, loved your idea of the yellow and golden bed. Sounds lovely.

In my garden, blood meal and bone meal work fine, but attract many kinds of animals looking for the dead animals they believe are represented by the blood and bone smell they're picking up on. I get dogs, cats, coons, possums, skunks and buzzards, to name a few. Luckily the 8' tall garden fence keeps most of them out of the garden itself as long as I remember to close the gate, but it is sort of a creepy feeling to be working in the garden while the buzzards fly in circles overhead. Fish emulsion likewise attracts cats (not just the domesticated pet cats) and coons.

*giggles* Guys, it's not me. I'm tellin' ya. I'm alive and well. I know where some snakes are, tho.


Someone was telling me that's why natural gas is tained to stink. They find the gas leaks by spotting the birds or something like that.

lol. Nothing would surprise me.