dbarron, The one thing I regret most about our particular location is all the wildlife from the river bottom lands that move upland onto our property in drought, searching for food....including gazillions of snakes, and they all want to eat eggs and chicks. If I never see another chicken snake, rat snake, or any other snake (copperheads are fairly common) inside the chicken coop again in my life, I'll be happy. We should have bought land on top of a big hill, not in a creek hollow in a river valley. On the other hand, our friends who built their home 2 miles away from us up on top of a hill had their house struck by lightning 10 or 12 years ago, so I guess every location has its risk...but they rarely had snakes up around the house. Of course, they didn't have chickens either. It was even worse when we had guineas. I always heard that guineas would help keep snakes away, but in our case, I think the incessant yakking of the guineas called in the snakes to come eat the keats. We killed one black rat snake one day they had eaten four half-grown keats. I never would have thought it could eat even one because they were a pretty good size, but it ate four. It does not help that my husband thinks all snakes are good snakes and would patiently relocated rat snakes and chicken snakes to some other place on our property---maybe 200 or 300 yards from the chicken coop. He didn't want to kill them. Well, they'd be back in the chicken coop before he made it back to the house and he finally had to admit defeat in that area and start killing them. One of the great snake memories is that 4 wooden eggs, placed in chicken nesting boxes to get young laying hens to actually lay eggs in the nesting boxes all disappeared. Obviously a snake swallowed them up. I guess it saw the error of its ways and regurgitated the 4 wooden eggs onto the ground, behind the Jeep's rear tires, about 25' away from the chicken coop. We had a good laugh about that. We hit 22 and 23 degrees for two consecutive nights, even though the days have been pretty warm. I'm so tired of the cold nights and frosts, but the fruit trees do not care and have been blooming in our neighborhood for 4 or 5 days now. Of course, it is far too early but there those blooms are. I felt really cold at 22 and 23 until I read your 17! Jennifer, Did he get kicked in the throat? Or the lungs? Maybe something is damaged. Or, maybe he just figured out it is better to stay quiet and fly under the radar. I'm glad your procedure went well and hope you are healing well. Kim, What Moni said....and, garden soil is meant for adding to raised beds and such, not for containers. It is too heavy to do well in containers in general, no matter what brand it is. dbarron, I am crossing my fingers and hoping the Sunday rain misses us, because if it does, I think I can finally get into the garden to at least clean out the raised beds beginning Monday. (This is a grandkid weekend, so no work tomorrow afternoon...). We'll see. The landscaping work "might" be able to be started, somehow, next weekend if the rain will stay away. Our soil still is too wet and heavy to rent a sod cutter, but we might be able to work on something else. If we get pretty much any rain at all between now and next weekend, I don't think we could do anything in the yard. It is just now to the point that we can walk in it without 'squishing' up the mud and leaving big footprints behind. The young dog who adopted us a few months ago likes to dig in the mud....he likes to dig in anything...so he comes in every day with a big chunk of mud dried to his nose, and I have to crack it and scrape it off his nose. He should be as tired of mud as I am. I can tell y'all that a big chunk of dried mud on a dog's nose is not a fashion statement. Jennifer, Since I cannot garden in any shape, form or fashion, I'm just working on other stuff, and if I stay off FB, it is amazing how productive I can be! lol. This is a grandchild weekend, so it has been filled so far with arts and crafts, shopping, cooking meals together, going to the park to play at the big playground, eating dinner out, "Family Movie Night" with ice cream, popcorn and videos every night, bubble baths and bath bombs for little girls, playing with the kittens, etc. Even if it wasn't so muddy, there probably wouldn't be much gardening going on because they are getting a full dose of it at home now with new beds and plants everywhere. How ironic that I am trying to give the grandkids a break from gardening....but it is because Chris has become so gardening obsessed. (grin) Lillie went to a sleepover birthday party last night and tried to learn how to use a hoverboard today, which resulted in a face-first collision into a parked car at her friend's house. That happened just before Chris picked her up and brought her here today, so we've been watching her eye swell and turn black, while making up silly stories that start out with "you should see how the other guy looks..." Of course, the drama of her accident makes her little sister wish she had gotten hurt and had a matching black eye, though I've tried to tell her that there's some things about her big sister's life that she doesn't want to copy. Kim, I'm sorry things are not working out as planned and hope it all ends well. Nancy, I'm fine. Other projects that are not garden-related are taking precedence during our aggravating rainy season, and staying off FB as much as possible gives me the time to work on them. I feel like I spend too much time on FB, so I'm trying to make a massive change there. Know what? I don't miss it as much as I thought I would. The less time I spend on FB, the less I miss it. I'm a stay-at-homer too and pretty much would stay home all the time if I could, but there's that pesky business of buying groceries and going to the feed store, etc., that need to be done at least occasionally. I don't dislike people, but at the same time, I'm happier at home. While we were out with the girls today, we missed a fire and, I am not going to lie, when the fire page popped up on the fire app on my phone, I glanced at it and said "yay, we're not home, can't go" which is totally the wrong attitude, but I don't care....that's how I felt. Even if we had been home, I wouldn't have gone because I am never going to take the girls to a fire as they do not belong there. The windy season approaches and I'm sure I'll spend too much time out at fires then, and the muddy ground makes it hard because you can't park/drive anywhere off paved roads or you'll get stuck, and we almost always have to get off the paved roads. I'm dreading that part of Spring, and it usually hits here in March. Jen, That's a lot of mulch hauling. I bet y'all all feel it in your muscles now and for the next few days. That heavy hauling is the part of gardening I really don't care for any more. I've done it all my life, and I'm getting to the point that my 60-year-old body doesn't want to do it any more. Yet, the need for heavy physical labor in the garden never really ends, so I guess I'll keep doing it for as long as I can. The rain largely missed us this week--only a quarter inch or so, and that has allowed for more surface drying. It all still is real wet underneath though. I think we are not quite as wet as Larry now, but cool-season planting still is questionable. I'm going to evaluate the soil in the tallest raised beds this week to see if they can dry out enough for onions. If not, there won't be any planted this year, and likely not potatoes either. I'm supposed to not plant any nightshades in the front garden this year as a form of crop rotation anyway, so I should just relax and stop feeling like I should be planting potatoes in there somewhere. I don't have hardware-cloth beds anywhere else to protect them from voles, so planting them out in the back garden is not a part of the plan either. I toyed with not having any veggies at all this year except for the peppers and tomatoes in large pots by the garage, but since we cannot do any landscaping in our mud pit of a yard, the raised beds in the front garden are looking more and more appealing now. I'm tempted to cover the whole side yard and back yard with black plastic and leave it for a year to kill the grass, but y'all know I won't because I am not that patient. I just want for the weather to cooperate for once. Spring is busting out all over here...random fruit trees are blooming and ornamental pears are blooming here and there. Tim said they were blooming in Sanger this past week, and we saw some around Marietta and Thackerville blooming yesterday and today. More and more wildflowers are blooming now and I see new ones almost every day. I am sure all the rain has pleased them enormously. Daffodils are in bloom everywhere as well. It certainly is too early for the fruit trees and I'm sure these nights in the 20s will kill the flowers that are in bloom and probably some of the buds that haven't opened yet. If we were only going into the upper 20s, it wouldn't be such a big thing, but we're hitting the lower 20s pretty often and blooming fruit trees cannot tolerate temperatures in the 20s without losing the flowers and fruit. I'm seeing tons and tons of gopher mounds on property all around us....next door....across the road, etc. The only reason we don't have gophers is because the cats kill them when they attempt to infiltrate our property, and somehow the gophers know that because they don't try to come into our yard very often. It must be a good gopher year, or perhaps it is the rain, because there's tons and tons of gopher mounds, and I do mean that in a bad way. I'm grateful the nights are still cold, because otherwise the snakes would be up more than they have been so far, but then, at least there would be plenty of gophers for them to eat. Dawn

I've just decided that I'm not going to worry about it. I'll go to the meeting and "protest" with the others, but, honestly, if they don't take our property to build anything, we will just stay here more than likely. It will not be fun being so close to a turnpike, though. My BIL said a developer will probably want our neighborhood at some point if the turnpike people don't take it. I guess, my things is--how much more do we put into this property if they'll force us out? This is not a fancy property at all OR a fancy house. We bought here because it really is just the perfect size for all we want to do. Our last house in a regular neighborhood was fancy and large, but had almost no backyard. I don't want to go into mega debt to buy a large piece of property. I'm sure we would qualify, but at our age, do we want a large house debt? We've paid this house down quite a bit since living here, plus used our money to add a 1200 sq ft. shop and do some remodeling--the entire kitchen, living, dining, and utility was gutted. The hall bath was remodeled a year ago. Tom did most of the work on the bathroom, though. Our bedrooms and other bathroom need help. The carpet and other bathroom especially. BUT, do we spend the time and money doing that? Also, just the work of adding the gardens and remodeling a 12'x16' shed into a nice coop. I just think of how much work I did on the kitchen garden--it took a couple of years to dig out all of the bermuda grass. But ya know, the local news keeps showing the same picture of Franklin NOT Indian Hills when it talks about the new turnpikes. It's the next main road to our south. To me, it makes more sense to use Franklin. Seems like there's less development. Except Toby Keith's house. lol. And his Hollywood Corners place. Oh, and the votech. We will just see what happens. Either we will stay, or we will be forced out. Whatever happens, we will bloom where we are planted. I'm not sore from my fall. Thank goodness. I might have a bruise. Once I realized I was not going to be able to stop it, I let myself just fall without tensing up. I've been sick a lot in 2022. It's like the first year I worked with children--was literally sick half the year. Maybe our immune systems were weakened from not being exposed for a couple of years. It's like starting over. What is everyone up to this weekend?

I tilled the garden yesterday and the tiller bucked and bounced through those rye grass clumps. It was a tough slow go. I had to muscle it a whole lot more than I wanted to. There was a point I didn't think I'd was gonna get it done. And I'm either way out of phyiscal condition or just feeling my 70 years. But its done and I'm ready to get going with 2023 gardening season. I usually plant my tomato seed in the next week. But this year I'm putting it off a couple more weeks cuz I don't like dealing with the tall plants. However, I normally get my first eating tomato around Memorial Day. If I put off the seed planting two more weeks, will that put off my first harvest till mid June ? I've never understood this " days to maturity " on the seed packets. Is that from when the seed is planted or when the plants go into the ground ? I've never noticed any diff between my plants started from seed and the plants I bought at a nursery. They all seem to produce an eating tomato at the same time. If I don't get my first tomato till mid June, then my window for the plants producing is greatly reduced. July heat and early blight will kill production in the first week or two of July.

I'm around, Kim. Just busy and tired. Also, not much to talk about that is garden related right now. Nothing new anyways. The neighbors' rooster that I was going to take to my friends tomorrow, died. I'll talk about it later. What a waste of life. Moving along on the bedroom remodeling. For the record, I will never texture a ceiling again. So glad the last bedroom ceiling is done. Just need to paint it now. Rick came out and cut potatoes, but I was texturing the ceiling so didn't spend any time outdoors other than feeding animals. The little tray of seedlings continues to look great. Rick, there are many churches that focus on grace....you just have to find one. Has anyone watched The Chosen. It's really good. Normally I dislike "bible" movies or series, but this one is good. I would think even nonchristians would enjoy watching it. I'll make a new thread.