Woody, we had some earlier cold nights that surprised me how well most of the plants in the garden did. I'm sure if there is a way you can cover it with a sheet or something you would. Although if I remember right, your Wisterias are large.... I feel for you, you wait all year for bloom. Fingers crossed! I hope this is a fluke of a year and that we aren't going to get this kind of inconsistency every year. You are lucky to have a garage that will act like a root cellar! And with windows. Ours is a stand alone unheated garage with one small north window and nothing has ever wintered over in there for me. Just as well, keeps me from branching out into 'wintering over'. (g) The quack grass is the worst problem in the garden for us. It took over my first vegetable garden, and I was pretty inexperienced and I tried to use a rototiller on the bed. What a mistake that was. It just quadrupled the grass in a 25 x 25 ft area. It was so bad, I abandoned that part of the yard for a few years. When I was ready to try to deal with it again, I did some research and came up with an idea of smothering it, instead of trying to dig it out. So I had a large roll of plastic left over from an ice rink we had for the kids when they were younger and I laid that down and anchored it with rocks over the whole 25ft area and beyond. I left it there for a whole year. It killed just about all the quack grass and I was able to reclaim that whole area. Part of it was under the dripline of a large Maple and that area did come back a little and now I have to get it out of there again, but it's about a 6ft area which is manageable. I think it died better in the full sun areas. It was a dry hot summer that year and I didn't put holes in the plastic, so it really baked it. I was SO happy to get that part of the garden back! Thanks for the link, it was very interesting. No, our son's dog is just a plain old mutt of a Lab mix. She was a rescue. She is a black lab with some white socks and some white on her chest. So she is pretty short haired and her shedding is not too bad. She rarely barks, even when other dogs are barking at our fence line, she goes over and wags her tail but then ignores them. Doesn't seem to mind the loud chain saw in the yard next door today. Doesn't dig. Follows me around. Doesn't mind baths or hair dryers. I guess that is the Lab personality, but we've had some that were a lot more 'hyper' than she is, so I wonder what her other mix is. We've never had a Golden, and the shedding was the only reason. I've always loved them.

Pixie Lou, you have a lot of nice lilies. I only have a few because of the RLLB. I just couldnâÂÂt keep them clean if I had too many. As it is, the âÂÂOraniaâ this year looked fine until after it bloomed I noticed the foliage has a fair amount of holes in it. You canâÂÂt cut the stalks back to the ground after blooming, right? I would like to have enough to smell them in the house, but nope. The âÂÂOraniaâ does make the whole front walkway a very pleasant trip when they are blooming. And thanks, glad the comparison of peppers was interesting. I think growing hot peppers does make a difference, they seem to be a more vigorous and shapely shrub that produces more and smaller peppers. The large sweet peppers seem to be more difficult to get more than a few per plant. Thyme2dig, what a pretty daylily border! IâÂÂm not always pulled to purchase a daylily and some of that is the way I see them being used. The way you have planted them all together that way without competition from other plants and with that great shrub border behind it, I really like it a lot. What is that dark shrub in photo #3? And is that Nasturtium at the base of your purple tripod? Jane, I donâÂÂt blame you about the FarmerâÂÂs Market next year. I took a couple of yearâÂÂs off from the vegetable garden and I missed it and here I am still doing it. :-) But is this year an exception? I think some years are not the greatest and this year just wasnâÂÂt. IâÂÂm going to try to salvage some of the season and go for some fall crops of Broccoli and Lettuces and Kale and other greens. This weekend IâÂÂm probably going to start. I have three squash plants without a squash between them. *sigh* Spedigrees, thatâÂÂs a good looking lily and the foliage is a lot cleaner than mine. :-)

Hoob I'm glad you kept your Laguna. Yours is what inspired me to get mine! Jasmine4U...I love Sadie! Shes such a cutie..there's just something about cats and roses that makes me smile :) My grafted Love Song does not look healthy. It has many branches that died back and just a few green ones. There is a big main branch that keep dying back and the green ones are attached to the bottom of it so I don't know if its doomed yet. I'm not gonna sp it but it might commit suicide :/ Its in a pot I am debating putting it in the ground for a last ditch effort to save it. Its on Doc Huey and we have nematodes though..sigh.

Nancy, I love the painting that tells your life story and find it interesting your foretold your own happy golden years with Garry. I think deep in your soul you somehow knew that the golden years/decades would be blessed ones. Everyone I know who has retired finds themselves so much busier than they ever were when they worked---and it is the good, happy kind of busy because they're doing things they love to do. Megan, I thought of you when I heard hail was falling up there, and told Tim "I think Megan is going to beat our hail record". I was hoping I was wrong about that, and just hate that y'all got hailed upon yet again. I am glad the hail wasn't any bigger than it was. Is it NWS tweets that are slow to arrive? I've noticed their computerized systems are having a lot of trouble these last few months---I'm guessing they have massive issues. Back in May when we were having all those storms, the NWS webpage was so slow to update that often we weren't seeing warnings pop up on the webpage map until they were about to expire. I was seeing them more quickly on FB and Twitter though. Our local Emergency Mgmt officials still were getting them directly from the NWS quickly and posting them in our GroupMe pages (one for first responders and another for SkyWarn Spotter network personnel) so I would see them twice on my phone long before they ever showed up on the official NWS webpage, tweets and FB posts. I think I might have been incredibly frustrated on those severe weather days if it wasn't for my GroupMe groups though. Oh, and during that time, our NWS radio transmitter that serves southcentral OK was out of service on a couple of crucial days, so warnings couldn't come that way either. They got it fixed as quickly as they could though. I'm sorry you're ill and wish you a speedy recovery. Chris came down with something a couple of weeks ago and ran a persistent fever for a couple of days. The fever just wouldn't break and finally he went to the doctor, was tested (we all were guessing it would be bronchitis) and had Type A flu. He was so frustrated to be sick with the flu in late May/early June, but he is a firefighter and runs a lot of medical calls all day long when he works his 24-hr shift, so it would not be surprising that he caught the flu (despite having the flu shot). The CSA battle sounds crazy and I hate that you got dragged into it. Why do people have to make everything into such a battle nowadays? Why can't people just be nice and get along? Jennifer, His little bird, Sunny, which is one of the parrotlets, is fine. She had some sort of ear infection. They had a hard time getting to the vet....made it to north Texas and discovered all the power still was out, more than half the traffic lights weren't working, etc. The vet's office had no power and had sent out a FB notice saying so, but Chris and Jana never checked FB that morning on their way down, and hadn't called the office because they left here well before office hours began. Personnel were in the office, awaiting the return of power, and checked her and diagnosed her by flashlight. The vet is wonderful and has told them that when they have a sick bird, because of the long commute involved, they should just hop in the car and head down and they'll work them in any time, but usually Chris does call them and let them know they are coming---it was just that it was so early in the day he knew no one would be in the office yet. There are not many vets that specialize in tropical birds so this vet office seems to stay busy all the time, and I cannot imagine what bird owners would do if this vet retired without finding someone to replace her in her bird practice. Luckily, she's nowhere near retirement age. Sorry, I must have missed you said they were cutworms. If you have SlugGo or SlugGo Plus, just a sprinkle of it on the ground will take care of the cutworms. I never have used it specifically for them, but just learned that when I used it for pill bugs and sow bugs (which are having a massive population explosion at the present time) that I often saw no cutworm damage either. I have had LBPs pop up in unexpected spots. For several years I grew them in a bed beside the old garden shed, which is up by the house and greenhouse, not down here near the garden, and I'd find random bunches of LBPS in odd spots....in containers nowhere near their bed, in a separate garlic bed about 15' away from where I had planted them, in the driveway, etc. I am thinking maybe birds plant the seeds because some of my LBPs that volunteered were in places where I don't think the wind or rain runoff could have placed them. Have a safe trip and enjoy your vacation. It always is good to get away, though I do not like leaving during the growing season either. I worked hard in the garden yesterday, multitasking in each bed as I worked my way through the garden. So, I was simultaneously weeding, deadheading, harvesting and planting Magellan Ivory, White Profusion and Polar Bear zinnias in each bed as I worked my way through the garden beds. I got 2 and 1/2 flats of plants tucked into just 4 raised beds. I harvested more beds than that (beans, tomatoes, peppers, onions) but only got the weeding, deadheading and planting done in 4 beds. I also weeded each path as I worked on the adjacent beds. This rain is keeping new weeds popping up daily. It would drive me crazy if I thought about it for too long. I'm hoping to get another 4 beds done today, but awakened to rain that is expected to last through at least 10 a.m., so I won't be getting an early start. Today's flats include more zinnias (Benary's Giant white zinnia, Oklahoma white zinnia and one of the tall white cosmos, though I don't remember its name). I have three kinds of cosmos growing from seed in flats, and think the tall one is Double Click Snow Puff. When I decided in May to use flowers as succession plantings instead of succession planting veggies, I wanted easy stuff that would blend in with existing flowers and herbs already planted, so I ordered and sowed seeds of several kinds of white zinnias and white cosmos since white goes with everything. It also was sort of a strategic move based on the prospect of a cooler summer. Often, white zinnia flowers don't last as long in the heat of an OK summer as other colors of zinnias do, so I figured a cooler, wetter summer would be the ideal time to plant a lot of the white ones with a reasonable expectation that they'll be happier in our summer weather than they normally are. Time will tell. They'd better be happy because we're certainly going to have a lot of them. Our tomato plants are at peak production right now, and in sort of a stunning way. None of the plants really look good, except the ones in containers where I'm better able to control both moisture levels and soil splash, but they're all producing well anyway. I picked a 5-gallon bucket of tomatoes yesterday and I only harvested half of the plants. Today I will do the rest after the rain stops. I really am not ready to have to deal with processing tomatoes every night after working in the garden every day, but here we are.....it is that time. Once I get enough ziplock bags of frozen processed tomatoes for salsa, I am going to start yanking out plants right and left. I already have enough tomatoes in the freezer for at least 6 batches of salsa and 3 batches of either tomato sauce or soup, and enough tomatoes sitting in rows on the table to at least double that, so the tomato plant yanking will commence very, very soon. I told myself that I would not be a slave to canning and dehydrating this summer, and I meant it, so once my salsa and sauce goals are met, the plants can come out and go onto the compost pile. Even if I keep nothing except the 12 plants in pots (six in the garden, six up by the house), we'll still have more tomatoes than we ever could eat fresh, so I can use the excess ones at that point for making tomato sauce, etc. I love tomatoes but when you plant far too many of them on purpose as I do, the excess harvest gets old quickly. The upside is that when I have too many plants, I can get all the preservation done in a really compact time frame---certainly well before the end of June. By the time the heat arrives later in the summer, I won't be a slave to a hot, steamy kitchen because the tomato preserving will be done. Since our rain largely stopped here a couple of weeks ago and we've only had a couple of small rains since then (half an inch one day, 6/10s another, and only very light rain so far this morning), the flavor of the tomatoes is getting better. The early season tomatoes suffered too much from rain watering down the flavor, although even with watered-down flavor, home-grown tomatoes still are better than those from the grocery store. The heaviest producers in the garden so far are Early Girl, Bush Early Girl, Early Doll, Cherokee Purple, Cherokee Carbon, Compari OP, Heidi, Mule Team, Chef's Choice Orange, Sun Sugar, Barry's Crazy Cherry, Black Krim, Jetsetter, Juliet, Aldi Orange, and Stump of the World. You know how some people will utter that phrase "I regret nothing"? Well, that's not me this year. I regret planting such a huge number of tomatoes. I'll add that I always get this same almost-panicky feeling when the first huge harvest rolls in...like....what what I thinking and what am I going to do with all these tomatoes? Usually I get over it. This year, though, I am going to get over more quickly---not by killing myself trying to process them all for weeks and weeks on end but by yanking out the plants one by one after I've harvested as many tomatoes as I want from each variety. I'm very close to yanking out plants now. Actually, I pulled out one Bush Early Girl yesterday after I harvested its last two fruit. It was the first plant to produce a harvest and it produced a lot of tomatoes over the last 6 or 7 weeks, but it is done now and happily (I assume) decomposing on the compost pile. I could have left it and it would have bloomed (it already had begun another bloom cycle) and set more fruit, but I'm at the stage where I don't want more tomatoes. We have been eating them daily since the start of May and are starting to tire of eating them constantly. I love tomatoes but am starting to feel like I'm overdosing on them. More plants are likely to follow the Bush Early Girl to the compost pile today, assuming the rain moves on out of here and I can get out into the garden to work. Have a great day everyone. Dawn