Week 3, June 2017, General Garden Talk
Okiedawn OK Zone 7
6 years ago
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Patti Johnston
6 years agohazelinok
6 years agoRelated Discussions
Week 3, May 2017 General Garden Talk,
Comments (90)I'm so far behind I'll never catch up but I did read everything and I'm keeping my response minimal since it is time to start this week's new thread. Amy, Time off from a garden can be good. We all work too hard at this time of the year. Hazel, The best way to dig is with a special potato fork that has rounded edges on the prongs so they don't stab the potatoes, but I'm too cheap to spend money on a tool I'd only use a handful of days per year, so I used a transplanting spade with a rounded edge. Start further out than you have been and proceed slowly and with patience in order to avoid cutting into potatoes. Just use the cut ones first as sometimes they do not scar over and heal (though sometimes they do) and the ones that don't scar over will not store for long. A tomato knife is essential for someone who grows and processes as many as I do, and I did find one yesterday. I had to buy an entire cutlery set to get it, but it was an inexpensive set so I didn't mind. I wanted that tomato knife. I am going to go online one day and order a couple more. It is just I have tomatoes piling up everywhere now and need to be able to quickly cut them and use them and the tomato knife makes it easier. Melissa, Don't worry about being behind. Some years are just that way. We all have to work with whatever weather conditions we get. I am so sorry about your niece's injuries and will keep her in my thoughts and prayers. What a horrible way for her summer to start. I saw the story on the news and was horrified at the thought of those kids being in that bounce house when that happened. Jerry, That is an amazing corn story. Sometimes plants can be so resilient and I think often that many gardeners are too quick to write them off and either yank them out or plow them under instead of letting them recover on their own. Nancy, In your case, because of all the rain you have received, it is a good thing that the tomatoes are not closer to harvest. If they were, the excess moisture likely would ruin the flavor. Flavor is best if they are kept pretty dry as they approach harvest. So, for me, as much as I lament the lack of rainfall down here, it isn't really a bad thing for the tomatoes as it means their flavor compounds won't be watered down and they won't be suffering from cracking and splitting either. The first time I grew Mexican sunflowers, I wasn't prepared for how big they'd get. I space them much better nowadays so they don't crowd out everything else. Our dear, sweet Mary normally grows a ton of veggies and cans all summer long, both of which are a huge amount of work, of course. She is trying to take off this season in order to recover from what I'd describe as a major cardiac event so hasn't been posting here much. I was so happy to hear from her the other day and to know she is going to have a few plants. I think plants can be great therapy as someone recovers from a medical issue, as long as you have the self-discipline not to overwork yourself while tending those plants. Mary, if you read this, I keep you in my thoughts and prayers and hope you make a full recovery so that next summer you can be back to your usual growing and canning. Amy, It is odd that cabbage refuses to cooperate with you. It is about the easiest thing I grow. I just plant them and forget about them, which is easy to do if you grow your brassicas under netting to exclude the cabbage worms and such, which I do. When they're ready, I harvest. I do plant cabbages with short DTMS in the 60s-low 70s so that they finish up fairly early here. That's more because I want to put a sucession crop in their place before the weather gets too hot than anything else. When I've grown varieties with longer DTMs, they've done fine too and I've almost never had a head of cabbage try to bolt. Rebecca, I'd just cut off all the damaged leaves and let the Brandy Boy put out new growth. It likely would be fine. Nancy, Cucumbers planted late will do fine. I planted my pickling cukes late on purpose (just last week I think, or at the end of the week before), except for 2 early plants I planted in late March, so that I could spread out the canning load. The cucumber plants from the seeds I just sowed will not be producing a harvest until I'm through canning tomatoes, which was my goal. Having too many things that need to be canned all at once can be a real problem, so I try to control the canning workload by using planting dates to spread out the harvest. You even can get a good cucumber harvest from cucumbers planted in July down here, and I expect it is the same up there. My honest opinion is that if you want more sun, get your sweet husband to cut down that tree now. As time goes on, the shade situation just worsens. I speak from experience. Now that you two both are enjoying gardening so much, it will be important to maintain sunny areas for your veggies, fruits and sun-loving flowers. There is a place in each landscape for both sun and shade, and too much shade (though shade is highly desirable in our hot summers) is not a good thing. Okay, it is Monday moring and I'm headed off to start this workweek's new weekly garden talk thread. Dawn...See MoreWeek 2, June 2017. General garden talk
Comments (112)Amy, It is a PITA to find places to stash things when you buy in bulk, but the upside is that when you buy in bulk, you tend to not run out of things so quickly. CostCo is so far away that I'd like to only make that drive down there once a month, but most of the time we make it twice a month. I'm trying to always remember to keep a list running and to not forget to take it with me. Really, though, just the act of making a list, even if I forget to take it, usually means I do remember everything that was on it. I get tunnel vision during canning season and don't even want to leave the house to go get canning supplies, so I try to stock up ahead of the start of canning season and then I never have to drop everything to go get lids, pectin, canning salt or just whatever. It is funny---on our way down to CostCo I'll be thinking that I want to stop at a Barnes & Noble, and then pop into Hobby Lobby or Michael's for this or that or whatever, and by the time we're through in CostCo, all I want to do is get home. I'm not much of a shopper any more unless I need to get something specific. Most of the time now, if I 'need' something and cannot find it at CostCo, Sam's Club, WinCo or Walmart, I figure we don't need it. Well, except for gardening stuff, but that's a whole category unto itself. About once every month or two we'll make a short side trip to Central Market to get something special but their produce section just kills me and you almost cannot avoid walking through it because the main entrance brings you in there. They have the biggest, most diverse produce section you'll ever see, and tons of organic stuff, and it isn't so much that I am buying much there.....but, rather, I'm looking at things and whispering to Tim...."Look, organic Habanero peppers are $6.98 a pound...." or whatever, just in awe of the fact that people will pay that price when they could be growing their own. It is like a trip to Disney World for me, and then when we get to the meat and seafood area, it is the same thing there for Tim. I get my Dr. Bronner's Lavender soap there, and a few food items, but we could live without it if it wasn't there. They do have the biggest selection of cheeses you'll ever see. I could kill an hour in there just looking at stuff, but there's always that nagging feeling that I ought to be at home working on something. They are one of the few stores that have pickling cucumbers, and they tend to have them all summer long. It isn't the same as homegrown pickling cukes pickled the same day, but if a person has a crop failure and absolutely, positively needs to buy pickling cukes, at least you know a place to find them. I'll try to weigh the potatoes tomorrow to see what we actually got. It won't include, of course, the ones we already ate. The year I planted too many and had to dig over 300 lbs. of them myself from pretty dense clay (it was amended, but it was a drought year and the sun/heat had baked the clay into concrete anyway) in immensely hot weather surely did break me of planting too many potatoes. I said 'never again' and I meant it. I still plant too many, so will try next year to reduce again and plant only about 50-60% as many seed potatoes as I did this year. I also need to plant fewer tomatoes. The good news is that Tim's new work group means I only need to can about 60 jars of salsa for him to give away at work, and that is so much less than I usually can for Christmas that I am almost giddy with joy. Except.... Well, what about the what if's? What if I can enough giveaway salsa for Christmas gifts to cover those 60 people and then his boss rotates the Asst Chiefs around to new areas (this job rotation is very common in his department) and suddently he has an area with 150 people and maybe tomato season already has ended? So, even though I am going to can less, I'll have that nagging worry in the back of my mind. Next year, I'd love to cut back the number of tomato plants I grow by 50% but I don't know if I have the self discipline to do it. No matter how hard I try to cut back, there's always more plants in the ground than I ever intended. That results in tomatoes piling up everywhere and me feeling stressed by the need to hurry up and process them all. Tomorrow will be a long day in the kitchen with tomatoes, but then I'll be able to breathe much easier after it is done. Still, silently and under my breath, I am starting to chant "die,die, die!" to the tomato plants every day when I am picking tomatoes. I know that is wrong. I know it is a sign of tomato overload and tomato burnout, but still, I can't help doing it. I dream of only having 10 or 12 tomato plants and not even doing any canning at all, just one summer, to see what it is like to not wake up every day in June and July with harvesting/canning/food preservation goals first and foremost in my mind. If it doesn't rain soon, I'll likely get my wish for plants to start dying, but with Murphy's Law being what it is, the wrong plants will die and the tomato plants won't die. That would be so funny, and so sad. So, after having believed for many years that it is impossible to have too many tomatoes, I've noticed increasingly that we have too many and I'm tired of having too many and I'm more and more ready to cut back. Of course, in June I see that, recognize it, understand it and acknowledge it, but in the hard winter months of December through February, all logic and rational thought flies out the window and I want to grow everything, and lots of it. If Bigfoot shows up here, I'll just throw tomatoes at him and scare him away. Or, I'll sic our big, bad, mean black rooster on him. Whatever it takes. Millie, Bears would be too scary. My first face-to-face encounter with a feral hog while at a wildfire near Thackerville one night was horrifying. It was huge and my mind couldn't even process what I was seeing. I'd seen them before in state parks while out camping and such, but the first time you see one up close and personal still is a shock. I remember my first thought was "what? Is this a hippo? a rhino?" I laugh at myself now, but I was so flabbergasted when I saw it that I couldn't even process what I was thinking. After about 30 seconds and when I'd had time to calm down a little, I realized it was a feral hog. A couple of years later we were driving from Marietta to Durant to have lunch with our son when he was a student there, and we saw this big dead animal on the side of the road near Lake Texoma. It looked like a small bear or a very large bear cub. We were flabbergasted, so we turned around and went back to look at it. So did everyone else. As each vehicle pulled up and people got out to look at it, someone would say "feral hog" and the new arrivees would say "oh, we thought it looked like a bear" and we all would laugh because we all thought the same thing. Now we see them so often that no one even bats an eye at them, and that's not a good thing. There's too many of them now and they don't stay down in the river bottom lands like they used to---they are right here in our rural neighborhood. We have them a lot at the back end of our property, which is about 1000' west of our house so we rarely even go back there any more. Sunnydew, I grow a lot of hollies but don't have any inkberries. I do know that spider mites like them though, so watch for those. Maybe your web is just some sort of spider. We live on rural acreage and it seems like we have about a million spiders per acre, and each and every different kind has different forms of webs and put their webs all over plants, more so further out....not right up around the house where humans, dogs, cats and chickens will walk right through their webs and bust them up. Spiders can do some odd things some times. Dawn...See MoreWeek 4, June 2017, General Garden Talk
Comments (93)Amy, Our dogs do adapt to Tim's shifts which is great on the days he's working, but on the days he is off, they start whining and making noise because they want to go out at 5 a.m. whether he is awake and getting up or not, so guess who gets up and let them out? They wake me up, so I let them out, naturally. A tornado hitting our house wouldn't wake up Tim, so he sleeps through it all. The sleepyhead dogs also go to sleep early like Tim does, so at 9 pm last night they were all confused that I wasn't turning off lights and putting everyone to bed. I think we were up until about midnight, and the dogs were getting grumpier and grumpier but wouldn't go to sleep until we did. Tim was gone most of that time, either working at the EOC or running on fire calls, and you'd think the dogs would clue in....they hear the fire truck sirens going down the road and howl right along with them. I wonder if they know those sirens are affiliated with Tim's absence from our home? Turnips will store from 4-5 days to maybe 2 weeks in the fridge depending on how wet or dry they were when harvested. I remove the greens, clean and dry the turnips, wrap them in paper towels to absorb excess moisture and put them in ziplock bags. For longer term storage, you can store them in sand or sawdust in a cool, dry location like a cellar (good luck finding a place that stays cool enough in summer, but it is possible with a fall harvest). I am not sure why yours molded. Perhaps the really rainy spring just made their moisture content too high, and there's nothing you can do about that. In some parts of the country, folks leave them in the beds over the winter, harvesting as needed, but you have to cut off the foliage and it helps to turn each turnip a half-twist in the ground to make the roots stop trying to continue growth. I don't know if it would work here since we don't get all that cold in winter any more. I do believe the plant you identified as tansy is tansy. My regular tansy started blooming a couple of weeks ago, but the silver tansy hasn't bloomed yet. Nancy, I agree that Willie is in a class of his own. He won't live forever and it will be such a sad day when he departs from this earth. I like even his oldest stuff better than what passes for modern day country music (so much of which seems more like pop to me). I guess it hardly matters because I hardly listen to to the current country music. I love old, classic country....including Waylon, Willie and the Boys...and Johnny Cash....the Highwaymen...George Jones....Don Williams....George Strait (he's still alive!), and the women....Loretta Lynn...Tammy Wynette....the incomparable Dolly Parton....Kitty Wells....Reba....Emmylou Harris....Patsy Cline. And, of course, having grown up in Texas, I love western swing and know that Bob Wills is still the king! Practically everyone I used to listen to is either dead or well on their way, and that is sad. Poor Kaida. Well, at least they know what it is and solutions for it. I hope she feels better quickly. It seems like the kids have such a short summer any more, and I hate that she's feeling to crappy to really enjoy it. Stores here have had 'back to college' and 'back to school' crap for weeks now...and I keep saying to myself that summer just began....why ruin it for the kids and parents by pushing back to school in June???? I suppose the retail world will start putting Christmas stuff on the shelves on July 5th. (Actually, Hobby Lobby started putting out Xmas stuff 3 or 4 weeks ago and I was not even ready to see that yet.) Before our trees got so tall we could see three or four distant fireworks shows without leaving our property, although we often would go up the road a little bit to a friend's place on higher ground than ours for an even better view. We could see the fireworks from Lake Murray in Carter County, from the Falconhead area in western Love County, and from the WinStar Casino east of Thackerville. Then sometimes we could see more distant fireworks shows from other places in Texas. Now that the trees are so tall all around the house and yard, I don't think we can see any of them.....and I don't much care. Been there, done that, blah, blah, blah. Usually on July 4th itself, Tim is at work and I am in the kitchen canning. He's off this year so I probably won't be in the kitchen canning, but I'm hoping for a quiet day/evening at home with no actual fires. I don't think we've had enough rain to keep fields from catching on fire when folks set off their own fireworks so my wishes for a quiet day and evening might not come true. Our first couple of years of living here, we'd go up to Lake Murray and spend the day at the lake and attempt to stay to watch the fireworks and that was a really long, hot day and we came home with Chris and his cousins asleep in the car and us adults all worn out. It was fun, but I don't miss doing that now. The older I get, the happier I am to just be at home at what Tim jokingly calls "The Compound". There's more than enough to keep me busy here all the time, and other than the weekly shopping and errands, if there's anything I want to buy (other than plants), I can just order it online and have it delivered. I think I could have lived 100 or 150 years ago and been a pioneer and would have been perfectly happy---except for the snakes. My grandmother was born in 1898....and I think that would have been a fascinating era in which to live, though life certainly was much harder back then. When we first moved here, I met a neighbor who came here in a covered wagon before statehood. I remember being both horrified and fascinated when he mentioned that his uncle made them a dugout home in the bank of the Red River. Maybe that would have been a tiny bit too rustic for me. We stayed cloudy and cool until mid-afternoon and it was so pleasant, and then the sun came out and ruined everything. At least one half or almost 2/3s of July 1st had really pleasant weather. Dawn...See MoreJully 2017 Week 1, General Garden and Harvest Talk
Comments (120)Rebecca, There are all kinds of options. For example, you know those pop-up canopies you can buy for camping trips or tailgating or whatever? They have a metal frame and then you put the canvas top over it and tie it to the frame? I think it would be easy to take the frame of one of those and attach one-inch chicken wire to it. You could use zip-ties (which evetually will break from the UV exposure weakening them) to attach the chicken wire, jut taking care to attach it every few inches so the squirrels couldn't find a gap to squeeze through. The only construction involved would be to use wood framing to build in a door so you could easily enter and exit the cage. I use one of these frames as a trellis in the back garden with woven wire fencing attached to it so that cucumbers and vining squash can climb it. I merely left an opening with no fencing for a door so I can harvest from inside or outside of it since mine wasn't meant to exclude any varmints. I'm talking about canopies like this: Pop-Up Canopy If I were doing this, I'd put pressure-treated lumber around the bottom to attach the chicken wire to so that the squirrels couldn't squeeze underneath the chicken wire there. The canopy frame I use in the backyard is a 10' x 10' but they come in different sizes. Or, for a larger tomato-growing area, you could use the framing from one of those portable garages. The frame is about the same as for the canopies, but bigger and (I assume) likely is sturdier. Here's an example of a portable garage: Portable Garage I know I've seen this for lower prices at times than the one I linked---I just wanted to find a quick example. If you want a geodesic dome style, there's kits you can buy to do the framing. Often you can buy the hubs used to connect the PVC pipe online or buy starplates or something similar and then just have your handyman buy and deliver the PVC pipe or wood locally and built the frame. Strombergs sells the starplates and people use them to construct wood framing that then can be turned into the structure of their choice---everything from solid wood chicken coops to chicken wire-covered chicken runs or plastic-covered greenhouses. The starplates are meant for wood-framing, but there's similar hubs available meant for use with PVC or pipe framing. Starplate Building System One of the easiest ways to build a simple greenhouse involves building a high tunnel you can walk into using PVC framing or even cattle panel framing built into a hoop house/high tunnel shape. To make a fruit cage (more accurately, a tomato cage structure) you'd just use chicken wire for the covering instead of greenhouse plastic. You can do this! Or, you can get a handyman to do this and then you'd have a way to keep the squirrels off your plants. Kim, Oh, I play that sort of hide and seek with the snakes. With three people bitten by copperheads in my county last week, I've officially given up weeding for the rest of snake season. It just isn't worth it. Timeout sounds nice. I am giving myself timeout indoors on every hot day....so probably most of every day from now through the end of August. For the rest of July and August, all I will do is water and harvest. At some point, I'll pull out the excessive number of tomato plants (which are well-mulched and almost weed-free) that have been in the ground since March (whenever disease and spider mites hit a certain point, I'll take out those plants) and put fall crops in those beds. My two early tomato beds remain in production so far, and the interim bed of 10 tomato plants at the other end of the garden (planted at the end of April and meant to provide us with fresh tomatoes in between the time I yank out the 4 rows planted in March and the time the fall tomatoes begin producing) already has fruit breaking color. I should yank out those older, tired and increasingly sickly plants this week but that would require working outdoors in the heat for more hours per day than I intend to spend outdoors so I might not do it this week. I wish I could do it at night, but that's when the snakes are the worst. You know that it is too hot and I am too tired of dealing with it when I am contemplating pulling plants out of the ground just to give myself a break from having to deal with them. It is scary enough harvesting southern peas while just hoping no snakes lie beneath the plants, which are planted close enough together to shade the ground....eliminating weeds by shading them out but also providing dense shade that the snakes like. There's no way I am weeding anything at this point, and sometimes harvesting feels sort of iffy in terms of safety. All my muskmelons and crane melons are trellised, and so are about 80% of my icebox watermelons, so I can harvest those off their trellises easily enough without being too worried about snakes. Usually the only snakes that climb the trellises and hang out on the plant foliage are the rought green tree snakes and I don't mind them. Sometimes they startle me when I don't see them before almost accidentally touching one while harvesting pole beans or lima beans, but the green snakes themselves are very shy and not aggressive and all I have to do is take a couple of steps back and they quickly disappear, generally racing across the garden, through the fence and into the woodland beyond. Nancy, Sorry about the snake scare. I don't like having them in any building. Snakes are free to roam about 12 or 13 of our 14.4 acres as they wish, but they had better stay out of the house, garage, greenhouse, shed and garden. Even in the yard, if they will leave, we won't even shoot the venomous ones....but if they are determined to stay there where we and the animals are inhabiting the same space and they won't turn and flee, they get shot. We haven't shot a non-venomous snake this year, but if we had chicken or rat snakes getting into the coops and eating eggs or chicks, we'd shoot them if we caught them in there. I can tell when snakes are in the garden even if I am not seeing them because all the frogs, toads, lizards, etc. disappear and that aggravates me a great deal because those creatures help out a great deal with garden pest control. Cherokee Carbon is a hybrid cross of Cherokee Purple x Carbon, so if you save seeds from the fruit produced by these F-1 plants, you will have the F-2 generation. That means that you have no idea what sort of plant or fruit you will get. Generally in the F-2 generation, you will get a variety of results--and some of them might produce fruit that strongly resemble the original Cherokee Carbon and some of them might not...and it is possible that none of them will produce the sort of fruit you want. ("Life is like a box of chocolates....."). What you get has to do with the way the genes resort themselves within the hybrid plant's offspring. Some people have successfully dehybridized a hybrid through multiple generations and eventually (often only after many generations of plants) ended up with a fruit that resembled the original fruit from which they saved the seed, but it is not easy to do. I have bought seed of supposedly stablized dehybridized versions of hybrids in the past and found that the plants and fruit I got were nowhere near the quality of the original hybrid plant/fruit, so after trying that for a couple of years, I went back to just buying the hybrid seed. I don't have garden space/time to waste on saving seed from hybrids and replanting it only to be disappointed in whatever fruit the plants produce. YMMV. I'm sorry to hear about your mom. It surely does sound like somebody dropped the ball in terms of notifying the family. I hope she makes a quick recovery and I wish she would come visit you while the yard and garden are so beautiful so she can see what you and Garry have done. Amy, The thought did cross my mind that returning the stockings did sound like a human activity. The thought that a person might be entering Rebecca's yard and stealing her tomatoes seems 1000 times worse than knowing squirrels are doing it. If they are watching how hard she is working to protect her fruit and returning the stockings, that seems vaguely stalkerish and disturbing. I had a lot of trouble with a mentally ill person who lived up the road from us (he passed away sometime within the last year, I guess) coming onto our property while I was in the garden (and other people had different sorts of problems with him), so I started locking the driveway gate all the time, whether we are home or not, and that stopped that. I don't have locks on the garden gates but could and would add locks if I thought someone was sneaking into the garden and stealing stuff. (People here know I will share produce with them if they want some, so why steal?) Jay, I'm sorry the rainfall is missing y'all. The 3+" we have received in July saved my garden from certain death (or at least postponed certain death for a while), but we remain in Moderate Drought and conditions are unlikely to improve during the summer months. I hope we don't go the rest of the month with no rain since that 3+" is more than our average July rainfall. I have little expectation of getting more rain any time soon. Despite the recent rainfall, our portion of our county has the highest year-to-date rainfall deficit in the state and that is so discouraging. I do think the OKC area in general is worse off than us though, because their rainfall for the last couple of months is much more severe than ours.....and the rainfall they got in March or April isn't helping them at all now. How much can I complain about drought? Well a lot, I guess, but it does no good. We spend most of each summer in drought so I should be used to it, but I just hate seeing all the green turn brown and production drop.....etc. I think the heat wouldn't be so bad if it would just rain every now and then. Well, dry heat doesn't feel as bad as humid heat so the benefit of rain is a two-edged sword. Dawn...See MoreRebecca (7a)
6 years agoNancy RW (zone 7)
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6 years agoAmyinOwasso/zone 6b
6 years agoAmyinOwasso/zone 6b
6 years agoOkiedawn OK Zone 7
6 years agojlhart76
6 years agoAmyinOwasso/zone 6b
6 years agomil_533
6 years agomil_533
6 years agoAmyinOwasso/zone 6b
6 years agoOkiedawn OK Zone 7
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6 years agoAmyinOwasso/zone 6b
6 years agoRebecca (7a)
6 years agochickencoupe
6 years agomil_533
6 years agohazelinok
6 years agoNancy RW (zone 7)
6 years agoOkiedawn OK Zone 7
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6 years agoNancy RW (zone 7)
6 years agoPatti Johnston
6 years agoNancy RW (zone 7)
6 years agochickencoupe
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6 years agoNancy RW (zone 7)
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6 years agolast modified: 6 years agoNancy RW (zone 7)
6 years agoRebecca (7a)
6 years agoOkiedawn OK Zone 7
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6 years agoNancy RW (zone 7)
6 years agojlhart76
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6 years agomil_533
6 years agoRebecca (7a)
6 years agoOkiedawn OK Zone 7
6 years agoNancy RW (zone 7)
6 years agomil_533
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6 years agoOkiedawn OK Zone 7
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6 years agoOkiedawn OK Zone 7
6 years ago
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