I'm sorry you are sad. Does your church have connections to a church near to Farm Lady's property? Sometimes churches are connected to other churches.

Y'all, I made salsa from my tomatillos. It is SO good. It's my new favorite. I must grow more of these next year!

My largest crane melon is about 7 inches long and about 16 to 17 inches around. They may not have mildew after all. As I was picking PEPH, I noticed several large left-footed bugs. I killed them, but y'all know how much I hate killing things. Ick. What sorta damage do these bugs cause? The cranes and PEPH are in the same bed.

The chickens have managed to put themselves back in their pen 2 nights in a row. There is so much drama over the roosting bars though.

It is raining now.

Kim, I feel that pain, too. Doesn't help you out in any concrete way at all--it's a kind of, "Well, here we go again," sort of feeling. Thinking of you and praying that the way will open up and your head will be clear. I know you can do it and will with a thankful and loving heart--just needing a bit of strength now, I suppose and for the sadness to pass? My love to you.

The month draws to a close??? How IS that even possible, Dawn! Not sure how I feel about that. I love fall. I hate time flying so fast. Dagnabbit, my days are numbered as it is! (Fact is, they always have been--just wasn't aware of it, before--:) ) Remember when we were 10 yrs old and 5 minutes could feel like 100 years? That doesn't happen very often nowadays. LOL Can't begin to tell ya what a gift you've been to me since Jan of this year--in so many ways! You are such a generous soul.

What a wonderful, wondrous year it has been, and how quickly it is passing. I've learned so so much from you all, and just am so thankful. I feel like a real gardener, and am so thrilled we got into this vegetable stuff. Remember when we built our veggie raised beds, we were feeling very smug, until I said to Garry, "I don't have any idea why we did that--I don't even LIKE vegetable gardening." And he looked at me in astonishment. So funny. We were just laughing about it tonight--as it was HIS idea to extend our fenced vegetable beds. I said tonight that I can't imagine life without our veggies, and he agreed. WHY? Like he said, we'd have to be alive for another 20 years before it paid for itself. But it makes us exercise. It nourishes our souls. We know what we are eating, even though the produce may not be as big or luscious-looking as fertilized, pesticided produce, it is chemical-free and good. We eat more veggies now. It keeps us from spending money or time on stupid stuff, like clothes or casinos or partying. It, in short, is a soul-satisfying life, and adds immeasurably to our thankfulness for nature and God and what miracles can be seen from a little seedling that is a huge part of our life.

Our grass? Looking awesome. (Well, the lawn--it's not really "grass," but a combo of Bermuda, crab grass that's not doin' so good (I know, hard to believe), and other weeds and some fescue.) The flowers? Mixed bag--like I said, a failed cottage garden. Zebrina hollyhocks limping on, same with echinacea, gaillardia, nicotiana, aphid-riddled morning glories, tired spider flowers, new zinnias are perky and prolific; brugmansia is awesome, datura, tired. Four o'clocks, no prob, perky as all get-out--black-eye Susan vine positively thrilled; hyacinth beans producing tons of pods; milkweed--went through a brutal first year with their special aphids, but I believe they were firmly enough rooted that they will come roaring back next spring; endless summer hydrangeas are still doing FABULOUS, which is almost unbelievable to me and they are now producing PURPLE flowers. Must be all that peat I put around them 1-2 months ago. GO, hydrangeas! Coleus--a silly frivolous plant--put them out everywhere since I had a jillion, and they're all 2-3 feet high and have really filled in this fairly heavily shaded yard. Same with begonias. 2-3 feet tall and happy as all get-out. Marigolds going nutso. Basil is planted several places, and I'm not sure I even love basil, but I just keep walking by, pinching off the flowers, and those are another 2-3 feet tall. Same with lemon balm and parsley (the swallowtail cats tried to devour them, but they're back with new growth--as biennials, I'm fairly certain we will have a constant stand of parsley. Chives are so welcome, I use them a lot and they're like 4 o'clocks.

Many of the above are flowers/herbs that I previously disrespected. Now I am seeing them in a new light.

HJ, I'm pretty sure I'll be starting plants in Jan. But fewer. You guys blew my mind when I found you in January of this past year--here I was, totally immersed in painting, and then happened to wonder about gardening and found you all. Dang! So now, I am going to start painting in October, even though I'll have to also be gardening, mostly finding soil stuff to put in our new enlarged beds; because I know come January, I will be raising little baby seedlings.

We've had little to no rain the past month. But everything looks fairly green, although our water bill will be high this month, as I am having to water quite a lot.

Mary, how are you doing??? Haven't heard anything for a while; Jerry, worried about Jerry. George. . . hope all is well, also LoneJack, Jacob, Rebecca, Bon, Denise, and all of the rest of you--Jennifers, Sharon, Paula, all of you. Eileeen. HJ, Amy--Amy, I am so with you right now and thinking of you. Friends are the absolute best!

HJ--tomatillos--AMEN!! :)

Other than being busy, not much going on here. After much, delay I finally called into the location I buy compost from, so we're hoping to go pick up some sometime this week so I can get my lettuce in. At this time of year, the place I'm overwintering my crops gets dappled shade to full shade all day. In the summer, it gets about 5 hours of full sun. In the spring it gets like 2-3. Once the leaves are off (not long here), it gets full sun. I think my lettuce will chug along until that happens. My cabbage I will likely try to pot up and plant once the trees are off, as I know from experience it isn't as tolerant of shade. It's a shady area, but it's the best we got. We're hoping to remove a couple trees next year that are leaning badly towards the house with no support, and they block a lot of sunlight. I'm hoping that would provide us better sun. The curse of living in a forest hollow!!!

Nancy, I agree. This year seems to have been a good year. I have found it very helpful having found these forums as well. Best gardening decision I've made!

Gotta go now, I'll catch up later when I've got more time. Have a great day everyone.

Jennifer, I'm undecided about starting tomatoes in December. It is hard to keep them happy indoors that long--even if I am planning to put them in the ground in March, it still is a long time to keep the plants happy indoors. If I knew it wasn't going to be too tough of a winter, I could move them to the greenhouse in January and grow them on there, even if it might require putting a small heater out there. I'll decide somewhere along the way, largely based on (a) what sort of winter fire season we're having, and/or (b) what sort of winter weather we're having---not that I'll necessarily know by December what weather we'll be having in January or February. I did like raising my own---and they are less likely than plants purchased in January to have diseases early in their lives, so that makes me lean towards starting my own and not buying any of the early ones this coming year.

My description of the Korean squash going crazy is that the plants grew to the top of their trellis, climbed across the pathway mid-air, grew into, over and throughout the asparagus bed, and continue to bloom and produce. I haven't harvested them in ages. I'm just letting them get big like winter squash and when their rind is hard, I'll brave the snakeiness that is my garden (hopefully on a morning too cold, one of these days, for snakes to be active), harvest them and pile them up on the porch with a few other winter squash I'm growing to form a nice little autumn display. Right now it is too snakey to set foot in the garden. So many people in our county have been bitten (more by rattlesnakes than copperheads, though I personally am seeing more copperheads than rattlesnakes) this year that it is terrifying to contemplate stepping foot in my garden at this point and I've been totally avoiding it as much as possible. There's far too many snakes out right now, and that's just one of the drawbacks of living in such a rural spot so close to the Red River. For 19 years I've managed to avoid getting bitten by a venomous snake and I'd like to continue avoiding it, so at the present time the poor old garden is off-limits. I'd like to avoid both the pain and expense of a venomous snakebite. Did y'all know the average cost of treatment for a rattlesnake bite runs around $150,000 and that does not necessarily include the cost of being airlifted from a rural area like mine to a big city hospital, which can easily add $15,000-$30,000 to the cost (and insurance only covers a tiny portion of the med-evac chopper cost, unless you've bought an insurance 'membership' in your local med-evac chopper network). People are always stunned by the cost of med-evac helicopters and by how little of that cost is covered by insurance.

There are years when the snakes are so bad that I wonder why I even try to have a garden here and wonder if it even is worth the snake risk---and this is one of those years. I wish all the venomous snakes would just go away.

Kim, I think if you are honest with her, it all will work out. I think it would be awesome for you to be able to live there, work with her, and save some money for your own place. We saved for so long to be able to buy this piece of land, and then when we moved here, we had no money to speak of because we had put it all into the acreage. I didn't care. I knew our bank account would rebound eventually, and it was worth it to be poor for a few years so that we could have this piece of land that we call ours.

I know it is hard, but if you could put aside your sadness that the current situation is not working out satisfactorily, then I think that would help you move on. My people on both sides were farmers, and it was a hard life. Mostly they were tenant farmers who sharecropped their rented land when my parents were small children. Since they rented land, they did not necessarily stay in the same place forever, moving on and looking for a better place at times. That was just part of it---finding the right place with the right soil and all was hard. especially since they couldn't afford to buy land. Eventually, as a matter of survival, they got out of farming, but many continued gardening and/or raising small animals their entire lives. You do what you have to do in order to be able to do what you want to do. The farming dream doesn't necessarily die, but it can morph into different forms. I am confident you will find your farming dream somewhere, sometime, somehow. It just takes time to make the dream work. You can do this.

Jennifer, Leaf-footed bug have sucking mouth parts like stink bugs. They insert their mouth parts into parts of plants and suck out the plant juices, not necessarily leaving a lot of visible damage, but their sucking of the juices does weaken the plants.

Nancy, September always seems to fly by. I'm not sure why. In your case, it might be because you were away from home taking care of your mom, and then when you got back, here it is.....with October sneaking up on us. It is sort of amazing, isn't it? I hardly look at a calendar or a clock since moving here. Instead, I go with the flow of the rhythm of the land---the plants, the wild creatures, etc. Once you have studied and observed your own area and its' flora and fauna, they will tell you on their own when the seasons are changing. It always amazes me as the plants and the wild animals, birds and insects signal the change from September to October or October to November, but I see it every year, just about as regular as clockwork. It fascinates me. I know our local trees so well that I can look across the street and tell what time of autumn it is by when specific trees on that ranch turn color. They turn in the same order every year and with remarkably similar timing, almost down to the same exact week. I can do the same with our trees on the edge of the woodland and in the front yard. Mother Nature's timing fascinates me so much more than mankind's timing.

I'm so glad you and Garry have fallen in love with veggie gardening. It does nourish one's soul just as much as it nourishes one's body---or maybe even more. You two ARE real gardeners and you know it. Look at how much fun you've had, how much more you've learned, how much your garden beds produced this year! You've had a remarkable year. Every year a person can be out in the garden is a great year. I was diagnosed with cancer when we had lived here about 5 months. Our new friends and neighbors were wonderful to us during that time---so loving and so supportive---but, if I am honest, it was my garden and my love for my family that kept me going through the dark days when I had to contemplate whether my time here on this land would be long...or shockingly short. As soon as I could hobble around, I just wanted to be in the garden, and I was planning ahead for the next year's garden long before I knew that the cancer was gone and I had a clean bill of health. In my mind, I was going to be out in that garden every day even if I was wearing a chemo pump or IV and dragging it along behind me. (Luckily, that wasn't necessarily.) I was so much younger and more stupid then----I hardly worried about snakes at all, for example, back then. I hadn't encountered enough venomous snakes yet to learn to be smarter and more careful about avoiding them. My fear of the snakes probably gets worse every year as they seem to get more and more abundant. I wish I had an answer for that.

I've been worried about Mary too. I hope her heart isn't acting up and I hope she is okay and checks in to let us know that she is alright.

Jacob, Many people find this forum while searching for info on a specific topic. They stay around because we all become a family. There's nothing that's more fun to me than hearing how everyone's gardens are doing, except maybe hearing how their lives are going as well. We have a marvelously encouraging and supportive group here. When we get together for our annual plant swap, called by the name The Spring Fling, each April, it is so much more than a plant swap---it is a big family reunion. I don't care if I bring home a single plant, and I do love plants. What I care about is simply getting to see everyone again, or to meet the new ones attending their first Spring Fling. The day flies by with the covered dish luncheon, the chatting, laughing, joking, admiring how much the kids (and grandkids!) have grown since last year, or how adorable the dogs are, as well as how yummy all the food is....and somehow we squeeze in time to load up on plants and take them home as well.

Who else but those of us here in the southern plains really understand what it is like to deal with all the wicked weather that we get in Spring, Summer and Fall. We've all known the heartbreak of having a gorgeous garden one day, and a hail-shredded, tornado-destroyed, flooded or microburst-flattened gardened the next day. We all understand the heartbreak of having a healthy garden flattened by freezing weather that was not even in the forecast by a long shot. We all know the frustration of having March's last freeze happen instead in April or May when we have tomato and potato plants knee high or higher. No one can console us better than someone else who's been through the same thing. It isn't always the technical knowledge and experience we share that means so much here, but also the mental/emotional support and encouragement too. If someone asks me how many brothers and sisters I have, do I tell them I have two brothers (one of whom also is a gardener) and one sister, or do I think of my large virtual family here and tell them I have many brothers and many sisters? I think y'all know the answer.

Lone Jack, It is about time you showed up! (grin)

Your fall garden looks great. My summertime plants are hanging on but I haven't even planted anything for fall, except a few fall tomatoes that are doing well. Mostly I seem to be raising a bumper crop of grasshoppers, butterflies (love them) and copperheads. The timber rattlers haven't been too bad lately, but a man here in our county suffered a very bad bite and a dangerous response to it this weekend, and that's always on my mind and has me being extra careful.

The native wildflowers that seemed dead in early August came back to life after the rains and are blooming now despite being shorter than usual. Unfortunately there's been almost no rain since then. There's a whole lot of monarchs this week. I think they are clustering together (I know there is a name for what they are doing, but don't remember what it is) and preparing to join the fall migration, which usually comes through our area the first week in October.

I still have hummingbirds coming through, but not at the high rate of 2-4 weeks ago. I believe most of the travelers have passed through already and what I'm seeing now is probably just the locals. I refilled the hummingbird feeders today and wonder if this is for the last time. We usually see the last hummers early in October, though it depends on when the nights cool down to stay.

Are y'all getting rain? We got 0.13" overnight. It isn't very encouraging, but it is what it is.

Dawn

When I checked the gauge a couple of hours ago, we had about a half an inch. It's been lightly raining for hours though. Luckily I had about an hour break this morning to take the dogs out for some exercise and food. I like rain and am So grateful for it, but it so hard on the dogs. I feel cranky in general right now.

LoneJack, your garden looks so nice!

I"m sorry you can't enjoy your garden when snakes are so bad, Dawn. Although, it does give you time to work on other things.

I have a pilates class now. I really don't want to go, but maybe it will help with the crankiness.

Jack, your beds are AWESOME! Well--I should say, the plants in your beds are awesome! How deep are they and what kind of soil mixture is in there? Love the soaker hoses lying about. . . Garry put up PVC drip tubing. At first, he only had holes coming out the bottom--when he realized that wasn't going to work so well, he took them all out and drilled holes at 180 degrees opposite. Now if we just turn one on at a time (he has spigots on each one), they spout out enough water on both sides to water the beds. Now they're working good. And only need to be on 30-45 minutes to soak a bed. The CARROTS! The brussel sprouts, the radishes! How many different beds do you have? And it look like you do a lot of succession planting? Do you do cover crops at all? Your potatoes are a little ahead of mine--mine are growing well, but are a little on the thin/as opposed to sturdy, side. Also need to be hilled up. Well, we'll get what we get.

How about the rest of you, do you do cover crops? I have some red clover here, and will get that in if I have time.

Dawn, it is finally dawning (haha) on me that you have a SNAKE problem. I truly cannot imagine that. And BELIEVE me, if we had that problem, I'd be reacting like you are. I was freaked by one measly pygmy rattler 2 summers ago that I almost accidentally petted! Uh yea, I do think you are using good sense. That just makes me sad for ya. So we've studied how to deter moles (unlikely), voles (bring in snakes), squirrels (well you all know my hostile attitude toward them, and our solution), gophers (difficult) deer (thank God for Titan and still nothing is REALLY safe from the diabolical sampling rascals); but snakes. Gotta go google how to keep snakes at bay. I know. . . pipe dreams. But that just is so LAME that one can't even go walk in one's garden!

Dawn, also, the bout with cancer. I absolutely KNOW that gave you a whole new lease on life, after you got through it, didn't it? You of all folks know your days were and always will be numbered. I am guessing it's why you have such energy, such love for life. Nothing like that kind of thing to put things in perspective. I sort of think the day of dawning (again, haha) for me was when my vibrant "healthy" 17-yr-old son died from the bone marrow transplant with leukemia. Our length of time on earth is a crap shoot (like gardening), and the best we can do is to appreciate it while we have it, right?

When we lived on the ranch, rattlesnakes were an always constant presence in the summer; when we hayed, the kids' jobs would be to turn the bales--but they all knew a rattlesnake might be under a bale, and by gosh that's one of the few things they were taught that they took to heart. We were always outfitted in tall cowboy boots and jeans, even in the 100-degree days (to this day, here, too, I always have my Levis and shoes and socks in this yard), and frankly there was seldom a day of turning bales that at least one of the kids didn't run into a rattlesnake; whereupon, my step son would run and grab the nearby shovel and dispatch.

Into (yet another) a digression here. . . my job was baling--either 70-80 lb bales (alfalfa) or loose stack baling. Husband and father-in-law cut it, I baled it. The kids turned the bales; husband had a bale stacker. I LOVED haying. One day the baler got stuck, nothing new or unusual. I turned the hydraulic lifter off, jumped out, went back to the feeder train, lay down and tried to jiggle it loose. Oops, it moved suddenly and caught my right index finger in it. And there I was. Trapped by an index finger in the chain, lying flat on my back on the ground. Husband was in the field next to me, father-in-law in the other field next to me. Both were too far away to hear me. Kids were in school. So it was me and the tractor/baler. And my finger. LOL It is funny now. Looking back, I could have lain there all day, and eventually the husband and FIL would have noticed. But me, impatient as I am, after an hour or two of laying there, kind of freaked out. I was thinking of a raccoon or coyote caught in a trap--and how they would tear their foot off to escape. That's what I felt like doing. I was considering just ripping my finger off. and, in fact, almost was driven to it. And then suddenly the chain slipped, after 1-2 hours of fidgeting and fiddling. And my finger was free. I felt like I had been sentenced to life and then gotten an unexpected and much welcomed pardon! (Loose stack baling was a hoot! And an art, which I perfected after a couple years!)

While my life on the ranch was the ultimate dream life for me (being in the country, wrangling cattle, being on horseback nearly every day except during haying season), my husband was a very ill alcoholic, and I had to leave for my boys and me. Broke my heart to leave the life. And broke my heart for him. Still hard for me to visit the ranch lands in Wyoming. And yet now, I have been gifted beyond what I could have thought could ever happen. GDW and I are SO blessed. He said if I wanted a horse, we'd get a horse. But. Sometimes, we just need to treasure the times, and move on. Still. . . LOL

Jacob--it sounds as though you and I have pretty much the same exact growing conditions and properties. Forest hollow. I need to google that. Okay, just did. Got a bunch of ads! LOL. But. We have heavy oak forest on the east and west, no houses, just oak forest. To the north and south we have neighbors (too close, but doable--:) ) and still many oaks. Yep. Lots of shade. So funny, the only place we have full sun is our #$%^&* driveway! Hmmm, thinking here. . . Think outside of the box, right? After all, how much driveway do we need? Uh-oh, GDW, I see raised beds at the back half of the driveway. . .

And the thing is, of course, is that we can NOT plant down. We ONLY can plant up. Shovels only go in 6 inches at most until they run into rock. Speaking of which, we have all this new extended veggie garden area, and it's gonna cost us a LOT of money to get those beds filled. I told GDW tonight that I knew where November's extra money was going--soil mix stuff.

I have 3 bales of seedy straw, thank you God, and may get some more. My plan is to lay the straw first, then cover with cardboard, and then a bit of dirt, just to hold it down; then by November when the leaves have/are fallen, to mulch em up, mix them with the bags of raised bed garden soil, peat, and dirt. What do you all suggest if I'm on the wrong road? Meanwhile, I'll be throwing in every plant that's on its last legs, as well.

HJ, did the pilates help? :) I hope so. Amy, love ya. And you, too, Kim. And all of you--like Dawn said, who is our family?

Thanks for the garden compliments!

Y'all are hoarding all the rain down there! Well almost everyone I guess. It looks like the rain is still one county west of Dawn. I think I might have received 3 drops on my garden yesterday. To make up for it I left a soaker hose running on a newly seeded radish bed all night :-(

Speaking of snakes, I had a little startle when I was pulling weeds out of an asparagus bed last weekend. I was blindly reaching into the middle of the bed and out came a Smooth Greensnake right at me and up and over the bed frame and landed on my foot. I'm not much of a snake fan but this little guy was pretty cute with its solid light green coloring.

Lonejack, that reminds me of seeing a report a few months ago on the news of a green snake being found in a green bean can. haha a chewy green bean...

Jacob - I saw that too. Below is a link to the report. I can guarantee that there are no snakes in my frozen green beans! Maybe a Mexican bean beetle or 2 but never a snake.

Snake head in can of beans

At 7:30 this morning, the rain gauge read about an inch and a half. I'll take it!

The dogs are miserable. (sorry to always complain about this) They have to be crated when left at home alone. This is my long day. Thankfully, Tom will be home in the late afternoon and it's supposed to stop raining by then. They should be able to go out and play by then. Their yard is a muddy mess. We bought a rain barrel to attach to the guttering that stupidly lets out near their yard. We just haven't had time to fix it yet.

I'll bet the garden will look so purdy when the rain it over--nice and green and fresh.

It's going to be tough to stay awake today. Josi wanted to go out 3 times last night. Once, I think she heard Charlotte killing a mouse right outside the back door. She was just being nosy and didn't really need to go. I didn't even realize Charlotte was outside. She is supposed to stay in. I picked her up and brought her in. I don't like it when she eats mice. Disease and yuck.

Try to have a good day everyone.

Jennifer, I hope you enjoyed your pilates class. Often, it is when I feel least like working out that I know I need the workout the most. I vary what I do between weight training, walking, jogging, yoga and pilates. So, if the thought of one type of workout doesn't sound appealing, then a different kind of workout often does. When I absolutely, positively don't feel like working out, I put a dog on a leash and take it for a walk---preferably Jersey, who is 10 years old and still wants to run, not walk, every step. She keeps me going at a faster pace than I'd walk on my own and I get the upper body workout from hanging on to her leash and trying to rein her in. She's part Great Dane and doesn't believe in walking---only in running. Usually by the time I've walked Jersey 1.5 miles (our favorite short loop through the neighborhood), my body is wide awake, alert and enthusiastic even if it wasn't before, and then I'm ready for a workout with weights, yoga or pilates. Of course, Jersey curls up on her dog bed and spends her post-walk time napping. Dogs have such a tough life!

It is hard for me to squeeze in working out when the gardening season is in full swing, but much easier in autumn and winter when I'm not feeling compelled to rush out to the garden first thing each morning.

Today a copperhead snake joined us on our morning walk. It freaked me out when I saw it in the road, until I realized it was dead. Then I felt better. I still walked the dogs in a wide berth around it because I don't want for them to ever be complacent about being close to a copperhead.

Nancy, I have a massive snake problem. The back of our property is only about 1/4 mile from the Red River. Snakes are almost always bad here, except in 2008, which was my favorite year of all time because there were no snakes. This is because we had massive river flooding in 2007 which apparently caught the snakes by surprise and swept away a lot of them.....and based on how slow the population was to recover, the flooding likely swept away a lot of their food supply as well. I noticed in 2008 that I hardly saw snakes at all that entire year---it was so noticeable that people were talking about the lack of snakes. I wish we'd have a year like that again. I was hoping the even worse river flooding in 2015 would have the same effect on the venomous snake population---after all, we had 3 or 4 separate rounds of river flooding, but it seems like the snakes were smarter and fled to the higher ground prior to the flooding---and, sadly, for those of us adjacent to river bottom land, the snakes moved up onto our property more than ever before, and it seems like they stayed. What I noticed in 2015 and again following the flooding in 2016 was that we had more kinds of snakes than ever before, though all the ones new to us were not venomous types. Usually timber rattlers are the worst, and they have a timber rattler 'highway' that comes out of the neighbor's woodland to our south and crosses underneath our fence exactly across from my garden gate. I'd say 75% of my timber rattler encounters occur right there when a timber rattler and I both are trying to go through the garden gate at the same time. Tim's only close encounter with a timber rattler this year was right there at the garden gate too. It is uncanny how often it happens in that exact location. Usually we can kill one before it gets into the garden, but every now and then one makes it into the garden and once it is in there, it can stay there forever and hide in the dense foliage. That's when I abandon the garden. I don't even have to see a snake to know they are in there. I just notice that all my precious little toads and frogs in the garden are disappearing, and know the snakes are eating them. I also think the snakes are the reason there's almost never a vole problem in the front garden.

Yes, my bout with cancer taught me many lessons, including how little control we can have over our own lives. No one---not you, not me, not your precious son--can control what illness will hit us, and we just have to accept what we are given and then do our best to overcome it because we surely cannot wish that disease away. I hate that your son could not overcome his cancer---believe me, every day I know how lucky I am that I survived. I know how many people I loved have lost their battle to cancer, including my grandfather, Tim's best friend and a close friend's 2 year old daughter. I have learned to live in the here and now, to appreciate every minute of every day, and to try to do good things so that my life would mean something to the world. I have known so many people whose cancer outcome was not as positive as mine, and I know people now who are fighting a cancer battle they seem destined to lose. I look at how they suffer, and say to myself "there but for the grace of God, go I". I am grateful for every single day I have had on this earth since then, and if I ever forget to be grateful, I hope God slaps me upside the head and reminds me to count my blessings.

Your story of being trapped in the baler is horrifying. I am so glad you didn't lose a finger. Several years ago (it probably is 10 years or so back, though it doesn't seem that long ago), our state representative was brushhogging a pasture and something went horribly wrong. He ended up underneath the tractor/brushhog attachment. I had my fire radio on and heard enough of the radio traffic with cops, firefighters and medics rushing to his place out in the western end of our county to know something horrific had happened to someone on a tractor at his place, but I didn't know then that it was him. I was hoping it was some random hired hand---not that I wanted it to be anyone, but I surely didn't want it to be him. Tim was at work and I was texting him and telling him something horrible was happening at Terry's place and I thought that someone was dead underneath a tractor. Eventually, I came to understand it was our state rep, not because of anything anyone said on the radio---but more by the fact that they were saying so very little. I heard just enough to read between the lines and understand that it was him. That horrific accident was not the first tractor/baler accident to take someone's life here, nor the last, but I do believe it is the one that had the largest effect on the most people. The folks of this county absolutely are scarred by that incident, and none of us ever will get over it. If ever there was a person in this county that every single family in the county thought of as a member of their own family, it was him. Tragedy can strike anybody anywhere any time.

A lot of the ranchers here are into cutting horses. and dog competitions (herding, team roping, team penning, all sorts of stuff with and without their cattle dogs) and such and have some very high dollar horses and high dollar dogs, and sometimes lose one of those animals to rattlesnakes on, in, beneath or between hay bales. That's one reason I won't do a hay bale garden---with a big snake problem already, the last thing I need to do is create a spot that would appeal to them.

Jack, I cannot say I have not gotten rain (grin) but I'm not hoarding it. I might hoard it if I could see it, but our rain sneaks in, falls lightly, and sneaks out so quickly that you really aren't even sure it rained. We were at a house fire in town last night in the overnight hours. It certainly didn't rain on us there, but when we got back to the fire station, the personal vehicles parked outside had raindrops on them. Why, I bet we got another 3 or maybe 5/100s of an inch. Yippee. Not that the ground even looked wet, because it did not, but we had new wet dusty splotchy spots on the vehicles. So, our rainfall for this multi-day storm might be up to 0.15" or 0.17" or so----not that such a small amount makes one iota of difference to the plants in the ground. I feel that I can say with certainty that the flash flooding occurring in some parts of OK yesterday and today will not be happening here at our place. However, we are much cooler than last week and I do appreciate the fact that are highs are not in the 90s this week and our heat index numbers are not 105+, so the rain brought us relief in the form of rain-cooled air even if it hasn't brought us much rain. It is heavily overcast here and our high temperature so far today is 73 degrees as of 1 p.m., so I am thrilled about that.

I do love the smooth greensnakes. I have them in the garden all summer. Mostly they like to wrap themselves around canna leaves and hang out there, but I've also seen them a lot this year hanging out in/on/around the large containers at the shady west end of the garden where I have a mixture of plants, mostly sun coleus as the thrillers, impatiens as the thrillers, and ornamental sweet potatoes as the spillers. The smooth greensnakes also have been pretty prolific on bean trellises at the east end of the garden this summer. In very hot years when I erect a 50% shade cloth over the peppers and tomatoes in July, the shade cloths usually are about 6-8' above ground, and the smooth greensnakes like to lie on top of the shade cloths and sun themselves. Sometimes this startles me when I am harvesting tomatoes and look up to see a snake peering down at me from the shade cloth overhead.

The snake head in the green beans doesn't shock me, but after so many years of dealing with snakes, I think I am fairly unshockable. They can get themselves into all kinds of places where you might not be expecting them.

Jennifer, Congrats on that fine amount of rainfall. Believe me, I understand all the trials and tribulations of having cats and dogs. Both types of pets can take up a lot of time, and you have to manage them and their indoor/outdoor time. When my dad was in hospice care and was dying, I stayed down there with him for multiple days and nights in a row. When I came home on the weekend (because my brother was going to stay with him all weekend, and then I'd stay with him during the workweek again), Tim was so relieved. He had discovered how much of my time was spent on the animals---cats, dogs and chickens....feeding them, cleaning up after them, letting them in, letting them out, playing with them, scooping litterboxes, washing muddy dogs, etc. and he was happy to have me home dealing with all the animals again so that he didn't have to. Really, we both deal with them, but since I'm home all the time, the larger percentage of animal care falls on my. It isn't the same as having children, but it certainly can be very time-consuming.

I don't like for our cats to kill anything either. Vermin and other wild things can carry diseases, I have the cats trained to leave the wild birds alone (spraying a cat with a hose when it is after a bird teaches it a lesson real quickly) but I cannot train them not to kill mice, rats, voles, gophers or moles. However, if we notice they've killed one, we grab the cat and bring it inside so we can bag up the dead thing and dispose of it properly so the cat won't eat it.

I am loving today's weather, and now I need to get into the kitchen. I just boiled a chicken and now I need to get the chicken stock into containers to freeze, then I'm going to make chicken enchiladas for dinner, do something else (I don't know what yet) with the rest of the chicken meat and then go through the chicken carcass and bones down on the banks of the pond for the turtles and other wild things to enjoy.

I wish it would rain here. If it doesn't I'll likely water the garden tomorrow to keep the tomatoes and peppers happy.

Dawn

Woke up yesterday to no internet and no landline phone. Oddly we had TV, since all 3 are supplied by the same cable. Spent the morning on the phone with the cable company, then to their store to get a new modem which didn't help. Then cleaning up before my mom came to stay tonight. (Her surgery is tomorrow.) Apparently my cell phone doesn't actually get internet here at the house (it does on Main Street, just not where it would be convenient). So many times I wanted to google something...like the tech support number for the cable company ::eyeroll:: I missed reading this forum, and I had 52 notifications on Facebook when I got back on line.

I'm not going to attempt to respond to all the posts. I missed you all! Every day I look out my kitchen window and count the okra blooms. The yard long beans hang down from what was the cucumber arch. It reminds me of the April fools joke some news station did in the 50s of the "Spaghetti harvest". It just looks like long spaghetti hanging down. The SVBs did in the Seminole pumpkin and the other winter squash got too dry. By the time I can get back out in the garden it will be hot again.

Honey learned to open her kennel. Now we have to lock it with a carabiner.

I just saw the last line of Amy's post. Yay for carabiners and dogs!

Got in very late. Took Kane to walk (pee) while checking the rain gauge--about 2 and a quarter. Impressive.

Also, have a canker sore and needed to find a yarrow plant. I know I saw 2 earlier in the week and found one next to the okra. That's always fun in the dark with a flashlight, thinking about Dawn's snake posts...

haha. Just found cans of Bush's Best Beans "Purple Hull Peas" at Walmart. Ha! Who knew! I got a couple cans.

Did you all of a sudden have it today, Amy, or did they have to come and work on it? Will be thinking of your Mom tomorrow. I pray it goes smoothly.

Ooooo. Honey must be really smart! Aren't you proud of her? LOL

Didn't rain here, Dawn--and OKC sounds like they're in the rain loop now, finally. 2 and a quarter, 4"--Good for you all. And now it is very dry here, so our turn for it, I guess. But yes, we got the cool-down here, as well; I have a light jacket on tonight.

Your chicken plans today sounded better than my crockpot pulled pork with Head's BBQ sauce. Usually I'm all over that, but just was not in the mood tonight--and the pork was a little dry and stringy. My bad.

Timbler rattlers--and copperheads--would scare the bejeezus out of me.

Your accounts of exercise, Dawn and HJ. . . . you are so good. I am so bad. I really wish I enjoyed exercising. I just don't. When I worked in offices (for 30 years), I was pretty good about it. . . haven't done a sit-up or stretching or yoga or walking since. On the other hand, I don't sit much anymore, except in the evening on the deck or watching basketball or baseball with GDW. Tonight I actually was awake through a whole game, and MAN that's brutal, sitting for 3 hours for a baseball game. I enjoy them a LOT, but it's a killer to sit for that long. And I wasn't even multitasking tonight--the Royals got my undivided attention. I know that's because I didn't eat much for dinner. Half a sandwich and some cottage cheese and 3-4 jalapeno poppers.

We're supposed to go fishing tomorrow, and should be a great day for it, but I'm freaked out by 2-gallon bags of jalapenos and bells that need to be dealt with. I could freeze them and cop out, but I really want to do pickled ones, so Friday will be a big work day--and I'll dig out the 4 frozen gallon bags of tomatoes, too, to can up.

Garry has the fence up and around the entire raised bed area and modified hugelkultur now; and has been stacking cinder blocks for the new BIG 6x20-foot bed--two are 4'x20', 2 are 5'x16', now this one, and the hugel is 8' angling down to 4'--by 25-ish. That is ALL. We quit. And how we're going to add the extra soil, no idea. I might be out on the street corners begging for leaves and straw. . . . I like the cinder blocks, but they take up an extra 12 inches on each bed that could otherwise be used IN the bed. My only complaint with them. :) Some folks fill in the holes, but I've been too lazy to do that. Besides, they're offset, so it's not like the soil would go straight down from the top. And it took me 8 hours on two days to dig out the crabgrass and Bermuda in that extra space. And today was shoveling out the previous compost (where now a path will be) and tossing it over into the new bed on top of straw/cardboard.

(Dawn--the tractor/baling incident wasn't at all horrifying--it was majorly annoying and frustrating! The finger wasn't mangled, just mightily dented for many years! LOL Can't see it now, but was there for 20-30 years. Whereas, the tractor accident with your beloved neighbor--now THAT was tragic. My father-in-law at the time on the ranch had caught his left arm in the combine belt and it was fairly badly mangled up, but he could use it a bit for light tasks. )

And I know you speak the truth from your heart from your cancer battle. God bless you. It's a tough lesson to learn, isn't it, but so very very precious--that, I guess is the gift that survivors receive. There's nothing that happens in our lives that we can't learn from. In fact, here's a thought. . . perhaps folks who travel lightly through life, who never have any real trials (and frankly, many of us in this great country travel lightly, compared to the rest of the world) lack the true lesson that life is so precious and fleeting.

The deer are getting pretty cavalier and daring, as they do in September, with hunting season around. . . Found a few more ECHINACEA nipped off in the shop bed, and last night, Titan was indignant and uncharacteristically woofed loudly at the back door to get out about 10 pm--the deer had gotten into our near back yard, and he was ticked off! Now tonight, he was out on the deck steps, closely monitoring the back 40, and I went out. HE goofed--he wasn't looking at (or hearing or smelling, apparently) behind the raised garden; I spotted them. I said, "Titan! Are those DEER I see?" And he took off charging toward me and that direction, without even yet seeing them. It was funny--as if he'd been caught asleep at the wheel. But he got 'em outta there.

How's Ethan's school year starting out, HJ? Is he a junior or senior this year? (I'm thinking junior, as I haven't yet heard you freaking out about colleges or school pictures or other senior stuff. . .)

Jack, I wussed out on the poppers. Bacon, cheese, breaded. . . I went with a "low" calorie version this evening, just oiled the outsides, stuffed with cream cheese/sharp cheddar; yeah, not nearly as tasty as your version! I know. And further, they were, for the most part, VERY hot! LOL oops, picked em a little late in some cases. The wonton ones--got the wontons. . . but there are a lot of little wontons in a pack! Now I need to google what to do with wontons! When we go to eat at our Chinese buffet, I CANNOT resist the cream cheese wonton appetizers. . . but WILL NOT make them here. I'd weigh 350 lbs!

Hoping to hear from Jerry and Mary. . . thinking of you.

George. . . he's busy busy. . .

Moni, you're back--will you be putting in some garden stuff?

Bon. . . miss you.

Rebecca. . . you been busy this week? Denise, it was nice to hear what's going on with you.

I just saw one of your (y'all's) earlier threads; I think I'd googled jalapeno poppers, and got an OKGW thread from 2014. And I've previously gotten ones from 2010 or earlier when I googled. And I realize that folks come and go from the forum. . . it's interesting, and a little sad. . . but true to life.

Sweet dreams, all.

My dear oreos has been driving me nuts acting weird following me off the property everyone I leave and today was hit and killed. My son's fiance found her and called my son. He buried her under the pear tree with 2 other beloved pets. What a bad sad day I have had. She was my constant companion on the property. I will be lost. She is the momma to the 11 pups. I still have 7 to find homes for.

Kim. . . . I am so so so sorry. . . My heart is with you. How old are the pups? Let me know. My love and hugs to you.

They are 11 weeks. Momma weaned them at 4 weeks ago it has been a long time they think that I am their mom. She was a sweet companion but a terrible mother. Her mother was a nervous ninny and she was similar. I am just heartbroken. She was out of my son's dog who disappeared awhile back. So thankful my son took care of her before I found out.

Mom's out of surgery, it went well. She is supposed to be able to go home Sat. I am so thankful there is no rehab.

Kim, I am so sorry about your dog!

I'll be back later.

I typed out a long response and then it all just disappeared. That drives me crazy.

So, here's the condensed version:

Kim, I am so sorry about your precious Oreos. I know that you will miss her.

Amy, I'm glad your mom's surgery went so well and that she will not require rehab.

Sometimes dogs are too smart for their own good. Hooray for carabiners. They do come in handy.

Jennifer, The nice thing about snakes in the dark is that you'll see their eyes when you shine the flashlight on them. One of our neighbors (he is the one who lives between us and the river, so he is our 'buffer' between us and the heavier numbers of river bottom wildlife) can sit on his porch with his grandkids or kids and shoot the snakes. They hold a flashlight and shine it out into the yard and he shoots the snakes whose eyes are looking back at them. It is a remarkably efficient way to try to keep the yard safe for the grandkids, dogs and everyone else. He has so many more copperheads than we do that it boggles my mind.

Nancy, It is true that people come and go here on the forum. A lot have gone more to Facebook and don't post here much any more. I prefer the longer conversations we have here though.

Please don't judge pink eye purple hull peas by the way the ones in the can taste. I despise canned southern peas, but that's probably because I am spoiled and used to having them fresh. They are just so much better fresh! Next best to fresh, according to my taste buds, are frozen ones that I picked, blanched and froze the same day. When you cook them, they are almost as good as the fresh ones were. I don't buy canned southern peas because I dislike them so.

I'm going to pick jalapenos this afternoon since the snakes seem unlikely to be out on a 66-degree day with rain falling, and make jalapeno poppers to go with today's dinner of chicken enchiladas. I hope these are hot. They should be since they've been growing in hot, dry conditions. The jalapenos I harvested in August after all that rain were just too mild in flavor and that was disappointing.

The rain and cool weather finally found us this morning and I am so relieved. We had gone about 5 weeks without meaningful rainfall, and the 0.80" that has fallen today is more than they had forecast (0.25-0.50") for us to receive, so I'm really pleased about that.

I'm not so happy about muddy dog and cat paw prints on the floor, but they're easy to mop up and we cannot have the rain without the mud, I suppose.

The dogs and I walked in light rain sprinkles this morning after the heavier rain had ended. I go in 'spurts' with working out. Once I get into the groove, I 'have to' work out every day or I really miss it, but if I start missing a day here or there, before you know it, I'm not working out at all and do really miss it....but find it so hard to re-start again. So, it seemed better to at least walk and not miss a day so that we wouldn't fall out of our regular routine and get out of the groove.

I wonder if the hummingbirds felt the cooler weather coming and headed south. I filled up the feeders with fresh nectar a couple of days ago and haven't seen a hummingbird since then. We'd had a lot of them that very morning, but perhaps they were filling up at the feeders as preparation for leaving us for this year. If they are gone for the year, we'll really miss them. We have had a lot of hummingbirds this year, including some types we almost never see here, so it has been a great year for them at our place.

Dawn

The deer had a party in my big center bed--I neglected to replace fishing line fence along two sides that I'd taken down; I got sloppy and they got in. Devoured the four pepper plants out there (I was getting tired of the peppers, anyway, and was thinking about taking them out--we still have 4 producing ones in the raised beds; and munched or trampled some of the other stuff. I haven't had venison for a long time, might be tasty. lol

That must have been other night when GDW and Titan went out and they were clear up into the back yard. This morning I was up by 4, and got Titan up to chase them back, as they were a little close. We did go fishing yesterday; it was a beautiful not-hot day on the lake, and we had a lot of fun, but didn't have great luck fishing; and we were exhausted; we both sat down after dinner, and GDW woke me up at 11 and I staggered into bed. . . so I actually did get about 6 hrs of sleep. But I'm not feeling very peppy this morning; and it is cool out here. I think I'll can and clean today. And water.

I talked to Garry about a puppy, but he remained the voice of reason, Kim. I do hope you can find homes for the puppies; will you keep one or two? I'm so sorry about Oreos.

Darn, we're needing more cinder blocks; I better get busy. . .

I am taking them to my dau in love in 2 weeks. She can take them to safe place to be rehomed. It kinda scares me that people would want to use them badly so I just keep feeding them and tripping over them. Now that oreos is gone I need a buffer. She was big and no matter where I went I could drop my left hand and touch her nose. Unless she saw a grasshopper. Then she would take off bouncing and jumping like a dysfunctional kangaroo. I have thought about keeping a pup and even have a little guy picked out but with moving not sure how smart that would be.

Garden should be happy. We have had drizzly rain since last Saturday. Well I guess it will be really happy when the sun comes back. Fall stiff is doing great. I have to pick today. .....in. .the. .rain

Just a quick "hey!". It's going to be a busy weekend. Hope everyone enjoys.

Things I've noticed in the past couple of days---wildlife seems to be very active at night right now. Tons of dead animals on the roads. Tom goes to work while it's still dark in the morning and says he sees all sorts of things out and about. Wonder why.

Saw a story on the news about stink bugs being particularly bad right now.

So, so sorry about your dog, Kim.

Stink bugs are all over the place here. They've swarmed me once or twice. Also seen swarms of some kind of brown moth or butterfly thing.

I haven't been on much because the garden is depressing me right now. Still bringing in more peppers than I can use (giving them away at work) and the occasional tomato (off the dying spring plants, nothing from the fall plants yet). Still getting herbs, green beans are growing, and new cukes are growing slowly. I guess I'll plant more lettuce and spinach and hope the hoppers stay off them.

I'm a good gardener. I can grow tomatoes. I am a bad pest control person. I can't outsmart them.

When is the best time to divide peonies?

Nancy, I've left the garden gates open on purpose lately so the deer can go into the garden and clean it up for me. Of course, not one single deer has stepped foot in the garden, so my plan isn't working.

I'm getting kind of tired of all of it. It's been a long, long growing season this year since it warmed up so early and I've got pantries and freezers stuffed and overflowing, so if the deer were to eat the whole garden, I'd be okay with that. So, naturally, they refuse to step foot in the garden.

Kim, We've had drizzly stuff too, but not enough to really add to the amount in the rain gauge. The drizzle kept our temperatures abnormally low today so that was nice.

Enjoy your day at the market tomorrow, Kim. Is this the final weekend?

The heavy rain was several counties west of us, but the runoff all flows down the Red River, so the Red River flood gauge at the Gainesville Bridge went from 7' yesterday to around 21-22' this morning. Hopefully no one was camping on the river banks or on the sandbars in the river. Our Emergency Mgmt office got the word out early about the impending quick rise of the river, so hopefully folks were paying attention.

Jennifer, I think the wildlife in general become more active as fall deepens, perhaps looking for food or a place to den up for the winter. The dogs and I have been smelling (but not seeing) skunks lately on our early morning walks---so I've been keeping my eyes wide open looking for them---being chased by a skunk is not fun. Been there, done that, don't want to go through it again. The deer, of course, are a lot more active---is it almost rutting season maybe? The little cottontails are coming out of hiding, but there's lots of signs that coyotes still are around....and are eating tons of persimmons.

We have regular brown stink bugs and southern green stink bugs down here, but so far have not developed a problem with brown marmorated stink bugs like they have in some states. I hope we never do. I know that people in Pennsylvania have been dealing with them for years---and they try to invade homes by the thousands. That would drive me nuts.

Rebecca, You divide peonies in the fall here.

This weekend Tim and I are planning to knock out one wall and build another in order to enlarge the mudroom. It has nothing to do with gardening, except it is the mudroom that catches all the dirt, mud, wet grass, leaves, etc. that I track indoors year-round when I come in from the garden or yard. So, looking at it that way, our mudroom is a very important room and the bigger it is the better. We're taking it from 5' wide x 7' deep to 5' wide x 15' deep. It is just a glorified wide hallway with a place to stow outdoor clothing, the garden tool bucket, and sometimes random plants and gardening supplies. We bought all the construction materials this evening so we could get an early start on the project tomorrow. After we're done, we'll see how many pairs of boots and shoes it can accumulate when wet, cold weather arrives.

Dawn

Thank you all. I am so thankful for this rain. I really just need some sunshine. It has been a draining week. Well I tripped a good one tonight. Trying to hurry. Not really sure if it was the gate, or puppy but trying to put something in the shop I flipped over the gate landed my head on some metal thing, cut my pinkies up and banged up here and there, had to call my son to get me up. Praying I can move in the morning.

Our last market is the last Saturday in October. I still have tons of tomatoes just need some heat. Peppers, eggplants, herbs are great. Last week I picked 43 pints cherry tomatoes this week I got 11 pints. I probably could have got more but so many are cracked I gave up.

Guess the deer liked my PEPEs. They're gone, at any rate. . . oh well. I know they will grow here now, and know they best be inside the fenced beds. And there weren't enough for more than a sampling, anyway.

That's so funny, Dawn! You can't give away your veggies and plants, even to the deer. The neighborhood deer herd numbers between high 20s and high 30s here. . . I'm really a little surprised I've more or less successfully kept them from doing too much damage--Titan has made a world of difference the past couple years, and the fishing line fences thwart them fairly successfully. Considering the stories neighbors told me about them, I feel very lucky, overall. Still, they have done more damage to garden plants than any other critter, thus far. Possums steer clear of this yard now, because of Titan, and we so far haven't seen many rabbits or raccoons. I saw more rabbits in my city neighborhood in Mpls than I have here. I think it's as GDW thinks, that people have hunted them out (and dogs, cats, owls, and probably coyotes). There was/is a woodchuck family that lives about 200 yards away down a creek gulley, but I haven't seen them at all this year. Nor have I yet seen any wandering armadillos or skunks this year. We have a mole or 3 in the front yard again, and now they don't bother me one little bit. It's not like we have a picture perfect lawn out there, anyway. :) I'm much better about watching for snakes than I was before listening to stories from you and others, and haven't yet seen any venomous ones here this year, which is fine with me. I know Titan's not going to be messing with them again--OR skunks. lol AND my voles seem to have vacated for now.

I didn't get the peppers canned today--they're still firm and nice. Told GDW maybe I'll get them done tomorrow, and if not, maybe I'll think of someone's back door to drop them off at as an evening mystery present.

We ran to Muskogee this morning and ordered 60 more cinder blocks to be delivered tomorrow for the beds expansion. GDW worked on those all afternoon. I was dragging, from not feeling well last night and getting up at 3:45. Legs ached all day. Took ibuprofen all day. That fishing must be really hard work! (Titan just took off like a bat out of hell. . . deer got too close, I am assuming. . . he doesn't bark at all, he's like the huge big bad phantom when he goes after animals.... only animals he barks ferociously at are human ones. I think that is odd--and funny. Oops--and snakes and possums. And woodchucks.)

Our veggies beds are not 100% technically accurate structures--one can see they were not built with a blueprint. I wasn't even watching what he was doing--I spent the afternoon laboriously putting up my fishing line fences and practicing my fishing knots at the same time. Killing two birds with one stone. That center bed looks like a giant spider web now. Whoever gets in there has bitten off more than they'll be able to chew. (50-lb lines, too). Most likely it will be me. LOL At any rate, I went over to see his handiwork just before dinner, and he was not happy with his imperfect work. We both were of the mind that we were going to try to maximize the beds' square footage at the expense of wide paths between. We found that the 26-28-inch paths are perfect for our purposes--we have no need to mow--takes him minutes to weed whip, and I just jump into the beds to work them if necessary. But the area is not squared, as one corner of it had to be fenced at a slant, which threw the final two beds off to some extent. I just laughed at him and reminded him of our goal--wasn't to build beautiful perfect beds, was to grow stuff. And that if we could get good soil in there, we wouldn't often be seeing the borders anyway.

Oh, we dug up sweet potatoes--we had 3 plants that produced beautifully--the rest, nothing. I was googling possible reasons. . . I am concluding, perhaps wrongly, too rich of a soil mix (hardly any of it was dirt--but rather peat, leaves, raised bed soil mix. . .) plus I think I dug them too soon (although as I said, 3 did great); I know some of you told me the poorer soil I could put them in, the better they'd do. . . we don't HAVE any really poor soil to plunk them in--wherever that dirt is, there's also rock 3 inches under. I'm not going to lose sleep over it, but what do you all think, if anything? However, we got enough to see us through probably 15-20 meals, which most likely will suit Garry just fine! LOL, so all's good. I was frankly surprised, after digging up the first three and they were good. Weird.

Kim, DAGNABBIT, watch where you're stepping!!!! AAGGHHH. I hate it when I do something like that--and hate it when one of my friends does. Are you okay now? Except no doubt sore. and most likely will be tomorrow. I don't know if it's smart to keep one of the little guys, either. . . it'd be a real dilemma for me, I know. Bless you, either way, and bless you in general!

Ha! I am so tickled that some of you are getting much-needed moisture!!!! All I can do is laugh. Sometimes we're the windshield, sometimes we're the bug. Right now we're the bug. And so I've been pouring out $$$$$ on watering. And know ALL my "discretionary $$" will be going into soil this month and next! And what a lovely thing to be spending it on, really. I'd love to find some good city compost places, but none around here. And so we'll spend money on compost, peat, raised bed soil mix, and pray for lots and lots of leaves. . . using cardboard, newspapers, and whatever else we can find. . . any ideas? (We also have our compost piles going with vegetation, straw, kitchen stuff, leaves. . . ) It's going to take a LOT of stuff to fill those new beds and replenish the existing ones. How ironic to have roughly 1 1/2 acres and no dirt. . . I find it rather amusing, really.

Had to laugh at your mudroom expansion, Dawn--it's going to be wonderful--and yes, you're going to all have to buy some more boots and gloves and doodads to fill it up! :) We don't have a mudroom. I'm almost glad--I KNOW what it'd look like! I guess my deck is my mudroom, kind of, only I don't have the boots and gloves and stuff. But I certainly have a motley assortment of gardening stuff on it. And my single-car attached garage (which used to be a double car garage, but now the other half is the "art" room), is my other mudroom, as there's where we put the shelving for the official storage of gardening stuff. Right now there are four huge garbage bags of goodwill stuff to be taken to town.

I suspect many of our gardens look better and are doing better than we realize. I think of mine as being in tatters, probably like you, Rebecca--what I REALLY suspect, is that I'm just not appreciating it like we do when everything starts growing in the spring. I have my shop bed, for example, where I tore out all the gigantic fun Tithonia. . . and so then it was empty--well, it's not at all empty--it has 2-3 ft tall new tithonias. . . it has clumps of geraniums that have taken over in a couple places, like 3x4 foot areas; three gigantic basil plants that look like bushes, verbenas, new zinnias that are perky and flowering like crazy. It really looks quite full and bushy--the datura have made a return and are now flowering again in one bed; mums are beginning to flower again; lantanas have taken over their respective spots; the HYDRANGEAS are still blooming, for crying out loud. elephant ears are fine, day lilies still providing greenery, silly coleus 3 feet tall where they are, Gaillardia is rebounding, verbena in one bed has gone nuts (I LOVE verbena--it was annual up north. It loves Oklahoma.) Catmint that looked dead when I got it at SF from Dawn is BIG. The 15 fabric pots scattered near and on the deck are all just full of verbena, begonias, the most gorgeous scarlet coleus plant (that is 3 feet tall and 3 feet wide) and a couple other bushy big coleus--dahlias limped through the summer and now are blooming happily, bushy big black sweet potato vines. . .It's really not that the garden has failed, so much, as it is that I am not seeing and delighting in the things that ARE doing well. And I should be, because they're awesome. It's more that I need to do a bit of "yard-cleaning," so that the not-so-good stuff is cut off or yanked, as well as weeds, always the weeds.

Amy, know you've got a lot on your plate; thinking of you. And all the rest of you.

Nancy I am sore. And so tired but I can't sleep. My alarm goes off at 4 lol.

Kim, sounds like me last night! (Only my alarm didn't go off, my internal one did.) And today sucked! I am hoping better for you, but if your day when you get up sucks, just take comfort in knowing mine on Friday did, too. And we can commiserate.

Sounds like a plan. I may have to find a shady spot and takea nap tomorrow

:)

On a gardening note when do roselle hibiscus bloom? I think I see buds all over mine, hoping anyway

Kim, George thinks there is a day length factor to roselle. They don't bloom till late summer, I have seen a few blooms already. The flowers aren't real obvious, they look like okra. After they bloom, the calyx over the seed pod turns deep burgandy red. That is the "fruit", the calyx. Apparently the seed pod is hairy, so most people remove it. I dried mine to use in tea. George said he made jelly. It is sometimes called a Florida cranberry and there are recipes for fake cranberry sauce.

I don't know what is happening in my garden. Thankfully we had 1.5" rain, because I have not been out there. Probably have foot long okra.

We are having a family party today. My brother picked my mother up and took her home. My sister will stay with her and Dad and brother will come down here.

Nancy, my dear, you are my hero. You survived driving all that way to see your mother and the stress of moving her. I am a basket case and have only been dealing with it for 3 days. Emotionally drained.

Oh, Kim, falling like that is terrifying! At least you had your phone. I rarely remember mine at home. How are you feeling today?

Dawn you go right ahead and knock that wall out, LOL. I'll sit here and watch! That seems like a huge undertaking!

Rebecca, I have some stink bugs, but none have swarmed me. I have seen more leaf footed bugs this year. They moved from the Korean squash to the yard long beans.

I've been reading along but I can't post from my phone and couldn't get decent wifi at the hospital.

XOXO

Oh, BTW, I am STILL finding carrot top dust in my dehydrator. I don't know where it hides, but when I use it it blows more out. (I know it's carrot top, because that's the only thing green I've done this season.)

Amy lol about the carrot dust. I did that when I dehydrated parsley. The dehydrator kept blowing out green leaves. Not to mention the green all over the floor.

Than you for yalls concerns. It was a horribly rough day. I could not move without shooting pain, especially my right eyebrow head shoulder arm hip leg. Hey my toes feel great! I was concerned and almost went to er but waited it out. The hardest part was the confusion and the heaviness in the right side of my head. Once I got warmed up at cracker barrel I started feeling better. I moved to my son's temporarily since a rat snake moved INTO the camper. Sigh

Well, Kim--how are you feeling today? Sore, I bet. How's your head? Okay, I began this earlier today. I see it has been a rough day for you. Are you guys keeping alert to signs of concussion?? Is there any chance of that? I am SO sorry you are not in great shape! Ibuprofen? I know you don't do drugs much. Ibuprofen is my friend when I ache. But if you can't take it, then I hope you just can feel better very quickly.

AND--how big is the rat snake that has taken up temporary residence? Can the two of you wrangle him out? He may not be willing to leave; he might think he found the home of his dreams!

Ah, Amy, glad to hear from you. I'm glad you all got your Mom home; and have a great party today. Gosh. You had me a bit nonplussed about your hero comment, you know--it was embarrassing and I thought you quite overstated the whole deal. I was thinking about that while I was in washing my hair just a few minutes ago. :) I WILL say that all of us are good at something, all of us have mighty failings with other things. I will admit that I handle huge things well. Much better than little things. There've been a few times in life where it wasn't a matter of being good at it, but when you're the one the load lands on, you do it. Period. It's not heroism, it's like having to clean the toilet. If I don't do it, it won't get done. Now little things.................. not so good. If I can put it off or not do it, no prob. I absolutely lose it when I'm dealing with unresponsive customer service people or trying to unravel incompetent mistakes with robotic corporations or computer problems. GDW knows those are BAD times for me, and he is always a little bit hesitant to bring such things to my attention, not because he's afraid to, just cuz he knows it's gonna be a downer for me--I bet it's like Ron going out to work on the plumbing or installing the dishwasher--or I've heard others hear talk about the hubby out cussing up a storm trying to do something. I don't cuss any more, but oh my gosh, those kinds of things take me to the edge. Social issues, politics, those kinds of things make my blood boil. . . I'm thankful for my growing faith that enables me to deal better than I may have at previous times dealt.

Well I KINDA took care of the peppers. . . dispatched a teense over half of them--pickled with garlic, touch of sugar, carrots and onions. It felt like it took forever, and only ended up with six pints. But they're awfully pretty, and I think Garry and I will actually like them. If they're not way too hot. . .

and we got the cinder blocks delivered today and he finished the beds. That is sans dirt or soil. No WAY are we going to get that accomplished. I'm going to have to use dirt--and just mix with it lasagna stuff, raised bed soil, compost and peat. And whatever other amendments I have lying around here--also think we'll go get more straw. Now all the things left growing (peppers, potatoes, cabbage and lettuce) are in one bed, so we can work on all the others.

I got such a kick out of Garry this evening; we were on our way into town to grab a couple things--and something to eat, since I just spent the afternoon cutting up and canning the peppers. . . and I desperately needed tortillas and sour cream. . . (priorities priorities). And he commented that it looked like I was ordering soil stuff. I said "no, I was just pricing it out." I said, "Garry, there is NO way that we can avoid using dirt in those beds. Otherwise it's gonna cost us an easy grand to put in enough soil-less stuff to even get them deep enough to grow anything," I said, "and dirt is fine. . . we just have to make sure we add plenty of really good stuff in with it. " And now, my new gardener husband is the prima donna. He said, "Well, maybe, but the more good stuff we can get in there, that's the way I want to go. We didn't build all these beds to put in dirt that won't grow anything." Nothing like a reformed non-gardener, eh?

Meanwhile, he hauled concrete blocks here and there all day; I watered, studied gardening stuff, cleaned in the kitchen, canned six measly pints of pickled peppers. . . nevertheless, I slept from 7:30 this evening to 11 pretty much, and he watched baseball/slept. THEN I jump up and know I have to wash my hair (another one of my top failings--I groom up okay except for this one little thing, the hair. Love that I have it. Hate that it's a pain to deal with and thick--and takes FORever to dry. Wish I could wash it, and go. But that's really not an option for me. . . it waves in the most obnoxious pattern ever, and/or frizzes up like a clown's hair. For the most part, I could care less about my appearance. . . but the hair. And since I have learned how it behaves well, then those are the things I have to do. . . but I do it begrudgingly, dragging and kicking.) So when one has showered and washed and dried and curled hair appropriately at 11:30 pm, one is then wide awake. Up early tomorrow for church, GDW is sawing logs, and I'm wide awake and ready to go.

Seeking for ideas for how to get stuff into the raised beds without having to ransom the house. . . LOL. I'm so anal-retentive, that I had to go out with the industrial tape measure today and figure out how many square feet of actual bed space we have--457 square feet. Sounds good to me! And, of course, that's not counting all the flower beds where I've plunked in tomatoes and peppers and cabbages. I learned something this year. (Well, I learned multitudes of things, largely thanks to you all. .) We DO not need 18 pepper plants, 7 cucumber plants. Okay, that's about all I learned about how many of which we need. I am so excited about next year's garden.

I read about the stink bug explosion--not something I'd like to hear. I researched it--seems the best solution is to make sure any cracks or entryways into the house are sealed. hahahahaha!!!!!! Our great log house is not chinked anywhere near satisfactorily. There is no such thing in our house as "sealed." Oh, heaven and God, help us, please! Thanks for the heads up, friends, but the only preemptive measure I can thing of is to pray mightily!! LOL

I was so traumatized by the cabbage caterpillars damage to the cabbages, can't believe I'm growing more this fall. But am, and will be interesting to observe. Question: Do the cabbage cats appear whenever the cabbages are growing, or are they more seasonal?

Dawn--busy tearing down walls? LOLOL. I'm with Amy.

Thankfully fading, and blessings to all of you.

I may have had a mild concussion. After my son helped me get up and moving he left for Colorado so no help with the snake.

Funny story tho, when we first went to look at this camper I warned my 3 year old grandson stay close to granny there might be mouse or a snakein there. Well he didn't listen, he ran to the back to inspect. Just as I started to try to get him to come back to me his daddywho was outside the camper made a big noise and my little man comes tearing out of the back room screaming " a nake a nake " runs smooth past me out the door no steps straight in the air bam face down then up running again telling daddy Nake daddy run. We laughed so hard but Ryder never did understand there was no snake. Since I wasn't moving very well yesterday I did not run from the snake.

No feedback here today or tonight from others, and I am realizing that I may be overly attached to the forum. I need to get a life. Well, life is gardening, taking care of the yard, keeping up with housework, also, preserving the produce we've harvested. God. And God entails going to and participating in, church, according to what we hear. We're in the fail mode there. We go, but we stay here, rather than join the groups. ...And Family. We Love our family. And we get a "FAIL" there. We don't like traveling; we want to be home. We fail our kids because we don't venture out unless we have to--no dance recitals or grade school ball games. A few of the kids don't get this and are hurt by it. If one of em's dying, I'll be there in a NY minute. Otherwise, I'll tend the garden or be fishing.

And for me, the itch to be painting, and if I didn't love painting, then quilting. And studying many things. . . history, geography, great literature, great classical music. I am about to relax with gardening, and get straight to painting. Have two large paintings in my mind. . .

Lonejack and Annie, I spent 30-45 minutes reading every post on Harvest tonight. Mind-blowing! AWESOME. I was SO wanting to be there, SO sort of envious. I want to can T-bones, venison, EVERYTHING. It's like I feel when I hear an exquisite symphony, or see a painting masterpiece. I am so sad that my life is so short that I can't do all the lovely things there are to do. . . OR go out and ride a great horse all day long. But. . . for now, gonna try to get the garden in order and paint a few pictures.

Nancy my life is similar tapping my finger waiting on posts. I have no friends or family activities at all here which sounds pitiful well it is pitiful. Lol. Not sure how it happened that way but it is a main reason I want move. Since my son has a fiance he is busy and I am left home alone so often. It was bound to happen these kids. Going of getting a life hmmmph. I guess it's time to remake mine. Kinda nice having a blank slate here. I am lost not having a specific plot of earth to plan for the spring. I need to get settled somewhere so I can begin a new dream. And seeds I need to be able to start seeds in December.

I am so far behind on this week's news that I feel like I cannot catch up.

First, the mudroom report. Knocking out the north wall so we could expand into former sunroom space was very hard. Amy, if you'd been sitting and watching, I believe you would have heard a curse word here and there. Apparently when Tim and Chris sectioned off the mudroom from the sunroom about 4 years ago, they built that wall to last forever. It had a gazillion nails and screws to hold it all in place forever, and there was a thick wall there. From the mudroom side, we had to remove the following materials in the order listed: beadboard wainscotting, drywall, 1/2 inch plywood, insulation and then, on the sunroom side, more drywall....and all the framing to which all of that was attached. Tim started demo while I was cooking a big breakfast of bacon, eggs and grain-free pancakes (made with almond meal and I think I like them better than regular pancakes, too). After we ate breakfast, he continued demo while I cleaned up the kitchen, did laundry, etc. I think the demo alone took until a little after 12 noon. Oh, and he removed the flooring from the part of the sunroom that is becoming part of the enlarged mudroom. Then, in the afternoon, we built the new west wall of the mudroom, getting the framing up, the internal window put in (it will allow the sunlight from the sunroom to enter the mudroom and help keep it light in there), the drywall put up on the sunroom side of the wall, and a new light fixture installed. I love the new light----it is a gooseneck style barn light. Then the fire pagers went off (for three grass fires) and that was it for Saturday's mudroom work.

On Sunday, we put up the insulation and the drywall on the mudroom side of the wall and framed in the closet and cubbie storage area at the north end of the new mudroom area. We tried to intermittently watch part of the Dallas Cowboys game---we had the TV on in the living room so we could walk into the house and check on the game periodically. After the Cowboys seemingly gave up in the second half, we quit trying to watch the game and just tried to work on the room. We stopped for dinner around 5 pm after cleaning up all our construction mess, and put the mudroom furniture back into the mudroom so the room is functional, though nowhere close to being done and it is a good thing we did because about as soon as we had finished eating, our fire pagers went off for back-to-back wrecks on the interstate.

I was hoping the mudroom would be a 2 or 3 weekend project, but based on how busy the fire pagers are all of a sudden, I fear it may be a 4 or 5 weekend project. That's okay. We'll get it done in October and will have a much more useful space. Part of the storage area is a garden closet where I can store my seed box, which doesn't really have its own spot inside the house so it tends to float from room to room, and my garden tool bucket, which I tend to leave in the mudroom year round. At least now I'll be able to hide it away behind a closet door.

Nancy, We have gazillions of deer here along the river. They come to the compost pile daily to eat whatever I've tossed on it that they find edible. I probably see 8 or 10 visit at a time, multiple times daily (not necessarily the same ones in the afternoon or evening as we had in the morning). They often cruise along the fencelines of the two enclosed gardens and eat bean vines and such growing on the outside of the fence. However, they don't like to go inside an enclosed area if they cannot see what is inside of it, so they tend to not step foot in the garden at this time of year, even if I leave the gate open, because they cannot see beyond the plants growing on the garden fences. They'll go into the garden as soon as frost (or lack of rain) kills the plants growing on the garden fences. I put out deer corn and other goodies for them in winter, and every day/night of the year, they scarf up any hen scratch or sunflower seeds that the wild birds and chickens don't devour during the course of the day. During canning season (they know exactly when canning season is) they often stand out by the compost pile waiting for me to bring my compost bucket out to empty out all the waste product so they can gobble i t up, I have to yell at them to go away just so I can walk out to the compost pile safely, It is a wonder I get any compost at all because the deer and other wild critters love to feast on stuff that I think I am going to compost.

One reason we moved here was that we wanted to live surrounded by wildlife, and we have almost everything imaginable here---whitetail deer, cottontail rabbits, skunks (striped and spotted), possums, raccoons, armadillos, snakes, turtles, frogs, skinks, lizards, coyotes, beaver, bobcats, ringtail cats, ferrets, feral hogs, squirrels, moles, voles, field mice, pack rats, all kinds of birds--including eagles (which is the coolest thing!), and an occasional cougar (they stalk the garden a lot when they are around), and more. I think we got more wildlife than we bargained for, but you learn to coexist with them and to avoid the dangerous ones. Occasionally there is an alligator spotted in the area, usually in a farm pond when the Red River is low during drought, but we've never had one on our property, as far as we know, The nearest one we know of was in a farm pond about a half-mile from us. We don't have ground hogs this far south or bears either, though they've been seen this year as close to us as Pontotoc County. which is closer than usual.

Kim, I am sorry for all your troubles and especially for your poor head. I hope you don't have a concussion. Take care of yourself. Your tomatoes would be growing fine here as we have abundant sunshine and mostly a lack of moisture. Yesterday was hot, today is supposed to be even hotter, and then I think we cool down again, though the heavy rainfall in the forecast this week is expected to miss us for the most part. I think we might get a half-inch or inch. We'll see. I'd say the autumn fire season started up here this past weekend, despite most areas getting close to an inch of rain last week. Sadly, an inch of rain is not much when you have waist-high dried, cured grasses filling pastures---the August rainfall caused rampant growth of grasses and brush, but the almost total lack of rain in the month of September allowed everything to dry out and become fuel for fires. Tomatoes, peppers and beans are exceptionally happy thought. My squash plants died suddenly over the weekend---not sure if it is SVBs (I'll look for signs of them next time I step foot into the garden) or if disease hit them along with last week's rain.

Amy, I hope you can just take it easy this week and recover from the draining effects of your mom's surgery last week. Dealing with aging and ill parents can be so exhausting, and I think the strain is every bit as much mental/psychological as it is physical too. You just need some down time to chill and relax and not feel so stressed and worried.

Nancy, When sweet potatoes fail to form tubers, there can be several different reasons. One is that the soil is too rich and they plow all their growth into foliage. Similarly, too much fertilizer can cause the same issue even in poor soil. Another is too much shade. It also can be a variety thing---there's a few varieties that need really, really long growing seasons, but in my garden, even those will produce tubers by October if I planted them in May. Sometimes if you let the long runners root into the ground, that can prevent you from getting large tubers---I believe it diverts the energy from forming tubers and keeps the plants overly vegetative. One way to prevent that is to use a stick or garden tool to move around the rambling foliage every few days so it does not root into the ground all over the place.

Rebecca, Where Tim is from in Pennsylvania, those brown marmorated stink bugs have been invading homes in the autumn for years now, and they show up by the hundreds and by the thousands. (I hopt that is not what you are starting to see up there now.) They do sell traps with scent baits to draw them in so that people can (hopefully) trap them outdoors before they find a way indoors.

Kim, Roselles usually bloom most heavily in October here (sometimes they start blooming in late September) but it can depend on exactly which type you have. Some bloom later than others, and all the ones I've grown have been daylength sensitive. I seem to have more blooms from the ones I grow at the shady west end of the garden as the afternoon shade may trick them into thinking daylength is shortening a bit more than it actually is. Some years, when I have had tons and tons of calyxes on the plants in October or early November as the first frost approaches, I have had to cut off the limbs (the plants are too huge and too deeply rooted to pull up) and take them into the garage or the house to keep them from freezing. Then, as the calyxes dry out a bit indoors and the blossoms fall, I can harvest and use the calyxes. If frost threatens before you can harvest enough roselles, since you don't have a lot of indoor storage space, you might be able to cover the plants with frost blankets or even regular blankets to keep them alive long enough for you to harvest an ample supply of calyxes. Not only are the great for tea but they also make a wonderful jelly---I like it better than any other fruity jelly I've ever made.

The rat snake in the camper is horrifying. It is that time of the year when they are looking for places to den up for winter, and also looking for food to gobble up before they hibernate. I am so very careful in October to not leave a garage or shed door open because I don't want unwelcome residents. I do leave the greenhouse doors open so that cool nights will push snakes out of the greenhouse just in case they are thinking of overwintering there...poor Ryder! His daddy played such a mean trick on him.

Nancy, To fill up raised beds, use anything and everything you can get your hands on---logs (preferably partially rotted ones, a la hugelkulture style), chopped/shredded autumn leaves, twigs, grass clippings, animal manure (local farms or rabbit raisers often offer it on Craig's List or Freecycle), hay, straw, wood bark, mushroom compost from eastern OK, etc. If you fill up the beds with all that stuff from now throughout winter, then by Spring you'll have a surprising amount of decomposition and it will be ready for planting. I have built our garden bed soil the same way the woodland builds its own soil----by piling up organic matter of all kinds and just letting it decay in place. I raked up and used lots of leaf mold from our woodland in the early years here because it is so good for the soil, but I can only collect stuff in the woods after we've had several very hard freezes. Otherwise, I have snake encounters even in winter (I learned that years ago with a pygmy rattler encounter during what should have been the snake-free season). You can add layers of cardboard to attract earthworms. Earthworms love cardboard. They'll come to eat it and stick around to devour everything else.

I have to go now---Jet is demanding his morning walk whether I'm ready to go now or not.

Dawn

Ha--I woke up this morning being thankful--and then the first other thing on my mind was filling the raised beds--Dawn--I was sitting here on the deck thinking, "I am going to start throwing anything and everything in those beds"-and then read your words. Hahaha. We have some great rotting firewood, I noticed, in one of the firewood piles--oh yeah, that's a great space filler. I had a glut of greens last month--now, not. I guess it's time to tear out a bunch of plants and flowers.

Kim, haha, not pitiful. Good alone time is precious. Good alone time is precious. . . repeat. . . however, kinda nervy of your son to go get a fiance. Hmmmph indeed! Traveling light. . . I think that's a good thing. When I was alone in Mpls, (before the kids moved almost next door), I decided I wasn't going to own anything I couldn't move by my self. So I had a cool wicker living room couch and chairs; and the coolest twin bed. It was a fold-up frame, with just bed springs, and a small custom mattress. Really, THE most comfy bed I've ever slept on. The kids (son, DIL and their kids) have custody of it now. I need to go repo it and put it in our spare room (computer room/"office.") Or, maybe just find another one. I loved my alone life. . . being alone after having been around people a lot can sometimes be an adjustment. For me, it really wasn't because of many hours of working, and loving to paint and quilt and listen to classical music. It wasn't until years later when I was used to having the kids living nearby that I found myself getting lonely at times--and it was simply because I was used to them dropping in or vice versa. But now, I am loving it again--except now, of course, I'm not alone at all, with GDW (and the animals); but it's kinda as good, since I get to do exactly what I want. . . lucky me. Same with GDW. I was a little miffed last night, because there were no baseball games on, so he spent the entire evening watching some stupid TV church stuff (LOL), so I couldn't go in and nap. The nerve of him! But it was good, as I spent the entire evening reading the Harvest forum, and doing my seeds inventory and finding seeds online that I MUST order. And reading other garden stuff.

I had the hardest time finding Laura Bush Petunias--finally found them on Diane's Seeds. Also stumbled onto Texas Superstar plants. . . and was looking for online Texas nurseries that might carry them. No luck with that. I have shopping carts on Select Seeds, SESE, and Diane's that are just sitting there waiting for me to hit the order button. . . I'm in pretty good shape with seeds, but what? No peppers!

So as soon as I choose a few of those, will hit the order buttons. And I think we'll check out the farmer's co-op in Coweta today to see if they have any alfalfa hay. . . and if not, grab more straw. And then we'll hold our breath and begin binge-buying gardening soils and compost and stuff. AND the leaves are falling somewhat, thankfully, so out to gather leaves. Life is good.

Praying for the folks in TX, FL, Puerto Rico who are facing such horrible challenges presently.

Dawn, I tried to keep track of the mudroom visually as you were describing it all. I finally got dizzy. LOL But I bet it's not going to take as long as you think it could. . . I'd bet $.25. Can guarantee that isn't something GDW and I would tackle--although he can fix anything, or cobble something together to suit me just fine, good carpentry isn't something he can do. So glad I haven't thought of any rooms I need to have done. . . grin.

Nancy, My source for Laura Bush petunia seeds is, always has been, and always will be Wildseed Farms. Here they are there:

Wildseed Farms

At Wildseed Farms, they have the original violet-colored LB petunias, the pink LB petunias, and the Formula Mix that includes various shades of violet and pink plus white. From the formula mix in the past I've had all sorts of pink and white striped and splotched and bicolored ones.

The mudroom in its new form will have an open, clear entryway, about 5' wide by 7' deep, at the south end, where you enter through the exterior door and can turn left (west) to go into the sunroom or can turn right (east) to go into the house. That is the formerly cramped mudroom where you had to share the floor space with the console table with the shoe shelf beneath it, the cubbies/coat hooks on the wall above the table, and the umbrella stand in the left corner between the table and the door to the sunroom. So, in its new form, the entry is clear of all furniture and feels spacious, and then you walk north beyond it and there's the table and coathooks along the east wall, beyond the doors into the rooms, so you can set stuff down and take coats off, etc., without blocking any doorways. The combination storage closet/cubbies for storage will be along the north wall roughly 12' from the exterior door that is along the south wall, the bench (so you actually can sit down to remove wet/muddy boots and shoes) will be along the west wall with the umbrella stand beside it. This gives us so much more space---in the past if two people were in the mudroom together, it was crowded and cramped. Now we could have up to 6 people in there easily without blocking any doorways at all. The storage closet at the north end is a bonus because we have things we tend to leave in the mudroom---like my garden tool bucket and an occasional trowel or shovel, dog leashes, and anything in Tim's hands that he sits down on the table and forgets to carry inside and put away. Instead of having those things sitting in plain sight, I can put them away in a closet or in the adjacent cubbies. There will be a hat rack on the wall above the bench and umbrella stand so Tim can hang all his hats there. On whatever small amount of wall space remains that is not a doorway, the window, a closet door or the cubbies, I hope to hang some sort of art/decor that is appropriate for a country mudroom.

I'm excited about having a much more functional room. Our kitchen has ruined me---it has a place for every single thing with every single thing in its proper place at all times so you don't have to search for anything, and the laundry room, which was redone at the same time as the kitchen, is the same way. The kitchen and laundry room work so well that they make every other room in our home feel disorganized and not nearly so functional by comparison. When the mudroom is finished, it will be just like the kitchen and laundry room---with a place for everything and everything in its place. So, that's the goal going forward as we redo each room (slowly, over the next few years).....to leave each room not only looking prettier, but also well-organized and very functional. Along the way, I'm going to be clearing out clutter----if I don't create a place for something that we have sitting around, that means we don't need it and aren't keeping it.

I sort of think of this as a form of pre-retirement downsizing or rightsizing---we aren't downsizing our home as we move closer to Tim's retirement, but we are redoing the house so that it functions better for us. Someday I hope we can work the same magic on the greenhouse, shed, garage/barn/shop building, and even in the garden, but that's probably years away. One room per year seems to be about all we can squeeze in between the end of the main gardening season and the holidays/start of the winter/spring planting season.

Kim, I agree with Nancy that time alone is not pitiful. I also find it precious, and it sustains my sanity. It's not that I don't like the company of other people, but I also find I am perfectly fine at home alone for hours or days on end. It is so much less stressful than dealing with other people all day long like I did back when I had a career outside the home (I don't miss it!).

Life in the country is sort of weird---you think you're all alone, but really there's people around all the time, whether you welcome them or not. I get so tired of strangers, salesmen, and weirdos knocking on all door all the time that after a couple of scary episodes where I didn't know what the strangers were up to (but it seemly likely they were up to no good), I just started keeping the gate locked 98% of the time when I am home alone. Sometimes we have it locked when we both are home. What I noticed is that if I leave the gate open for even one day (like, for example, when I'm expecting the delivery of a package), I'll have several strangers knocking on my door that day. I swear---what do people do? Do they drive up and down the road all day and jump on a chance to come up your gate and knock on your door if you happen to leave the gate open???? It sort of makes me crazy. Tim will go somewhere, will come back and will say "I left the gate open" and I'll sigh and tell him "someone we don't know will come knocking on our door", and it happens within an hour or two". I know this because it happens every time the gate is open.

The constant intrusion of unknown persons makes me want to put up a big sign at the gate that says "If you are selling it, we ARE NOT going to buy it. NO, we don't want to hear about your religion. NO, we are not going to give money to whatever cause you say you're collecting money for. NO, we don't want to buy what you're selling---we don't want the steaks you're selling out of the back of your truck, we don't want to buy a photograph of our property that was taken from a plane and is poor quality and being offered to us in a $1 picture frame for only $50. NO, we don't let people hunt on our property, and you aren't going to change our mind about that. Just NO, NO, NO. And, yes, "No Trespassing" signs do apply to you." Do y'all think a sign like that would work? I don't. I still think we'd have an endless procession of strangers to our door---hence, the locked driveway gate. I happily unlock the gate if friends are coming over, but I don't like having strangers on the property---especially when I am home alone. Just no, no, no. And, if a stranger parks at the end of the driveway outside the gate and walks the 300' up to our house anyway, they'd better not be expecting a warm welcome from me, because they aren't going to get one. There, that's my rant for the week---friends who have lived here for 30 or 35 years warned me in our first year here that they got all sorts of people knocking on their door 24/7 and I really didn't understand what they were talking about then, but I certainly get it now.

Dawn

Dawn, I enjoyed the Wildseed Farms site last night; but they were sold out of the mix; so I found the mix on Diane's. Haha, though, I went back and doublechecked and see I have a want list going for Wildseed, too! Do any of the rest of you ever do that? Have a list of stuff and then forget you have the lists?

Loved the unwanted visitors rant. We don't have that problem nearly as much as you do. (knock on wood) Now that you mentioned it, I'm pleased as punch about it. The mudroom sounds divine; I focused really hard and could picture it. :)

Well, Dawn, you and I talk about being alone, but we're not really alone, alone. How far away is your son, Kim?

I spent the day updating my online cookbook, and was going to print out the new pages, and no ink. If I'd realized that, I could have been cleaning the art room and put the update off til tomorrow. Grrr. One of my updates included your tomato butter garlic dish, Eileen--pretty tasty! It reminds me of tomato vodka sauce in a way--the richness of the butter and balsamic, probably. And the new popper recipes from Jack are front and center in the appetizers, now.

I have mental lists of plants and seed I want, but the garden is always full and overpacked, so I generally don't have any place for them--so I don't buy them.

Tim is gone for roughly 14 hours a day, five days a week, so I am alone more than I'm not, but I do know what you mean.

The only comment I'll make on strangers knocking on my door is that they always seem shocked to discover somebody is home and then they cannot get out of here fast enough. Hmmm. Guess what sort of crap they must be up to if they are knocking on a door and expecting no one is at home.

Property thefts are incredibly common here....druggies looking for stuff to steal and sell and the same with folks who have an out-of-control gambling issue. Meth is a huge issue here. One of our neighbors had his metal gate stolen off his cow pasture overnight a couple of years ago---the methheads will steal anything/everything you have. The best way to avoid being a victim is to make it hard for those sorts to come onto your property or to move around on it, so that is what I do.

Nancy my youngest is 3 blocks. But since I hit my head he has been out of the area so I am on my own. If I would have told him it was serious he might have stayed. I have 2 other kids in Denton. My daughter inlove wants me to move there so I can spoil my 2 new grand boys. She loves how they call me granny and warmed to me so easy. As much as I would love to I can not do Denton again. That city is horrible.

I am pretty sure I have a concussion. I don't like being alone and not well. I slept till 11 today and still exhausted. This too shall pass. My heart aches for the victims and families in Vegas. Horrible senseless terror.

Sweetie--and I don't call hardly anyone "Sweetie"-- it may be time to go to the ER or doctor. I was worried about concussion. All my love and prayers for ya. I SO got your daughter--in law? wanting you to move there so you can spend all your time on the two little ones. That was the EXACT position I was in with my "kids" in Mpls--and now a couple new kids here. They all want their parents to be the ever-present ideal grandmas and grandpas, whose only purpose on earth is to adore and be there for their grandchildren. I sorely disappointed my DIL, who I love to death. But she wanted me to be the ever-present, ever-adoring, grandma. I was not that. If the grandkids wanted to be with me, I adored our times together. I adore the grandkids, period. But was I willing to give up everything that mattered to me to show that I was a good grandma? If the grandkids wanted to spend time with me, their wish was my command. But if the kids/grandkids expect/expected me to give up what I was doing (and loving) for whatever was going on in their lives, not gonna happen. My DIL was upset with me because I didn't spend time with the kids (I spent a ton of time with them when they were little and wanted to be with me); she lamented that I didn't invite them down to paint or plant flowers or teach them about music. All any of them needed to do was express an interest. My world, for better or worse,since I figured it all out, has never revolved around any others' expectations of how I should behave.

Nancy I hear you on the Dr. I should have gone Friday or Saturday but now there is nothing they will do except tell me to rest. I am trying but my son keeps disappearing so I have to do stuff like animal care etc. It's all going to be all right

Kim, Why is Denton horrible? I've never lived there, but the folks I know who do live there seem to like it. Granted, it has gotten too big for me now, and I cannot imagine finding a place to have a market garden there because the builders and developers buy up all the available land, pushing prices higher than average folks looking for acreage can afford.

Maybe going to the ER would be smart. A guy I worked with in the 1980s bumped his head on an overhead cabinet in his laundry room one evening. He developed a wicked headache but didn't go to the doctor. Thought he had a concussion. What he had was a very slow brain bleed and a couple of days later he was dead from that brain hemorrhage. His case is sort of a permanent reminder to me that we all should take hard bumps to the head seriously. If he'd gone to the ER, they might have recommended an X-ray, cat scan, MRI or something that might have found the brain bleed in time to save his life. Or, maybe not. It was the 1980s. I don't remember what sort of medical technology we had available back then.

The Vegas thing still leaves me nearly speechless. How one person bent on evil and destruction can hurt so many people is just beyond me. What I try to focus on is the hundreds of heroes who helped each other, who tended to the wounded, who make tourniquets and/or applied pressure to slow down or stop bleeding, who held and comforted the dying, who held and comforted the living, who shielded others--whether their own loved ones, friends or total strangers---with their own bodies, who helped people climb over fences to escape, or pulled them underneath cars, trailers or tables, or into restrooms or condos to shield them. Then there's all the war vets in the crowd who helped the firefighters, EMS personnel and police because they know combat first aid and they chose to stay and help instead of running away to save themselves. There's the folks who let others use their phones to send a simple "I'm safe" message. There's cops, medics, firefighters, doctors, nurses and other medical personnel who worked 24 hours straight---or longer---because fate demanded it. Was their evil in Las Vegas that fateful day? Of course, but there was also so much good. There's hundreds and hundreds of heroes who rose to the occasion when circumstances demanded it. I cannot help thinking that the good done by all these heroes far surpasses the evil done by that one person. I believe good always, ultimately, triumphs over evil. And, yet, we must grieve for all those who lost so much and then we must go on living so that evil people who want to do things like this learn that the world goes on despite the evil they inflict on mankind. To me, this Las Vegas thing is one of those things we never will forget---just like 9/11. We'll remember when we heard, and how we heard, and how we felt...and just the horror of turning on the news and seeing the aftermath. Some things cannot be forgotten and should not be.

Dawn