Wow, I'm impressed, Dawn. That is short for you. Think when you're starting seeds you can live with it?

I do think so. I've been trying hard to cut back the last couple of years, and with a possible drought looming, I believe I can stay focused and firm in my resolve. I've got to save room for all the flowers I want to grow!!!

It will be much, much harder to start so many fewer tomatoes. I'm already thinking of filling the cattle feed trough up by the barn with lots of little dwarf, cherry and grape type plants for the girls so they can harvest tomatoes up close to the house without having to step foot in the garden on snakey days. I've got the seeds of maybe 8-12 dwarf bite-sized types of tomatoes in my seed box, so I can add on the special tomato trough for the girls without buying any more seeds.

I think the trying time for me won't even be when I am starting seeds. I think it will be when the tomato plants hit the store shelves. I chose only 15 tomato varieties on purpose---to allow a little space for me to make a few impulse buys when plants hit the stores. I cannot even look at my tomato grow list, or I start second-guessing myself and asking "Where is True Black Brandywine? What about Pruden's Purple?" etc. It is painful. I keep thinking that I should just throw out the grow list and start whatever seeds please me, but I'm not going to do that!

Dawn - your resolve is stronger than mine! I've expanded my garden this year by adding 4 new raised beds and planting a few hundred square feet of a friend's garden. I will have my hands full keeping up with it just working it evenings and weekends. What, no true pumpkins or sweet potatoes?

Sweet Corn: Probably Ambrosia or maybe Gotta Have It if I decide to order it from Gurneys

Green Beans, Bush: Maxibel first then Provider in the fall.

Green Beans, Pole: Probably Rattlesnake but I'd like to try Emerite.

Cucumbers: Vertina pickling and Sweet Success

Hot Pepper: El Jefe and Emerald Fire Jalapeno, Baron Poblano

Sweet Pepper: Carmen, Escamillo, Orange Blaze, Flavorburst, Ace, Big Bertha

Summer Squash: Elite zucchini, Multipik yellow straightneck

Winter squash: Honey Bear acorn

Cantaloupe: Sarah's choice

Watermelon: Crimson Sweet, Sugar Baby

Tomatillos: Tomayo R

Sweet Potatoes: Vardaman, Betty's, Bush Porto Rico

Pumpkins: Tom Fox, Rock Star

Eggplant: Calliope, Orient Express

Carrots (fall): Purple Haze, Bolero, Yellowbunch

Jack, Your list is nice and be careful or you'll fall into my trap of planting more garden than you can maintain/defend against wildlife and pests.

Believe me, cutting this grow list is absolutely, positively the hardest thing I've ever done garden-wise. I am not exaggerating when I say how very painful it was and is. It has caused tossing and turning and sleepless nights, lying awake wondering how I will "survive" without 50 varieties of tomatoes, remembering the great experimental years when I grew 300 tomato varieties (600 plants) in one year in an effort to see how they did in head-to-head competition. (This was only possible because deer hadn't found our garden yet as many of these plants were outside the fenced garden itself. It also was, ironically, the year the deer found the garden, naturally, and started eating tomato plants.)

Ever since we moved here, my gardening motto has kinda been "go big or go home". However, there's just the two of us now and we can eat only so much produce. Of course a person always can give away the excess, but if you raise lots of excess produce, you even put lots of time into growing, harvesting it, washing it, sorting it and bagging it up just to give away. I want to spend that time more productively on projects here at home. Even when I can, freeze and dehydrate all the excess for us, all I'm doing is filling up pantries and freezers with more food than we can eat. If you keep preserving more food than you can eat every year, after a while you have quite a surplus in storage. I work hard to rotate the oldest stored canned and frozen goods so that the oldest stuff is eaten first and the newest stuff last, but that's also a ton of work that involves keeping the deep freezes (we have 3 of them) really, really well-organized.

I've been working really hard the last few years to more closely align what we preserve with how much we eat, though I still like to preserve two years of food each year---so if there is a total garden failure in any give year (it's never happened, but you never know) then there's still a year's worth of yummy home-grown food stored away. So, it is time to cut back even more. I have to have the mindset that what I grow and preserve this year will be enough for us, but not too much, and I cannot focus on the stuff I'm not able to grow. That opens up the door to have more space for flowers. I used to grow a lot more flowers than I have in recent years, but the veggies kept pushing them out. This year, it is a return to many more flowers.

True pumpkins have zero chance of surviving here with all the squash vine borers---we always have two generations of them and sometimes 3 or 4. I'm just so tired of fighting them. I'm thinking that if I take off a year or two, maybe the SVBs will die out in my neighborhood. Before they found us, I grew 15-30 varieties of true pumpkins every year and had such a wonderful time doing it (and not even in the real garden, but out in the 10' wide strip of grass between our driveway and the southern property line....with me having to go drag wayward vines out of the driveway occasionally and direct their growth back towards the fenceline), but then the SVBs arrived, and everything changed. I think the SVBs didn't find us until our 7th year here. I do not know a single person in my county who grows true pumpkins (or summer squash) organically without the use of synthetic pesticides. I suppose I could just make life easy on myself by planting those true pumpkins and summer squash in their own garden away from the other two gardens and then spray them regularly with synthetic pesticides, and we'd have a great non-organic harvest of them, right? But, I find it nearly impossible to even contemplate doing that. I'd rather not ever use a synthetic pesticide even if it means giving up pumpkins.

Oh, and my whole no-pumpkin plan is somewhat in danger because Lillie mentioned she loves pumpkins and have I ever grown the blue ones? I told her yes and the pink ones too, so of course, she's hoping I'll find a place to grow them. I need to have my head examined for even discussing pumpkins with that sweet child. I'm toying with the ideal of building a high tunnel, maybe 10' x 12', back in the back garden and covering it with Biothrips Proteknetting instead of plastic, and planting blue and pink pumpkins inside it for Lillie but I'm not going to tell her about that idea until the high tunnel gets built (if it gets built). Even then, we still have the vole issue so could go to all the trouble to try to exclude squash pest and still have voles eat the plant roots and kill the plants. We couldn't grow many pumpkins in a space that small, but for her, even 1 or 2 plants of the blue and the pink would be better than nothing.

Sweet potatoes? I know I don't have them on my list. Every now and then I skip growing them because of space issues. What usually happens when I 'think' I am skipping them for one year is that I walk into Mike's Garden Center one day in May and see the 4 or 6 or 8 varieties of slips that they have, and then I impulsively buy some slips and find a way to shoehorn them into the garden. Last year I grew them in a regular bed, not one lined with hardware cloth, and I got away with it and the voles didn't eat them. That's a rarity. Maybe I'll find a spot to try that again this year because my hardware-cloth lined beds already will have taters, carrots and other things in them.

The problem with all root crops is that we have billions, possibly trillions of pine voles living in our woodland. Usually they stay there until it gets hot and dry and food starts getting scarce--so generally early July. When that happens, they flock to the garden and eat every living thing that has some sort of fleshy tuber or root underground (or at/slightly above grade level)---sweet potatoes, Irish potatoes, onions, leeks, the bulbing form of fennel, carrots, radishes, turnips, beets, tulips (but not daffodils), dahlias, lilies, daylilies, ornmental sweet potatoes and virtually every other flower that has any sort of bulb or tuber for a root except I don't remember them ever eating glads. After they devour all that stuff, they start in on the root systems of fruit trees (and sometimes non-fruiting trees) and black berries. Still hungry? They start eating the roots of cucumbers, southern peas, watermelons and pumpkins. Honestly, sometimes it is a wonder that we are able to grow anything at all and get a harvest before the voles kill the plants. Other years the voles stay out of the garden. You never know what kind of year it is going to be. I have three small raised beds completely lined in hardware cloth where I can grow root crops, but there's never enough room in those beds for everything---so it means I have to make hard choices. This year I choose carrots over sweet potatoes, but there's always a chance that I'll be able to squeeze in a late sweet potato planting to succeed the carrots. So, cool-season root crops usually get to mature before voles show up but I plant them in hardware cloth-lined beds because some years the voles show up at planting time (maybe in a hard winter?) and eat all the seed potatoes as soon as I plant them if they aren't in the hardware cloth-lined bed. Warm-season root crops have a lot more vole trouble because the voles get hungrier in the summer once the heat decimates their usual food supply.

In the worst drought years, the voles even have devoured the roots of lantana, moss rose and zinnias. They also love herbs, especially (for whatever reason) lemon balm. They've never bothered garlic or asparagus though.

And, yes, I've tried all the castor oil based repellents and I think all they do is make the voles reproduce more babies more quickly. I've tried growing a border of castor bean plants along the garden fenceline---from the way some of those seeds 'moved' after they were sown, I think the voles dug up the beans I had planted and carried them around and moved them into new spots before they sprouted----and we still had voles destroy the garden plants anyway.

If I were starting over with a brand new garden here, knowing what I know now about the voles, and if money were no object, I would have poured gravel 6" deep (or even poured concrete) over the entire garden plot, and then built raised beds on top of the gravel/concrete with each and every bed fully lined in hardware cloth. The problem with hardware cloth is that eventually it rusts and corrodes and needs to be replaced when it is used underground in the garden. I'm dreading the day when that happens to just the three small beds lined with it because it will involve moving a ton of dirt to replace the hardware cloth and we're getting older and less fond of heavy digging every year. And, yes, the voles do tunnel through the gravel driveway sometimes, just to show me they can, but I still think a gravel-based garden would have less vole trouble.

So, root crops are limited by necessity. The kinds of flowers, fruit and berries I grow are limited by whatever the voles' appetites are in any given year. I'll never plant a fruit tree again without burying a hardware cloth root cage around the root system to at least give the tree a chance to make enough roots to survive the voles in its early years. I believe the voles are one reason we have so many snakes come into the garden. The cats control field mice and rats pretty well. Pumpkin does his best to control the voles, but there's so many of them that he gets tired of playing with them and gives up by mid-summer. The older cats just ignore the voles with a "been there, done that" attitude. Bobcats got into the garden almost daily and controlled the voles (though at the time, I did not realize that's why they were there because the voles hadn't become a garden problem yet since the bobcats were controlling them) when the garden had only a 4' tall fence. When we raised the fence to 8' to exclude the deer, it also excluded the bobcats. So, my choice appears to be a garden with a 4' fence and no voles and with bobcats but with tons of deer damage, or a garden with an 8' fence, no bobcats and no deer damage, but tons of vole damage. What's a gardener to do?

So, those are the challenges I face, and that's the reason certain veggies (and many kinds of flowers) fall off the grow list. I love where we live. I expected wildlife. I might not have expected as much wildlife as we have though. With the Red River to our west, south and east, and tons of Wildlife Management Land along the river, we have such huge numbers of wildlife that sometimes it can be mind-boggling.

In drought years it almost becomes dangerous here as the wildlife gets hungry and more aggressive---you do not, for example, want to encounter a bunch of hungry feral hogs ever. Even the deer have stalked me at times because they are hungry, and sometimes they will stand outside the garden fence and blow air through their nostrils trying to scare me out of the garden, or will stand outside the fence, stare at me and stomp their feet trying to scare me out of my own garden. I always, always, always must be mindful to close the garden gate behind me when I enter the garden and to securely latch the gate closed----it isn't fun to have even a little skunk come wandering into the fenced garden while you're in there...and that is why my garden has two gates! Truthfully, when the deer are that aggressive, I'd rather go into the house, but that means leaving the safety of the enclosed garden and walking about 100' in an open area with the deer right there....so I yell back at the deer, tell them to go away, throw things at them, etc. and after they leave, I go indoors. We won't even get into talk of the cougar year when the sudden appearance of cougars at my garden gate in mid- to late- summer caused me to start carrying a long gun instead of just a hand gun out to the garden with me....and for weeks I was so scared that I hardly went into the garden for any reason except to harvest and then I'd take two big dogs with me. Big dogs trample gardens, so I was sort of choosing the lesser of two evils at that point. Personally, I'm more in favor of gun-free gardening, but not willing to move back to the city to make it a reality. : )

As more people move here to our rural area slowly over the years (near us, but usually not between us and the river), it just seems to push more wildlife towards us, especially if they clearcut the woodland areas on their property. More wildlife is just more trouble for me and my garden.

If I ever build a new garden spot, we will either build a deck of pressure-treated lumber or pour a huge concrete slab and then I'll have an Earthbox garden right outside the back door with a hard surface beneath it that might keep the garden vole-free and snake-free. That's my dream retirement garden, but we'd have to fence the side yard to make it happen....and Tim hates fencing. Still, I expect I'll get my way and have this retirement garden built after he retires in a few more years.

Okay, my rant about what I can and can't do is over. Everything I've learned I cannot do here because of the wildlife absolutely was learned the hard way by having wildlife destroy what I planted over and over again, so I've learned to focus instead on what I can do. That means that some root crops don't make the list in any given year and many forms of flowers that have tuberous or bulbous roots are off the grow list permanently.

Some years I get so tired of fighting squash bugs even on regular squash and C. moschata types of winter squash that I swear I am never, ever again going to plant squash but then I plant it anyway. One of these days, I'll skip all squash for a year and y'all will think I've completely lost my mind. It's okay. I don't expect anyone who has never had these sorts of garden challenges to understand that a gardener can only fight that war so many times on so many fronts before they decide that gardening shouldn't be a war and just give up on that particular crop.

Dawn

Dawn - your list of garden pests certainly dwarfs mine. I am thankful not to have to deal with voles or pocket gofers here. We do have moles that do lots of damage but not usually to my garden. Sometimes they tunnel into them to eat grubs and worms and occasionally kill a plant by undermining them with their tunnels. I put down Milky Spore in and around the perimeter of my garden last August and it seems to have worked to kill the Japanese Beetle grubs because the moles seem to be staying outside of the perimeter I treated (so far). The castor oil doesn't seem to help on moles either.

My garden is not fenced and we do have plenty of deer but don't really do much damage. Last season they nibbled on some young cucumber plants but they recovered after I put some fencing around them. They also found my fall carrots and nibbled on the tops but I put a stop to that with some fencing over the bed. The year I planted sweet corn was the only year that I had big problems with the deer. The corn brought them in and they ate it and 1/3 of the rest of the veggies.

I am planting the sweet corn, pumpkins, watermelons, cantaloupe, and tomatillos in my friends garden a few miles from my house. He has never planted any cucurbits in his garden so hopefully the squash bugs and SVBs won't be a problem. His garden is fenced so hopefully the 4 legged critters won't be a problem. My friend is only 56 but he has about 8 grand kids already and another on the way. I am growing the melons and pumpkins for the kids.

Jack,

It is so nice of you to grow the melons and pumpkins for the kids.

That's a terrific grow list.

When we first moved here, if I had known all the pest (insect, animal, reptile/amphibian, etc.) issues we'd encounter, I probably would have been afraid to attempt a garden. Thankfully, I had no clue what was to come...and it unfolded, bit by bit, year after year, so about the time I thought I'd figured out how to deal with one challenge, another one arose. The voles, for instance, weren't a problem until 2010. It is mind-boggling----like there was a schedule all the pests/problems animals knew about so that they'd show up at different times to ruin different crops in different years. The deer didn't become a problem until 2006. So, I just keep trucking along, wondering each year if there's going to be another big surprise pest unleashed upon us in the current year. At least it is never dull around here.

Moles and gophers were only an issue the first year, and only until our big hunting cat, Moose, took care of them. Moose would kill a 'beast', then bring it inside through the dog door and put it on the pantry floor. I guess he was stocking up his pantry for winter. Needless to say, we stopped using the dog door because the cat brought in too many dead things that we didn't want in the house. He controlled the voles well too, but never could wipe them out because there's too many of them and they reproduce at a very high rate when they have plentiful food. He wouldn't kill baby bunnies but he'd bring one inside, drop it at out feet and run back to the nest he'd discovered to bring us another living bunny. I never understood why he brought them indoors alive. Perhaps he had a soft spot in his heart for them and wanted us to keep them and raise them. We spent a lot of time following him back to the nest, putting the bunnies back into the nest, and then keeping him indoors until the mama rabbit came back and moved the bunnies someplace safer.

I'm looking forward to having a more manageable edible garden so I can enjoy non-edible gardening more. I want and need the change of pace. I've gardened and preserved food at a very high pace for a long time and I really want a break from that.

Here's my warm season list (* = New to me):

Beans, Bush (Early)

Mascotte for containers*

Royalty Purple Pod*

Tanya's Pink Beans

Beans, Cow Pea (Late)

trellised

Big Red Ripper (Mandy)

Georgia Long*

Hardee*

Haricots Rouge Burkina du Faso

Kentucky Red*

Penny Rile

Whippoorwill

unsupported

Lady Peas

pink eye, purple hull

long beans

Long Bean Taiwan Black Seeded

Green Pod Red Seed Asparagus (Yardlong) Bean

Beans, Pole

Grandma Nellies yellow mushroom beans*

rattlesnake*

Cucumber

Ashley Cucumber*

Barese*

County Fair

Diva

Eureka Hybrid*

Greenfingers*

H19 little leaf

Marketmore76

Salad Bush hybrid*

Vertina*

Armenian

Suyo Long*

Eggplant

Black Beauty*

Black Diamond*

Florida Market*

Grain for mulch/compost

Sorghum, White Popping

Greens, Warm Season

Balady Aswan Celtuce

Purslane, Golden

Purslane, Organic Tall*

Jewels of Opar

Malabar Spinach

manihot, hibiscus*

Melokhiya

Red Calaloo

Lettuce

Adrianna Lettuce*

Anuenue*

Australian Yellow Looseleaf

Black seeded Simpson

Blush batavians*

Buttercrunch Butterhead*

Carioca summer crisp

Cherokee*

Cougar Summer Crisp Lettuce*

Cracoviensis Leaf Lettuce

Drunken Woman Lettuce

Jericho*

Midnight Ruffles Leaf Lettuce

Muir?

Nevada. crisphead*

Simpson Elite Lettuce*

Summer mix, Fedco

Thai Oakleaf Looseleaf

Melons

Ha Ogen*

Ginkaku, hybrid*

Okra*

Becks Big Buck*

Green Velvet

Peppers, Hot

Aji Dulce Spice*

Anneheim

Czechoslovakian black pepper

Guajillo (this didn't germinate last year)*

Jalapeno Early

Joe's Long Cayenne

Mad Hatter F1* (just for the shape)

Mild Jalapeno

Tiburon Ancho/Poblano Hot Pepper

Peppers, Sweet

Blight Buster F1

Charleston Belle*

Chocolate Cake*

Figitelli Sicilia, Sweet Pepper

Golden Greek Pepperoncini*

Red Cheese Pepper

Spanish Padron*

Sweet Pimento*

Pumpkins

Seminole

Squash, Summer (Korean Kudzu)

Early Bulam

Meot Jaeng I Ae

Teot Bat Put*

This is the great eggplant experiment. If these don't grow well this year, eggplant is off my list.

I hope to make room for Sweet Potatoes, but that may not happen. I don't need that many cukes. I may pare that list down more.

Amy - that is a great list! I've not heard of several of the varieties. There are quite a few cucumbers on your list but if you want lots of pickles you should be all set. I do think you will really like the Vertina pickles so do keep them on your list.

Jack, it is just beginning to dawn on me that I am a sucker for new varieties and pretty pictures. Part of the problem is I bought some things last fall that I forgot about when drooling over seed sources this winter.

Amy, That's an incredible list. Where in the world will you put it all? Are y'all building more beds? Is the garden going to be fenced off to keep Honey from destroying it all? Your list raises so many questions in my mind. (grin) That's because I have so much experience cramming too many varieties of too many plants into too small of a space myself.

Dawn

I don't know Dawn, LOL. Yes, I need some kind of fencing. Ha ha, I was parked in front of the 6' welded wire at Atwoods. DH did say the other day the dog was the size of a small deer. The flower beds are going to have to be fenced. She's not going to like not being able to stand in the bed to look over the fence.

The plan is for a new bed to grow the sorghum in. I may use some of the vining cowpeas as living mulch. I think that is why I bought the Hardee, it was in the description. I will probably only have 4' each of the various climbing cowpeas with a cucumber plant included because I decided not to grow them side by side this year. If the garden is fenced, I may grow things along the fence line, which gives me lots of options. I might have 6-8 total okra plants. I think I can grow melons under the Green Velvet okra, unlike the Stewarts Zeebest last year that created a forrest. The eggplant goes in mineral tub sized pots. One of each variety pepper plant tucked in here and there or maybe in big pots. Lettuce also gets tucked in here and there, and gets grown in tubs. I never know which of those I will plant until I do it. Melokhiya (Egyptian spinach) only needs a couple of plants. I'm going to have to research manihot, hibiscus. I think they get tall. Which reminds me, I left roselle off this list. May put that in a flower bed or a pot. Squash on trellis, or the fence. I have this vision in my head where the garden fence goes from the chain link property line, maybe all the way across the yard. I seriously don't think DH will go for it, but it would be easier than fencing flower beds AND garden. That leaves the dogs the East side of the house and the patio. The east side of our house is wider than most. Seriously cuts her space, though. Y'all do know this is all subject to change. Depending on what DH will do.

Subject to change:

Cucumber: Little Leaf pickler, General Lee, Tasty Green (English type)

Squash: Multipik yellow straightneck, Dixie yellow crookneck, Ponca Baby butternut, Bush Table Queen acorn, maybe a zucchini TBD

Beans: Jade, Triomph de Farcy, Fortex

Eggplant: whatever Italian variety TMD has this year

Peppers: Sheepnose pimento, TAM jalapeno, Yolo Wonder, Charleston Belle, Jupiter, Joe E Parker

PEPH: whatever Stringers has ordered this year

Tomatoes: Brandy Boy, Big Beef, Early Girl, Jet Star, Fourth of July, SS100, Sungold, Baxters Bush Cherry, Glacier (possibly, to try for early fruit).