Mia, Yes , I think it will work. Interplanting tomatoes with other crops is something I do all the time. I often grow smaller plants like lettuce and carrots underneath and between tomato plants, essentially using them as a living mulch beneath the taller tomato plants. I also mix all kinds of herbs into the tomato beds as well, and think those herbs help explain how I grow so many tomato plants and yet only rarely see even a single tomato hornworm or fruit worm. You sometimes will get less yield per plant when you interplant multiple kinds of crops together using close spacing, but since you have a lot more plants occupying the soil, you still get a good harvest . The best carrot crop I ever had was a result of me broadcast sowing lettuce and carrot seed randomly into the tomato bed after the tomato plants already had been transplanted into the ground. My garden was smaller then and I had run out of space, so was packing as much into each bed as I possibly could. I just thinned carrots and lettuce after they sprouted. When I grow onions with tomato plants, normally I hammer a stake into the ground where each tomato plant will be planted later, and leave a small unplanted spot there as I plant the onions. When it it time to transplant the tomato plants into the ground, I put one tomato plant next to each stake. If I have to pull up a couple of onions to make room for a tomato transplant, it isn't a big deal . We eat those onions as scallions. I started interplanting multiple types of plants together long ago, after reading John Jeavon's book "How To Grow More Vegetables...." book. It is amazing how much you can pack into even a small space when you interplant. Even when I grow tomato plants in molasses feed tubs, I generally have pepper plants, herbs and flowers mixed into each container with the tomato plants. Look at how Mother Nature mixes everything up together. On the eastern edge of our woodland, for example, we have native pecan and oak trees growing as the dominant plants, but underneath them we have wild cherries, American persimmons, possumhaw hollies, and redbuds, and beneath those understory trees we have American beautyberry bushes, native blackberries, inland sea oats and brushy bluestem, peppervines and several native wildflowers which ebb and flow with the seasons. All of them happily co-exist. Why can't our gardens be the same way? To garden bio-intensively in this manner, you need to pay careful attention to soil fertility and irrigation (if adequate rainfall is not being received). Obviously when you interplant several types of edible crops together, the plants will be competing with one another. I get smaller onions in interplanted beds than I get from onions grown in a monoculture with recommended spacing, but still get tons of onions. We still have several dozen onions from last year's crop, though now they are starting to sprout. There pretty much is nothing grown in our veggie garden that isn't interplanted with several other things. If I ever were to plant even one single monoculture bed, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't like the way it looked and would be out there trying to fix the bed by adding more stuff to it. In fact, I do have my onions planted as monoculture beds right now, but that is because they are the only thing I've put into the ground so far this year. The onions will not be alone in those beds for long. Hope this helps , Dawn

jo3ponies, Hold a white sheet of paper underneath the leaves and thump the leaves. See if those little yellow and gray spots fall off onto the paper and start moving around. That would be the first clue they are insects. If you have a magnifying glass, you can look at them through the magnifying glass and see if they look like insects or eggs. Insects generally would have legs you could see. About how big are the yellow and gray spots? 1/16th inch? 1/8th inch? 1/32nd inch long? Figuring out the size helps you begin to figure out what you have. What you would, could or should do with them depends on what they are. You could, of course, spray the undersides of the leaves with a general purpose pesticide. If you do that, please do it in the evening hours when the bees are inactive. I think it is better to be sure of what you have before you spray, because even organic pesticides can harm beneficial insects so I try to avoid them as much as possible. If you have something like aphids on the leaves of your cucumber plants, spraying the undersides of the leaves with a sharp stream of water often will knock them off. If they come back, spray them again. After a few days of that, they usually pack up the bags and move someplace else. I'm going to link the Texas A&M Cucurbit Problem Solver. Maybe you'll see something on it that looks like what you're seeing. If you click on the link, it will take you to the Cucurbit Problem Solver main page. Then, on that page click on the word "leaf" if you want to go to the page that deals with foliage disorders, or click on "insects" to go to that page. Then, on each page, look at the photos to see if you see one that looks similar to what you're seeing. If so, click on the photo and it takes you to more info about what you're seeing. There are many insects that can and will attack cucumbers, but about the only pests I see on my cucumber plants are cucumber beetles or blister beetles. I think aphids are a good possibility merely because they are so common. Leaves can curl for many reasons, and the curling of the leaves may or may not be related to whatever you're seeing on the leaves. Also, you might want to google and look at a photo of lady bug larvae. They are grey and sort of orange (the orange could look yellow I think) and look nothing at all like a lady bug. If that is what you have, they are beneficial insects who are busy gobbling up pests like aphids and mites that are on your cucumber plants. The first time someone sees lady bug larvae, they tend to think they're bad insects but actually they are beneficial ones. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: TAMU Cucurbit Problem Solver

When we have a county burn ban, our commissioners usually lift it once our KBDI drops below 600. I don't know that the OFS uses that same criteria when making recommendations to Gov. Fallin, but I have been expecting them to lift the ban for some counties for a couple of weeks now, so the move didn't surprise me. We are having small fires in our county, but nothing that has gotten the least bit rowdy or out-of-control lately, so I think that they could lift even our burn ban (our KBDI is 661 this morning) right now (which they did not), and we wouldn't have serious wildfire trouble at this point in time. The trouble will come after you have a few frosts and killing freezes if it is still very dry and then you have all that dry, standing vegetation which will burn easily whether it is dead annual vegetation or dormant perennial vegetation. We need to have a really wet fall and winter so that the winter fire season isn't bad. Nothing about our soil is in good shape, Larry, except where I've been watering in the veggie garden and around the fruit trees. We're starting to see cracks in the soil near the house where we haven't had them before, so today and tomorrow I'm going to try to water long and hard in those areas to try and get those cracks to close back up. I'll probably have to water a while, let it soak in, then water again, etc. You know how hard it is to get clay to absorb water when it is rock-hard. Carol, I imagine it will be a real relief to everyone to be able to burn that piled up wood from the big storm that hit your area. As long as it is sitting there, it is such a fire hazard. I'd rather be able to burn that stuff deliberately and have it under control than to have a raging wildfire burn through the area and get it. Some of the Texas counties have been lifting their burn bans here and there along the river. One county made the announcement lifting their burn ban, then said that people should NOT go out and burn brush or do prescribed burning of land for brush removal because it still was too dry to burn. That made me wonder why they lifted the burn ban if they were going to stand there and say "but don't do any burning". That whole thing made no sense. Dawn

Yeah, *baybee*! Our Shallots are coming up like gangbusters, and better yet, we got rid of a *huge*, old, semi-diseased maple tree in our front yard, thus enabling the penetration of more sunlight and the promise of increased veggie, herbal and floral production. Love trees, but I have no use for *widow makers*. - Had our heat-pump/AC repaired today. Needed a new motor and capacitor. Can't be without AC,...and live to post about it. Have a great week y'all! :)