Amy, Your list is officially the most insane list so far. How many big tubs are you going to use? I always try to not devote so much space to cool-season plants that no space remains for warm-season ones. That's always a huge challenge for me, so I have to really watch myself at cool-season planting time. nowyousedum, All my asparagus is in one bed---each variety has its own row. Planting times vary, but for most cool-season veggies, the OSU-recommended planting dates are from Feb 15 to Mar 10. I'll link the fact sheet with the dates. With some things, like asparagus, you can plant them as soon as you get your hands on the crowns. I'm pretty sure that in the year I planted mine, I bought the bags of crowns in early January and planted immediately, Since asparagus is perennial and can stay in place for decades, it is important to do great soil prep first because you cannot go back after the fact and dig up the roots and redo the soil. Any future soil improvement you do after the asparagus is planted mostly consists of adding layers of compost and mulch on top of the asparagus bed and letting it get worked into the soil naturally by rainfall and small burrowing/digging insects and earthworms. Here's the OSU planting guide with dates. Please note that there's a range of dates for each veggie. For Spring planting, the earliest dates are recommended for far southeastern OK, the latest dates for far northwestern OK, and the rest of us who live in between the two extremes choose an appropriate date, based on our location and weather, somewhere within that range of dates. Oklahoma Garden Planning Guide Jack, I like the purple asparagus a lot. It has a very fine flavor. I hope you enjoy yours as well. Dawn

Kim, I wasn't worried so much about the shed warping as I was worried about it blowing away, but we built a deck-type wooden floor/frame set in posts anchored in the soil in concrete today, so it may warp in morning sun/afternoon shade, but it won't blow away. It did hurt my gardener's heart to cover up beautiful garden soil that was humusy and rich with a shed floor. Regardless, there now will be a shed to hold the tools. We plan to assemble the shed tomorrow and bolt it down. Tomorrow should be less windy than today and that will help will assembling the shed. Hooray for being caught up on your To Do List and for feeling so relaxed, and happy to have traveling money. This is just your week! Jennifer, The netting does break the wind some, and how much just depends on the size of the holes and all. I do think it helps and sometimes all a plant needs is just a little bit of help to get through these crazy Spring winds. The water heater news is not good. I don't do anything for chicken wounds---they heal just fine on their own. You can clean them with Betadine or hydrogen peroxide, but if they're minor they tend to heal quickly with no human intervention. Our chickens are independent and don't especially want us messing with them. Wounds aren't real common here. If it is a puncture wound, keep an eye on that for infection. Nancy, I'm glad they're keeping GDW in the hospital on those IV antibiotics. It will be better to have him more healed than less healed when he is released. Sometimes it seems like hospitals are too quick to shove patients out the door. I'm glad this one is not doing that to him. About the SF, I cannot rearrange our schedule (ha ha) because it is a family wedding (extended family, not immediate family) and I wouldn't dare ask our niece to change her wedding date now. Don't you hate it when real life gets in the way of gardening? (grin) We just had either our second or third day in a row with highs in the 80s, and with only minor fire calls, so it is another good day here. It helps that our relative humidity and dewpoint are really being driven upward by the relentless south winds. I really think the big outbreak of fires here on Wed scared everyone so badly that they've been really, really careful the last couple of days. With all the rain that's supposed to be coming, I'm feeling like our county may already have peaked in terms of the winter fire season and maybe things will start improving now. The green-up needs to speed up though, or that will not be true. Rebecca, I have no idea if I am right or wrong about the weather, but I trust my instincts and they rarely let me down. If they do, I have enough frost blankets to cover my entire front garden and about a third of the back. so I could, theoretically and if the ground were warm enough, just lose my mind and plant everything now. So far this year I haven't covered up anything a single time, except I put a little mulch and autumn leaves over the volunteer pineapple sage plants on a couple of nights when we were going to drop below freezing, and they survived. I suppose the fact that pineapple sage reseeded and the volunteers are growing here already is another sign that our soil is plenty warm. Y'all have to remember, though, that I am really, really far south compared to the rest of you. My weather is more like the weather in Dallas than in OKC, and I plant accordingly. I won't plant everything now, but it is tempting. Not only have four o'clocks sprouted this week (they're usually one of the last volunteers to pop up as they really like and need heat) but so have squash. It is hard to guess if they are winter squash or summer squash, and it won't matter because they are in a compost pile and I'm not going to transplant them and hope they're something worth having, but I find it interesting that the seeds are sprouting. Squash seed will eventually germinate at soil temps of 60, though they prefer 70 or 75 and even will germinate when soil temps are 90-95. Our soil temperatures in the raised beds are staying in the mid-60s and even going up warmer than that during the day, but I didn't think the finished compost that is earmarked for a flower bed I'm reworking was getting that warm. Apparently it must be. There's a family of 7 deer lurking near the front garden. They are making me nervous. They are there every night. They are there every morning. The other day, they came to check out the garden at mid-morning while I was out working, and they were probably less happy to see me than I was to see them. I know in my heart they're trying to find a way over, under or through the fence. I rarely pay attention to the fence on the north side of the garden but I think I need to check it carefully tomorrow because that seems like the weakest section of fence and I don't need for a herd of 7 deer to find a way to breach it. That is a really old fence on the north side and we need to redo it, but that's not going to happen this weekend because it is shed weekend. I've had a flat of purchased tomato plants---7 in all---four Early GIrls, 2 SunGolds and 1 Cherokee Purple that I've been carrying outdoors every morning and indoors every night for at least a month. I meant to pot them up to larger containers (they're in 5" pots) but never got around to it, so now they are big, blooming, have baby fruit on some of them and are getting rootbound. So, today I did the obvious thing and put them in the ground. Oh no you didn't, y'all say. Oh yes, I did. I did it and I'm not sorry. They are in the second highest raised bed and it is staying really warm. Zinnias have been popping up in it for about a month now, and there's a pineapple sage volunteer in that bed too. I lined them all up in a row, three feet apart and I didn't cage them because it is easier to put a frost blanket over them if they aren't caged. I did stake them to help them endure the wind. I know my microclimate, I know my ability to cover and protect these things and I'm confident I made a good decision, but I'm not mentioning it on FB because I do not want to lead astray any less experienced gardeners who might decide to follow my lead. Most people in OKC, for example, have little understanding of the fact that our weather down here is more like the weather in Dallas than the weather in central OK. These days in the 80s are making me worry that we're about to go straight to hot weather with very little mild Spring weather. It isn't that I don't think some cold weather lies ahead---it probably does. I just think I can keep the plants warm enough to mitigate any return to the cold that happens. The great thing is that these are purchased plants, not my sweet baby plants that I've raised from seeds, so if something horrible happens to them, it doesn't hurt as much because I'm not emotionally attached to them. Regardless, I haven't lost tomato plants to late freezing weather in many years, so I don't consider this much of a risk. Well, unless those 7 deer jump the fence, get into the garden and eat the tomato plants. Now, if that happens, I'll consider it a sign from God that I shouldn't have planted so early. My precious raised-from-seed tomato plant babies probably won't go into the ground for another couple of weeks yet as they are younger and smaller than these purchased plants. Oh, the final thing that made me decide it was time to just go ahead and put them in the ground? When Tim was doing the dirt work to combine the two narrower raised beds into one wider raised bed this past weekend, he dug up a sweet potato I had missed when digging sweet potatoes last year....and it was sprouting underground. I say that if you have a sweet potato sprouting in one of your raised beds, the soil probably is warm enough to plant tomatoes. The real miracle is that I restrained myself all week long and didn't rush the plants into the ground the minute Tim dug up that sweet potato. I waited almost a full week, watched the soil temps, watched the weather, etc. and made a fairly rational decision. So the beans are planted and the first round of tomato plants are in the ground. If I can get the east end of the garden prepped in time, I'll sow corn seed before the rain falls. Or, if I don't get it prepped, that will be the first thing I do after the ground is workable again. This might sound early, and it it a little early, but that little voice in my head is telling me it is okay to risk it. That little voice in my head never lets me down, so I trust it. Now, don't y'all go rushing out planting things like I did unless you're willing to risk the consequences. (grin) Dawn

I guess for me, the priority is not so much information as the fact that I regard you all as forum mates. Info can be had anywhere - friendship, however distant and attenuated, is much harder to find. But surely we are free to post what we like, when the fancy takes us, so at any moment, someone may feel inspired to ramble on about agastache or heuchera or whatever, then information is there. Not really sure what you mean by organising, to be honest. I know other forums often do a plant alphabet or seasonal categories while some forums are much stricter about appropriate subjects for discussion - going OT is verboten but I rather like the freeform. trajectories as posts go wildly askew while the original thread subject has vanished in a mish-mash of personal (and for me, more interesting) speculations and confessions. I see no reason why we don't carry on much as we have always done, and if anyone wants to talk about specific subjects, then we generally join in. I suppose we could have some formal categories beloved of bloggers...such as Wordless Wednesday or a particular colour or style.

THanks Kate! Thank you for offering me Magician's Magic. When I bought daylilies from Marriott's final sale before he closed his daylily business, he also gave me Magician's Magic as a bonus. Like yours, mine struggled to put out a nice bloom for the last 3 years. I think I have gotten only one or two times in the last 3 years that bloomed nicely. The rest of the times, they were either splotchy or not opened well. I had since moved it to the edge of my garden where I don't often frequent. I think it is still alive but if it passes on, I won't miss it. Here's what mine looked like this year.