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November 2018, Week 1

I can't believe it is November already. Winter is almost here! At least we are having November weather in November, so maybe we'll have one month out of this calendar year that seems pretty normal. Well, really, I think a lot of us will be cooler than average and wetter than average if the monthly and seasonal outlooks are correct, so maybe I shouldn't refer to our November weather as normal.


This is the time of the year when gardening work slows down. Some people are busy doing a lot of garden cleanup, while others prefer to leave the dead and dormant plants standing in the garden to provide food and shelter to overwintering insects and birds. Increasingly I fall into the latter camp. It depends on the year though, as well as the condition of our native pastures. This fall, the native pastures look fairly good, having rebounded decently from drought after rain returned a couple of months ago. In fact, some pastures rebounded so well that some of our neighbors only very recently completed a late hay cutting/baling, rushing to get it done ahead of the next predicted round of rainfall (which was last evening). And, just to show that heavy flooding rainfall doesn't prevent all grass fires, we were paged out to a grass fire late yesterday afternoon, but we weren't home at the time, so I don't know how bad of a fire it was.


The little cold fronts are coming through OK more frequently now, and I guess a fairly big one is due later this week. This is not surprising at this time of the year. Here's a map from the OCS that shows the average dates of our first autumn freeze:


Date of First Freeze


I don't know how many of you have had your first freeze yet (I remember that Jacob has), but we haven't even really been close yet, which would be normal for us. Yet, the dreaded first freeze surely draws closer every day now.


Garden tasks?


Garden cleanup can commence now, or you can wait until late winter if you chose to leave dead and dormant plants standing for the wildlife. I've noticed that the longer I leave plants standing, the more filled with birds my garden is, even in the dead of winter, so I've gotten to where I tend to leave plants standing until it is time to clear out beds to plant onions in February. Some years, autumn sage, if left alone, will continue to bloom sporadically all winter if we don't have too much cold. I'd say it is semi-evergreen here, though the green often takes on a purple hue in the worst cold weather. The beautiful mallow plant commonly referred to as French hollyhock (Malva sylvestris) often stays green all winter too and sometimes blooms a little in warm winter spells, so that often is a nice contrast to the brown foliage in the rest of the garden. Chives often stay green too, so even though I often complain about the lack of green foliage, there is some out there if I just slow down long enough to acknowledge it and appreciate it.


It still isn't too late (at least in southern parts of the state) to plant annual winter color plants like dianthus, violas, pansies and ornamental kale and ornamental cabbage. Fruit trees can be planted now if you can find them (some stores here get in fresh shipments in October for fall planting) and you often can pick up clearance-priced shrubs and trees in nurseries at this time of the year too. All benefit from an autumn planting as it gives their roots a few months to establish and spread before the summer hot season arrives again.


Corrective minor pruning of shrubs and trees is another chore you could be working on right now, though full pruning for most plants is more of a late winter chore. If you have any dead trees that must be taken out now, particularly if a professional crew is required to do so, this is a great time for that---better to take out a dead tree now than to have an ice storm coat it with ice and bring it down on top of other trees or power lines (or your house or garden) during one of OK's wicked winter ice storms. It seems like it has been a while since OK has had an epic winter ice storm, so we might be just about overdue for one.


If you're a lawn person, and if you have a cool season lawn like fescue or winter rye grass, now is a good time to apply a lawn fertilizer if you haven't already done so this fall. This is a concept that is foreign to a non-lawn person like me because I'd prefer for the bermuda grass to just die and go away so I could replant the whole lawn with shrubs, ground covers and flowering plants, but back when we lived in Fort Worth and had the standard green carpet of lawn grass in the front yard, I was a much more attentive person in terms of fertilizing the lawn grass. Even when we overseed our yard here with winter rye, I usually don't fertilize it as our red clay soil is high in mineral content and seems to keep the rye grass happy and lush even without fertilizer being applied.


Oh, and if you haven't planted garlic and/or shallots, it still isn't too late. Really, no month is too late, but for a good summer harvest in 2019, getting your garlic in the ground now, the earlier the better, is a good idea.


Our garden still has lots of flowers in bloom although the plant foliage is looking increasingly pathetic, so the flowers are nice to have. I expect it won't last too much longer. There's still a ton of butterflies. I haven't seen any monarchs the last couple of days, so maybe they finally all have made their way south, but we still have lots of Gulf Frits, Queens, Sulphurs and many other smaller, less showy butterflies. I'm not seeing a many moths now, but we still have crickets and grasshoppers, as well as tons of spiders. I would think the spiders would begin spinning egg cases any time now, or doing whatever it is that they do in order to overwinter. We still have tons of bees, increasingly desperate for food, and visiting the doves' cracked corn all day every day.


Fire ants? Well, they're everywhere. They always are here, but often are content to live underground until heavy rainfall makes the water table rise, pushing them above ground. Now is a good time to treat any visible fire ant mounds with a Spinosad product while the mounds are easier to see.


The amaryllis bulbs I've been trying to wake up to force into bloom by Christmas are halfway cooperating. Two have foliage that is visibly growing, while the other two just show the smallest hint of green leaves emerging from the bulbs. I've been carrying them out into the sunlight each day and back indoors to the mudroom at night, but the time is approaching where they'll just have to be content with a sunny window because the daytime highs will continue dropping as Christmas approaches.


I need to get some African violets or something to add some living plants to the indoors. With cats and dogs indoors, house plants are sort of risky here, but without them I feel starved for something green in the winter time.


What's new with y'all and your yards and gardens this month? Do you feel the cold approaching? The cold weather is supposed to really hit us down here on Thursday night, so I assume most folks here on this forum will feel it a day or half-day earlier than I will.


Dawn



Comments (32)

  • 6 years ago

    I will try to clean up the garden again, like I first tried last year. I used a weed burned attached to 20 pound propane bottle. Last year I had a lot of bamboo and tread wood on my trellises. There was a lot of damage to the bamboo and wood and the binder twine I used to tie the trellises together and to attach the plants. I aim to use wire to tie the cattle panels to the tee post, I will just burn the binder twine when I burn the plants and weeds. You really have to be careful doing this because of the fire hazard, but it seemed to work well last year, so I will try it again. By cleaning the garden this way I can sit a lot and dont have to cut or pull anything. I also dont have to bundle it up and take it to a burn pile or grind it with the mower. I also seemed to have less insects, and less production. I think that the weather had a lot to do with my production, plus this is my first year to go no till, so I am still in a learning curve.


    It stinks when you start losing your mobility, but thank God for my little tractor. Without it I would be pretty much grounded.



  • 6 years ago

    Here in NE Ok. I've still go lots of flowers blooming too.

    The Bermuda is turning brown.

    The garlic DH planted in a window box (its on the ground) is thriving. He also planted onions in a window box and is experimenting with it. So far they are growing. Time will tell I guess.

    I leave most of my flowers and let things go to seed for the birds and free plants next yr.

    Have a good Nov.

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  • 6 years ago

    I hope to do some garden clean up this week. Been too busy to do much. I have turnips and daikon radishes going strong. I also have quite a few garlic plants volunteering all over the garden. I hope, however, to clear a spot and plant more garlic from what I harvested back in September.


    Because my hardneck garlic made scapes, I have lots of hardneck garlic seedlings coming up in parts of the garden. They look much like grass. I LOVE this aspect of hardneck garlic. It's like a super useful weed!


    As of last week I was still picking AfricanX okra for meals. It seems to be slowing way down now, due to the cool nights. Regular okra would have quite quite some time ago. I like this okra, though, as I mentioned on the thread, dedicated to it, that I wouldn't want to grow it as my only okra variety.


    As of today I still have enough beans in the garden for fresh eating. i expect we will see an end of this, most likely this week. We're supposed to get a lot colder soon.


    This winter I hope to dig up and transplant some bamboo to a pen in the middle of our pasture. The idea is to enclose it in cattle panels. Then, whatever escapes from the cattle panels will be goat food. The patch where it is now growing is getting too rambunctious. I'll transplant what I can, cut down the rest, and eradicate everything that comes up in that spot, in the future.

  • 6 years ago
    last modified: 6 years ago

    Hey Everyone.

    Thanks for all the info and suggestions, Dawn.

    I sure like to read what everyone else is doing in the garden (and in life).

    After working today, I came home and worked on securing the chicken yard. I didn't buy enough wire, so only got part of it done, BUT I put landscape staples in where the plastic netting is not reinforced, and it seemed to keep them inside the yard.

    I really can't have them escaping. They've been getting increasingly closer to the dogs...less fear. However, my dogs are patiently waiting for them to get close enough "to play".

    We have neighbors who have two large dogs that aren't confined to their own property and these dogs run the neighborhood. Yesterday, they were making their way to the chicken yard, which they could break into with little effort, when I caught them. And told them to "go home". The chickens only go to the chicken yard when I am home, but now it's going to only be when I am outside, I guess. So frustrating. They upset my dogs too. And other neighbors who try to walk their own dogs with a leash, when these two show up and upset them. I get the "free range" thought behind keeping dogs, but it is annoying for others. I also get that sometimes dogs get out or escape but these are free to come and go at will. I also get that people judge us for keeping ours on cords. We did spend a couple thousand dollars building them a nice dog yard...that they tore up and escaped from and nearly "hung" themselves on a couple of times. I wish there was a good solution to dogs and the keeping of dogs.

    A few dead ish tomato plants were pulled tonight and thrown on the burn pile. It's really hard to do when they are mostly dead, but making new foliage and blossoms. The watermelon too. I did thank them for blessing us with food. I'm smiling, because I'm remembering them as tiny seeds and then seedlings, and then they were TOO big, but we were still having freezes so they couldn't be planted. Finally, they were planted without being fully hardened off and I alternated between "frost" cloths and shade cloths. Those tomatoes were fighters for sure. Proud of them.

    I like to clean up my garden in the fall and winter and have it ready to plant in the spring. It's never done to my satisfaction...but I like to get as much done as possible. The southern peas and peppers are still standing. The peas are dead, I think. Also haven't pulled the cucumbers, but they are completely dead by now.

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    Can you believe in 3 weeks I will be decorating for Christmas?!

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    Okay...I realize that last paragraph was total ramble. So, good night, my Gardening Friends.

  • 6 years ago

    We have this spot just off the patio that's bare dirt (or rather, clay), and our little angel decided to dig a hole there. Then the hole became a pond, which made it easier for her to dig. So now I'm laying concrete pavers there to get rid of the mess. Little miss is not happy I took her toy away, so now she's eating the gourds she planted.


    I'll clean most of the garden beds up; since it's in the front yard I feel obligated to keep it semi manageable. But a lot will just get tossed over the fence into the back yard, so the birds etc. can still use it as they choose.

  • 6 years ago

    Larry, I admire the way you keep on keeping on despite impaired mobility. One of our neighbors always had a nice garden, even though in the later years of his life he found standing and walking very difficult. His solution for several years was to carry a plastic chair out to the garden (I think he left that chair in the garden all season and moved it as needed) and to sit in the chair with his hoe in his hand and to chop away at the weeds. I admired his persistence. He wasn't going to have those weeds in his garden even if it meant he sat in that chair all day chopping with that hoe. His ability to adapt to his changing physical limitations allowed him to keep gardening for several more years. It probably wasn't as fulfilling to him to have to garden in a different manner, but he kept on gardening and that made him happy. I think for most of us it doesn't matter how we garden as long as we're able to keep on gardening somehow. I think when the time comes that I really, really have to cut back on physical activity a great deal, I'll be happy just to have a few Earth Boxes near the back door so I can at least grow tomatoes and peppers if nothing else. Hopefully that's still a long way down the road.

    Sorie, Generally onions and garlic do really well in containers so I think y'all will be pleased with growing them that way.

    Having flowers in bloom so late is so nice, isn't it? I'm afraid our flowering period is coming to an end here with forecast lows around 34-35 on Friday night. I intend to cut armloads of flowers and bring them in before that happens so at least I can enjoy the cut flowers for a few more days in case we have a frost or light freeze on Saturday morning. Well, the dianthus won't freeze so we'll still have a few flowers but it won't be the same as what we have now.

    George, I agree that hardneck garlic is like a super useful weed! I feel the same way about garlic chives and onion chives---once you plant them, you have them forever, and you never know where their seeds will give you new plants in random places.

    I know it is time for us to get colder since, after all, it is November, but I'm never quite ready to peacefully accept it. I hate that first morning after the garden freezes but know it is coming, perhaps by the end of this week.

    We're supposed to be in the 70s today and tomorrow though, so I hope to do some finally gleaning of whatever is still worth harvesting out there. I think the nights have been cold enough, finally, that I shouldn't have to worry about snakes being active in the garden with me this week.

    We've chased off plenty of free-range dogs over the years. If people want to let their dogs run free on their own property that is one thing, but no one else should be expected to tolerate having those free-range dogs come onto property that is not theirs. It depends on the dog too, though. We have had neighbors' dogs who just come over, tail wagging and happy to see us, and they never bother our poultry or our cats. Those dogs are welcome. When it comes to other dogs, if we know whose less-friendly dogs are on our property, we'll call them and let them know their dogs are out, but often all you can do is chase other dogs away from your chickens. An air horn sounded in the direction of the dogs often will scare them enough that they stay away for a while. An electric fence works well too as far as repelling unwanted dogs (and coyotes and bobcats) from your poultry. In one case, a neighbor had two little dogs who usually came here to visit me in the garden when they escaped their yard, so at least he knew where to come looking for them. He must not have those two dogs any more as I haven't had any visits from them in quite a while now. I also now tend to keep the garden gate closed when I am in it because I don't want to look up and find anybody's unfriendly dog inside the fenced garden with me.

    Our dogs stay in their dog yard but I wish we'd made it bigger so they could run more. I keep wanting to enlarge it for them, but then we never really get around to doing that. Maybe this will be the winter we make the bigger dog yard happen.

    It sounds like you got a lot done this weekend. I cannot believe all the major marching band activity will be ending soon. Ethan's senior year seems like it is flying by so quickly already. It is great to hear than Mason's life is going so well. Grandchildren are the most fun ever and we cherish every moment we spend with ours, but having them for several days in a row also can be exhausting for someone our age. Having less energy as you get older is a real thing, you know. My sister became a grandmother much younger than we did and then the number of grandkids expanded very rapidly when her son met a woman who had two daughters (and they've had another 2 children together since then). Now she has six grandchildren and one great-grandchild (he's almost a month old and still in the NICU), and she's only 53 years old. As darling as all her grandchildren and her great-grandchild are, I'm glad I wasn't a grandma while still in my 40s and a great-grandma in my 50s. It blows my mind to think that one of these days she could become a great-great-grandmother at what would be a pretty young age for that milestone.

    I'd decorate for Christmas now if I could, but I also know if I started this early then I'd be tired of looking at the Christmas decorations before Christmas day even arrived, so I'm restraining myself. I do have the house decorated for Thanksgiving, so at least we have some pretty holiday stuff to look at for the next 3 weeks before I bring out the Christmas decorations. We finally bought an electric fireplace and it is gorgeous, so this year I'll finally have a fireplace mantel to decorate. It is ridiculous how excited I am about that.

    When we were down at Grapevine Mills mall this weekend, the mall already had plenty of Christmas decorations set up. Even the area where Santa Claus will meet and greet the kids and have photos taken is all set up, although at least Santa Claus wasn't there yet. A friend of mine saw Santa Claus at Wal-Mart in her part of OK on Saturday---it is too early for that! I think that here in this country we seem to be fighting a losing battle to keep Thanksgiving from getting lost in the early ramp-up to Christmas.

    I know that turkey is the traditional holiday meal, but none of us love it or even like it that much, so we got together and decided well in advance to have BBQ this Thanksgiving instead. That may become our new Thanksgiving tradition.

    Jen, Little angels do love to dig. Our dog, Jersey, is 11 and a half and she still will dig herself a hole in the dog yard to lie in---even when it is raining and cold and the ground is mud. So then she comes indoors with dried mud clinging to her and I find myself having to sweep it up multiple times a day as it dries enough to fall off of her. She is too fond of mud and dirt and not at all fond of being bathed. lol. The two younger dogs dig for fun, but don't lie down in their holes. They bury rawhide bones in their holes and then dig them up and repeat that over and over again.

    I do think your front yard city garden has to be held to a slightly different standard in order to keep the neighbors happy. When we lived in the city, I always did all the garden cleanup promptly for that reason. Out here on our rural land, I only have to please myself.....and that is one of the best things about living out in the country.

    They took the rain in last night's/today's forecast out of the forecast. Yay! We are supposed to be sunny and fairly warm with nothing falling from the sky for at least the next two days. The big cool-down and more rain comes later in the week.

    I bought a nice, big cyclamen plant at Sam's Club yesterday and it is sitting on a shelf in the living room, brightening up the space with its lovely foliage and flowers. It isn't much of a garden substitute but is better than nothing.

    Something evil must have been lurking on our property yesterday afternoon. I opened the front door around 5 pm and had several hysterical, panicky cats run right in.....I told Tim that they came in like the devil was chasing them. A couple of minutes later, the other 2 cats showed up and came indoors at the same level of freaking out/panic/fear. Tim was outside, first working and then later grilling and she said he didn't see anything, but had noticed one of the cats that was hanging out with him seemed hyper and a bit nervous. I searched the yard and didn't find anything near the house, but the cats don't act scared like that unless they are really and truly scared. I might keep them indoors today as a precaution. I have seen bobcat tracks recently in the mud in the mornings, but have assumed the bobcats were out overnight. I will sometimes see bobcats out hunting on winter afternoons in broad daylight, but didn't think we were late enough in the season that it would be a problem this early in November. Maybe I'm wrong about that. The Red River still is running high, bank to bank, and Lake Texoma remains about 8' above normal and flooding adjacent land, so the disruption has pushed a lot of wildlife up out of the river bottom lands to higher ground, so maybe our cats are seeing more wild things than normal.

    The asian ladybugs are crazy this year. They come and they go. For a couple of days they'll be trying like mad by the hundreds to come indoors when we do, and then for a couple of days we won't see them at all. Any that manage to make it indoors just get vacuumed up with the shop vac and returned promptly to the great outdoors.

    Last night Tim grilled some peppers from the garden to go with dinner. It makes me sad to think the pepper harvest probably ends this week, but it has been able to go pretty deep into autumn. We'll likely harvest enough to keep us in peppers all winter if I take the time to freeze a lot of them since they don't last indefinitely on the counter or in the fridge.

    Dawn


  • 6 years ago

    Hey Jen! Where is everyone?


    Dawn, do y'all not have a fireplace? This house does not. Disappointing, but honestly we bought this house for the property. (It really is just perfect for us.) A couple of years ago, I found a college student in Edmond who was selling her electric fireplace. The plan was to remove the "electric" stuff and set candles in the empty spot, but it has a really pretty "fire" and it puts out nice heat so I kept it as is. I'm like you, I love to decorate a fireplace mantel. Glad you have one now too.


    About Christmas decorations, I want to buy a new artificial tree. Since moving in here, we've bought real trees, but I'm sure y'all remember the fiasco with the tree we purchased last year. Bought it the Friday after Thanksgiving, decorated it, and it was dead in a week. Plenty of water. A Boy Scout Troop sells them, and because it's their fundraiser, we paid a little more for it than HD or Lowes, but it's for a fundraiser, right? A good cause. They didn't care that it had died and offered nothing. So, a week after decorating that tree, I had to undecorate it and borrowed my sister's old tree. So frustrating. So, we will be sticking with fake trees now.


    When I ate meat, I remember liking turkey. Maybe I'll like it again.


    What could be scaring your cats, Dawn, other than a bobcat?


    I'm also sad about the end of pepper harvest. I'm grateful to have so many frozen, as well as onions, but they aren't quite the same as fresh.

  • 6 years ago

    I still can't post a decent post here it disappears

  • 6 years ago
    last modified: 6 years ago

    Hi Kim! Blessings to you. post when you can! I'm in a rush tonight, so just popping in to say hi and bye. Leaving for Wyoming tomorrow morning. I'll miss Garry and the kitties and Titan. I'll miss my home and yard. And I am freaking. I don't know where my head has been! I was so worried about checking the forecast for driving to Wyoming and back in CO, KS, Wagoner and WY that I forgot to check it for freezes here! I'll have to brief GDW on what to cover on frost nights. I listed all the nights (and there are SEVERAL!) on a notepad and he'll have to get the frost blankets on. Oh I am an idiot!

    We have a great fireplace, HJ, but it's an insert, so not an open flame. And the mantel is too high for anyone to see if it's decorated. Hahaha. . . ah well, can't have everything.

    Dawn! Same same on the turkey situation for Thanksgiving. LOL. That's funny. I do love all the fun side dishes--BUT I just don't eat much anymore, so a lot of side dishes for ME are just silly. I don't know if we'll get any family down here for Thanksgiving. They are all so busy and have so many other family members. I'm going to throw it out there--we could even do it the week after. Two of the daughters have six kids, between them, 7-13 who are in Billions of school things. They are frantic busy all the time. (And both work full-time.) One has four kids; other has two. I love these KIDS! AGGH. The one with two--they're also living in a 2 bedroom apt while they're waiting for the house they bought to be ready for them to move, because THEIR house sold right away 3 months ago. (The owners of the new one haven't been able to move yet because THEIR new house wasn't finished yet.) So that daughter's family is in a holding pattern.

    I digress. Wish I'd gotten a pic of this. Tiny's been snoozing to the left of my left hand on his little polar fleece. He opened his eyes, the water dish was right there, so he just lay his head on the edge of it and began licking water sideways. . . obviously far too exhausted to actually get up. I have lots of nicknames for him. Stubby, Pudgy, Chunky Munky. . . . yeah, he's a character. BUT he's really got nothing on T and J. Tom is WEIRD. But in a kind of enchanting way. He's usually pretty wired--okay, almost ALWAYS wired. Moves fast, sometimes very skittish, sometimes positive obnoxious in his affection--both to GDW and me--today all over both of us and got in trouble with both of us, but it didn't stop him. Too much claw; too hard of love bites. Jerry is by FAR the naughtiest. Tom's probably the most beautiful in terms of form and grace. But we all know who is the cutest, don't we.

    Okay back. Then we have the power daughter/couple, who both work like a jillion hours a week, and she has small grandchildren, 4-6 that she is devoted to and plus she has a new house so doesn't want to leave HER new house. . . ahhhh, it's just all so complicated. Not the situation--just their lives are all so complicated. I really do wish we could get together, and it usually would have to be here, as GDW is the unifying factor. Complicated. I do love all these folks, and they love their Dad, especially, and me, too. But I'm kinda sad everyone's too busy for a big family get-together like we had last year.

    I am so so so mad at myself for not realizing we were gonna be freezing this next week. I am going to have a BIG ole MESS to clean up when I get back.

    Even though you're all right here on OKGW, I feel like I'm gone from you when I go to WY or MN. Peace and blessings to you all, I'll "miss" you! Hugs.

  • 6 years ago

    Jennifer, No, we do not have a fireplace. We didn't want one when we built this house---Tim has been a certified firefighter since 1982 or 1983 and is not a fan of fireplaces inside homes at all because of all the house fires they cause, so he has never wanted to have one in any of our homes over the years. What I wanted, really, was to have a fireplace for architectural interest and a mantel to decorate. I didn't really care if fire was an actual part of the equation. (grin) We talked about just building a fake fireplace so I could have that, but there's never enough time for us to work on projects like that particularly since the grandkids are here every other weekend, so we just went to Lowe's a couple of weekends ago and bought the one I liked most, and I'm very happy with it. The grandkids adore it, and the little one is especially happy because "now Santa Claus won't have to come in through a door or window". Who I am to burst her bubble, so I just nodded my headand said "Right! That's cool, huh?" All too soon she'll be too old to believe in Santa, so we have to enjoy Santa while she's young enough to still believe.

    After a few years here of dealing with dropping needles, we no longer use real Christmas trees either. Most of them are cut in October so they can be bundled up, loaded onto trucks, and hauled across the country in order to be in retail locations in November. They sit in warehouses, retail stores, garden centers, etc. drying out more and more each week. By the time folks buy them, they are already very dry...as you experienced last year. I know that if you buy one and but it in one of those tree stands that hold water, that tree can drink up to a quart of water a day every day for the first week because it is already so incredibly dry by the time it is purchased. I doubt that water can save needles which already reached a certain point of dryness before the tree even is brought home, so then a person sees what you experienced....needles dropping almost instantly. Our last live tree was like yours....dropping needles and browning from the day we brought it home, and it looked pathetic by the time Christmas arrived. I couldn't wait to get it out of the house as soon as Christmas Day was over.

    The only way I can think of to work around the real tree dilemma would be to go to a Christmas tree farm, cut your own, and bring it home and immediately get it into a water-filled tree stand. That might work if you're cutting it in mid- to late-November. At least a tree from a Christmas tree farm would last longer indoors than one shipped in from another state because it would be about one month fresher. Oklahoma does have some Christmas tree farms, but I don't think any of them are in my part of OK.

    We bought an artificial tree that looks pretty realistic at Lowe's maybe 3 or 4 years ago. Last month I looked at the artificial trees they had in the store the same day we bought our electric fireplace and didn't think any of the ones at this specific store looked very realistic. I was disappointed in their appearance and glad I wasn't shopping for a new tree that day. I also was somewhat shocked they had around 10-12 trees up and on display before Halloween even had arrived yet. That was at the Lowe's in Ardmore. The one in Sherman, TX, only had 1 or 2 kinds of artificial trees last Sunday when we were in that store so they aren't as ahead of the season as the Ardmore store.

    I'd rather have a real tree, but I am so over sweeping up needles off the floor daily that I doubt we'll ever have a live one again.

    If we ever win the lottery and money is no object, I'll buy one of the awesome high-quality artificial trees available from someone like Balsam Hill.

    Probably nothing would scare the cats more than a bobcat except for a coyote or a cougar. So.....let's hope it is only a bobcat. The cats behaved normally yesterday and there were no more unusual animal tracks in the mud yesterday or today, so whatever it was likely is gone now and probably was just passing through. This morning, though, a little before noon, Jersey was out in the dog yard barking at a coyote that was howling and barking and taunting her in that way that coyotes do, trying to get her to follow it into the woods. Thankfully, she cannot escape from the dog yard so there's little to no chance she can engage in combat with the coyote. It is early in the season for coyotes to be acting like this. I think it is going to be a very long winter if the predators are prowling in the daytime in November like this.

    Kim, If you're having trouble posting from a smart phone, yep, I can't do it either, so if my computer dies, I'll disappear from here until we get the computer fixed. I don't have much trouble posting from a computer but after the last Houzz update (when they added the extra screen so you can cross-post to multiple forums), I did have a lot more trouble getting a thread to post than prior to that. It seems to have calmed down some since then.

    Nancy, Have a safe trip. You are not an idiot---you've just been distracted by other things.

    Our forecast for Friday night has gone here steadily. At first it was for 36 degrees and I thought frost was likely, then it dropped to 34 degrees, 33 degrees and now 31 degrees, so I'm expecting a freeze and will harvest accordingly. There's nothing I'll cover up. Plants will make it or they won't.

    Being stuck in a holding period waiting for all the moving parts of real estate deals to fall into place is so frustrating and so common! I hope they can get into their new home soon.

    The baby is always the cutest, whether we're talking about humans, cats or dogs. Tiny Dude will rule the roost forever, or until a younger cuter kitty joins the family.

    It is warm and gorgeous here now, although the morning started out cool in the mid 40s. This is our last good day I think before the weather starts going downhill, and I think this is it for us---this is not one of those years with an early frost or freeze and then six more weeks of Indian Summer. I think the end comes abruptly this week and we stay colder for the rest of the month. Then December arrives and we get even colder. Vacuuming up lady bugs and returning them to the Great Outdoors is a daily task now.

    I opened the drawer this morning where cold weather gear like hats, scarves, gloves, etc. have been stored since last Spring and knew that any day now I'll be getting out that stuff and wearing it. I guess I was just looking to make sure it all was there where I thought I put it (and it is) since I haven't had to think of those items in months. I'm so not ready for this......guess it is time to drag out the winter boots too. I'd rather exist year-round in spring or autumn weather and skip the extremes of winter and summer weather but that's not how it works here in OK.

    Yesterday on the news I saw where some ski resort in CO was opening up in 3 days---first time they've had enough snow to open early in ten years. I think they may have been talking about Breckenridge. What I remember thinking as I listened to that news report is that such heavy snow this early just one state NW of us probably is a bad sign.



    Dawn

  • 6 years ago

    It felt hot today---77 degrees. Won't we be wishing to have this weather back again around Friday or Saturday? Now there is a light sort of mist falling....not really heavy enough to call it rain.


  • 6 years ago

    Yes. We will miss it. I wish we could have about a month of today's weather...maybe a day or two of rain thrown in.

    Basil, cucumbers, beans were pulled this afternoon. All the peppers harvested. The plants still look incredibly healthy.

    Was thinking about Garden 2019...I think I'll put hot peppers, most of the tomatoes, and tomatillos in the back garden. It's been awhile since they've been down there. Maybe some eggplant too.


    I'm SO glad I went to Pilates tonight. I've been having severe pain in my neck. I mentioned something about how can I do the exercises without tensing my neck--which is where I hold my tension...and I got special treatment. She did some type of adjusting (it's amazing when she does this--She's so intuitive with it--and she can instruct the rest of the class while doing it. It's always a treat to be the one getting extra treatment. The pain is gone. So thankful!


    Dawn, I want a tree from Balsam Hill too! Someday I might make the investment. You can get an unlit one for fairly reasonably. Fairly.


    We had a gas fireplace at our last house. It was nice. Even when the power went out, we could use it somehow...I don't remember how exactly (We could also manually light our gas stove even though it had an electric start). The year we had that ice storm (I think it was 2007), we were able to cuddle around the fireplace and cook too.


    Kim, I miss you. Hope all is going well with you.


    Okay...I think I'll wrap it up and take the dogs out for a walk.

  • 6 years ago

    Last night's misty rain, which was about what the forecast said we'd have with very small rainfall accumulations, eventually morphed into a brief thunderstorm that knocked out the satellite TV reception (which happens every time we get rain of any strength whatsoever) and dropped fairly heavy rain for a while, along with a little thunder and lightning. So, the expected rainfall of less than a tenth of an inch turned into about an inch of rain in the gauge this morning. Oh joy, oh joy, the rain puddles that were drying up now are full again. What season is it (and has been for two months now)? Not autumn. Not winter. Mud. Mud season. I wish we could save all this recent rainfall for next summer.

    Jennifer, I am so glad that your Pilates instructor was able to help with your neck pain. I bet you felt amazing afterwards and amazing is so good!

    I agree that the high-quality trees from Balsam Hill are fairly reasonable given how great they look. I bet I'll have one of them one of these days, but when you're married to a man who prides himself on being a thrifty Yankee, sometimes it is hard to convince him to make an investment like that. I wouldn't want one with the lights attached either. When Jersey was a puppy she chewed theso-called built-in light cords on an artificial Christmas tree that was only 2 years old, and it looked really good. It isn't good when the built-in lights no longer function.

    I do think one bonus of having a fireplace of any type is that you have back-up heat if your home's HVAC system's furnace goes out.

    Kim, I miss you too. Hope you can work through whatever is interfering with you posting here.

    It is icky, gray, windy, cloudy, and cool here this morning. Know what? It feels like November! Uggh. I want to be happy about this, but after coming indoors from feeding the chickens and deer earlier, I just feel cold. The red oaks continue to put on a show with their foliage this year and I'm grateful for that, but all the wind yesterday brought down massive amounts of leaves so it seems like the minute the foliage turns a lovely red, we get a strong wind day and all the leaves come down. I'd love to be able to enjoy the brightly-colored leaves on the trees for more than a day. The red oaks in the yard around the house look spectacular now, and it gives me great pleasure to open the curtains and blinds each morning and to be able to look outdoors at the sea of red in the trees. I just wish it would last longer.

    Since it is mud city here this morning, I guess I'll work on indoor tasks, but I am going to need to go out to the garden today or tomorrow and do the last harvest before the cold weather arrives. I've got mud boots and they're certainly doing their job this fall and carrying me through mud and puddles daily. At least snake season effectively has ended. Finally. Hooray for that.


    Dawn


  • 6 years ago

    We had more rain last night. I had planed to work in the garden and/or work on the drive way, and extend the parking pad. The mud was bad before, but it is terrible now. We plan on having a huge crowd here Thanksgivings and I have to have a place for them to park. The ones with 4 wheeled drive can park in the pasture, but some have too nice of a car to put it in a place like that.


    Madge has gone to Mena, AR.. She has two sisters and one brother there. They are younger then she is, but she still wants to help all she can. It seems as though we have reached the age that everyone we know can use a little help, but it so wonderful to still be able to help.


    I will go to Ft. Smith now to visit mom.

  • 6 years ago

    Larry, I hope you had a nice visit with your mom and that Madge has a good trip to and from Mena.

    We have heavy clouds and it looks like it could rain more any time, but so far the rain has stayed south of us. Maybe we'll luck out and not get any more rain, at least today.

    Our yard is a mess. When our dense red clay soil is extremely wet, it becomes very pudding-like. That loud sucking sound you hear is the wet clay trying to suck my boots off my feet. Today I left footprints about 1-2" deep in parts of the yard. (sigh) We're in trouble for Thanksgiving and Christmas if this mud doesn't dry up because it surely does make parking almost impossible.

    I harvested all the sweet and hot peppers today since our forecast low for Saturday morning is 30 degrees. There's nothing else edible out there, other than a few herbs. I probably will clip a bunch of them, bring them in, bundle them up and hang them to dry tomorrow morning. The green tomatoes could be harvested but I don't know that I'll bother. We've had so much rain that it is doubtful they'd be any good even if they eventually ripen.

    Some flowers are still so gloriously beautiful that it is hard to think about them freezing this week. This includes the Cape Honeysuckle, which is loaded with blooms and gorgeous, although sadly there's no hummingbirds here to visit those blossoms. It is likely to freeze since it is a zone 9 plant, but I have read reports of it surviving as far north as zone 7b (my zone) some years. I really don't think it will survive the winter here although I wish it would. I contemplated digging it up and moving it into the greenhouse, but it is a huge monster plant and I don't want to do all that digging without a backhoe to help me, so I'm going to give it some extra mulch tomorrow and hope for the best. The Dallas Red lantana growing beside it is gorgeous and lush and thick and full and I hate to see it go as well, but know that it also is not reliably winter hardy here. Oh well, I'll just hope for the best and be prepared to replace them if they don't overwinter.

    The 'Diablo' Bat-faced Cuphea, also a zone 9 plant, has spread out and filled in the areas beside it where the zinnias have died back, but it also is likely to die Saturday morning. I might cut a lot of them and bring them in as cut flowers on Friday or maybe even tomorrow. These are super easy and fast from seed so I just grow them from seed every year. About 95% of the zinnias are dead and gone now, between the heavy rain and colder nights. Only a few remain in bloom. Also in bloom? Lots of marigolds still, and the salvia farinacea. Oh, and the annual Texas Hummingbird Sage. These don't overwinter, but they generally reseed. I'll miss their brilliant red flowers after they freeze. The pineapple sage is about 4-5' tall and spectacular, but it is only an annual here in my soil. It has survived a couple of times in raised beds, but this year's plants aren't even in a raised bed---that are at grade level at the uphill side of the garden right next to the driveway in amended clay that stays really wet during wet winters because water from the higher ground next door drains underground beneath and through my garden like a river. I don't expect these to survive. At least the dianthus plants in the ground will survive and bloom all winter.

    Today I didn't see any bees, though there were plenty out yesterday and the day before, and only have seen 2 butterflies---1 in the garden and 1 visiting the trumpet creeper near the house. Of course, it is cloudy and chilly, so there's not many birds or squirrels out either. I did see a lady bug patrolling a pepper plant in the garden. There's still a lot of spiders, and I was careful to avoid busting through their webs where they've woven them across pathways. Pumpkin (the cat) wasn't as careful about the spider webs as I was. We didn't see any snakes, but there's plenty of new fire ant mounds popping up.

    The red oaks still look gorgeous. I hope the sub-freezing temperatures on Sat morning don't ruin what is left of our beautiful autumn color. Some of the red oaks and all of the post oaks, among other trees, aren't even changing color yet.

    That's about all from here. Oh, a couple of gardening catalogs arrived. Guess it is that time of the year.


    Dawn

  • 6 years ago
    last modified: 6 years ago

    Are y'all watching your weather? The forecast for this weekend as well as for Monday....well, the forecast weather conditions are looking more and more grim. The fat lady is about to sing.

    There's a good chance of either snow or a snow/rain mix for a significant portion of the state on Monday, if not earlier in some more northern areas. Even as far south as I am, there's a slim chance of a rain/snow mix on Monday. I'm not ready for this. I'm going to miss those garden plants after they freeze. I've already harvested all the edible stuff. I might cut flowers and herbs tomorrow if we don't have an unforecasted freeze tonight (only supposed to be 37 degrees here). Our overnight lows for every night keep falling each day, so it seems like the models that were forecasting worse weather may have been correct. That cannot be good this early in the season.

    Today I just stared at all the flowers, trying to freeze (ha, no pun intended) them in my memory so I could remember how good they look for this late in November. It was cloudy and cool all day but it didn't rain here. The dogs are already disgusted with the cold weather. Just imagine how unhappy they'll be tomorrow morning and Saturday morning when the temperatures are in the 30s or even the 20s compared to this morning's low in the low 50s. What we've had so far has only been cool weather really, but it is about to get cold.

    I've packed away all sorts of gardening tools and supplies in the shed today because they won't be needed again until I prep for planting time. As exciting and joyful as planting time is each winter, this is exactly the opposite now---not exciting at all and certainly not a joyful time.

    Hope you all are well and have remembered to bring in any plants that cannot tolerate the cold. I've been carrying out the pots of amaryllis every morning and carrying them in during the evenings. I guess that is over now. I'm afraid if I carry them out on these colder mornings, I might forget to bring them in before the cold nighttime temperatures arrive and I don't want to let them freeze at this point.

    I still have containers of annual periwinkles in bloom near the back door. They usually don't survive this well into fall as they are true heat lovers, but there have been some surprisingly warm periods mixed in with all the chilly weather and rain. I guess they'll probably make it through tonight's temps in the upper 30s, but the grim reaper of freezing weather will get them overnight Friday.

    I kinda think I went through most of today thinking it was Wednesday and I had 2 more days before the weather went to crap, and then late this afternoonI realized it was Thursday! I'm laughing at myself here. It doesn't really matter anyhow as the garden is going to freeze no matter what I do.

    Dawn

  • 6 years ago

    Brrr...I'm cold!.

    Not much new. I brought the giant aloe vera indoors tonight. Grabbed the few green tomatoes from the remaining plants...and that is about it.


    The poor half naked chickens. I wish their feathers had grown back in before we got so cold. I suppose they'll be fine. There is a power shift in the coop that I've noticed but haven't had much time to truly observe.


    I gave the dogs a bath tonight. Since it will be so cold, they'll be spending more times indoors and they can't stay in their crates all day, so they need to smell fresh and be as clean as possible. Kane needed a trim up as well. A good trick is smearing peanut butter along the walls of the tub/shower and while he is busy with that, I can trim his backside.


    I made a lovely vegetarian chili tonight...and cooked up some hamburger meat for the boys to add in. Perfect night for it.


    Hope everyone is doing well and staying warm.

  • 6 years ago

    Everything is pretty much at a standstill around here because of the mud. Often when it gets this way I have to wait till the ground freezes solid before I can work on my projects.

  • 6 years ago

    I just need to yank some bean vines and get them under cover, so I can glean seed from them. Oh, well, I doubt I'll harvest more than a small handful of AfricanX okra pods, and that'll be the last of okra until next summer, other than some frozen and stashed.


    We have plenty of wood and a nice fire going in the wood stove. That's one thing I enjoy about this time of year!

  • 6 years ago

    Wild and crazy night here. We have 4 puppers visiting. A 6 year old rottweiler, a 6 month old rott, a boston terrier that is as active as the tasmanian devil, and a 6# yorkie. In addition to our 4, it's a houseful. Garden is pretty much done for, though I'm hoping a few things survive to finish making seed. My to do list for the next couple weeks will be cleaning up the dead stuff and ordering a load of wood chips.

  • 6 years ago

    I would like a load of wood chips, but the crew is not trimming in this area. I think I have plenty of mulch, but I expect it to compost by gardening time.


    My outdoor temp. was down to 23 about 15 min. ago.


    I will try to burn my garden clean when the plants dry out a little more. After burning I hope to try mulch to keep the ground covered, no cover crop for the past two years. I am still going through a learning curve. I dont know how I am going to do no till and still grow potatoes, especially sweet potatoes. Planting through the mulch is fine, but harvesting, if you cant use a spading fork, or any other hand tool is quite a task.

  • 6 years ago

    Larry, I love free wood chips from crews working near our house! They seem all too happy to drop them at my garden too! It saves them a trip, I think.

    I also love how creative we all get when it comes to our gardening!


    Jen, how do you do it? Eight pups? Do you get any sleep at night?


    Our two ran around like 8 month old puppies--well, Kane mostly-- last night. He will be 9 in June and still has boundless energy and must mouth everything. Honestly though, he is better. Finally. At 8 years old. Not great but better. Josi was obsessed with the Juno and Juno did not want to be obsessed over. Speaking of Kane, he has a strip on his back that is not regrowing hair. From his injury this summer. The hair that did grow back, is darker. How am I going to explain that to the vet? And explain why I didn't take him in? Anyway...


    I didn't really look at the garden, other than a glance when I took out the dogs and opened the chicken doors. All the half naked chickens made it though the night. I'm glad the sun will shine today.


    We have a (late) Halloween party for the band tonight. Luckily it won't be late into the night.

    That's about all for me.

  • 6 years ago

    Good Morning, Y'all.

    We only dropped to 28 degrees so, surprisingly, many flowering plants survived and look half-decent. When I looked at the garden around 7:45 a.m., I still could see flowers that looked fine on the Cape honeysuckle, begonias, lantanas, marigolds, some of the Texas hummingbird sage plants, mealy cup sage, autumn sage and the globe amaranth plants. The remaining herbs (rosemary, sage, chives, parsley and basil) also looked fine. Even some of the remaining zinnias looked good. Everything else probably is gone though. If the butterflies that were flitting around the garden yesterday survived the cold night, and it is likely they did, then at least they still have some flowers for nectar.

    Jennifer, I need to give our dogs a bath. Maybe on Monday. I have one grandchild here for the weekend, so just don't want to mess with bathing dogs while she is here.

    Larry, Mud has us at a standstill here as well. I'd say that I'm hoping we'll dry up in this cold, dry air, but more rain (and snow) are in the Monday forecast so I guess we'll just have more mud. You're quite a bit colder than us this morning, but then you're quite a bit further north. Our Mesonet station went to 26 but at our house the Min-Max only shows 26, and it still was at 30 when I got up at 4:40 a.m., so we really weren't at 28 degrees for more than a very few hours.

    A mole has tunneled across our driveway, from the neighbor's pasture to our yard. I hope he or she isn't planning on sticking around. When moles show up here, the cats usually take care of them so they normally aren't a problem for us. I kinda felt sorry for the mole having to tunnel through all the mud.

    Some people that I know dig up their regular potatoes with some sort of attachment they pull behind their tractors. I don't know if it is some sort of mechanical digger or what, but it merely turns over the soil and then they can easily find the potatoes. I wonder if such a thing would work with sweet potatoes?

    George, I bet y'all were cozy and warm with that fire going.

    Jen, That's a lot of dogs. Are you dog sitting?

    Jennifer, If you know what caused the injuries to the dog, I'd just explain it to the vet. I suppose if the vet questions why you didn't bring in the dog you could just explain you used your own holistic methods to heal the wounds? Lots of folks here that have lots of animals do a lot of the routine day-to-day doctoring of their animals (not just cows, horses and such, but farm dogs and cow dogs as well) and don't take their pets in for every injury--not if they can heal it themselves. Wherever the hair is not regrowing there probably is scar tissue. We've had that with snakebitten cats---the hair did not grow back in the snakebite area. Our cat, Shady, is 18 or 19 years old and still has a circular scar that is white flesh with no hair growing there in the same spot where he broke out in a copper-colored rash after a copperhead bit him in the abdominal/groin area when he was only a couple of years old. I just think of it as his copperhead bite scar. In the early years I did think that hair eventually would grow back there, but then it never did.

    Today is sunny and bright and it looks so nice outdoors, but it still is very chilly. Looks can be deceiving, I guess. The leaves on the red oaks look a brighter red this morning, so at least there's that. Everything that had yellow or golden leaves left on the trees has lost them over the last couple of days. I expect the red oaks will lose the rest of their leaves soon, although some of the red oaks have foliage that still is 95% green. It is odd how some trees are so slow to change color and lose leaves this year. There's not much consistency. The post oaks are still green too, but usually are about the last trees to lose their leaves here and some of them will hang onto their leaves all winter long before dropping them in early Spring so new leaves can emerge.

    We had a lot of hungry deer waiting for deer corn this morning. They remind me of cows standing near a fence waiting for the rancher to show up with cattle feed. I don't go back there and put out food for them until they've all moved far enough away from the feeding area that I feel safe. Generally, I feel safe if they've jumped the fence into the adjacent pasture and moved at least 30 to 50' away from where I feed them. Deer that are too friendly can turn dangerous in the blink of an eye, especially bucks during the rutting season, so I'm always extremely careful.

    I hope everyone has a good day.


    Dawn



  • 6 years ago

    Yep, we started a dogsitting business a couple months ago. Our pup loves having the dog park in her back yard...and living room...and bed...kitchen... Well, after 4 dogs, adding more isn't a problem. You hardly even notice them!


    Everything is pretty much dead here. Found a few cherry tomatoes that were good half frozen. Looks like my milkweed bit it, as did the cotton. Next warm day I'll have to pull everything & put it all to bed.

  • 6 years ago
    last modified: 6 years ago

    Aggh! Tell me it isn't so! Mesonet says minimum temp today was 18 degrees????? No way. Someone from near me tell me that's not true. Please? I bet my yard is going to look a lot different when I get home on Wed or Thursday than it did this past Monday. Yikes!

    Some of you who are FB friends will see that I had a little incident in Colorado on my way to Wyoming. Put 4.5 gallons of diesel in my gas tank. I was staying overnight in Colorado, so called tow truck first thing the next morning and was on the road 2 hours later, thank you GOD!! I was so scared! And what was amazing was how many people knew about this problem! So don't do this, friends. It's not a super cheap fix. In my defense, this stupid gas station had only green pumps, and only one hose per pump, and ALL the handles were black. The diesel ones DID have Diesel written below in 2" tall black letters, true. But if one doesn't see a green handle, one may not think of it being diesel. Like me. :And according to the tow truck guy and the auto mechanic place, not to many others, either. Really. We oughtta have a class action suit against those clowns! LOL. AGGHH. My fix was cheap--only $280--because the mechanics could get to the gas tank from my back seat. Most cars have to be put on the hoist and the gas tank has to be taken off.

    Back to the frost. WOW. I am NOT happy. GDW, bless his heart, has been covering my dill and cilantro. I forgot to ask him this evening what the damages were. I can't imagine. I hope we get some decent weather so I can kind of put the yard to bed.

    Yeah. . . can't imagine 8 "pups." Wow!

    This has been a really somber trip for me, of course, with Mom's memorial service today. But it was a lovely service. I loved the minister of her Methodist (MY childhood Methodist) church; it was so lovely seeing many of her/OUR longtime church families. It is lovely seeing so many of MY friends, and my sister and sister-in-law. A bittersweet trip.

    I will be so happy to get home to Garry and the critters and life and friends in OK.

    Meanwhile, I was driving through Casper WY and found myself right behind this! I laughed and thought, "Only in Wyoming!" (Or maybe Idaho, Montana. . .) Any of you see these in OK or elsewhere?




    PS: Any of you grow rock cress here? I just found out about it today! Definitely want some!

  • 6 years ago

    Jen, Eight dogs is a lot, but I agree with you that there's not much difference between 4 and 8. We had 3 dogs, and one day when I was walking two them, Honey followed us home. A skinny, starving stray, we let her stay and gave her a name, going from 3 dogs to 4 dogs. After a couple of weeks of regular eating, she suddenly looked like she might be pregnant....not extremely pregnant but then she'd only had a couple of weeks of eating regularly. We set up a vet appointment for Saturday, which we never made it to....because Honey gave birth to 4 puppies on Friday evening, and suddenly we had 8 dogs. That was in 2005, and we just buried the last of those puppies---Jet---a few weeks ago. So, now we are back to three dogs again, but the number slowly fell from 8 to 3 over about a decade. Three is about the right number at this stage of our lives. Sometimes a neighbor's dogs come over to play, but they always go back home like they should after play time is over.

    I think that after a couple more cold nights, everything will be gone here, more or less. Even some of the plants that still have flowers that look pretty good do seem to have a lot of foliar damage. It is time to just let them go, but I hate seeing everything turn brown or black.

    Nancy, I was so horrified by your diesel experience when I was reading it. By the time I saw it, you already had a lot of great advice from friends who understood the implications of what had happened and had told you what to do about it. I'm glad the solution was as simple and easy as it was. I think it could have been a lot worse.

    I'm so glad your mom's service went so well and that you got to see so many old friends at your old church.

    I think it probably got every bit as cold as you fear it did. Northeastern OK had some temperatures on the Mesonet map as low as 15 degrees, and they weren't all that far from your county either.

    In one way it is peculiar to see the cold temperatures and the snow in the forecast, but then this has been one of those years when many months had abnormal weather, so why should November be any different? We had May weather in March, February weather in April and June or July weather in May. So, December or January weather in November seems par for the course in the context of all the other mixed-up months. As soon as I bought and read the 2019 Farmer's Almanac and it said we were going to be warmer and drier than average, I knew two things: (1) I needed to stop laughing out loud while I was reading because it was annoying Tim, and (2) we were going to have a colder and wetter than average winter. I just didn't think winter would arrive in early to mid-November

    I have no idea what that thing on the truck ahead of you might be as I don't think I've ever seen them here. So, my best guess would be an ice fishing hut or something similar that we do not have here in Hot-lahoma.

    As for rock cress? It isn't nuts about our heat and demands good drainage, so I've never had any success with it. You can grow it from seed, and it probably would do okay for you in partial shade and well-drained soil unless you have red clay like mine.

    Lillie and I worked on Christmas crafts all day and I am worn out. How can a 9 year old have such endless energy? It will take me a week to recuperate from this weekend. Thankfully, the garden no longer is calling my name and I don't do a lot of clean up in fall, having learned how much the critters need the plants for shelter and all at this time of the year.


    Dawn

  • 6 years ago

    Dawn, the object in the photo is a sheep wagon. Someone is hauling it somewhere! I got a kick out of it

  • 6 years ago

    We once had a diesel Suburban and did the exact reverse of you Nancy. The solution and cost are about the same!

  • 6 years ago

    I thought diesel nozzles were larger than gas nozzles and would not fit into gas filler neck. I don't buy diesel over 5 or 6 times a year since I quit driving a truck, and maybe only the truck stop pumps had the large nozzles because most trucks can carry 200+ gal. of fuel, and needed to refuel quickly. I have not noticed what size the fuel nozzles are where I buy tractor fuel. You can bet that I will check.

  • 6 years ago

    Nancy, So that's the modern-day version of a sheep wagon? I've only seen historical type photos of the old wooden ones. Thanks for the ID.

    George, That's so unfortunate.

    Larry, I thought the same thing. I know that diesel nozzles used to be larger than regular gas nozzles, but I don't know if that still is true nowadays. It wouldn't surprise me if someone in the retail gasoline world simply decided they's stop putting in the larger diesel nozzles for whatever reason, which I think would be a huge mistake.

    Dawn

  • 6 years ago

    Hi guys! Great time driving home today! I'm staying overnight, my new favorite, in Russell Kansas! The weather is insane. GREAT day driving. Blue skies, but freezing-&*( cold. Right now, here's the report. 29 degrees in Buffalo WY/ they got 1-2" snow. 28!!!! degrees in Wagoner OK, flurries today, but none stuck--BUT so cold, GDW said, that he didn't take the frost blankets off.. but the cilantro and dill are still good. I told him I bet everything else was armageddon, and he affirmed. I can hardly wait to see it. I asked him. . ." Is everything just kinda black?" He laughed and affirmed.