Weekend Cold Blast for January 19-20, 2019
Okiedawn OK Zone 7
5 years ago
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Megan Huntley
5 years agoRelated Discussions
Blast from the past - 2000 'Get to know each other' thread
Comments (3)Wow....what an amazing list of people.... too many of them no longer with us or active here. It is nice to remember some of their names and their struggles that we shared. Thanks for the memories....See MoreSS Weekend Support - Fri. 3/19 thru Sun. 3/21
Comments (17)Thanks everyone! Joanne's gift was really great. She sent pictures & information on the town she lives in & the street she works on. There was pure maple syrup. Joanne knows that this TX girl doesn't know anything about pure maple syrup & that it is honestly a treat to me! Joanne's pictures were of her in the snow at Christmas & one of her & her furbaby, Mulligan. Love the name! She gave me the cutest "diet angel". Honestly, I love it. Then some tea. Canadian maple fudge with a cookie cutter, recipe & fact sheet. (I've never had any so I know it will be a treat!) The coolest bag, Joanne, I think I'm going to use it for the book club that I am starting here. Three gourmet dips. Yummy, cannot wait to try them out. Then a pamphlet on maple syrup with some recipes & a beautiful birthday card. Joanne~I couldn't believe it but it was so close to saying exactly the same thing as the one DS#1 & DDIL had sent to me! And, for the first time ever, yesterday when I called my Mom, she picked up the phone & said, "Hey, beautiful!" So, I'm feeling pretty special. Thank you isn't strong enough to express my gratitude. You honor me by being my Friend! Ladies & Gent~DS#1 & DDIL sent a bar of soap from Crate & Barrel along with $200. They said that they know that they aren't supposed to tell me how to spend it but would I please give it to "Pops", Dave, so that he could go with me to TX this summer for DS#1's graduation. So, I guess that it is now the 2 of us going. :) Dave isn't cooking tonight. He is taking me to Cypress Gardens. They have a paddle boat there that has a buffet. It takes you around a string of lakes during the sunset. The menu tonight is sirloin steak, grouper, turkey & dressing, a medley of veggies, mashed potatoes, salad bar with all of the fixings, & Chef's choice of dessert. So, we'll leave in about an hour & a half. It is beautiful here & I expect that we will really enjoy ourselves. Again, thanks. This is the nicest group of women. Love~Patti :)...See MoreJanuary 2019, Week 2, Making Grow Lists & Checking Them Twice
Comments (69)Rebecca, I am happy your drought is gone too, but sorry this dreary weather contributes to your aches and pains. I am hoping for warmer, drier weather for all of us, but not sure when we are going to get it. January always seems like the dreariest month to me. Stock will grow here, but it is pretty picky, and I have better results from it when I plant it in October or November which is the same time here in my area that you can plant pansies, flowering kale, flowering cabbage, dianthus, and snapdragons. Stock is not only a cool-season plant, but it is a bit pickier about the cool weather than some other cool-season plants seem to be. For example, dianthus goes in and out of bloom cycles here pretty much year-round, whether the temperatures are high are low. Stock doesn't do that. Stock blooms when the weather is cool, period. I believe it has to have temperatures in the 60s in order to set flowers and bloom. Once your temperatures are hotter, then it is pretty much done. If you can find some transplants in flower or ready to flower and plant them in early Spring, you can get a few weeks to a few months of bloom from it if the weather cooperates. I like stock but don't plant it often in Spring as we get too hot too early down here most years. It also tolerates cold less well than the other plants I mentioned above, so may need to be covered up in the winter and early spring on nights going very far below 32 degrees. It will tolerate some light frosts but not real heavy ones. Lupines? I haven't tried the ones that grow in northern parts of the country as I don't think they'd do well in our hot summers but I grow the kind of lupines that God gave us....Lupinus texensis, aka Texas bluebonnets. They either are perennial here or reseed in our clay, and some years we get big stands of them and other years we have smaller stands. Our clay really is too dense for them here at our house and I knew that when I planted them, but I figured that maybe if I was foolish enough to sow the seeds and plant them here, then maybe they would be foolish enough to grow and bloom at least a little bit....and they do. I also have grown the red-flowered variety of Lupinus texensis called Alamo Fire and it does pretty well here. In our area, all kinds of Texas bluebonnets do better from seed sown in the fall than in the spring. The bluebonnet seeds have a hard shell and sprout sporadically over a period of a couple of years. I do see fairly large (maybe one gallon, maybe two gallon) pots of Russell hybrid type lupines in stores each spring. They have them around the same time they have delphiniums in bloom in large pots, so maybe in April. To me, these are the kinds of things you buy, bring home and plant for instant impact, and you do so knowing they are likely to be relatively short-lived in our heat. If you don't expect them to thrive and flourish in our heat and can be content just to enjoy them while they last, I don't see anything wrong with buying them and planting them. I suppose they could be a big disappointment if a person bought them thinking they would bloom all summer. Yet, you never know---what if we had a cooler than average summer and they did bloom and survive? Cool summers aren't common here, but we had one in 2015. Nancy, I've grown Drummond's Phlox here and it did okay, but not well enough that I continued growing it. Drummond's Phlox is one of the smaller varieties and it needs well-drained sandy soil (which I really cannot give it). As for the taller garden type phlox, there's a handful of heirloom types that thrive here---we had someone in our neighborhood in Ft Worth whose home was just surrounded by the old magenta-flowering one grown back in the 1960s and prior. I don't know the name of it. There's a few of the taller garden phlox, like the variety "David", bred to be mildew-tolerant, but I haven't grown any of those. Jennifer, We have a fenced chicken run. We always have had one. I wouldn't have a chicken coop without one. I believe our run with the only coop now in use (we have four coops, and each has a fully enclosed chicken run) is 10' x 20' and it is fully covered in sturdy fencing, including a fence type roof. The chickens are fine when they are in it, but they hate being confined because they are used to free-ranging. I think that if they never were allowed to free-range, they wouldn't know what they were missing and they'd be content to be in the chicken run. We have lost more chickens to predators in the last 5 years than we did in the first 15 years, and I'm just done with that. If we buy more chickens, they are not going to be allowed to free range because it really is just setting them up to eventually become some predator's meal. Our predator problem probably is 20 times worse now than it was when we moved here. As land a few miles from us continues to develop, the wildlife gets pushed upriver to us. We have to change how we manage our chickens, or there's no point in having them any more. Tim is gone from home roughly 14 hours a day on work days, so he barely sees the chickens except on weekends and he is out of touch with our current reality with regards to the predator issues. I wish we were in a nice, quiet semi-rural neighborhood where chickens can free range and be relatively safe within their own yard, but we live in a wildlife jungle. It would help if I could convince him to fence our entire yard, but he hates fences with a passion. I don't know how to have chickens any more without an 8' tall fence around the whole yard. Dawn...See MoreJanuary 2019, Week 5, The Longest Month
Comments (63)dbarron, I am glad you are liking your Instapot. Still, for me, it always will be a no go. I have lived through 4+ adult decades of all the latest kitchen appliance-type things that have come and gone, and I'm over it. (grin) Now, show me a nice garden gadget and I might have to have it because my garden shed isn't full yet. Rebecca, Ditto on the Instapot. Glad it works for you and I'm just not interested in it for us. Neither is Tim, although if he wanted to get one, I guess I couldn't object since it is his kitchen too. We have a pressure cooker and pressure canner that we haven't used in years, but I certainly used them in the past. They are put away in storage in case I ever need to pressure can again, but I don't know why I hang on to them because I only do BWB canning nowadays. Getting rid of 'stuff' is contagious. The more I purge unused, unwanted or unneeded items from our home, the calmer and happier I feel mentally. I cannot explain it, but it is real. Of course, all the purging only works if you aren't buying a ton of new stuff to replace the old stuff. Kim, Congrats! That is a nice thing to win. Nancy, I am sure that the few non-canning cookbooks I have left were kept mostly for nostalgic reasons, though I do still use Fannie Flagg's Original Whistlestop Cafe Cookbook as everything in it is exactly the same kind of meals my grandparents, parents, and aunts and uncles prepared---just good old southern cooking. Nothing fancy at all. I also use Tim's cookbook (a gift from mme to him decades ago) for Helpful Cooking Hints for Househusbands of Uppity Women sometimes too. It has simple, tasty recipes in it. Most of the others I never open any more. The weather down here stayed between sort of foggy/misty and then just south of us it cranked up to almost drizzly on the Texas side of the river. The sun finally came out in late afternoon and burned off most of the clouds and fog/mist. I think from this point forward we just have gorgeous weather until the cold front comes through around Thursday. Rebecca, I saw that on FB earlier today and went over and clicked on it to at least view her top ten. Let me see if I can link it. I wonder if the problem is that it is a PDF? Let's find out: Tomatoman's Daughter 2019 Plant List Well, I can see it here. I don't know if it will stay or disappear when I click 'submit', but if y'all cannot see it, then we'll know it didn't stick around. Okay, I am going to go start next week's thread now because tomorrow is seed-starting day and I hope to be busy with all that. Dawn...See MoreRebecca (7a)
5 years agoOkiedawn OK Zone 7
5 years agoOkiedawn OK Zone 7
5 years agoLoneJack Zn 6a, KC
5 years agoOkiedawn OK Zone 7
5 years agohazelinok
5 years agoslowpoke_gardener
5 years agodbarron
5 years agoOkiedawn OK Zone 7
5 years agolast modified: 5 years agodbarron
5 years agoNancy RW (zone 7)
5 years agodbarron
5 years agoOkiedawn OK Zone 7
5 years agoOkiedawn OK Zone 7
5 years agoNancy RW (zone 7)
5 years ago
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AmyinOwasso/zone 6b