Grrr. I am irritated. Have typed a long, rambling answer twice and lost it twice. So here's my final attempt for tonight. Tim is still very sick. I am beginning to understand what a violent stomach virus the norovirus is....it gives new meaning to the word projectile. If the rest of us manage to escape all the germs he is spewing into the universe, it will be an absolute miracle, and not a miracle I'm expecting will occur. The four year old granddaughter was lucky---she left for her dad's house and an out-of-state vacation the same day Tim came home sick, so she might be spared. The rest of us probably won't be. This weather.....this is what Oklahoma does. What is pretty much guaranteed is that the weather each year will find a way to be very different from the previous year's weather....so, after three relatively nice, warm Februaries, we are having a cold one....with March seeming like it will start out the same way. It is what it is and we just have to deal with it. Our erratic late winter and early spring weather is why Oklahoma isn't known for having a huge commercial fruit-growing industry---because such as industry would go broke here. Blueberries are extremely difficult to grow successfully. I grew them in Texas and was smart enough to never attempt them here as I have highly alkaline soil and highly alkaline water, slow-draining clay and frequent summer dry spells with tons of heat and little to no rainfall. What do blueberries need? A very specific acidic soil in a very specific pH range, and if you can create that, you also need to have neutral to acidic water that isn't working against you. If you have alkaline water, then each time you water (blueberries tend to need irrigation daily in our very hot and dry summers in southern OK), the water is making your acidic mix a bit more alkaline and it takes a toll on the plants after a couple of years. They need perfect drainage. Perfect. They are shallow-rooted and will die quickly if allowed to get too dry in the summer. They abhor wet feet and will die quickly if allowed to sit in waterlogged soil. How are you going to help them cope on one of those days when 5 or 8 or 12" of rain falls in one day? Have a plan for that! They are very prone to root rot diseases like phytopthera. People who have success with them tend to have perfect drainage and soil that is in the perfect pH range for them. When I grew them in Texas, I had them in a raised bed completely above grade so their roots never made it down into our slow-draining black gumbo clay. That bed was filled with a 50-50 mix of pine bark fines and peat moss. I watered with a soaker hose so the water went into the soil-less mix and not onto the plants. My plants got direct sun from about 8-10 a.m. and then were in dappled shade to heavy shade the rest of the day. If you grow them in containers, you may need to water with drip irrigation lines more than once a day in the hottest weather. It is hard to create a soil-less mix that drains well but also doesn't drain too well....good luck with that. Here's the OSU Fact Sheet on Growing Blueberries in the home garden. The people I know who have had the most success have lived in the NE quadrant of the state and had naturally well-draining and acidic soil. I don't know if any of them kept the plants alive for longer than maybe 5 years, and lost the plants about the time they really began to produce well. Sometimes they did get a year or two of good production from the plants before they died. Growing Blueberries in the Home Garden Megan, I'm glad your daughter is so much better and continue to pray for your uncle's continued recovery. He's had such a tough time the last few days. Your poor mom! Being sick is not fun and if you feel compelled to go into work anyway, that is just a miserable situation. Of course you are tired and low in energy today---your crazy week drained it all out of you. I hope you were able to rest and yet also to find the energy to cover up and move whatever plants needed it. I am afraid y'all are going to take a pretty hard hit from this weather up there. They have snow and/or sleet back in our forecast for tomorrow---it pops in and out of the forecast every few hours, but tonight our local TV weather guy seemed more convinced than previously that it is going to find us. I'll continue hoping it misses us. We're still going to be pretty cold for this far south. The wind chills for the whole state look horrible over the next couple of days. At least wind chills themselves do not affect plants, though cold temperatures and strong winds can be tough on our plants in these sorts of cold spells. I helped Jana and Lillie paint Lillie's room at the new house today. It looks really nice and two coats of her chosen paint color (one coat yesterday, another one today) covered up the previous paint color very well. There's a ton of prep work involved in painting these rooms because they have so much of the lovely Victoria style trim and woodwork that needs to be covered in blue painter's tape so that we don't get the wall paint on the trim. Really, by the time you can finally start painting, the painting goes much more quickly than all the prep work. After we finished that room, we worked on prepping the living room for painting...it has a total of 8 walls and I think 10 windows, 8 of which are the 84" tall windows....so lots of time was spent up on ladders, and we never even made it high enough today to cover the crown molding to protect it from the wall paint. I guess that's a project for tomorrow if we aren't iced in here at our house. My son works tomorrow, so we may take a day off and stay home unless we have to be up there at the house because an appliance is being delivered. One is scheduled, but the weather could interfere......and we all may be tired enough that we are sort of hoping it does. One thing that struck me about her room is that the only closet is the original one from 1932, and it is sort of wedge shaped in a corner, and very tiny, so it will not hold much....she is sort of in shock at the fact that her lovely room has so little built-in storage. We're looking for furniture that can store a lot of clothing.....maybe an old-fashioned armoire or wardrobe. For lunch we had a picnic sitting in the middle of the kitchen floor since no furniture has been moved into the house yet. We had our favorite Bar-B-Q from Caddo BBQ so it was the yummiest meal and was lots of fun. I spent a lot of time looking out windows at the landscape today. They have a lot of shade so that may present some landscaping challenges. Oh, and we met the lovely older couple next door....almost old enough, perhaps, to be my parents, but not quite. They are so kind and so friendly. We found some old wallpaper previously not seen when removing light switch plates and old cabinets and things. That was pretty fun...but it wasn't drastically old wallpaper....I think I remember very similar patterns from the 1980s. My tomato plants are outgrowing their light shelf and I have no desire to move them to the greenhouse yet, as that would mean setting up heaters in the greenhouse....and I just do not even want to go there.....so I'll bring in a bigger shelf tomorrow that has adjustable shelving which will allow the plants to stay under fluorescent lights for at least a couple more weeks. We still have nice weather out in the forecast around Thursday or so....knock on wood! Dawn

Len- I grew potatoes in some last year with success. I started with a little soil and filled it in as the plants grew. They dry out QUICKLY so keep an eye on them. This year we are using them for some squash and dwarf corn. I’m a fan of them but I’ve learned that it’s important to have a growing media that holds onto water. The ones I’ve been using are basically recycled plastic that’s been felted into a sort of fabric.

Love those black matte door handles. That is exactly what we will be buying. Kathy so glad you have so much work happening. It is going up fast now! Johnscreek very nice home! When do you think you will be in? We have windows in and inside framing is done. Now awaiting pricing from HVAC and plumber coming next week to look. I like that our framer keeps everything so nice and clean a the end of every day. back of the home, south facing, This is looking towards the front and east side from the kitchen area. On your left is the office and entery way. Right are the two guest bedrooms.

Megan, I am so concerned about everyone in Nebraska---of course, I think the farmers and ranchers are getting the worst of it, but then there's all the local businesses whose livelihood depend on the farmers and ranchers too. It is so heartbreaking and so devastating and really, simply stunning, when you read the first-hand reports and see the videos and photos. My mind is boggled. How in the world does anyone recover from such utter devastation on so many fronts---not just the loss of their financial livelihood, livestock lines they've been breeding forever, buildings, equipment, land that may be silted, badly eroded and ruined for some time in terms of being able to use it properly and start working on recovery, etc., but then the loss of homes, personal belongings, family heirlooms, paperwork, etc. Then there are the communities that will be crippled with overwhelming financial needs---roads, water treatment plants, and other infrastructure that need to be rebuilt, etc. My heart goes out to all the people there, and I think Nebraskans overall are such good, strong, salt-of-the-earth folks who are used to taking care of themselves and their neighbors, and I worry about the mental and psychological toll all of this will take on folks like that who aren't used to asking any form of government for help. They are going to need all the help they can get. There is the larger worry about other states too. Water flows downstream, and all those crazy-heavy winter snows are going to melt, and then the ground will thaw in the cold states, releasing even more water that currently is trapped as in-ground ice, etc. The flood outlook for much of the country looks really bleak for the next few months. My mind goes back to 1993 and the massive flooding that year, and I wonder if this year's flooding could come close to that. At the present time, only mild flooding is expected to touch Oklahoma so I don't think most of us have to worry about flooding, but we still do have heavily saturated soils already and our rainy season really hasn't begun yet. It really doesn't take flooding to create garden struggles---just heavily saturated soil alone will do that. I read an outstanding blog post about the spring flood outlook on WU yesterday, and it was very sobering to read it and to think about all the lives potentially to be affected by the coming Spring 2019 floods. I hope you have a productive weekend and can get gardening things done. After a productive last couple of days, I feel much better about the spring garden overall, even though my soil moisture still is horrifically high, even in my raised beds. I am trying to file away all those concerns about soil moisture in the category of "that which I cannot change" because even well-amended, raised beds that function just fine 90% of the time still are going to be wet after months of being 100% saturated plus. At least there are no puddles standing in my raised beds. Jennifer, I will start by saying that I do not believe four o'clocks form long running roots like that--they form huge potato-like tubers that can get to be the size of a human head in just a few short years, but....having said that, those little plants, including the one you're holding in your hand, look quite a bit like emerging four o'clocks....not seed-grown four o'clocks, whose cotyledons are quite distinct and not visible in your photos, but returning four o'clocks. So, I guess the question is whether or not you have any four o'clocks to compare these little plants to, and if not, what else do you have growing that has similar foliage. I think they are a weed because those little heart-shaped leaves look so familiar, but I don't know the name of them. What I remember about them is that I removed little ones like that from our garden by the hundreds for several years in our first decade here until they finally all were gone. The thing about those little greenhouses is (a) they don't keep plants warmer outdoors at night unless you run a heater at night because the plastic has virtually no heat retention value and they are too small to have enough mass inside to hold heat....so on freezing nights, without a heater, plants will freeze; a person might be able to mitigate that a small bit by placing them on a concrete or stone foundation like a patio or a corner of their driveway though. (b) Strong wind will bend them, break them or carry them away---I have seen this happen to people over and over again who loved their little portable greenhouse until the first strong wind it faced destroyed it. Sadly we have no lack of strong wind here in OK in some months. (c) The smaller a greenhouse, the harder it is to properly regulate the temperatures inside, so keeping the plants warm enough at night and cool enough during the day is a real challenge. Even small hard-plastic 4' x 6' greenhouses are hard to regulate (I had a neighbor with one and an uncle with one) temperature-wise. I know folks who have gone off to work happily, leaving their plants in their little portable soft-plastic greenhouses like this, only to come home on a hot Spring day and find the plants pretty much roasted, toasted and dead or dying because they forget to unzip the door to release heat or they chose not to unzip the door because the morning air was so cold when they left for work. A person who is home all day and who can unzip the door and open it to vent out heat might have more success with them, but there's still the issue of them not holding in heat at night. I always like them when I see them and picture plants inside sheltered from the wind and then toy with the idea of buying one just for hardening off plants right inside the garden, but I don't buy one because I know how hard it is to regulate temperatures inside my much-larger hoophouse style greenhouse, and it has 4 operable vents for air flow and cooling and two walk-in doors that can be opened to facilitate air flow and cooling too, and I have a large evaporative cooler I can roll into it and use as well, and I've been gardening long enough to know the smaller the greenhouse, the harder such temperature and air flow regulation is. The best use for these little things is either inside a garage or barn to protect seedlings from cats, mice and such, or inside a house if cats are a problem, or maybe inside a larger greenhouse or hoophouse for plants that need extra cold protection or perhaps if you need to do serious plant propagation you could do it inside one of these because you could hold in the humidity better in such a small confined space---sort of like a propagation chamber. Be grateful you don't have standing water...it breeds mosquitoes and ground that has been saturated for months develops a sour smell that smells worse than a swamp. I am sure that all the grasses and wildflowers are dead in the areas where water has been standing almost nonstop since September. I always hope for rain to miss us here during March and April when it is time to plant because wet, soggy clay is hard on seeds, often rotting them before they can sprout. I can water if we are too dry, but I don't have any way to extract excess moisture from the soil. When I was planting brassicas this week, I hit standing water about 2" lower than the depth at which I was transplanting seedlings, and that is in a raised bed, albeit a raised bed at the lower, more soggy end of the garden. Sadly, that well-amended clay seems to wick moisture upward from the wetter ground beneath the raised beds. So, my brassicas may not make it and if they don't, they don't, and I'll just move on to the next thing. I am worried about what Spring rainfall will do to an already soggy garden but rainfall is one of those things over which we have no control. The sad thing is that we could use this moisture in June, July and August, but those are the months when rain can become quite rare to almost nonexistent. Jen, I am watching our forecast and thinking that the cold nights are almost done with us, so maybe you can squeak through this Spring without having to do too much more plant protection. Our soil temperatures, at least in the raised beds, are coming up pretty rapidly too. We just need for the nights to stop dipping into the 30s because that is keeping the soil from holding its nice daytime temperatures, which are in the 60s. I probably could plant tomato plants in the ground today, and certainly could plant them in containers, and feel like the soil mostly is warm up for them, but our average soil temperatures keep lagging behind our daytime soil temps because the nights are still slightly cool on some nights. We also haven't had much really strong wind....say, gusts in the 30s or higher, since the bomb cyclone moved on, so I'm hoping that March, which did come roaring in like a lion here, is now sedating departing like a lamb. This has been a pleasant change as the tomato plants are out all day long now and get enough wind to toughen them up but not so much wind that they are damaged. It is supposed to rain on and off here all day, so there's probably no hope to get in any gardening at all. At least everything that I transplanted into the ground earlier this week should get some nice light rain, and hopefully no big downpours or I'm going to have to build raised beds on top of my raised beds, which would be ridiculous. Almost "everybody" is back now....Purple Martins, hummingbirds, monarchs, etc. to add to a plethora of bees, bumble bees, wasps, yellow jackets, all kinds of moths and butterflies, craneflies, etc. This week Spring absolutely exploded into being here, not only in name, but in the reality of the flora and fauna, and it is so good to finally feel like I can start spending at least a part of every day in the garden. As long as the grandkids are still living here, it likely won't be all day every day because the 4 year old gets bored after about 4 hours of gardening time, but Chris and Jana are working on the last big project---that 14' long closet that is almost big enough to be a room and, once they finish that, they can move into their home. I'm going to miss them, and I haven't minded adapting my garden time so I can spend more time with the girls---it truly has been a gift to be able to spend so much time with all 4 of the---the big kids and the little kids---over the last month and the house undoubtedly will seem too quiet, too empty and sort of lonely once they are gone. Dawn