Awesome new pics and updates everyone! I'm glad lots of folks got some good, soaking rains too. Last Thursday afternoon I was caught in the heaviest downpour I've ever seen here in over 12 years. Amazing! Tons of rain water in my rain barrel right now, and it only collects from about 20% of the roof surface! Mary, you should definitely get some rain lilies, they're just so easy and they absolutely do not need to be on life support (automatic irrigation)! Just plant them, water them once every ten days or so when they seem active, and forget them. They're great, and so easy! Congrats on your pumpkin bloom, Xica, so nice! Keep us posted! Thanks for the nice comments on my little blog, it's a fun little outlet for me. Oh, you can plant those desert bluebells (Phacelia campanularia) any time, but when I am introducing them into a garden for the first time I wait until November to sprinkle them around the garden. They'll pop up in late winter and bloom in spring. Once you let some go to seed, you'll never need to plant them again, LOL. Awesome pics and plants as always, dlg421! I love your garden! Great that it got a nice rain too. I noticed a few mushrooms popping up in my garden too, LOL. Fun! Okay, it's September now, so I'll see everyone in the September thread! Thanks for sharing your gardens with everyone, it's wonderful to see/hear what's going on in your gardens! Take care and happy gardening, Grant Here is a link that might be useful: Happy September 2012 what looks good/bad in your garden?

Thanks Loretta for the info on the lavenders. I don't have a lot of experience with them. I've been pleased with the shape mine are taking, but the scent is a bit off of what I had hoped for. Good advice. Janet, I was reading back through the posts and found the one where you commented about the pampas grass and palms. It just makes you shake your head and wonder what in the world they were thinking, doesn't it? I'll definitely be looking up some of the viburnums that have been mentioned. I can't find the specific post, but someone said they had to yank out their pyracantha because of problems. I spent some time yesterday in looking up the specific cotoneasters that could be used as a replacement if you're looking for a nice show of berries for the birds. I don't know if they'd be suitable for anyone, but I'm tossing in the idea for whatever it's worth. I believe they are also hosts for several butterflies, but don't know which species, and I also need to note that they can attract bees. Some have a slightly crinkly leaf similar to a viburnum, and the big ones often look a lot like a pyracantha until you get close enough to see that they don't have thorns. It's such a huge family to choose from, with a wide range in habit, from low groundcovers to big shrubs. Not all will do well in OK, but a lot of them will. Here are a few that look interesting, if anyone wants to follow them up. One variety or another seems to be happy in such wide variations as PA, Denver, Albuquerque, Georgia and a lot of places in between. Most of them are tough and low maintenance, and many have good fall or winter color. Bullatus is deciduous, up to 12' high and 10' wide. Hardy in zones 5-9 Lacteus takes dry to normal soil and is another big one. Zones 7 - 9. Parneyi is big and can be pruned to tree shape. heat/drought tolerant. Z 7-9 Congestus in small and round, in a fairly tight ball shape. Rockspray or cranberry is low and spreading Salicifolius is also low and wide. 1' high x 5' wide. Z 6-8 The first photo is of a lacteus laden with berries. Next is a bullatus in the fall. I stole the photo off the web but don't know who originally posted it. Pat

Dulahey, I am so sorry to hear about all the damage, but you and your family are okay. Everything else can be fixes. Your garden and yard are so beautiful and I am confident you'll have everything back shipshape in no time at all. That's too bad about the onions. You still could yank them out of the ground (if the growing tips are damaged and I imagine they are), slice or chop and freeze them to use in cooking. That's the hard thing about growing both corn and onions here---if the growing tip is broken, the plants don't regrow and produce. If by chance your outer leaves are broken but the growing tips in the center are intact, the onions might recover. At least you didn't take a harder hit to the house---so, as bad as things look now, they could be worse. I hope the little Purple Martins were okay. Our PMs already have their second round of eggs in their nests, and the juvenile birds from the first hatch are flying and doing their share of eating the nine billion mosquitoes that the wet conditions have brought to us. (I'm just guestimating nine billion---I didn't go out and do a mosquito census.) You know, there's tons of things you could start from seed now and still get a great harvest: squash, watermelons, okra, and even the southern peas of your choice (blackeyes, pink eye purple hull, zipper, crowder, cream, or lady peas). Don't let this weather steal your gardening joy. Even flowers and herbs would be enjoyable compared to looking at empty beds and thinking about what the storms took from you. Earth Sister, I agree with everything you said. I'd be so tempted to take all that trash and return it to them as well, although Tim likely would stop me from doing it. I have said it many times and will say it over and over and over again: we won the Best Neighbors In The World lottery when we bought this land and moved here, having nothing but the best neighbors on all sides of us. I still cannot believe we got so lucky, and wish y'all had had the same luck we've had. It only takes one un-neighborly neighbor to ruin a neighborhood. Busy1, I am sorry for your neighbor troubles too. Maybe the rain will wash them away. George, How could you sleep through the storms? I got almost no sleep on Wed night/Thursday morning because our storms rolled in around 1 or 2 am and stayed loud and crazy forever. I got twice as much sleep last night so I feel like a new person this morning. kfrinkle, I assume you got what already had come through here. It was so loud and crazy with all that lightning and thunder, and it goes without saying that none of us down here in SC OK wanted or needed more rain. Our rainfall never matches our mesonet station's either as we're several miles from them. I try to keep a running total for our place in my head and we often run higher than our mesonet station all spring and sometimes in the summer, but by the end of the year they almost always catch up with us and we end up with about the same amount. It is good to see Texoma rising, but now we are at the point where they have to start wondering if the marinas and campgrounds are going to flood. It seems like it is always feast or famine around the lake. So, you don't have much planted yet? Are y'all too wet? I have the whole front garden planted, but don't know how the lower portion without the raised beds is going to fare. It depends on how much more rain we get and on how quickly it comes. The back garden? Completely untouched. There's perennial herbs and flowers back there, but it is a muddy, weed-filled mess. I doubt I'll get it planted this month, but I haven't lost hope yet. It is reserved for hot-season plantings, including southern peas, okra, watermelons, muskmelons, Armenian cucumbers, winter squash, some summer squash and cucumbers, so I'd hate to not get those things planted. I still have time to plant all of them and get a harvest but the hard part is going to be just getting it to a plantable condition. If I can't get the back garden whipped into shape, I'll have to wait and plant the hot season crops as succession plants in the front garden after all the cool-season crops are harvested. That's not ideal, but it might be the best I can do with the sort of weather we are having. At this point maybe we all should be planting water cress and rice. We had a lot of street flooding in town and cars washing off roads and into ditches and such last night, and I just want to say that it is hard to feel sympathy for ANYONE who drives around a barricade and deliberately drives into a flooded roadway. Barricades exist for a reason. At least one roadway in Love County is closed until further notice because the road washed out. Down in the Valley View and Sanger area where they had the tornadoes and other severe weather to our south, a train derailed off the railroad tracks. Someone sent me a photo of it, but I haven't seen the news so don't know if that train was blown off or washed off or what. In the photo I can see train cars piled on top of train cars but don't know if the piling was from the force of the derailment or if weather "helped" create that mess. Okay y'all, we can keep talking about the weather and its effects on our homes, yards and gardens on this thread all day, but y'all know I will go and start a Friday Check-In Thread later this afternoon. If you aren't watching the weather to our west/southwest, there's already a Tornado Watch active in west Texas for a whole bunch of counties in the area covered by the NWS-San Angelo and NWS-Lubbock. I haven't looked at the radar yet to see if the party has started, but once it starts, those storms could roll towards SW or W OK. What are we going to do if we can't spend the weekend out in our yards and gardens???? I'd rather be out there in the yard or garden doing chores---mowing, edging, pruning, weeding, anything.......and instead we'll likely be inside watching the radar and running to our storm shelter locations and hoping to escape further damage. Rainfall is good but too much at one time is not, and it seems like we are only getting the kind of rain that is accompanied by severe weather this spring. Whatever happened to a nice, slow, kind, gentle, easy-going spring rainfall? I hope the western OK lakes are able to refill the way the ones in central and eastern OK are. The Red River is looking bigger and crazier every day now. Dawn

Tina: I tend to like to see my Roses in person and pick them out myself whenever possible… So I purchase my Eden’s from Roger’s Gardens in corona Del Mar, California and also from the Plant Depot in San Juan Capistrano, California. Tina & Diane... that is so strange that your butterfly bushes do not have a scent. I grown A few different varieties… And they all have a scent... that’s one of the reasons they’re worth growing for me. I was actually just at Roger‘s Gardens this past week… Checking out some different varieties of butterfly bushes… And again they all have scent.