Sammy, thanks for the comforting words. Also, you all have reminded me that many of you are having far worse years than I am; and that my plants are mostly in fair condition even if the flowers have been dreadful. I hope the many sufferers get relief soon. Suzy and Greybird, Mariannese, I hope you get rain--lots of rain--soon! And Greybird, that the temperatures drop. Ogrose, I happy for you that you're happy with what you've got. Sherry, we do have plenty of crows, but I don't know whether they eat beetles and grubs or not. No armadillos. I've thought about chickens, which my sister tells me love bugs, but haven't been able to bring myself to think through a chicken coop and the various requirements. Many people here let their chickens run free during the day. Bart, I'm glad you got some rain! I'm actually planning on introducing broom (ginestra) to some areas of the garden where I can't get anything to grow. I may be getting in touch with you about those pheromone traps. I think it's interesting that you say yellow is the favorite color of the black beetles. I don't remember seeing a lot of them on my Foetidas, which are as yellow as anything can be; while they particularly adore pale roses: 'Bermuda's Anna Olivier', 'Mme. Jules Bouche', 'Maiden's Blush'--all close together, however. I've been doing some maintenance down in the shade garden, yanking weeds, cutting back plants, thinking. The shade garden, with its trees and shrubs and wooded surroundings, is closer to being a mature garden than is the big (sunny) garden which was just a brushy field until a few years ago, and enjoying it once the height of the spring flowering is past doesn't require an effort of imagination. The shade garden is where I can feel the effect of the form and bulk of trees and shrubs, appreciate the texture of foliage and the effect of freshly cut grass--my husband mowed it yesterday--against the beds and the woods. A pretty spot. Until this year we were chronically behind on maintenance in the shade garden and didn't have the planting adequately planned or carried out; but now we're fairly well caught up, there's enough of the planting in place for a plan to pleasantly evident, and I have plenty of ideas about how to continue developing the garden. There's certainly plenty to do in the sunny garden, but for it to be pleasant in summer the shrubs are going to have to grow taller than me, and that won't happen in a hurry. Thank goodness for the cool green of the shade garden. Melissa

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?

Bon, I expect it will get pretty miserable here on Sunday too. I think our worst weather at this end of the state will be Sunday and Monday. Right now our temperature is hovering at 33 degrees, but most of the rain has moved on...not that much fell, a little over a tenth of an inch, but any rain is good. I can see more rain on the Texas radar to our southwest but when it gets about a county away from us, it vanishes. That's the story of our year---rain vanishes when it gets close to us. I won't mind if the ice vanishes before it reaches us though. (grin) For the rest of the weekend, the weather is expected to be about the same as it is right now---with temperatures here hovering in the low 30s and rain coming through in little waves. The issue will be whether the rain falls while we are at 32 or below or if if falls when we are 33 degrees or higher. Thursday was an odd day. We had snakes out in the yard, which I'm never happy about, but it was oddly warm for this late in November. We made it up to 69 degrees before the cold front rolled in and dropped us about 30 degrees in three hours. Earlier in the day, when walking past the garden on my way back from the mailbox, I saw a watermelon in the garden. How I have missed seeing it before now is beyond me, but it looked whole and intact, so I brought in the mail (so it wouldn't blow away) and went out to the garden to pick the watermelon. We have been down as low as 19 degrees, so I figured it was rotted on the bottom, perhaps, and only looked good on the top. I picked it from the dead vine, and it was whole and intact. How crazy is that? After carrying the melon inside, I cut it in half, expecting the flavor to be poor because we had so much rain in October and early November. If the flavor was poor, I was going to feed it to the chickens. Nope. The flavor was good. In fact, it was great, so I celebrated the survival of the watermelon by eating some of it, and saving the rest for other family members. Then I carried the rind out to the chickens and they happily picked it clean of any remaining bits of red flesh. Enjoying a slice of the 'Harvest Moon' watermelon in the final hours before a brutal cold front arrived was a fittingly weird end to a weird growing season. The plant itself had roamed and rambled around the garden before the freeze got it, and had produced plenty of melons in the summer months, but none in the fall. I never thought it would have produced a melon so late in fall that would survive several freezing nights. I likely didn't see it before because cosmos and zinnias sort of surrounded the part of the plant where this melon was. Still, I walk by the garden every day on my way to the mailbox and I do generally look at it as I go by, and I still don't know why I didn't see the melon before now. Harvest Moon was probably my best producer in terms of pounds of melons this summer, although Yellow Doll produced a larger number of melons per plant. It is just that Yellow Doll is a really small melon. I hope y'all stay warm and safe up there, and that the ice misses your place, or at least that it melts quickly. Our driveway is a long, gentle, uphill slope, so when ice falls, we sometimes have problems getting up or down the driveway without sliding off of it. That is reason enough (I think) to stay home when it is icy, but Tim and Chris both are pigheaded and try to make that long drive to work in Dallas despite the ice. I've been waiting for a quiet day to sit and flip through the seed catalogs, and I am thinking that today will be it. Other than going outside to feed the animals after sunrise, I don't plan on being outside much. The wind chills are going to be brutally cold, especially since we haven't had enough cold yet for our bodies to get acclimated to the colder temperatures. We remain, still (and forever, it seems), abnormally dry here. I keep thinking we'll get a good 2 or 3" rainfall that will pull us out of drought for at least a week or two. Sadly, it isn't happening. Obviously it won't happen this weekend because the forecasted rain/ice amounts are really low (and I'm okay with that). Our local TV met said last night that all the kids hoping for a snow day today were going to be disappointed, and that their best chance of having a snow day here will be Monday. It seems ludicrous that we're talking about snow days in November. We started this week with an 80 degree day and I guess we'll end it with a 30 or 32-degree night. That sort of sums up Oklahoma weather in a nutshell. Dawn

Bon, I'm glad he's feeling better, even if he is bouncing off the walls. I hope it is warm and rain-free today so maybe he can play outside and enjoy feeling better. (In my perfect world---the one that exists only inside my imagination, it would rain only at night so we could work outside during the day). Thirty-five degrees is awfully cool. Have y'all reached your average last frost date yet? Lisa, I've been watching the 5-day and 7-day Qualitative Precipitation Forecast all week. A few days ago it was showing really great rainfall totals over much of OK, especially central OK, and every day for the last 2 or 3, the amount it is showing is dropping. I still think y'all will get some good rainfall, but I'm not sure it will be as much as the forecasters once thought. The same is true for much of the state. For all my complaining the last few weeks about wet soil, we have had a lot of drying in the upper few inches of the soil during all the hot, windy days when the rain kept missing us. There's still good moisture about a foot down. I know this because I removed the low tunnel from my onion bed (the leaves were hitting the netting, which meant it had to go) and when I pulled the rebar out of the ground, there was a giant sucking sound from that deep moisture. Unfortunately, up in the raised bed where the onions are growing, it is a lot drier. Now I'm worried our wet-so-far year may be changing back to more skimpy rainfall. I have been watching the soil moisture measurements falling on the Mesonet map and felt they did not reflect our reality at our house until, suddenly, now it seems like they do. I hate that. On the other hand, the reason I've gotten so much garden work done lately is because it has dried up. Now, I guess, I need for it to rain again which will help the plants but probably will put me behind schedule on the back garden, where I hope to get a lot done before the heavy rain arrives, which is expected to be Sunday here, though maybe not until Sunday night. We never seem to get the rainfall we need when we want it or need it, but maybe y'all are finally going to get a break before Lake Hefner turns into a desert. I think Lake Texoma is down about a foot, but that's not too bad all things considered. I've been on a sapling-killing binge too---mulberries, hackberries, elm and oaks. I can blame the oaks on the squirrels, I guess. On these windy days the adjacent woodland has rained down tree seeds, flowers and pollen on me and the garden all day long. I mean the stuff is swirling around in the air like snow. I don't ever remember being showered by so much tree debris in the garden before while working. I pick up every elm seed I see lying on top of the soil when I'm weeding, figuring I can pick up the seeds now or pull the young trees later. Carol, I bet you're right about your soil generally staying too wet for herbs. I have found that most of the ones I grow really like to be high and dry within reason. My soil still is too heavy for thyme to grow, even in raised beds, since we sometimes get really heavy rainfall. I just grow what I can in the ground and put the rest in containers. I have transplanted all the big tomato plants that I'm going to plant into the ground and am holding the rest for the Spring Fling. Those are the ones started from seed on Super Bowl Sunday and then in the second round about two weeks after that. I have tiny plants from a third round that have not done as well. They just won't grow. It is vexing. I don't know whether to blame it on the constant cool, cloudy weather they had to grow in virtually from the day they sprouted or if it is the growing mix (I potted them up into Miracle-Grow Moisture Control, which worked great for the earlier seedlings, but not for these....and I think they went into mix from a new bag which might explain why they are underperforming). Most of these plants are only 2-4" tall, but Ildi is only 1" tall and has been for about 3 weeks. Their color has been off, which isn't unusual for very small seedlings, but usually by the time seedlings are 5 weeks old they are much bigger and have great color. I think something in the soil-less mix is out-of-whack but haven't had time to do anything about it. I'm contemplating planting some of these tiny plants directly in the ground to see if they will grow better in real soil and then potting up the others into soil-less mix from a new bag. I was busy with so many seedlings during seed-starting and potting-up time that I didn't want to mess with chasing down all the ingredients and making my own 5-1-1 mix, but now I kinda wish I had taken the time to do it. I don't regret breaking the tomato list into thirds and planting in three rounds as it helped me feel like I could take my time transplanting tomato plants into the ground at a slow, steady pace instead of rushing to get all of them into the ground quickly before they got too big. I just wish the third round had grown as well as the first two. Since we have had some sunny days lately, the tiny tomato plants' color has improved somewhat but their growth hasn't. If they were the only tomato plants I had, I'd be losing my mind worrying about what is wrong with them. Instead I'm just taking a reasoned response that "sometimes this happens" and will see if I can get them to start growing better and looking better. I've had mixed results with peas. Of the batch I pre-sprouted and started in paper cups, some are doing great in the ground and others are struggling. They're in a bed that runs west to east and all the happier plants are at the west end. The garden runs downhill from west to east, so I'm wondering if the plants at the east end are staying too wet even in their raised bed. I noticed while weeding yesterday that the east-west running onion bed, which also is a raised bed and sits even higher in the garden is exactly the same. At the drier west end, the ground is hard and crusty at the surface and I couldn't just pull weeds out---I had to use a small weeder to break the soil surface and then I could pull the weeds out. About midway down the bed as I moved further east, though, the soil became progressively wetter at the surface and I could yank out those weeds there quite easily. Even in my pathways between raised beds you can see where the garden effectively changes from drier to wetter soil. In the drier areas the mulch is a lighter color and in the wetter areas it is darker and even looks wet. I really enjoyed yesterday's weather. It actually felt like April when I walked out the door. Our high was only 73 compared to the previous day's 87 and it was so much more pleasant to be outdoors that I was out as late in the day as possible. I have to be in before dark because so much of the night-roaming wildlife is not something I want to run into, but I just barely made it in before dark. An hour or two later I was out on the front porch calling the name of a cat who apparently decided to stay out all night and saw the biggest skunk in our driveway that I've ever seen. It was bigger than any coon I've ever seen and we have had some fat, corn-fed coons some years. I joked to Tim that if the cat doesn't come in this morning, we'll know the skunk ate him. It was a really, really big one. We've also had some really huge possums this year, so I guess the mild and wet weather we've had the last few months really agreed with them. Now, I'm headed out to the garden in a minute for what I hope is a full day of getting things accomplished before the rain arrives. Dawn