I'm so late getting my "game on" this year. I am contributing plants to a community fundraiser the same day but I am saving lots to bring to GG's and can't wait for the fun! I'm digging this weekend and will post those things later. Here is my "WANT" list: Delphinium Aconitum (Monkshood) Lupine Rhubarb Fig Kiwi Blueberry Rose cuttings (I want to attempt the potato rooting method) woodland anemone lady slippers Toad Lily (Trycirtum) Lily, "Beverly" Lemongrass Stevia Canna, Phasion, Stutgard, any other mint lobelia cardinal flower clematis (any, will also like to try rooting a cutting) plastic pots, all sizes, seed starting to 5 gallon 3 and 5 gallon buckets posts, plant supports, bamboo (no roots, just pole - I can come to collect if you don't want to bring them), leftover pieces of wire fencing, Tree Peony SEEDS any other flower seeds

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

Leslie, I was at O'Tooles yesterday and saw the bush we brought. On our original plant list it is shown as a Black Chokeberry, Aronia Melnanocarpa. I should have trusted the info and put that on the tag. I took pictures of the O'Tooles plant and the tags, shown below. Turns out you can use the berries for jams and jellies! Who knew? I don't actually remember the berries, but we have so many different bushes that berry I simply may not have noticed. Our plant list shows 2 were originally planted in the area we are taking them out. Given that it pretty much stayed in place. We controlled it by cutting down the suckers but they generally stayed within a few feet of the plant and it did not spread itself all over or into the yard. Also pretty much stayed out of the rock bed nearby so I consider it pretty well behaved. Ours did get about 6 ft tall but stayed a pretty shallow clump of a couple of feet deep while it spread width wise. But then it started as two plants that grew together.

Amy, Five dogs is a lot! When we had 8 dogs (because our Honey showed up as a skinny, starved and apparently pregnant stray), only 3 or 4 slept indoors in the house and the rest slept in the garage. The three we have now all are spoiled house dogs, and they're getting to where they don't like going outside when it is too cold, too hot, too wet, too windy, etc. I guess they are spoiled from living inside a climate-controlled house. I hope y'all have a great week and that the wedding is perfect. I bet your dad is really enjoying having everyone around a bit more right now. I used to get livid over the herbicide drift, but what good does it do me to let my emotions get all riled up? I have tried (really, really, really hard) to remove emotion from the equation because I just want to be able to live with a peaceful, happy soul. This is one reason I don't document everything and file complaints---I just don't want to end up in a perpetual war with everyone who sprays, and I guarantee y'all that people never will stop using herbicides. I did tell Tim I wanted to put up a big billboard across our front pasture near the bar ditch that says something like "Organic Garden: Stop Spraying Your Herbicides Carelessly and Killing My Plants", but he was not a fan of the idea. lol. Oh, and I was just kidding about doing it.....but there are days when it seems like a good idea if I thought anyone would change their ways because of it, and I do not think that they would. I think I found the source of the Round-up drift, and it is a fairly close neighbor. (sigh) I hope that killing what they wanted to kill was worth the two dozen tomato plants that we lost to their drift here. I wonder how strong some of this crap is that they use. Y'all might remember that several years back---maybe 4 or 5---somebody in the road spilled a tank of herbicide in the road or at least had a big major leak from a tank that ran down into a portion of our bar ditch. I didn't see it happen and only became aware of it after the fact when that area turned brown and died while everything around it was green and thriving. . It was a broadleaf weedkiller, easy to tell because all the broadleaf plants died and the grasses did not. So, here we are 4 or 5 years later and there's still only grass in that area---everything around it has wildflowers. Obviously that soil is contaminated and I assume the contamination is so bad because the herbicide ran into the soil in a concentration greater than what is sprayed through the air. I expected to see the wildflowers return to this area, but they still haven't. After that spill we stopped collecting the grass clippings when we mow the bar ditch. We used to catch them in the riding mower's grass catcher and use them as mulch or as fodder for the compost pile, but we don't any more. The rain mostly missed us too, but I am not going to complain because our soil remains incredibly wet from all the previous rain. We ended up with about a half-inch, which is much less than the 2-3" or even the 3-4" that the QPF predicted for us 7 days out from the multi-rain event. I'm not complaining. Heavy rain fell west of us, moving north towards OKC. It fell over a huge area to our south with so many problems caused that it makes my head spin just thinking about it. Overnight it fell to our south/southeast. All we had here was light rain, mist, clouds and, today, fog and mist. I miss the sunshine and hope it comes out of hiding today. Larry, Your garden might be spotty, but it sounds like you'll have plenty of everything regardless. Jennifer, There's something to be said for planting only a reasonable number of tomato plants. I might do that next year because this year my tomato plantings are totally out of control, and I'll pay the price for that by having to preserve tomatoes like mad this summer. Luckily, I am not a sentimental tomato grower, so when I have harvested and canned, frozen and dehydrated all I want to preserve, I can ruthlessly yank out the plants and throw them on the compost pile without a second thought, keeping only a small handful for fresh eating. I always remind myself when that time comes that (to steal my cousin's daughter's favorite childhood phrase) that "you are not the boss of me" (I'm speaking to the tomato plants there) and out come the excess plants. There are people here in my neighborhood who think it is a crime to pull out healthy tomato plants that still are producing. Well, that's their issue, not mine, because my large number of tomato plants are a tool that serve me and when their service is done, I want to be done with them and replant that space in something else that will provide a different harvest. I also have no desire to spend the entire long, hot summer trying to keep 100 tomato plants watered and happy and healthy because that becomes an increasingly difficult battle at some point every summer. I'd rather have southern peas growing at that point because you generally don't have to water them much if at all. I believe I could give up canning, freezing and dehydrating tomatoes in a heartbeat at some point and just grow a few for fresh eating each year, but I am not at that point yet. I think I might retire completely when Tim retires from working. Well, maybe I'd make one or two salsa batches per year for us. Just for us. Rebecca, It sounds like it was the perfect day for you to get a lot done yesterday. I planted corn and beans yesterday and this morning, while it is foggy and misty out, I'm going to start some hot-season flower seeds in flats. It is hard to guess how many to start because so many volunteers are so slow to pop up and show themselves in the garden this year. I don't know if we'll have less because of all the excess autumn/winter rain and the excessively wet ground we've had since September, of if they are just slower to appear. Or, if maybe I mulched so heavily last year that they cannot sprout. Time will tell. This year continues to remind me a great deal of 2002 when we stayed cool and rainy through June and then were instantly hot and a whole lot less rainy. I wonder if that will happen this year? It wasn't the worst year ever as the cool-season plants stayed productive very late into spring and almost into summer. The only hard part was the ultra-brief transition from cool to hot. My broccoli is trying to head up. I hope we are going to get normal heads and not buttonheads. It seems awfully early considering how late (compared to most years) that I planted. Dawn