Well Monday is moving day for houseplants (the final one)...I trucked them in and out once, now it's to stay.

And no, that hibiscus bud won't ever make it. There's always next year.

Maybe the cold front will take care of your snakes, Dawn too.

Amy--I didn't even THINK about the "prairie turnip" being native here. In Wyoming, we called it Breadroot.

That was before I began learning scientific names. And it's one of those plants that has been reclassified; it has so many names! That's probably why I haven't run across it, perhaps, in my researching. Thanks!! Some of the names: Indian breadroot; Indian turnip; breadroot; tinpsila, timpsila; formerly Psoralea esculenta, now Pediomelum esculentum. But THEN, if one googles Indian turnip, one gets "Jack-in-the-pulpit and some other names, and it's actually Arisaema triphyllum, a totally different plant. Here's an interesting link: https://www.wolakotaproject.org/timpsila-the-indian-turnip

I haven't seen it at ALL in my current searches--bet Dawn knows it--probably because my focus had been on butterflies. It is native in this central prairie strip all the way from north Canada through TX. Lots of Lakota references to it--probably other tribes, too. What an interesting story it has! I think we need some, don't you? And not only an edible, but also a legume! Prairie Moon Nursery says it needs inoculum.

Larry, well looks like a good fall garden to ME. You have a lot of stuff in there. I got a laugh out of you saying you might have gotten some out of order. That's my usual trick.

I'm glad both of you mentioned the weather/frosts, Dawn and debarron. I guess it's time to bring my houseplants in, too.

Mountain lions weren't uncommon in Wyoming--I don't think I ever heard people call them cougars, though of course we all knew they were either--and they DO stick to the mountains up there, for the most part. They're so reclusive that they didn't commonly cause problems for towns or ranchers, with some exceptions now and then.

I'm glad to hear that you're coughing less, Amy--big thumbs up. I, on the other hand, think I may be seeing shingles for the first time. THAT's no good! Lower left side of my abdomen, just about 1.5" in diameter today. Any of you have experience with them?

Well, that's it from here. Best to you all.

Morelos looks like an awesome store, Rebecca! Have you been to the one on Garnett? I'll be anxious to make a trip.

I collected some seeds from the local prairie turnips on the roadsides near my house in Oolagah when I lived there. They germinated and took about 3-4 years to get big enough to flower (ie quite slow growth). Unless numerous they wouldn't make a food crop (and not quick to recover).

Hi All! I don't have much to talk about. I did look at the garden today. There is still life there. I really need to clean up the east garden and get it ready for the winter. So glad the back garden is done already. It's fixin' to get real cold.

I worked today and this next week will be very busy so it is doubtful I'll have much time in the garden.

We are going to Branson--wasn't planning on it, but a friend accidentally rented a entire duplex and the second side will be completely empty so he offered it to us. It looks really nice and it will be good to get away for a couple of days. My work week will be packed AND getting ready to leave town will be another thing. Ethan will be "in charge" of the house and animals from Sunday night until Wednesday night. This makes me a little nervous....but I'm sure he can handle it. But, I'll have to show him the routine this week.

from the other thread...

Amy, glad you're feeling a little better. Our main coop doesn't get so muddy AND since adding grass clippings it's been amazing actually. The little coop is another story. I probably need to build up the ground there with straw like you suggested or grass clippings or something else. It's a smaller coop and in the past, we moved it 2 or 3 times a year. BUT, it's sat in this spot for well over a year now. It probably won't be moved again so we need to work on making it a bit better. It's not used year 'round. Just when we have babies or need an extra home for a chicken for one reason or another....like Sweetie Pie. The chicken that showed up at some friends' "in town" house and need a new home. As we all know, you just can't throw a new chicken into a flock. It's awful and needs to be done slowly. Which, my two flocks have mingled and it's going well. As well as can be expected. I'll get them all together when we return from Branson and then will work on improving the pen floor with straw or something else.

That is all.

dbarron, I am so desperately hoping that this week's cold sends the snakes into hibernation. Last week's rattlesnake was a most unwelcome visitor that really derailed my gardening plans.

Is today your last good day or just the most convenient day to move plants? I am looking at our end-of-the-week forecast and shivering. We waited so long for weather that felt like autumn to finally arrive and stay and now it seems like winter-like weather is coming too early and will cut our autumn short. I'm going to move my two beautiful jasmine plants in pots from the garden up closer to the house today along with the large shrimp plant that is in a 10 or 15 gallon container. I may leave them outside a couple more days, but they they are coming inside into the sunroom probably Tuesday or Wednesday, depending on what the overnight low will be on Tuesday. I'm sort of afraid to look, because if the cold is coming sooner than I think, I don't want to know it.

Our small (about 20' tall) Shumard red oak at the front SE corner of our 10-acre woodland has not liked the recent weather at all. It usually puts on a glorious show of red in latest October or earliest November. Well, that 27-degree night a few weeks back put the hurt on it when it was fully green, and its leaves turned the tiniest bit of a red tint, then turned brown 3 or 4 days later and fell off the plant, leaving a now-naked Shumard red oak far too early in autumn. Meanwhile, its mother tree that sits about 8' away from it still is almost fully green with only a little hint of red, but she is much larger, much older and much more well established---probably 40 years old or older, while the baby might have been 12-15 years old. I hope the smaller red oak is only reacting to the sudden cold and not that it had anything else wrong with it, as it looked fine until that cold morning.

Nancy, With anything that Prairie Moon says needs inoculum, I think they sell the appropriate inoculum for it if you buy the seed. Buy a large enough quantity of the seed and they throw in the inoculum free of charge. I also know this plant as breadroot.

I had a very mild case of shingles a few years back and I didn't even know that was what they were at first. lol. I had been clearing brush around the garden perimeter, including poison ivy, and thought I had been extremely careful to wear protective clothing. Then I started itching and thought it was poison ivy most likely contracted while clearing brush, and then when it didn't look like poison ivy, I figured out it was shingles after a bunch of Googling. Being me (I hate going to the doctor), I put calamine lotion or something on it and toughed it out. After a couple of weeks, the shingles were gone. I hope that's the only time I ever have to deal with them. I do know that the less I touched that area, the less it bothered me, so I tried to avoid scratching it, etc.

Jennifer, Well a surprise trip can be fun. Maybe y'all will see some glorious autumn foliage?

I haven't read the end of last week's thread because we had a grandchild here all weekend (and I hope she never sees this and reads my words....because her father could not be bothered to spend one of his two weekends per month with his own daughter....his loss, our gain...but if she does read this, she'll know that I always tell her that his issues are about him and not about her and it isn't her fault). I try to stay off the computer when the grandkids are here because I want to be fully present with them, not ignoring them while on the computer or the phone. Obviously, though, Amy said she was feeling better and I join the rest of you in saying that I'm glad the coughing is lessening.

I promised a report on the plant shopping trip. Naturally, with our darling granddaughter with us, we tried to build in some weekend activities that were for her, but she enjoys plant shopping, so we did some of that as well. We picked up a bunch of clearance-priced perennials for next to nothing at the Lowe's in Ardmore. I am not ashamed to say that after two separate trips to that store (one on Sat morning and one on Sun morning), they didn't have a lot of perennials left on the clearance rack. They did have a ton of annuals for as low as 25 cents each, but with freezing weather due at the middle of this week, no one was buying those and rightfully so. Most of the plants we bought were at least 80% off their regular price, so I was such a happy camper.

We bought two varieties of heuchera (coral bells)---"Apricot" and "Carnival Coffee Bean" in 1-gallon pots, so those are a really nice size, and we bought a total of 9 of them. They had one more variety that I thought didn't look nearly as appealing (Flores Seas) and I skipped it or I could have bought 9 of that one variety alone. We bought 11 kniphofia (red hot poker) plants and the variety was "Mango Popsicle", which is a different color from the red hot poker growing in the garden's perennial border. Then, for gorgeous summer color, we bought 6 of the newish ornamental garlic "Millenium" and I would have bought 45 of them if they'd had them. Unlike the other ornamental alliums we grow, this one is more of a summer bloomer than a spring bloomer, and I am going to grow it outside the back yard's fence since it is pretty likely to be deer-resistant. I'll be watching for more "Millenium" plants as I shop, and I love the blooms on these enough that I'd pay full price for them. (grin) From the almost-dead-and-dying rack of clearance plants, all marked $1 each, and then reduced by 50% at the checkout stand, we bought 9 sedum plants--a mix of the varieties "Autumn Joy", "Autumn Fire", "Raspberry Truffle" and ""Cherry Truffle". I'd love to find more of the latter two varieties as their foliage is very lovely, so I'll watch for them as we continue plant-shopping for the 2020 landscape renovation. We purchased 10 1-gallon pots of Coreopsis "Big....something". I don't remember what that something was, but it has yellow flowers with a red eye. I'll check the label when I go outside later today. Finally, our last clearance item, from the Lowe's in Sherman, was 5 pots of dwarf modo grass, and again, if they'd had more of them, I would have purchased more so I'll be watching for those at other stores. They'll be great in some areas where the trees have shaded out (finally!) the bermuda grass.

Knowing I cannot renovate a whole landscape on clearance plants (bet I could if I was willing to spend an extraordinary amount of time going from store to store each week looking for bargains but who has time for that when the nearest stores are 20-50 miles away), we paid full retail for some of the shrubs I want for the south side of the house. We bought 9 of the "Sunshine" ligustrum from the Southern Living Plant Collection, and yes, they are a privet, but a sterile one. These are gorgeous plants, and 9 is not enough, but I have a long list of plants I want for the renovation so I cannot buy too much of any one thing. Still, I think we'll buy more of these maybe as soon as this coming weekend because I want to plant them en mass at the proper spacing for dramatic impact in the yard. We only bought 9 because the vehicle already was full of plants and we only had space for 9, but I want more. Of course I do, being a plant person, I want more of everything.

We haven't even started removing the bermuda grass yet, so these plants will have to wait patiently for us to do that and to build raised beds for them after we improve the grade-level clay soil, and then get the fence up as well. For the time being they will be planted in nursery beds in the front garden where they can stretch their roots out a little and overwinter, waiting for planting time to arrive. That's the only job on my To Do list for today, other than eventually making dinner when I am finished gardening. I'm just going to remove them from their pots, plant them into the raised bed in rows since it is just a temporary home for them, water them in very lightly (more rain is expected this week) and then mulch them. We am trying to buy all the plants we want and can find now so they are ready and waiting when we're ready to plant. Last year, some of the plants I've had my eye on, knowing we were planning the landscape renovation, did not arrive in garden centers until May, and I would prefer to have them planted earlier than that so they can become more well-established before the summer heat arrives. I was watching carefully all of this year to see when the plants arrived in the stores because I wanted to know when to expect them in 2020 and I was a little surprised at how late some of them showed up in local stores---a good month to six weeks later than I was hoping for.

Other than plant-shopping, we went to a Halloween party where our bee and beekeeper costumes were a big hit on Saturday night, and it worked out perfectly because a good friend of Lillie's was there so she got to play and dance with her all night and they enjoyed very much spending time together. Then, last night we attended a birthday party for a very dear friend and that was so enjoyable as well. So, we, the reclusive hermits that we are, went out and socialized with people twice in one weekend. That's about our quota for the whole year, so we can happily stay at home now. (grin) I adore our friends and it was so good to see them all. It is rare I can get Tim to stay up later than his standard bedtime ( 8 pm or so), even on the weekend when he isn't getting up in the middle of the night to go to work) and he did it for two nights in a row.

We also looked at our bermuda grass growing there in all that clay and decided we'll rent a sodcutter to remove it, and hopefully that will occur sometime in the next few weeks. You have to have the right soil moisture to successfully operate one of these things in dense clay like ours, so we'll rent one when the ground is wet enough for the sod to be easily cut, but not so wet that it is too heavy to roll up and remove. Right now the ground is heavily waterlogged, but it shouldn't stay that way forever, although last autumn and winter it did.

Some of the stores still had a lot of cool-season herbs and veggie transplants, and it killed me to walk past them and not buy anything.

We are in a race against time now. The garden centers closest to us, and by close I mean a driving distance of 50 miles or less one way, usually clear out as much of their nursery stock as they can by November so they can use the outdoor space for Christmas trees and such, and that means we're already sort of at the outer limits of when plants normally are available and not looking either dormant or dead (and it can be hard to tell which is which). Luck is on our side though because autumn stayed far too hot for far too long and from the looks of the great plant selection still in the garden centers, I'd say people were not buying plants in September or most of October. I'm hoping that means we can keep buying more plants for a few more weeks.

There are a lot of Christmas plants arriving at the garden centers now, sharing shelf space with warm-season annuals that are about to freeze--for example, I saw a lot of the so called 'living Christmas trees' that people sometimes like to buy to put indoors for Christmas and then plant outside after Christmas, and all the garden centers now have rosemary plants sheared into Christmas tree shapes in decorative pots that scream "Christmas". Most of those sheared rosemaries are meant strictly for indoors because they aren't cold-hardy varieties, but one store did still have Arp rosemary on the store shelves. I am stunned by how many warm-season annuals remain in the stores. It is apparent they just weren't selling this fall. I could have bought a gazillion of them for practically nothing per plant, but for what purpose at this time of the year---I have no desire to nurse them through the winter in the greenhouse.

Speaking of nursing, I heard a 'suspicious' sound in the garage last night, and we found a white mama cat nursing a litter of newborn kittens in there. She isn't our cat and we do not know from whence she came, if she plans to stay, or if she'll pack up her babies and move them back to wherever she came from after they are older. Lots of people here around us keep barn cats that are left to pretty much fend for themselves (I understand the concept, but think it is cruel to expect them to survive only on what they can catch), so she may be one of those and she may have decided her chances of being fed are greater here because we've been feeding another feral mama and her three babies for a couple of months now. Or, she could have strayed from a neighbor's place to ours during all that rain. I had left the garage open for the feral cats on those rainy days so she may have been in there for a few days already. Or, as so often happens out here in the country, she may have been dumped by some city dweller who didn't want to deal with a pregnant animal. Sadly, that sort of thing happens all the time out here. Regardless, during the week that I am going to turn the garden beds into temporary plant nursery beds, that little mama cat has turned the garage into a different sort of nursery altogether,

Finally, in one of the strangest autumn events, absolutely no multicolored Asian lady beetles have tried to come indoors to overwinter. This is the first autumn in probably at least 15 years that this has happened. I'm not complaining as it means I won't be having to vacuum them up and kill them or release them outdoors, but I am wondering what happened to them. While we did some exterior caulking work while painting the exterior of the house recently, and or course you hope you find and caulk every gap so nothing can find its way in, that's not why we aren't seeing them. Even if we were successfully keeping them out, we'd be seeing them hanging out near the doors, usually clustering on warm south-facing walls during the day, and we haven't seen any of that at all. On the other hand, some wasps have been relentlessly trying to come indoors--trying to fly in an open door every single time we open an exterior door to let a dog or cat in or out or to go in or out ourselves. I cannot even tell you how many wasps have made it indoors only to promptly be killed with a handy fly swatter---probably about 2 dozen over the last 2 or 3 weeks. We've not really had this sort of an issue before either. It is such a strange year!

Dawn

Dawn, I'm writing down every plant you mentioned. I will copy you and buy these plants too! Lol. Our backyard makeover won't happen in one year, though. We need to enlarge our patio and I'm not sure when that will be in our budget. Unfortunately I'm making about a tenth of what I once made at one of my jobs. It's cutting into our fun money! And fun for me includes gardening, remodeling, and such. Oh well. Still so blessed.

I didn't get my day off because I had a funeral. (It seems like so many friends' moms have passed this past year!) Before and after the funeral, I worked. Then had to pick up Mason from the airport.

I was hoping to do a little garden clean up this afternoon, but winter is here! I thought the highs today were going to be in the upper 50's. It didn't happen.

I didn't do much outdoors other than fill the chickens' water containers and add some pine shavings to the old coop.

Tom is smoking some turkey breasts to take to my friend whose mom passed.

I went to a "cooking day" at our church on Saturday. They provided the meat and spices and potatoes. We brought the other ingredients and prepared 5 meals for the freezer. "We' are having one of them tonight. It's a crockpot green chili chicken. I will not be eating it, although it smells good. I'm a bit of a snob when it comes to the meat I buy for the boys...and judging by the huge sizes of those chicken breasts that were provided, those were no organic chickens...those were pumped full of something to make them so giant. I know that is snobby of me...but I can't help it. And Tom doesn't care if things are organic or not. So, it's not a big deal, I guess.

It was a pretty neat deal--the cooking day. I spent $36 on ingredients and left with 5 huge meals. Plus the leftover ingredients that weren't used for the recipes...like milk and butter.

I'm also going to make pumpkin bread tonight. Yum.

So...I should get off the computer and get to work.

Houseplants are in, because rain next two days. Four days (at least) of freezing temps starting Wed morning.

I got home late and only moved into enclosed porch, I'll start making them permanent homes tomorrow in the house.

Our rain that was supposed to come overnight or tomorrow arrived at mid-day. Yuck! I worked all afternoon in cold drizzle to get all those new plants in the ground, but now it is done, and the mud "should" come out of my clothes eventually. This was supposed to be our last nice day before the rain and the cold, but it really underachieved and wasn't that nice at all. Still, it was great weather for the plants if not really for me...cloudy, cool, drizzle and mist....so probably they really won't suffer any transplant shock at all even though some of them were root-bound. It took me 2 or 3 ours indoors in dry clothing to thaw out and feel human again. Jesse (the puppy dog) was pretty miserable too, but I made him stay out with me. If I had left him indoors, I would have had to put him in his dog crate so he wouldn't chew furniture, shoes, drapes, etc. etc. etc. while I was out working. Even though he didn't like the weather, I bet he preferred being out there to being indoors in his crate.

Tomorrow all I have to do is move the two jasmine plants and the shrimp plant indoors. My tropical plants already are back indoors.

We are supposed to get only light rain tonight and tomorrow and then the heavier stuff arrives.

It looks like the kids are going to have a cold Halloween.

I think I'll take down the hummingbird feeders sometime before the end of the week. I think our last straggler hummingbird that I saw at the feeder was last Wed or Thurs so it is likely the slow or late hummingbirds all have made it south of us now.

Oh, and the coreopsis with Big in its name was Big Bang Cosmic Eye. Apparently there's a whole series of Big Bang coreopsis varieties from a breeder (I believe it was Darrell Probst) who crossed at least 8 species to get these long-blooming perennials, and it took thousands of crosses to get the ones he selected and released. I'll have to research the rest of the series and watch for them. In general, coreopsis does not do well in my clay soil, but since we're building raised beds for these, I can create the right type of 'well-drained soil' conditions for them above grade level. It doesn't matter how much I amend the grade-level clay, it just never drains well enough for plants that demand well-drained soil. With raised beds, I can create the right soil though.

The raised bed in the garden were I put these plants temporarily for the winter looks so good. I intended to plant them in straight lines since this is just a nursery bed, but I just couldn't do it. I planted them in groups or clusters as if I was doing the actual landscaping. I found myself laughing at myself because I couldn't just slap them into the ground in straight rows. Having them grouped, though, does give me a feel for how they'll look when put into their actual landscape location.

Having worked outside in the rain, mud and muck all day, I now get to relax the next couple of days because it will be raining and I cannot work outdoors....I've paid my dues for this week! I can spend some time researching and making plant lists and figuring out what will look good in various locations. Honestly, though, anything will look better than the bermuda grass there now....so there is nowhere to go but up.

Dawn

Those coreopsis were not good at over-wintering for me Dawn. However, it may work better for you..like many things the hardest part seems to be the deluge in the spring that drowns them just as they start waking up.

My experience with all coreopsis, dbarron, has been the same, and it really frustrates me because I love them so. I am going to build them a tall, really well draining bed and fill it more with sand and rock instead of good, rich, moisture-retaining soil and hope for the best. I have been able to keep some other picky (i.e. cannot tolerate much moisture at once) plants like lavender in beds built very high above grade and filled almost entirely with native sandy-silty soil fairly happy, although the lavender died in 2016's 78" of rainfall and the replacement lavender has suffered in 2019's heavy downpours. Maybe our climate/soil combination just isn't right for these coreopsis plants, but I want to give them a try. If these don't make it in a bed built just for them, I won't buy coreopsis again. The huge issue here where I live is that the plants that often tolerate/survive the dry years when 20-30" of rain falls (and very little of it at all in the summer) and we have very low RH values most of the time are not the same plants that are happy and tolerate 40-78" of rainfall and constant high RH values.....so there are times it feels like half of what I have is going to die in any given year depending on the weather. There's not a lot of plants that tolerate both weather extremes that are common here , although the ones that do tolerate both obviously are on my permanent grow list, and they do tend to be plants with prairie origins.

And, in news that should surprise absolutely no one, my 60-year-old body is strongly objecting to yesterday's work. Apparently digging out the row of roselles (which was tough, and required a lot of pushing and pulling and tugging to get those long roots out of the ground) and then digging 59 holes for 59 plants in the rain was too much for me, and I am stiff, sore and tired....just like I am in springtime of any year. lol. To clear that bed so it could be a nursery bed for landscaping plants, I also had to pull out a couple dozen pepper plants, zinnias and salvias, but I didn't mind that---there's plenty of other flowers in other beds and the ones I pulled likely all were going to freeze this week anyhow. Anyhow, whatever muscles I still have at this age are not amused at all by yesterday's sudden burst of gardening activity and expect to have some down time now to recover. That allows me to sit here at my computer and research more potential landscape plants today.

I had so much trouble with those roselles. Their roots ran everywhere, often for 4 feet or so horizontally. In some cases, I couldn't even pull up all the roots, so used lopping shears (these were thick roots!) to cut them off and leave part of the root in the ground. The roots will rot over the course of the winter. This was just the small roselle bed. I need to clear the larger roselle bed, perhaps later this week after the rain stops, to make that bed available to use as a nursery bed for whatever future plants I buy this autumn to hold in the ground for fall planting.

One thing about the concept of removing several thousand square feet of lawn and replacing it with a mixture of hardscape, limited lawn area and plants is that it is going to take tons and tons of plants to replace the thousands of square feet of lawn. All those plants we bought looked like so very many plants when they were lined up in the garden pathways waiting to be planted, and then I planted them in the nursery bed, which they didn't even entirely fill up, and they looked like such a small number of plants compared to how many we eventually will need. Granted, in the nursery bed they are not planted as far apart as they will be in the permanent landscape. Still, this process helped me understand how many plants we are going to need. I tried to break the news gently to Tim when we were out shopping, by throwing out a random number of plants we'll need. I just made up the number but it might not be that far off if you take into account how many dwarf mondo grass and sedge plants we'll need to replace lawn area under the 20-year-old trees where shade had pretty much killed the bermuda grass anyway. I told him we'll need 1300 plants. To his credit he did not pass out on the spot or have a hysterical fit. He "might have" looked at me like I'd lost my mind. Some of those 1300 plants are things I'll be raising from seed this winter/spring, and some will be transplanted from the big fenced garden, but we still are going to have to buy a lot. I'm okay with that though because I've waiting a long time to fence the yard and to be able to landscape it the way I want, so I'm willing to spend the money on the required plants.

My goal for the part of the landscaping we are renovating in 2020 is to have about 30% hardscaping (decks, patios, pathways), 30% heavily mulched planting beds filled with a mixture of trees, shrubs, perennials and ground covers and 30% grass, although I really don't want that much grass. I don't want for it to be bermuda grass either, so we're going to use the sod cutter to take out the bermuda and plant something else. I'd be okay with buffalo grass, even though the native buffalo grass on our property doesn't stay green long in those non-irrigated areas. Obviously fescue grass would like like crap here in the hot months, which last forever this far south, and I hate bermuda because of its insane level of aggressiveness. Tim likes green grass more than native grasses that turn buff-colored so early in summer, so he'd be happier with water-guzzling St. Augustine. It is just hard for me to like/want any grass at all, period, when we are surrounded by thousands of acres of native grassland 365/24/7. I get tired of looking at grass, mowing grass and working to keep the grass out of the landscape beds. I've had a split-stem bluestem come up in the middle of a large, well-established daylily plant right in the garden's perennial border. To get rid of it, I'll have to dig up the daylily, dig out all the bluestem that I can, and then divide and replant the daylily. I'm guessing that normal gardeners who live in town never have an issue with random prairie grasses popping up in their perennial borders.

Today is cold and rainy, even colder than yesterday, and with that same sort of very light misty/drizzly rain, but the difference is that I had to be out in it yesterday and today I don't. That's a huge difference. We're sitting here at 44 degrees and I think our high is supposed to be 46 or 47 so it isn't going to get much warmer than it already is. It seems like a great day to continue working on the landscape plan. Being out in the nurseries this weekend reminded me of plants I'd forgotten about and not even considered yet.

Nancy, it’s at 31st and 129th east avenue. The Asian market is across the street, lol.

Hahaha--I've been to the Asian one, so thanks, now I know right where I'll be going, Rebecca! GDW and I are going to enter a chili cook off in early December, so we're practicing! We're entering separately. I fully expect his to win, as it's the one we both always fix, and it's good. Mine will be more experimental. At any rate, I'm excited to go get some Mexican chiles.

I was trying to read your last post, Dawn, but have been visiting with Garry for the past hour or more. We're not normally that talkative, but we've been talking about all kinds of stuff this morning. I read the paragraph about telling Tim how many plants you were going to need. He thought that was so funny. So did I. Good humor! I took a fall and mashed my left big toe, so am kind of taking it easy for a few days til the swelling goes down a bit. Good timing with the nasty cold wintery weather. We agreed that we are really hoping for some Indian summer weather in November--we have totally missed the window (what window?) for yard clean-up--besides, even though there are leaves all over the lawn, doesn't look like hardly any have fallen by looking up into the trees.

Oh--seeds. I see Johnny's is having a GREAT seed sale. I'm going to go check them out.

Your landscaping project sounds magnificent, Dawn. That hardscaping! Wow! It will be so lovely, I know!I

I've been looking at seed sites most of today with little physical work. I have done so little garden work since mid-September, I'm sure I'd be totally crippled if I did the kind of work you just did with the roselles.

Regarding the grandkid's Dad--there's a reason he's an ex, right?! I used to feel so sad for my two little guys continual disappointment about their Dad not coming through for them. Children are so precious--I am continually horrified by the conditions that our school's children live with.

Poor Garry can't read! His eyes are so much better after the cataract removals that now his glasses are the wrong prescription. And his last check-up and eye exam isn't until Nov. 19. Ha! So we're going to go look for reading glasses this afternoon.

We were supposed to meet one of our daughters and family, as the 12-yr old had a football game in Wagoner today. We spent some time last night on messenger discussing restaurants, and I was so excited to have a glass of wine with a good dinner. Today she canceled, as the 12-yr old is sick. I was so primed for dinner that we're going anyway--minus the glass of wine. We'll go to our favorite Mexican restaurant.

I'm trying to decide what I'll grow for veggies next spring. Onions, for sure. I don't think we'll do potatoes, though. Lots of greens, pole beans, I think, and will again try beets and carrots. Still thinking about it all. Need lots of dill. I keep shortchanging myself with it, as the caterpillars have gotten it all the past two years. Greedy little guys.

Well, back to my seed searches.

This cold mist is really working on me. I will be nuts before bedtime if I don't get out and do something. I think I will sneak out and plant some winter peas as cover crop if the mist stops.

I gave half of my sweet potatoes away Thursday, but I still have more than I need. I did not get to cure them properly, that is the main reason I gave them away. I gave them to my sister and she has frozen most of them. We have frozen some and are trying to keep the others in the house, under the bed in a spare room.

I planted out some cabbage yesterday, I expect them to not produce. But I also expected my sweet potatoes to be a flop, but wound up with a pretty good crop. The cabbage were planted where some of the free plants from the farmers co-op had croaked. I still had over half of the free plants to live.

My Egyptian walking onions are growing like crazy. Madge wanted them out of her flower bed this past spring. So I pulled them and tossed them in a plastic shoe box and placed them on the back porch. I noticed that the box had a lot of water in it from a blowing rain we had, so I gave away a lot of them and planted the rest in the garden, thinking they would rot if I did not plant them. I think I lost one plant. This seems to be a plant that you cant kill. I have noticed that more have come up in the flower bed. If I cant give them away I will just take them over to the wildlife garden and let them take over.

Well I got my daily fix, I planted grain rye and winter peas in the south garden, turned the compost pile, and, moved a bucket of compost to the north garden, and counted the deer tracks. The deer are not taking as much interest in the garden as the will be later in the year.

I ran out when I got home & picked all the peppers and tomatoes, then loaded up the dehydrator with ones that I picked before the last cold snap & were finally ripe. & I discovered just how important it is to label stuff when you pick it. The Pretty & Sweet peppers look an awful lot like another pepper I grew that happens to be super spicy. So now they're all drying to make pepper flakes, which I'm calling "sweet & sassy".

Lol, I suppose you could taste a bit of each one and classify it (the peppers).

Heard from my neighbor about golfball size hail in our neighborhood this evening while I was at work. I guess I’ll have the roof looked at. After everything financial I’ve been through this year, paying a $2000 deductible is not something I’m prepared to do. The hail probably finished off the tomatoes remaining outside. Have to wait for morning light to check out the carnage.

On a better note, Amazon sent the wrong butterfly costume, the monarch instead of the blue I ordered. I love the monarch one! Happy to wear it, even though my arms are too short. That can be fixed for next year. I forgot to buy antennae, though.

HELLO! It got busy while I've been away for a day. Love to read y'all's posts.

Rebecca, I'm sure you look adorable as a monarch!

Yes, Jen, labeling...and then not losing labels. SO important and SO difficult. lol I like dbarron's idea about tasting and classifying. :)

Larry, you keep so busy! I'm exhausted just reading all of the things you accomplish in a day!

Nancy, I've really started thinking about next year's garden too! I don't want to experiment with many edibles....I want to grow the things I know we will eat...and focus on the continued building of our gardens. Sorry you missed your glass of wine. I am having one, but not a good dinner. Just some Harvest Snaps and a bit of hummus.

I did not look at the garden one bit today. I've been running like a crazy woman. This weather is annoying to me. Like the 100 degree weather annoys me. Where the freak is our fall????! Why is it January right now?! Josi is whining...and she doesn't need anything. She's eaten, drank, pee'd, poo'd. She's bored and needs to go for a walk BUT it's pouring rain. I feel bad for her. Anyway...

Tomorrow will be a day of trying to figure out the logistics of moving Trunk or Treat indoors. Having 100's of people come through the building is always interesting. It has to be done well...with much mindfulness and carefulness so that it can be a fun and safe event for our community. Luckily, I have a police officer friend who will be there as a "presence' for those who want to ruin it with bad behavior...and for those who will be soothed by having that presence there. IF that makes sense.

Then there's the "trunks" that will become a classroom door OR an alcove in the building--some wanted to have a BB game. Oh, okay...so...just whatever. I'll try to find a place with a tall enough ceiling for you.

I'm rambling, I know.

Ron picked all the green stuff yesterday and it didn't freeze last night.

Ron didn't latch the dog gate this morning when he went to the pool, so I was awakend by a cold nose and wet paws. I gave up trying to ignore her when she started licking my toes. Now she is sprawled across my lap. My 65 pound lap dog. She doesn't want the cat to get that prized position, since the cat is on the back of my chair.

Larry, you've done wonderfully! H/J, I'm sure you will get your indoor trunk or treat squared away. Nancy, YOU FELL? I'm so sorry! Rebecca, HAIL?! Yikes! Maybe it didn't last long enough to do a lot of damage. There is a Mexican bakery on 21st down from the other Asian market that I've heard is really good. As usual, Dawn, your plans exhaust me. It has been really dreary and cold this week, not that I've been out in it. But I have to go out today. Still coughing.

Sale at Johnny's? Yikes.

Hazel, I don't do anything without a machine or a tool. My days of working are over, but I still play around with all the junk I have, and enjoy it. One bad thing I have to deal with is keeping all my junk repaired, because I sometimes have to use it in a manor of which it was not designed to do.

I am really not ready for the weather we have coming. This has been a strange year for me. It seemed as though the weather was hacked off at me all year long, but I guess we are even, because I have been a little hacked also.

Madge and I just cant get caught up. We are so much slower than we use to be, and it seems we have more to do. The family is getting larger, our sibling are have health issues, and the same things apply to Madge and me. I have canceled two Dr. appointments this week because I felt like I just did not have time to go at this time.

It looks like the rain has stopped, so I should go out and see what I can do.

Madge bought some crepe myrtle bushes for two of her daughters. They are not ready for them yet and we are concerned that it may get too cold for their roots sitting in a plastic pot on the deck. I told Madge that I could scoop out a spot at the edge of the compost pile to sit the bushes and push some compost up next to them for shelter. I don't think the edge of the pile will have enough heat to harm the bushes. We just dont have room for any more plants in the house, plus the plants will be safer out away from the wild monkeys we will have running through the house during the holidays.

Nancy, I thought 1300 plants was a fair estimate, but clearly we are not going to buy that many, so I'd better do a good job of raising as many as possible from seed. lol. Can you even imagine purchasing 1300 plants of any size? I cannot, especially when we're talking about trees and shrubs. Now that Tim survived the shock of hearing me say 1300 plants, I wonder what he'd say if I tried to estimate how many bags of mulch it will take to cover the ground well after they are planted? I am sure that next year we'll be hauling home loads of mulch every weekend for the whole year.

I hope Garry's vision recovers as quickly as possible.

The grandchild's father was a high school boyfriend and I am not sure if he still was around by the time she was born. He surely hasn't been around consistently since then either, and probably the less I say about that the better. You know what it does to a child who simply doesn't understand why their parent doesn't make seeing them a priority. It breaks my heart to see her hurting over his choices.

There's tons of other stuff that swallowtail cats will eat in addition to dill---fennel (I grow all three--regular green fennel, bronze fennel and Florence fennel), parsley, carrots, chervil, anise, caraway, celery, rue, and natives like Golden Alexander. They like Queen Anne's Lace, but you don't have to grow it as it plants and grows itself. Also, you can grow citrus (in addition to anise) for the Anise Swallowtail and the spicebush (and sassafras) for the Spicebush Swallowtail, and Dutchman's Pipe and gasplant for the pipevine swallowtails. I do find most of them prefer dill first, but no matter how much dill I grow (and I grow tons of it), it never is enough. After they decimate the dill, they move on to the others and in our garden fennel is almost as popular as dill, especially Florence fennel, and so is flat-leaf parsley.

October's weather had been so very frustrating. I was hoping for Indian Summer too and am not sure we'll get it. The 6-10 and 8-14 day outlooks from the CPC don't look that great. We waited forever for autumn weather to show up here, and then when Autumn came driving up in its shiny pick-up truck, we discovered that Winter was hiding in the bed of the truck, ready to hop out of the truck and ruin autumn. I bet 95% of our trees here still have most of their leaves, and most of those leaves are green, and the next few sub-freezing nights are ruining our chances of having pretty autumn color---those green leaves are gonna freeze, turn brown and fall. At least once that happens we can gather them, chop them up and dump them on beds and compost piles.

Rebecca, I saw both the blue butterfly and monarch costumes when shopping for the bee costume and I am sure either will be fine. If you were closer, I'd lend you my boppers.

Hail in October is crazy, but then we've all decided that this month's weather meets the crazy definition.

Jen, I bet your pepper combination will be an awesome flavor combination.

Amy, Our puppy isn't as big as yours yet, but also thinks she is a lapdog. A cold, muddy, wet lapdog. She and I have been having issues regarding that today. She's asleep on the floor day, which might me a first...the very first time she's fallen asleep without being confined to her dog crate. She fights sleep like a little child.

Jennifer, November usually is the cruelest month for our gardens, but this year the weather has determined it is going to be October. Oh well, with nothing much left living/producing, we all can move on and work on other projects I suppose. I try to ignore the generally sorry state of most of the plants in the garden at this point as we've hit freezing several times already, and just focus on the handful that still are pretty. Well, they are pretty today, and won't be pretty tomorrow.

Our dogs are bored like yours and, in fact, so are the cats. The rain cannot last forever, but the mud might last a while.

I am sure Trunk or Treat will be a hit indoors, and agree that it always is good to have a police officer friend present just in case anyone was thinking of acting up. Nowadays, you just never know. Today Tim sent me a photo of the jack-o-lantern his staff carved for the D-FW Airport employee pumpkin-carving contest being held tomorrow. I am dumbfounded by what they did and however they did it, though I know he took his Dremel electric carving set in to work last week, so they did have the proper tools to do it. Their 'jack-o-lantern' features a police officer holding a gun and aiming it at someone using a proper police stance. Of course it does. Cops don't think like normal folks. They did a great job but, you know, I was expecting to see something more traditional, like a pumpkin carved into a jack-o-lantern. Silly me.

Larry, I'm glad you got your fix and got something planted. I wish I could be out in the garden today, but 40 degrees and misty rain are a really unappealing combination.

I also want to run out to the garden and throw myself over all the plants still flowering and hover over them and protect them from freezing, but I won't. It is time to just let them go as the seasons change.

I believe I'll bring in the hummingbird feeders tonight before it freezes. Our Freeze Advisory is in effect from 7 pm tonight to `11 am tomorrow and that's a long period of freezing temperatures. I don't want for the nectar to potentially freeze or for the feeders themselves to freeze and crack. Y'all know how it isn't over until the Fat Lady sings? Well, I think the Fat Lady is warming up for her performance tonight.

Our October weather was all over the map, starting in the 90s for most of the first week, then hitting 27 degrees on the 11th, and then hitting 94 degrees about 3 days later. Since then, it has gradually cooled down and become more consistently cold at night but we did have a couple of nice autumn days. However, I expect and hope for more than just a couple of nice autumn days. (sigh) I knew it was foolish to keep hoping for a lovely Indian summer that would last well into November, but I kept hoping.

We are far below average temperatures now and for the next couple of days. There's nothing we can do about it....well, maybe online seed shopping. Ha! It isn't like any of us already have too many seeds or anything like that.

Can it just stop drizzling and misting already. Everything is far beyond dripping wet, but the skies keep dripping more wet stuff down on us anyway.

Dawn

Ha, Dawn. Well the thing is, the Swallowtail cats preferred the dill. So they stripped it first. And there wasn't that much of it. I had it in three different locations and they found all three. I have tons of the carrot family plants--Remember, I planted the ammi majus and visnaga. It re-seeded nicely! The bronze fennel has become a huge stand, and I had quite a bit of parsley. And yet the only thing that wasn't completely stripped was the fennel. Go, fennel! Now my plan for the dill this year is to again put it in different locations, but lots lots more of it! Re spicebush. You know how foresty/brushy it is here. We must have some spicebush shrubs among all that brush, as I saw several spicebush ones; and quite a few pipevine ones, as well. I know I don't have Dutchman's pipe or spicebush (or VA snakeroot). . . having said that, those are on my list for next year--mostly for the school, but I'll skim a few of the seeds for me, or if I buy plants, it'll be one for them, one for me. Haha. I am spending a great deal of time researching host plants this fall, as well as natives for all the birds and pollinators. I really am concentrating on those, though will still have zinnias, lantanas, and tithonia. Although when I started these beds and the garden, butterflies weren't on my radar at all; that didn't happen til last year. But I had luckily and unwittingly happened to plant a lot of host plants. And of course had enough nectar plants to make them happy. I'm going to pull out all the plants (cept petunias) that they don't care about--like the four o'clocks (I know I know, good luck with that! lol), a lot of the basil, a lot of the lemon balm. I've given up on the pretty salvias, including the pineapple sage and Black and blue--I'll move them to the school next spring where they'll be happy in the sun.

It didn't freeze here last night--got down to 39. I laughed a couple hours ago when I checked--it was still 39. Drizzling, lightly raining. What a drag!

Larry, Garry and I are WAY WAY behind, too. Dumb me, making him go to the eye doctor. That effectively ended his gardening for a month, with the cataract removals. I'm not going to worry about it. Glad you got your planting fix. I'm so done for now. I'll just stay in and look for seeds; but am hoping we'll get SOME decent weather this morning for yardwork.

Haha, Amy, yep, forgot about that one little step on the flagstone part off the deck. and just must have landed totally on that toe! That toe and my right thumb. I was trying to picture how that landing must have looked, and can't EVEN imagine.

Rebecca, report back on the hail stuff.

Oh rats, gotta get this sent off and get back to "work."

It snowed here this late afternoon! Obviously it didn't amount to much....but, it snowed!

I was out this morning in 28 degree wind chills, with my bucket, gathering up the remaining tomatoes, and anything else that might ripen indoors. I think that makes me a real gardener.

You are a REAL gardener, Rebecca. I'm thinking I'm NOT a real gardener. We already had a frost 3 weeks ago, however a tomato plant that I covered with frost cloth, died. BUT there were several nice sized green tomatoes on it. They have continued to ripen, but I need to grab them. However, I'm super tired and super cold and am thinking about just letting them freeze. I'm so cold.

Maybe you just motivated me to go out in the blowing wind in a 20 degree wind chill and pick them with a flashlight. It just dropped to 32 here. Okay. Thank you for the motivation. I'm going to get up and go get them. I have several red one that have ripened in the past three weeks since our first freeze. ..but why let those beauties freeze.

Going now...

Fried green tomatoes, here we come.

Nancy, They strip my dill first but....we normally are so hot here in summer that dill doesn't survive past June no matter how much you're watering or succession sowing because it either goes to seed if it is older and more mature, and then it dies, or it burns up in the heat and dies before it is mature enough to flower. In fact, if I even can get succession sowings to sprout, they die quickly in the heat. After the dill dies, that's when the fennel and other plants suddenly become immensely popular with the swallowtails. I guess you could say it is because they have no other choice, but it works.

We have spicebush swallowtails here and I've never seen spicebush anywhere, neither native nor cultivated, so I've long wondered what else they are feeding upon because we don't have the other plants in that family that they favor, like sassafras, sweetbay or tuliptrees. We don't have the soil pH they thrive in, though I certainly could amend our 8.2 pH soil and get it down to the 6 to 7 range with some dedication and effort. I have done that in the raised beds in the veggie garden. I have wondered if prickly-ash trees might be native somewhere around here but never have seen them. Since they tolerate alkaline soil and clay soil, it is likely they are somewhere around here, and if they aren't, then I bet the southern prickly-ash are.

I have a long list of plants I want to incorporate into the landscape for various types of butterflies that we routinely see here because I know that in the drought years when the heat and drought are extreme, the native plants can die back since they aren't irrigated. The good news, of course, is that we already see them here, so somewhere, likely on our acreage or very close by, we already have plants that are feeding them or we wouldn't be seeing them. I just want to plant more of everything for everybody so we're covered no matter what the weather does. I'd irrigate any plants that we plant as part of our landscape, of course. While recent years have been wet, I have pretty recent memories of years in which our whole rainfall for the year was 18 or 25 or 28" and I know those years will come again.

Our county's plant life is bizarrely diverse---east of I-35 the soils are more like those in eastern OK and there's a lot of trees you might not expect to see this far west. But, then once you cross I-35 (and we are just a little west of it) there is a rapid change in the soils and plants that grow. When we drive pretty far west in our county, we might as well be in southwestern OK because it doesn't look like the eastern part of our county in any shape, form or fashion, except that the plants alongside the river growing in the river bottoms lands are pretty much the same all along the river. There's different trees (and they stay much shorter overall unless in the river bottoms or in creeks) and the sorts of grasses that thrive in sandy soil take over, compared to our prairie grasses that thrive in clay soil.

I went so far west once when we were at a fire, that it was pure sand, and I mean sandnot sandy loam, and what passed for a lawn was 100% grass burrs. We had our Command Post set up in that yard, and when we left it, the soles of our shoes were solid stickers. Solid. We sat at the station and cleaned all of them out of our shoes so we weren't going to go home and plant grass burrs everywhere we stepped. We were within a few feet of the Love-Jefferson county line, and that's some serious sand hills and prairie grasses out there, and apparently a lot of grass burrs as well.

A plant that is a great case in point as you move from eastern to western Love County: sand love grass. At our place, it is lucky to get 6" tall in a wet year, and 2-3" tall in a dry year, and the plant is about the same diameter as a grapefruit. When it blooms, it maybe is 10-12" tall in a wet year and that is if it lives long enough to bloom because it tends to die before blooming in our clay in drought years, and probably our clay soil is most of the problem as far as its size being poor even in a wet year. When you see sand love grass out in the western part of the county, where at some points there's fields full of it, it is huge in diameter---maybe 20-24" across and a good 14-16" tall before it blooms and 2-2.5' after it blooms. Ours barely survives, and theirs out west won't die and you cannot kill it, making it a great forage grass for livestock. Its' big pitfall out west is that it burns like the devil and once it is burning, it is almost impossible to extinguish. I don't know why that is so, but it is.

It is pretty fascinating to me that the soils and plants can change so much in one small county, and it means that I can try lots of different plants that thrive both further east and further west because we are just the tiniest bit west of 35, so really in the central part of the county. I always think sand love grass looks gorgeous out west, and pitiful at our place. You always want what you cannot grow (or grow well)!

I haven't had to try very hard to plant for the butterflies because so many native plants exist on our acreage. I literally spent the first three years here walking around the property endlessly with guidebooks and notebooks in hand trying to ID all the plants growing here and taking notes on what we had and where it was. I did it year-round because I was stupid and lacked an understanding of how common venomous snakes are here. It is a miracle I wasn't bitten as I roamed all over the place, and I am much more cautious now after many close calls. Once I understood what we had, I was careful not to remove anything native and non-invasive that filled any sort of niche for wildlife. I also worked to remove overly aggressive plants like greenbrier and poison ivy. I don't mean that I got rid of them, but I spent those three years pulling them down out of trees where they had climbed to the tops of the trees and were cutting off their sunlight, etc., and just reducing their overall footprint because none of that stuff ever had been cleared away here and was choking out more desirable stuff. I burned them like crazy hoping the burning was destroying their berries/seeds too. I still work at that a bit each year, but not like I used to.

Once I knew what we had and what I needed to leave alone, then I could add whatever I wanted for various butterflies and moths, but didn't have to plant extensive amounts because we already had so much growing there naturally. Still, everything I have chosen to plant has been chosen because it will provide food or shelter for something.

The thing I hate to see (and it is incredibly common here) is when people buy land filled with native plants, whether woodland, grassland or both, and they hire someone to bulldoze it down to almost nothing, keeping a few selected trees to shade the site where they will build a house. THEN, they drive me crazy by complaining they have no bees, no butterflies, no birds, etc. Well, of course you don't, I say (as kindly as possible)....you just removed all their habitat. If you want them, you have to plant the plants they need and want. It just would have been simpler to leave things in a more natural state to begin with, but most people don't. The ones who do are those who chose to move to the country for the wildlife and who have an understanding that they cannot live surrounded by wildlife if they remove all the 'wild' areas, or at least the wild plants, from their property. Sometimes, the land quickly reverts to native plants because the residents aren't landscaping/gardening oriented and just sort of ignore everything once they move in, other than mowing the grass. Clearly over time Mother Nature restores her own habitat.

I want to plant shop this weekend. I want to buy more shrubs and ground covers, bring them home, fill up another bed in the garden with them, and sit back, calm and prepared for winter, assured we have some good plants on hand with which to begin our landscaping next spring. Well, truthfully, there is a part of me that also wants to buy a bunch of small trees and fill another nursery bed with them, but that's not likely to happen. There's not enough time. Will a second nursery bed happen? I don't know,but I hope it does. This cold spell, which has us about 30 degrees colder than usual, has me contemplating the wisdom in planting anything too late. Normally late October and the whole month of November are not too late, but this weather makes me wonder. I'd like for temperatures to return more to normal for a bit, but who knows if that will happen.

Maybe the cataract surgery at this time is not a mistake because it sounds like the weather is conspiring to shut down gardening work anyway.i

Jennifer, Maybe it is just me, but I consider snow in October a somewhat ominous sign that maybe it will be a bad winter. Actually, I'd love a snowy winter because we almost never have one this far south. I bet I was the happiest person in Oklahoma in 2010's winter. I think it was 2010. I remember we had at least 8" or snow in our main storm and I had to go out with a broom and keep cleaning the snow off my shrubs so their limbs wouldn't bend down to the ground, and off the shed roof, so the shed roof wouldn't collapse. I'd love a year like that again. The best thing was that the snow lingered for days. Usually when it snows, we get snow, it looks pretty, the sun comes out, the snow melts away and we have mud, all in 1 or 2 days. Having snow stick around for 4 or 5 days was a real treat.

Rebecca, I'm glad you got the tomatoes in time. There was nothing on earth that could get me outdoors late yesterday in that wind, except I did move the three potted mums into the mudroom. They are going back outdoors in a minute now that we have warmed up a bit.

The wind chill was brutal this morning and I am a weather wimp. When I was outdoors feeding the feral kittens, doves and chickens this morning, the wind chill was 17 degrees, which is too cold for me. I wasn't out there long though, and the hardest thing was breaking the layer of ice on the feral cats' water bowl, which was about 1" thick, without breaking the bowl itself. Then I brought the bowl indoors and filled it up with lukewarm water for them.

I notice icicles on the pickup truck this morning. They formed at the bottom of the truck, down low to the ground. Apparently as the sun melted the heavy frost off the truck while the air temperatures still were in the 20s, the dipping/melting frost reformed and refroze as icicles. I am pretty sure we haven't had icicles in October before.

Was everyone cold enough? Here's the OK Mesonet maps:

OK Mesonet: Minimum Temperatures Since Midnight

I think for most of us, those temperatures were about what had been forecast. Then, there's the wind chill map, which shows some awfully cold wind chills for October 31st:

Minimum Wind Chill Temperature Since Midnight

Looking at that wind chill map makes me grateful we don't live in the OK panhandle!

I hope tonight's weather is kind to the kids while they are out trick-or-treating. I do remember a few years as a child in the 1960s when we had to wear coats or jackets over our costumes, but I doubt it was as cold as what the kids here will face tonight.

It looks sad outside with all the hummingbird feeders down, but we'd only had 3 or 4 stragglers over the last 2 weeks, and only 1 of those in the last week, and I believe that was 1 week ago. I imagine last night's freeze killed everything that still was in bloom for them, so they'd better be pretty far south in Texas now.

Dawn

Well, the coleus is toast, as are the tomatoes, peppers, okra, basils and melons. I can now see all the brassica plants put out a month ago. They look good after one spraying with BT. There are a few turnips. The kale from spring will be useable unless we get a realy bad freeze. I can't say I saw any spinach. There are cilantro seedlings coming up where the old plant self seeded. They ignored the freeze. Last time I was out, there was a blue flower vining up through the tomatoes. I thought it was wild. With the tomatoes dead, I can see it came from the chicory plant! Those are supposed to be perennial, aren't they? I can't say the greens tasted great, but they were pretty and stood up to the heat longer than the lettuce and didn't seem to have pest problems. Did the flower stalk get long and viney because it was in tomato shade?

The surprise mum in the flower bed looks like it survived. The romaine in the lettuce bed is all bolting, it stayed too hot for too long.

There are holes all over the yard where the beagle has been digging. She comes in with a black muzzle. She will eat grubs, and maybe crayfish. Sasquatch came in with a muddy muzzle yesterday, too, and proceded to wipe it all over me.

I wondered if your snow storm happened when we had the ice storm, but that was 2007. 5 days without power. Went to the office and washed my hair in the bathroom sink. No thank you. I hate winter. Hate it, hate it, hate it.

If you will be above freezing Dawn, you might put one hummingbird feeder out. I saw one today they had wrapped with an ace bandage for insulation. There are reports of one or two late stragglers still passing through.

Have a nice halloween.

It's so interesting, Amy, to go through, counting the fallen and noting the survivors. I laughed to see that perilla died back. I have no idea how it even got there, among the four o'clocks, but it was hiding among them, despite my efforts to get it all. I know I did not plant it. Or maybe I did, believing it to be perilla majilla. I bet that's it. Bet some nursery mislabeled it. But NEXT year that stuff will be gone.

Of course the basil, coleus, black sweet potato vine, squash, cardinal vines, brugmansia are gone. I was surprised by one happy-looking pot of alyssum, though two others are hurting.

It didn't get down anywhere NEAR what the forecast was. My thermometer says 29.3. So I'm not surprised so many plants escaped for now.

I wanted to mention George's excellent homesteading blog that shows up on FB on how to "clean up" the garden for winter, and that is exactly how I have proceeded with ours. Basically, we aren't doing ANY clean-up in all the big flower beds. We already pulled all the tomatoes, and I've pulled out all plants that were done in by the heavy rains in the past 2 months. I laugh at all the online articles about sustainability who say leave the leaves. Hahaha! I laugh really hard. If we left the leaves, by Jan. 1 we'd have a 14-16" layer of tough oak leaves--EVERYWHERE. Yeah, that's not gonna happen. Having said that, the leaves landing in the beds will stay.

Dawn, up north, I remember one Halloween in Wyoming where at the last minute, my boys had to ditch their planned costumes. I ran to the drugstore, picked up two 36" or so high hanging cardboard skeletons. Then we taped the skeletons onto large black plastic bags--They had their winter coats and boots on underneath--I cut arm holes in the bags. It was so cold and snowing. And they stayed warm and comfy.

Dawn, absolutely sad and distressing to see folks bulldoze their properties. I hate it. Another sad thing is folks getting all their leaves gathered up and then burning them. Actually there are a slew of sad things about the way people garden. I've changed radically in the past four years of gardening here. I'm really thankful for the change.

I am having fun reading about your landscape project, Dawn; keep it up. You all, the big center bed at the school--this bed is one of several low spots on that property (the property is enormous.) I was struck yesterday--thought, "Why couldn't we turn that into a rain garden!" Only the back half of the circle had problems with the standing water. John's plan was to put pavers, maybe 2 high, around the entire circle and build it up a bit. I think I need to read up on rain gardens NOW! :)

My book order (one of my many! LOL) came today. So I guess I know what I'll be doing today. Have a good one, all!

I'm sitting at my desk in a huge pile of mess. I've gone back and forth between my jobs today and haven't accomplished anything in my office. I might as well call it a day and start fresh tomorrow. I can't even think straight with all this clutter--mostly odds and ends from last night's Trunk or Treat. And honestly I'm too tired to clean it up/walk around the building putting it away. Tomorrow and tennis shoes--yes.

Strangely, we aren't doing anything tonight. Before Ethan was in high school, my sister often had a Halloween party. After Ethan was in HS, we normally were AT or preparing for OBA, so did nothing for Halloween. The last time we were at our house on Halloween night, we made an awesome display--a large cauldron with dry ice. Zero children came to our neighborhood, so that was disappointing. I will take home a bit of candy just in case, though. Apparently our neighborhood isn't a trick or treat place. I suppose all of the children around us, go in somewhere.

I'll probably take a nap when I get home and then start on chores. My house is like my office. I haven't been home before 9 all week, so it's a disaster. We've just been dropping stuff when we come in...and piling dirty dishes in the sink.

2007 was an awful ice storm, I remember, Amy. We had just moved into our last house.

I also remember a couple of years...2010 and 2011, I think, that were very snowy. One of the years there was a blizzard on Christmas Eve. It was beautiful. BUT, getting to my Mom's house the next day for Christmas was terrible. My sister and her family came from Edmond. I'm surprised we (and they) made it honestly. My Mom hated that year because we all had to leave early to get home before dark--the roads were that bad. Christmas Eve was very cozy though...and a lot of fun with the exception of my dog, Percy (I miss him everyday) refusing to go out to pee. It was have been easy enough to stay home that Christmas, but we couldn't leave my Mom alone.

You know, it seems for several years after that we had decent snows. In fact when we moved to our current home in 2014, we finally bought a sled...and haven't been able to use it since because of lack of snow.

I'll probably look the garden over when I get home first thing and see if the pansies, mums, and violas made it.

We "fall back" this weekend and that means it will be dark about the time I get home. Dislike.

Amy, I haven't even stepped foot in the garden---I was too busy preparing for Halloween.....but I imagine my parsley, rosemary and fennel are fine even if not much else is because they always overwinter so well here. The autumn sage should be as well, but even if the cold weather nipped it back, it will regrow and bloom in no time. Autumn sage has bloomed on and off every winter since I first planted it about a decade ago, and I didn't expect that. I did expect late autumn blooms, but the winter blooms are just a bonus. We did drop down to 26 degrees so I'm sure all the warm-season annuals are toast.

I do assume the tomato shade is why the chicory got long and viney---just searching for light.

My snowstorm that I adored so much happened the same week that Dallas was hosting the Super Bowl, so it was the winter of 2010-2011, and specifically the first week of February 2011. I remember it well because Tim and Chris had such horrible commutes to work and it was the sort of crazy-busy week that you dare not call in to work unless you couldn't make it to work because you were dead. I think Tim stayed down there for 2 or 3 nights, sleeping in the guest room at his best friend's house because it was just a short commute. I was the one stuck at home dealing with snow piled up everywhere, but I didn't mind. The dogs loved it, but the cats and chickens not so much. We haven't had any sort of damaging or power-disrupting ice storm since moving here in the late winter of 1999. I have watched in horror as some of you have had them multiple times, but the closest a damaging ice storm of that type ever has come to us is probably about 3 or 4 miles north. Our county had extremely widespread damage to the power grid and trees from a very bad ice storm about a decade or so before we moved here, and that one did bring down trees on what later became our property. We eventually bought ourselves a just-in-case generator after watching all the news stories about ice storms causing power outages in other parts of OK so we're prepared if it ever happens here. So far it only has been used when someone is using power equipment too far from the house to use outdoor extension cords. The last time we put up a replacement fence around part of the front garden, Tim used the generator to power the power auger to dig the post holes. It was so much easier to dig them than using a manual post-hole digger. I think that if we didn't have that power auger, my chances of getting a fence finally put up around the yard in 2020 would be slim to none.

Nancy, I laugh at leaving the leaves too. We always chop them up or shred them so they'll decompose into wonderful leaf mold quickly, and use them as we wish on compost piles or as mulch, but don't leave them lying there whole. First of all, with our OK winds, they're all going to drift or blow if left intact anyway. With the way we can have exceptionally warm winter days occasionally, the last thing we need is leaf cover on the ground to allow the venomous snakes to hide when they venture out on a warm winter day, and we've had those warm winter days that bring out snakes in Jan/Feb for at least each of the last three winters. Otherwise, I do believe in leaving standing plants and all non-diseased plant debris in the garden areas to provide food and cover for wild creatures. I've done it for a long time now and never have felt like there is any reason not to do it. Well, unless a person needs to take out everything to clear a raised bed to serve as a nursery bed for recently purchased landscaping plants that cannot be planted until the ground is prepared for them. I checked that nursery bed yesterday, by the way, and the plants looked as good as they did the day I planted them, so temperatures in the mid-20s didn't affect them at all. I forgot to look at the dianthus plants, which were in bloom, to see if the cold weather affected those, but they've overwintered for several winters now so even if the cold nipped them back, they'll recover quickly.

There's a ranch across the road from us that was badly overgrown with trees when the current owners purchased it a few months before we bought our place. They hired a local guy to selectively clear many trees after we had our house built and moved up here---so he was doing that our first summer here, and I also he think he did a lot to contour the land to help manage water flow and decrease erosion. He did an amazing job, but.....suddenly, at our house, we had a huge population increase of the wildlife kind......snakes, possums, skunks, armadillos, rabbits, coons, etc. I didn't really mind it since we love most wild things, but it was just shocking how many we had all of a sudden. It makes sense---they needed habitat, cover and food and our property still had that in abundance. It was too much wildlife though, and too much competition for resources, and it took a few years for everything to get back to more normal levels.

Jennifer, You must be exhausted after such a busy week. I hope you can restore order to your work environment and also get some rest.

I remember that Christmas Eve snowfall. It was only the second white Christmas I ever got to experience, and the first one was in 1964 when I was only 5 years old, so my memories of it are sort of vague. I do remember my dad taking me across the street to the neighborhood park to play in the snow, and I remember how pretty our house's exterior Christmas lights were in the snow. I remember our recent white Christmas much better.

I do hate the fact that returning to standard time means it is dark before dinner time. That means Tim leaves the house in the dark early in the morning and comes home in the dark in the evening. I'm sure the same is true for people who have a much shorter commute than he does as well. We just start counting the days until the winter solstice arrives and the day length finally begins to lengthen again after that.

We never have had one single trick or treater at our house which is one of the pitfalls of being so very rural and living so far back from the road, so that's 20+ years of not really having a Halloween, except for going to a party at someone else's house, which we did last weekend. This year, Jana and Chris invited us to come up and do Halloween with them and Lillie. Aurora was at her dad's house because he and Jana have joint custody and she spends one week with her dad, and then the next week with Jana and Chris and this is her dad's week. Friday evenings is when she goes from one parent/household to the other. So, Jana and I took Lillie to downtown for the trunk-or-treat that ran from, I believe 3-5 pm, while Chris stayed home preparing for trick or treaters and doing meal prep because he takes in his meals prepared in advance when he works his 24-hour shifts. He doesn't have to do that, since they do cook at the fire station, but since he's training for a half-Ironman, he is eating super healthy and preps all his meals in advance to help him stay on track. Because their house is just SW of downtown, we just had to walk maybe 3 blocks to get to Main Street, and Lillie's dear friend from next door and her dad walked with us. The trunk or treat was very long...blocks and blocks and blocks....but the kids had fun. Once we were back home, we ate dinner and got ready for the onslaught of kids, goblins and ghouls. Tim had taken off work a couple of hours early and was at the house by the time Jana, Lillie and I got back. As soon as we finished dinner, the first kids arrived, but it turned out that most of them were Lillie's friends from the Cub Scout pack stopping by to see if she could join them for trick-and-treat in the neighborhood. Off they went.

We had tried to prepare for what a neighbor told Jana and Chris would be a huge number of kids driving in with their parents from other neighborhoods. They were not kidding. The 500 pieces of candy that they had bought was going quickly so almost as soon as the trick or treat activity began and we could see we were going to run out, Tim ran to Wal-Mart and bought probably twice as much as we had started out with in the beginning...and mostly got the good stuff (chocolate) as that;s what they had purchased. The four of us handed out candy for well over three hours and got to see every possible cute, adorable, scary, terrifying and just weird costume you can imagine. Some were amazingly clever. The kids just kept coming and in the latter part of the evening--after 8 pm--we all got the feeling that we were seeing very tired parents, mostly with older kids, who'd just gotten off work and were trying to squeeze in a little Halloween fun with their kids. Tim, Lillie and I headed home (no school today) about 8:45 pm but Jana stayed out for quite a while longer and handed out candy for as long as kids kept showing up. By the time she was finished, there was almost nothing left in her treat bowl and Chris was sound asleep because he usually gets up sometime around 3 am on the days he works.

Overall, Halloween was a huge success. After Lillie's group of friends finished collecting candy around the neighborhood, they went next door and played with a Ouija board (and who knows what else...whatever would amuse 4th and 5th graders on Halloween). Chris and Jana feel better prepared for next year now that they know what to expect and are enthusiastically planning more decorations for next year, better lighting near the sidewalk and steps, and the plan is to buy a bunch of the big bags of candy from Sam's Club so no one has to make emergency trips to the store. Tim and I just enjoyed being able to participate in Halloween activity in a way we cannot in our remote, rural neighborhood (where there's not even that many kids around us to begin with).

I want to plant shop today, and places like Lowe's and Home Depot might have Halloween decorations on clearance sale today, so we are going to be out for a few hours seeing what we can find after Lillie eventually wakes up. She is sleeping the sleep of the dead, so to speak, after staying up really late with me last night to watch the original Friday the 13th. She's seen some of the later sequels but this was the first time she watched the original. I guess if she sleeps away most of the day, we can plant shop and Halloween shop tomorrow, which will be warmer anyhow.

Damon Lane posted a thing last night about Halloween 2020, so don't say you were not warned: next year (leap year) Halloween falls on a Saturday, it is the night of the full moon and it is the night we turn the clocks back, so we have a Halloween trifecta. I think it is safe to say that sets us up for an amazing Halloween. We only had a sliver of moonlight last night, but we'll have the whole thing next year.

It was awfully cold again last night, but we hit our low temperature pretty early and then the temperature climbed for the rest of the night. I think we had hit 25 or 26 before midnight but then we climbed back up to 28 pretty quickly and it was around 32 by the time the sun came up. Most of the time we hit our low around sunrise at this time of the year, so last night was odd.

Happy November! I guess we'll remember 2019 as another year in which we went from summer to winter in the blink of an eye. Maybe next year we'll have the long, leisurely autumn we all crave. I'm just hoping we don't have a bad winter, but this early cold is making me wonder if we will.

Dawn

Well, Dawn, you certainly got your share of Halloween celebration. The only part we got were our Reese's snack size. I probably should take them to church Sunday and hand them out. That's the ticket, will get an aluminum foil pan for them.

I was just having a great time reading past posts on Oklahoma native plants. Some good stuff--thank you all.

Amy, nor am I a fan of winter. Not one little bit. Though it WOULD be nice to get up to MN and see the snow. Then I could leave it up there.

HJ, my house is a disaster, too, and I don't have a job outside of the home. I'm busy looking at seeds and reading books. Speaking of, I've gotten a few new books lately--the most impactful one is Bringing Nature Home, Douglas W. Tallamy. Do any of you have Gaia's Garden (Permaculture)?

Larry. It is SO wet here, too. Apparently it is SO wet nearly everywhere in OK. I can't even fathom 14-+ lbs of seeds. Compared to you, we have tiny garden spaces. And yet in the Monarch watch descriptions, our square footage is monstrous. Go figure.

Nancy, honestly I'm jealous of people who can ignore the mess and keep enjoying their current activity--looking at seeds/reading/whatever. I SO want to be that person. I just can't settle until things have a certain feel...which is usually tidiness. It's dumb. I don't like being this way. Okay...I only read your post because it's the latest. I'm going to read the rest now...

Here's a pic from Wednesday night. Our building has "main" halls in a square...they were all packed like this. I never got out of the "fellowship'' room (this pic is from a friend) because that was the last stop before they--our guests--left. My food team couldn't keep up with the hot dogs and hot chocolate. We did our best.

sorry...a third post from me. The garden is dead mostly now. Does cauliflower struggle more with a freeze compared to brussels and broccoli?

The chaste tree looks dead. Is that normal?

Tomorrow, I signed up to help with food for a funeral, so I'll do that, BUT I have so much to do before leaving for Branson on Sunday afternoon. Y'all just say a little prayer that Ethan can keep everything healthy while we are gone. Part of me is thinking...WHY, did we agree to go out of town. And part of me is looking forward to the rest. The trick will be to NOT think about what will be waiting at our return.

I want to start thinking about Garden 2020. Maybe I can do that next week.

Nancy, in my garden I use a lot less seed than I do in the wildlife garden. In my veggie garden the soil is a lot better and I do a lot by hand, and my two gardens combined would be approx 1500 sq ft.. The wildlife garden is a few acres and is all done with some kind of tool. Most of it is done with a disc, pasture cultivator, and some kind of drag. I have a seeder, but it is hard for me to change implements on the tractors. Because of my poor way of doing things I have a lot of seed loss. I did not use all 14 # of seed today, matter of fact, I started out with over 200 # of seed, but I will not be able to use all of them this fall. I will have to do some soil work in early spring and start again. I just cant get around and do all the things I want to do. I am making headway on the place, but if is a slow go.

I need to shut down and work on my potting shed and repair the bucket on my John Deere. This make the second time I have torn that bucket up, but I am getting that 8.2 acres looking nice.

Dawn, I saw that information about Halloween next year. That will be fun and interesting. Sounds like a good time to do moon water.

Make sure to list every plant you buy so I can copy it. LOL

I LOVE that your family had such a huge turn out for trick or treating. That is fun. What a neat community.

Larry, what are you doing to your potting shed?

Hazel, my plans are to build on to the shop, by adding on a 10 x 10 area, leaving the south wall open, In that area I will have a visqueen wall I can lift out with the tractor, or (2) 5 foot doors I can swing open to catch a breeze. I will have build 2 low work tables 2' wide and 6 or 8 feet long, that I can lift in and out with one of my tractors. ( my little tractor will be able to drive up into the shed, my larger tractor's front end will fit into the shed). I plan on the north wall to have cabinets on it that can be used with grow lights, if needed. The east and west wall will have 3' wide doors for cross ventilation. I have made the roof almost flat, with only about a 3 or 4 inch pitch to the east, I give as much head room as possible to operate the front end loader on the small tractor. After I get the shed finished I will take my small tractor to the creek and dig out gravel for the floor. I will also have a tool cabinet to store tools and use the area as a repair area also. This will be a "Sitting Down" work shed. My old body does not do stand-up stuff very well any more.

This is the same shed that I told my wife and daughter that I could build without climbing. They would not let me do it other wise. ( My Dr's have been on my back for years about the things I do, wife and daughter have also stepped in now). I thought I could build everything on the ground and just use the tractor to lift it into place and anchor it into place, but I found that with just one old man trying to do that it became dangerous, plus last spring was so wet that my larger tractor was cutting my lawn up terribly.

When the lawn dried out it was too hot to work on my shed, and I had other things to do anyway. I finally convinced my wife and daughter to let me climb, if I really needed to. They wanted me to hire it done, but they dont understand that I want to do these things, and besides, you cant hardly find anyone to work on jobs like this. Anyone that is in the business and knows what they are doing has more work already lined up than they can get done.

I know this in a very long answer to a short question, but it is just going to be a work shed that I can start, and pot up plants in also. It will not be a pretty shed, most of the material is used and was given to me. I am a hoarder, I collect junk that I think I may be able to repair and re-use.