January 2020, Week 2

4 years ago

The weather this week looks interesting. It might be more interesting in some parts of the state than in others. Temperatures seem like they will vary from near-normal for January to as much as 10 degrees above normal in other areas on a few days, and many of us have rain in the forecast later in the week.

There are many gardening chores that can be done now, including the following:

Ordering seeds online or checking out the seed racks once they appear in local stores. Those piles of seed catalogs are sitting there just waiting to tempt you into buying.

Organizing/re-organizing your seed supply so you can see what you have on hand already. This helps remind you what you need to buy and might prevent you from buying duplicate packets of seeds that you already have on hand.

Wintersowing seeds if wintersowing is a technique you use.

Broadcast sowing of most wildflower seeds can be done now, particularly cool-season bloomers. The February-March time frame is a great time to sow seeds of warm-season wildflowers. In your garden beds, you can sow seeds of larkspur and poppies now through March. The earlier you sow them, the earlier they'll likely bloom for you.

Preparing for indoor seed starting that will occur over the next month or two. You can be gathering all your seed starting supplies now, checking your lighting setup to make sure all the bulbs are working, setting up your seed-starting shelf, etc.

Planting bare-root fruit and nut trees, brambles and berries as fresh stock arrives in stores. I've always had the best success with bare root plants if I purchase them as soon as they arrive in the stores because they do better if we get them out of their plastic bags as soon as possible. Asparagus crowns also arrive in stores at about the same time and can be planted any time now in well-prepared soil. Remember that the asparagus plants will be growing in that soil for the next 15-20 years so do good soil prep first before planting.

Planting any pre-chilled tulip and hyacinth bulbs lingering in your refrigerator. It is time now (almost past time if you're further south) to get them in the ground so they can sprout and grow and bloom on time a few months from now. Other bulbs like daffodils that do not need pre-chilling also can be planted now if you didn't get them planted previously.

Adding cool-season annuals (some may be perennial depending on your location within the state) for seasonal color if you are feeling starved for blooming flowers. You can plant these any time after they arrive in local stores: pansies, violas, snapdragons, ornamental cabbage, ornamental kale, and dianthus. A month or so after these appear in stores, some of the less cold hardy cool season flowers also will show up: English daisies, sweet alyssum, Iceland poppies, calendula and stocks.

Trees and shrubs can be transplanted now while dormant if you have any that need to be moved.

Depending on how far south you are in the state, this is a good time of the year to begin pruning. If you are further north, you may want to wait a few more weeks. Plants that can be pruned in more southern areas now include crape myrtles (removing old seed heads or doing corrective pruning, but please don't murder your crape myrtles), roses, fruit trees, grapevines and summer or autumn-blooming shrubs. Remember to avoid pruning your spring blooming shrubs now. With those, you want to wait until after they have bloomed. If you prune at the wrong time, you could be cutting off this year's blossoms before they have a chance to bloom. I know it sounds crazy to be talking about pruning roses, but mine already have a lot of new growth, so they are ready....even if I am not.

This is a good time to remove (or have removed) trees that are dead or dying or otherwise too close to a house or whatever. It also is a good time to prune mistletoe out of your trees if you can reach it with a pole pruner.

Corrective pruning of evergreen shrubs also can be done now.

Removing any winter weeds from beds and adding mulch to prevent more volunteer weeds from sprouting is a great chore for January, with one caveat: if you'll leave early blooming weeds like dandelions, henbit and chickweed, the bees will thank you as they need those blossoms when they come out on warm winter days. There's no reason to leave weedy winter grasses like poa annua though, as you want to remove those before they can go to seed.

If you still have autumn leaves available that you have not raked up or mowed up and utilized, now is a good time to finish up that chore. The same is true if you have acorns, pecans or other nuts lying on the ground.

I don't use fertilizer much, preferring to feed the soil and let the soil feed the plants. However, if you do apply fertilizer, now is a good time to feed plants as needed, especially winter-blooming flowers that might need a little nutrition to keep them happily in bloom. It still is too early to fertilize lawns though.

Remember to feed your compost pile as you do yard and garden clean up.

Finally, don't forget to feed the birds!

Have a great week everyone.

Dawn

Featured Answer

Megan Huntley

4 years ago

I’ll have to come back later but look who I ran into at a presentation by the OK county master gardeners...

Comments (50)

hazelinok
4 years ago
last modified: 4 years ago
Hello. It doesn't feel like winter...which is good and bad. Not good when you see flies.

It is good that the dogs are outside. It is good that the chicken waterers aren't frozen.

I have a weird feeling about this year--but nothing specific.

Personally, I would like a true winter for a couple of months--a truly true winter every year...as difficult as it would be for those months.

Honestly, it seems like the areas that have colder winters and are slower to warm up in the spring/summer, have better gardens. Have y'all noticed that? Their tomatoes get bigger, they are able to grow all sorts of brassicas with success. But, I try not to dwell on it because there's nothing I can do about it except move and that is not in the plans. There are things we can grow well here. Things I like to eat like okra, peppers, southern peas.

Speaking of compost piles, Dawn, I need to find a new area to start one. Normally I use an area where a future garden bed will be made. Often we make the frame in the fall and I throw the compost items in the frame and add soil in the spring. I don't have that this year. I have a compost bin, but it is full of chicken droppings (as well as other items) and it really needs to be topped off with fall leaves and allowed to sit for a few months. Which means I need to find another spot very soon.

Believe it or not, I have my list ready. I know what I'm going to grow this year (or attempt to grow). And the only seed I need to buy is a hot banana pepper, a cucumber, and some lettuce. Someone (maybe it was Blaze Baxter) mentioned a teeny tiny cuke that she loves so much, West Indian Gherkin??? Anyone familiar with it? I found it online, but it's unavailable. Does anyone have a suggestion for a cucumber like that one? That grows well in our hot, humid state? I'll always grow the Armenian, but would like a tiny one too.

Oh, I forgot. I need to choose onions too.

Now, it's just deciding where to put everything. I do need to make a new bed in the main garden and extend another one, which could help with the compost issue, but I'm a little nervous to dump chicken droppings into a bed that I'm going to be planting in 3 months, ya know? But, I could dump the TP rolls, paper towel rolls, and kitchen scraps there.

The chickens are slowly laying eggs again. I'm getting 3 a day now. For awhile it was only Stormy's egg every day. She is a laying machine. She has a pretty olive colored egg. Her mother was an easter egger. She is the youngest hen--a year and a half. That isn't including the pullets, of course. The pullets are very interested in the nesting boxes right now. They like to peek in, go in and look around. I think they're all about to start laying soon. They are around 26 weeks, I think. I'll be happy to stop buying eggs from NG. Although, they have a specific egg that is so similar to my own. I have about 14 on the counter right now. Just in time for getting back to healthier eating.

Here's just something I've noticed and wondered if anyone else who has had chickens noticed this too: the hens who were broody during the summer did not molt this fall...including Stormy. Is that common? I wonder if it's because they pull out their own feathers while broody....

I'll come back with a picture after Ethan's BD party. I planted flowers back in the summer that are apparently perennial and don't mind the cold. I had no idea--I just picked them up. I really don't want them where they are planted. I thought they were just temporary, but you can't help but smile at pretty pink flowers growing in January. I would like an ID on them.
AmyinOwasso/zone 6b
4 years ago
Spent 3 hours at urgent care today. Both Ron and I. Got shots and a RX for antibiotics. Hopefully this will knock it out.
Related Discussions
January 2020, Week 1
Q
Comments (56)
Moni, Tim and I think the cedar trees started pollinating here about 4-6 weeks ago, which of course is so much earlier than usual, so maybe what I should have said is that they might be peaking now. There is a property next to us that has a solid couple of acres of them just about as thick as grass, and another that has probably 45 to 60 acres of them not quite as thick. While many of us try to cut them down and keep them to a minimum, many others just let them run wild and reseed all over, so we have a shocking number of cedar trees around here. I'd been trying to stay away from taking allergy medicine, but it is time to take it daily again. Amy, I know! I was so happy to be over the flu and feeling good again, and then here come the allergy symptoms after just a few days of feeling really good again. I even told Tim that it felt like cedar season had begun, but surely not....and I believe that was in late November. So, the next time we were out, we looked at the cedar trees and were stunned by have heavily laden they were with pollen. I am going to guess that the early autumn freeze followed by several periods of warm weather got the cedar trees going early again. I think this is the third year in a row cedar pollen season began early. I can't help thinking an early start to the pollen season is just another complication for anyone with allergies who also is dealing with the flu, a cold, bronchitis or pneumonia. There's also been a lot of strep throat going around. I suppose it is just that time of the year. Tim, Chris and Jana all are exposed to tons of sick people in the jobs on a daily basis, and I'm not, so usually I'll get sick once and that's it and they might get sick more often, but they also bounce back more quickly...especially Chris and Jana since they still are young and probably have more robust immune systems. This winter the kids have been perfectly healthy. Aurora had a cough for a couple of days, but it lasted no time at all, and Lillie hasn't been sick at all. Perhaps they are just old enough that they aren't bringing us every virus they encounter any more. I do remember what it is like with infants and toddlers who seem to have a runny nose more often than not at this time of the year. I did see that meme about seed buying and seed planting and it made me laugh out loud. The seed buying....that is the dream, right? The seed planting, though, that is the actual reality. Some gardeners live more in the dream and others live more in the reality, and most of us have some sort of combination of both the dream and the reality. I have really, really cut back on the seed buying, but still have a huge accumulation of tomato seeds from past years. With everything else, from veggies to herbs to flowers, I've stopped buying more than I can plant, and am trying harder to plant all the ones I buy. So, at least I'm partially reining in the seed madness. This is the first year I haven't ordered a single veggie or tomato seed, and most of the flowers I ordered were wildflower seeds. It feels odd to not have seed deliveries flooding in. Because of the landscaping projects, I suspect I'll be buying more plants than seeds this year, which is a big change. Kim, I'm glad you're getting all settled in and ready to have a big garden again. I know how much you've missed having that garden. Jennifer, Last year we bought the orange storage tubs for all the autumn, Halloween and Thanksgiving décor and I am so glad we did. It was so easy to spot them and pull them out immediately when it was time for autumn decorating and I was thrilled with not having to figure out which tub in the attic had which stuff in it. So, this year, we bit the bullet and invested in the red ones for the Christmas décor. I am so excited to have them, and they immediately made me feel more organized. We are going to recycle the previously used gray storage tubs to the garage to store Tim's junk. Did it hurt to go out and buy all these red storage tubs right after Christmas at full price? Of course it did, and the miser who lives inside my head kept telling me to wait another 2 or 3 weeks and they'd be on clearance, but I couldn't do it. I wanted the Christmas stuff taken down and put away promptly. I do consider them a worthwhile investment because they'll keep us organized and save time and frustration each year when it is time to bring out the holiday decorations. We even moved the 2 artificial Christmas trees from their old, torn, tattered and taped up original cardboard boxes to the red plastic tubs. I believe overall it will simplify our lives and decorating a lot. Rebecca, I'll see if Chris and Jana want to come to the Spring Fling. They both usually work on weekends though, so it is the luck of the draw, schedule-wise. You know, I am sure that back in the fall he sent me diagrams of his plans and I know what he intended to plant, but for the life of me I cannot think of any of it. I know they are more interested in blooming perennials than shrubs or trees, and they invested heavily in bulbs of all kinds, especially lily and daylily bulbs. What happened with those....Chris was visiting websites and making lists in May or June of all the lilies and daylilies he wanted for the yard. He'd show his lists and the photos to Jana and she'd add some others she liked. Then, at some point, he thought he read where they said that sales were closed for summer 2019 and they wouldn't ship again until fall 2019, so he ordered a ton of lilies and daylilies on sale, expecting them to ship in the fall. Well, somewhere there was a misunderstanding and tons of bulbs started arriving in the mail very soon thereafter, and they had nowhere to put them. So....molasses feed tubs to the rescue! We took him 6 or 8 of them, he filled them up with soil-less mix, packed in the bulbs close together since the tubs were just their temporary home, and the lilies and daylilies have been happily growing in them ever since. Now he is ready this month to move all those to the planting beds he created in his front yard this week. I believe that this week he planted his carefully selected mix of tulips, daffodils, hyacinths, crocus, anemone, guinea hen flower, red fritillaria, and whatever else he ordered. Back to the lilies...Once he knew he could temporarily plant them in the molasses feed tubs, he went back and ordered more lilies and more daylilies on sale all summer long, so now he has amassed an army of lily and daylily bulbs, ready to move to the garden whenever he has time to transplant them. I'm not even sure he has room for all of them, much less anything else. It is possible that Chris is a gardening maniac who wants to plant it all, and we didn't even realize that before he bought the house. They have specific rose varieties picked to plant this spring, etc. They really did their planning last spring while it was raining every day, and that carried over into summer along with all the bulb purchases, and then this week they built and planted the first two beds. He said they've been stopping traffic because everyone in their neighborhood wants to see what they are doing to replace all the lawn grass they've torn out. Moni, To label our tubs, I tape clear plastic page protectors to them. Then, we can slide a sheet of paper inside the page protector on each tub and, if the contents change, we slide out that sheet of paper and slide in the new one. I write on the sheets of paper with black permanent markers. I'm the most organized I've ever been, but it has taken me 60 years to get to this point. Now, if only we could apply all the great household organization techniques to Tim's garage/shop, where junk just piles up. When we were younger, he knew where everything was from memory. It would amaze his friends. Some friend would stop by and say "do you have a whatever..." and he could go straight to a location and get it in the blink of an eye. Now he stands there and looks around and says "it is in here somewhere". Then he has to dig and paw through everything to find it. So, just like last year, cleaning out/cleaning up/reorganizing that building is on our To Do list, and I hope we have more success with it in 2020 than we did in 2019. Larry, I hate that the mud is slowing you down. It is the same here...mud everywhere. I hope you and Madge recover quickly from the bug you have. I'm hoping the mud dried up before spring. We cannot rent a sod cutter and remove all the Bermuda grass until our clay dries out more. Right now it is so wet that I fear the sod cutter would bog down in the wet soil and get stuck. It is hard to have just the right conditions for cutting sod....you need the soil a bit moist, and certainly not rock hard like it is in the summer, but you don't need it wet and soupy like it is right now. I look at all the mud and puddles and just roll my eyes because I'm so tired of looking at all of it. We need to get Elvis to come spread a new load of gravel on the driveway, but it is in the same boat---probably too wet to be workable at this point, so we need it a bit drier so his equipment doesn't bog down in the mud. The good news is there is no rain in our local forecast until at least next Thursday, but the bad news is that the ground dries up so slowly in the lower temperatures and less intense sunlight in the winter. Jennifer, I have no idea what lights we have because Tim chose them while I was elsewhere in the store doing something else, but I know he bought LEDs and they are nice and bright, but the lights themselves stay cooler than the other ones we had before and don't build up a lot of heat, and you can put more strings of them together since they use less energy. It is good to see your little Brussels Sprouts. Yay! I've been working on my tomato grow list and it is an unbearable form of torture to keep chopping it down smaller and smaller. I was aiming for only 6-8 varieties since they are going to be grown in containers, but I think that when I'm done with it, it will be closer to 12 varieties. There's just no way to make it any smaller if you factor in needing a couple of cherry types, (I could do only one cherry tomato plant, but how can you choose between SunGold and Black Cherry?), some blacks/purples, some pinks, some reds, at least one orange (Tim's favorite Nebraska Wedding) and a couple of late types for production in late summer and early autumn....then 10-12 varieties is the bare minimum. I think if I can cut the list to 10-12, then I will have done really well when you consider my usual long grow lists. Rotating all the nightshades out of the front garden this year and next as a form of crop rotation means growing no potatoes this year. I don't like growing tomatoes in feed tubs, and there's nowhere else to grow them where voles won't get them. (Voles will go up through the drainage holes in the feed tubs, but only for potatoes....not for tomatoes or peppers.) I am feeling iffy about using the back garden at all with all the other stuff we have going on because, realistically speaking, there's only so many hours in the day for planting and maintenance,, so there likely won't be many other veggies. Probably onions, cucumbers, beans and southern peas, maybe all squeezed into one raised bed in the front garden, with all the surrounding beds filled with flowers. That means that onions will be the only cool-season veggie, and I am okay with that. Oh, maybe kale and lettuce. See there....cutting back is impossibly hard. Anyhow, I'm going to finish my tomato grow list and post it in the next few minutes. I've been working on it all week. I went through the seed box, pulled out all the packets of tomato seed that I wanted to plant, then began editing that big pile down to an ever-increasingly smaller pile. I piled up the seed packets in groups by color, then had to choose our favorites from each color, and while doing that, I tried to take into consideration which ones produce early, mid-season and late, as well as which ones' flavor we absolutely, positively must have this year. Ultimately I put back tons of seed packets into the seed box, and ended up with the ones that made the final cut this morning. It is odd to not plant any paste tomatoes, but not planting them is essential if I am to have the year off from canning (still gonna make pickles though) so I can focus on the landscaping projects. If I had more self-discipline and didn't love all the various types of tomato flavor so much, I probably could cut the current tomato grow list in half, but I lack that self-discipline and enjoy the wide variety of flavors too much to do another round of cutting. As it is, we'll probably have twice as many tomatoes as we need for fresh eating, but then I can just whip up tomato-basil soup or fresh pasta sauce for dinner when too many tomatoes start piling up on the counter in the summer time. Dawn
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January 2020, Week 4
Q
Comments (48)
So, I'm back now to read thoroughly and try to respond. Amy, I do treat lima beans pretty much like snap beans except for planting them slightly later since they are heat lovers and I'm using them to fill that legume role after the snap beans are pretty much done. I have tried planting lima beans at the same time as snap beans, and in my location it doesn't work out well. Maybe that's our cool spring microclimate getting a bit colder at night than the lima beans like or something, so I tend to plant them about a month or six weeks after snap beans. However, I plant snap beans sort of on the early side to beat the heat and the spider mites, so maybe the limas just don't tolerate being planted too early as well as the snap beans do. One thing I do ponder is this: if I have snap beans, the spider mites are going to show up on them...sometimes insanely early. Why, then, do the spider mites not bother the lima beans at all? Beans are beans, right? I wonder if anyone has researched this. We are not big fans of celeriac either. We have tried it, but about the only way I use it nowadays is chopped up in a big pot of vegetable soup. I don't blame you for being mad at Wal-mart. Ours never has enough electric carts for all the folks who need them, and they've taken out the benches they used to have at the front of the store. I guess the benches got in the way of one of the little banks, or the vet, or the hair salon or whatever that now populates the front of the store outside the checkouts. I fight the blahs in dreary, cloudy winter weather too. I need sunshine! This winter has been tougher than most because the sun has been hiding behind the clouds almost every day, and often (I blame the warmer temperatures for this) we have had fog until noon. I feel like we've sort of had Pacific Northwest weather this year with all the incessant fog, mist, clouds and drizzle and I have not liked it at all. Jennifer, In my garden, beans as a group are relatively pest free, except that the spider mites really love them. Some years the mites arrive early and are horrible, and other years the beans pretty much finish producing before any spider mites arrive at all. You might see occasional damage from Mexican bean beetles. I will see a little of that here and there, but not enough to worry about. Some years, if there is a heavy population of stink bugs (like we had last year), they will be on the beans. I have noticed that southern green stink bugs are more of a pest on beans than the brown stink bugs are. I run across the green stink bugs on the plants when harvesting beans so I try to always have my garden scissors with me so I can snip those stink bugs in half. (Don't squish stink bugs with your bare fingers unless you want for your fingers to stink all day long, even after you have thoroughly washed them.) Because you have coyotes in your neighborhood, I would not have a miniature cow unless I also had a guardian livestock dog (like a Great Pyrenees, for example) to protect the cow from the coyotes. Or, maybe a donkey. Donkeys are great at protecting livestock as well and even will take on large dogs and cougars to protect their herd. Okmulgeeboy, I have grown a gazillion types of beans over the years. There are hundreds of varieties available commercially and it has been fun to experiment with all the different kinds. If a person is going to binge on something in the garden, beans are a fun crop to experiment with. I do not grow dry beans. They are so incredibly cheap to buy in bags at the store, or in bulk at some stores, that they just are not cost-effective to grow in the garden by comparison. That's why I don't grow pinto beans or black bean, and I always harvest our southern peas green, not leaving them on the plants to dry. I prefer to use the garden for fresh legumes that I can harvest weekly, and then either snap or shell, and eat fresh. We just freeze the excess for winter when I grow more than we can eat fresh and that is possible because we have three freezers in the garage, though all of them are not full year-round....one of them usually empties out as we devour our fresh-frozen food over the course of the fall and winter months. Then, as soon as the harvest starts in Spring, I refill that big freezer with garden produce over the course of the growing season. It is a big chest freezer divided into compartments by blue plastic dividers, so I fill each section with a different veggie, which keeps it organized and makes it easier for me to find what I want when I'm removing frozen produce from the freezer to use in meal preparation. Larry, That is great cow advice! Rebecca, I have hesitated to try to put words to how I feel about this year's winter/spring weather because I am getting mixed feelings about it. Does that make sense? I don't have a strong feeling that we will have late cold weather. I don't have a strong feeling that we will have early warm weather. It all just feels sort of "blah" in my brain. Good heavens, I hope I'm not losing my garden intuition as I age! That would be terrible. So, my best guess based on my garden intuition is that we are going to warm up early in general, but need to watch carefully for late rounds of cold weather. We aren't going to warm up extraordinarily early. You know, there have been some years when January was so warm that I actually put tomato plants in my 4' round galvanized metal stock tank in February...around the third week of February, and I did so expecting they would do well and would produce early and they did, though I had to cover them up on 2 or 3 cold nights. Well, this is not one of those years. It doesn't feel the same as those years. This is more of a middle-of-the-road year. I want to believe it will warm up early and stay warm, but there is a little voice inside my head (picture a miniature Three Stooges type guy jumping up and down in my brain, yelling at me to get my attention) warning me not to get into too much of a hurry to plant too early. Do I wonder where that voice is coming from, given than the signs around me outdoors have been hinting at an early Spring since at least December? Of course I do. I've learned not to question the voices in my head (hope I don't sound like a schizophrenic here) because they are coming from somewhere I cannot explain. I just know that when I follow my intuition, things tend to work out well in the garden. So, I'm not getting in a big hurry with anything, but I'm also not going to drag my heels too much and start seeds too late relative to the weather we are having. I have wondered if my garden brain is being lazy this year because I'm not planning on a big veggie garden? Because I'm rotating my favorite crops, all the nightshades, out of the front garden and replacing them with a lot of flowers as a form of crop rotation, am I losing my focus and not listening to my usual garden-planting intuition? I suppose that is a possibility. However, I am strongly feeling the urge to plant veggies even though that really is not supposed to be a part of my gardening in 2020 since I want to focus on renovating our landscape. I'll talk about that more sometime this week in the Week 5 thread as there are some rational reasons for that, and maybe one irrational one. So, now I'm thinking the front garden won't be 100% flowers and herbs. Maybe it will be 60% flowers and herbs and 40% veggies. We'll see. I promise that when I am starting seeds and planting and transplanting, I'll say so, and just by my actions y'all should be able to see if I'm feeling an early spring sneaking into the garden...or not. Early for me is much earlier than early would be for those of you further north, so if I start things early or on time, you all still have plenty of time to start things early too (and Jennifer is ahead of me this year, I've noticed, and there is nothing wrong with that--I think she is listening to her intuitive garden brain too.) My biggest fear as an intuitive gardener always has been that my garden intuition will fail, one of these years, to send me the right messages and I'll plant too late, but it really hasn't happened yet, so I try to listen to the voices in my head and behave correspondingly. This year, as usual, I expect to start seeds on Super Bowl Sunday....which is next week! Yikes! In a way it is sneaking up on me, but I already have seed-starting supplies and seeds on hand, so I'm ready to start the seeds next Sunday even though it doesn't really feel to me like it should be Super Bowl Sunday yet. I have one plant shelf set up indoors (long story) and the actual light shelf is going to be set up, hopefully today, in the mudroom, so it will be ready for next weekend's activity. Jennifer, I will go find the outlooks and link them, but the last time I looked at them, which I think was early January, they were showing February warmer than usual overall, and were iffy on the rain---no real hint there. At the time I checked them, there were equal chances of us having above average rainfall in February, average rainfall in February or below average rainfall in February. When they put up the EC on the map to indicate Equal Chances, I think that normally means their models are in disagreement so they cannot conclusively predict what might happen. Let me go retrieve the latest outlooks now. This first link shows the quarterly climate outlooks for temperature. Essentially, the tan or brown areas are showing above average temperatures, white will show average or equal chance type temperature forecasts, and if they were showing blue, that would be below average temperatures. Is it scary to anyone else that all the long-term outlooks consistently show us above average? Seasonal Outlooks Now, here's the rainfall outlook. Overall, I find the temperature outlooks to be more reliable than the rainfall outlooks, but since they prepare the rainfall outlooks, I want to post them as well. I'll tell you in advance that there is nothing in the rainfall outlooks that strongly hints at a wet year....and, yet, many of us have had a very rainy January, so I feel like there are mixed signals here. Quarterly Rainfall Outlooks Okay, I'm out of time and need to go make breakfast before it ends up being brunch. I'll be back later to finish catching up. Dawn
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February 2020, Week 2
Q
Comments (84)
dbarron, I'll probably have to start all mine indoors too. Then I'll build the plants little boats and they can spend the rest of the spring and summer floating downhill, slipping through the garden fence, slipping and sliding across the front wildflower meadow and sliding happily down the embankment into the bar ditch, and then they can travelthrough our creek until they end up floating down the Red River. Maybe they'll wave bye as they float away. That is how discouraging all this rain is. I already can visualize my plants floating away before I've even started seeds. Yesterday when everything was frozen solid, our soil looked dry. It looked so good from inside the house, though walking on it wasn't that great when I went outdoors. Then the frozen ground thawed out during the morning hours and turned back into mud. I'd start hoping for drought, but I've been watching the videos of the 400 million locusts destroying Africa and headed into Asia, and I don't really want a drought because that's when our grasshoppers try to turn sort of locusts. Although... I should point out that it was a couple of rainy years that have given rise to the plague of locusts there in Africa, and we have had more than a couple of rainy years here....and I saw grasshoppers hatching out and growing in both December and January. I haven't seen many lately, so I'm hoping they drowned in the rain. It is just so wrong to have grasshoppers here in the winter, and in previous years when they were hatching out in the winter, we had a horrible problem with them all summer long. Those usually were drought years though. Jen, There have been years I've grown too much basil and I'd say you're about to have one of those years! The good thing is that it is a great companion plant and if you truly have too many plants taking up too much space, you can cut them back relentlessly....and they'll grow right back. If you have more than you can use, and more than you can dehydrate or make into pesto, you can use basil as fillers in bouquets, or tie together a lot of sprigs artfully to form a swag to hang up in the kitchen...and it will perfume the kitchen for ages. Larry, The wading pool idea sounds like a winner to me, but wouldn't work here because the 4 kittens would think it was just a big kitty litter box. I already have trouble keeping them out of the houseplants. Nancy, I always had too much lemon balm, but I just pulled out excess seedlings or dug up excess plants. I figured I'd never be rid of all the lemon balm. Then, in 2015 we got around 79" of rain and the perpetually wet soil finally killed the lemon balm plants. I was not sorry---for once, having dense wet clay was an advantage. Every now and then a lemon balm plant will pop up here or there in a raised bed, but not in great abundance like we once had, and that is a relief. Chris has been building the raised beds for their potager garden in their back yard, and he's just had to work around the rain. He has it about half built. I think he'll get the other half built this week. He needs to---he has seeds started and tons of plants all over the place and they are going to outgrow his light shelf soon. We are praying for an early last freeze so he can get those babies in the ground. He is at a much higher elevation than we are, so he probably will be able to plant before we can even though he is further north. Microclimate is everything. This morning, the nursery delivered his dump truck load full of garden soil that he intends to use to fill the beds in the potager garden. He's already dug out and removed all the grass from the potager garden area, which wasn't too time-consuming since he has loose, sandy soil. Anyhow, his driveway is fairly narrow and slopes sharply uphill and they didn't think the dump truck could back up that driveway with the load of heavy, wet garden soil, so they dumped it at the base of the driveway, covering his driveway, the sidewalk and a great deal of the yard. Ooops! Wanting to clear the sidewalk off and regain use of the driveway, he and Tim spent a long, hard few hours pushing wheelbarrow load after wheelbarrow load of heavy, wet garden soil up the steep driveway. That effort got it to the top of the driveway, but they couldn't wheel it into the back yard because it is incredibly wet (of course). So, they spread out the soil in heaping piles, covering up about half their driveway--the upper half, which leaves the lower half available to park their vehicles. Chris is hoping the soil will dry out quickly on the concrete, and then he can load it up again and wheel it into the back yard. The important thing to him is that the rest of their driveway is usable and the sidewalk is clear. The two of them went to lunch afterwards and had a nice father-son day together, and I predict both with be sore and achy tomorrow. I was home with our animals, letting them in and out as it pleased them, and doing housework and stuff. I didn't really want to shovel and haul dirt uphill so was smart enough to stay home. The cats and dogs were happier today, but we still have a ton of puddles and mud. Amy, I'd be happy if I only had to go to one store, but since we occasionally drive all the way to the metroplex to go to Costco and Central Market, I make a list and we stop at every other store we need to visit so we are getting the most bang for our buck after using all that gas to drive down there. It drives me crazy, though, and I cannot get out of the metroplex and back home quickly enough. It doesn't even matter if we only go to Gainesville or Ardmore, I've still had 'enough' of it after one store and just want to rush through whatever else we need to do to get home. Rebecca, Your poor nephew! Tim was about the same age when he slammed, face and teeth-first into a tree while sledding, and much expensive dental work ensued. I'd say an early Spring definitely is happening overall, even though we still have occasional nights in the 20s. All our Spring birds came back around 4 weeks ago, and everything here is sprouting, budding and leafing out, including trees. We went from sort of 0 mph to 60 mph overnight. I am sure more cold nights, and the threat of snow, will keep Spring from plowing ahead too enthusiastically, but she definitely is here. I noticed today that trees along the Red River are really leafing out now, though ours here at the house are a bit further behind and are only either flowering or budding. For those of us with allergies, I am sure the pollen counts are about to go off the charts. Jennifer, You do have a long list! I have a perpetually long list as well. The Stone Barn at Blueberry Hill surely will have blueberry plants, won't it? Otherwise, why the name? Some people have success with blueberries here, as long as they amend the soil to very acidic levels and put in an irrigation system to pamper those plants through our long, hot summers. The further northeast a person goes in this state, the easier it is to succeed with blueberries. Regardless, whether they have blueberry plants or not, I'm sure it will be an awesome place for a wedding. Hopefully Diana will adjust in the long run. She just may need time. Some cats take a long time to relax and calm down and become comfortable. We have a busy day planned tomorrow, but Monday I plan to be out in the garden at least doing some garden clean-up and weeding. I may have to carry out a sheet of plywood to put down in the pathway to kneel upon so I'm not soaking wet and muddy, but I've done that in the past and it has worked pretty well as far as keeping me above the mud. The next couple of days will be nice, but then the rain comes back. Honestly, can we not have one single week without rain? I'm so over it! Dawn
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April 2020, Week 2
Q
Comments (79)
Jennifer, We have been having more fun than a barrel of monkeys with the girls. It has been the most wonderful 3 days, and today will be the fourth. Then, everything gets back to normal again as the work week/school week start up again tomorrow, but at least we got to spend some time together. The girls have been totally exhausted by the end of each day. Tim and I have been totally exhausted by the end of each day. See a trend there? lol. Having their youthful exuberance around just seems to infuse the house (and us) with more energy. When the girls get home, they are going to have a big surprise this afternoon and I'll tell y'all about it later. I wouldn't want to ruin the surprise by having one of them walk in and start reading over my shoulder. All of you who are looking for seed: buy what you can now, and save what seed you can save from open-pollinated varieties. If this is like 2008-2009 all over again, then it is the second year of the economic downtown that was the worst then and could be the worst this time around too because new gardeners planned ahead better and ordered seed online earlier the second year after having so much trouble finding it the first year. I already have a horde of seeds set aside for 2021, and now I'm going to start buying for 2022. It can be very helpful to be thinking ahead and preparing ahead of the curve. I went to look at Renee's Garden Seeds' website a couple of days ago just to see how they were doing, and I don't think I've ever seen so many varieties sold out before summer even arrived. It was just nuts. If I didn't already have a collected seed stash for Fall 2020 (remember you can grow a ton of root and leafy crops this fall to help you have fresh produce in the fall and winter), I'd be feeling somewhat concerned that I wasn't going to be able to find the specific varieties I want. Not that the world would end if I couldn't find my favorite varieties---I'd just grow other varieties, but prefer to have the tried-and-true varieties that I know I always can count on. In some ways, the run on seeds may worsen over the next month or two as people in the northern tier of states finally get some decent weather and decide to plant a garden in May or June. I'm not saying they'd have success from one started that late in a short summer area, but that doesn't mean they might not be buying up the seeds to try. Now that some stupid states are saying seeds are non-essential and cannot be sold in big box stores, the online seed companies are going to get even busier. Nancy, Back in the year when our overnight forecast low of 50 gave us a surprise freeze and frost at 32 degrees, I lost virtually everything in the garden, including tomato plants that were knee-high. I did have about 4 True Black Brandywine tomato plants at the highest point of the garden that survived. In instant freak-out mode, I ran to the store and bought whatever tomato plants I could find. It was pretty late in the season, and I didn't have a lot of options, but I figured any tomatoes were better than no tomatoes. I did the same with pepper plants. Then, I came home, cut off the frozen plants at the soil level and planted new tomato plants in between the old, dead plants....so they alternated, dead plant, live plant, dead plant, live plant, etc. Lessons I learned: 1) It is good to not pull up dead plants by the roots because if they were old enough and well-rooted enough, they may resprout from the ground. My tomato and pepper plants both did, and because the root systems already were pretty large, they outgrew the newly purchased plants. 2) Any tomato variety you can find and buy is NOT better than nothing. We had a lot of hybrid varieties that produced reddish, roundish, baseball-sized looking things that claimed to be tomatoes. They had horrible texture and firmness (hard) and mealy flesh (yuck) and poor flavor. Their skin was tough. They were roughly the equivalent of grocery store tomatoes despite being grown in an organic home garden. Clearly they were bred for people who think any red round thing is a passable tomato and they weren't bred for flavor. They were bred for something else....and I suppose shelf life was that something else. To our picky palates that were used to eating a huge variety of open-pollinated tomatoes, those things were just horrible. They were fine, though, for making home-canned paste sauce or salsa because you add enough to those cooked products to make up for the poor flavor. Oh, and lesson number 3 was to never really trust the forecast, and to buy and use tons of frost blankets. I haven't lost a crop like that since then. Larry, I need to go for a long drive in the worst possible way. I think it would be great just to get out of our little world here and go somewhere, anywhere, for any reason at all. Tim doesn't feel the cabin fever burning like I do, likely because he "gets" to drive to work in Dallas 5 days a week, but I haven't left our little area in more than a month, not even to go to someplace a close as Sherman or Denton Texas, which are maybe 50-60 miles one-way, depending on where we're actually going in those cities. Maybe next weekend we'll do that because the girls and I have science experiments and other fun already planned for today. I'm pretty sure Tim is going to mow the lawn while he has the chance, if it isn't raining. The last time I looked, we had a 20% chance of rain for today, so I think the odds are that he'll get to mow. It was sad to realize it was Spring Fling day, but Tim and I had planned from the beginning to skip it so we wouldn't potentially carry Covid-19 germs from him, because of his work at an international airport, to y'all, so it wasn't that tough of a day for me....since I didn't expect to be able to attend it this year anyhow. There's always next year, so let's think positive and hope for the best. Kim, I'm glad your green babies are resprouting. I started my tomato seeds super late because we were continuously under water for months, and then Tim dropped a whole flat of them while they still were pretty small in the starter flat. Many of them lost their labels at that point, so now I truly have no idea what I have. I saved all the ones that were salvageable, potted them up, and have plants that are a decent size now but most have a ? on the label where the variety name ought to be. I hope when I plant them that I don't plant only cherry types. lol. Mine are ready to go into the garden except they aren't hardened off. I will start that today. I had started it a while back and they were up to 3 hours a day when the cold came back. Since I already had so many other flats of other plants outdoors that needed to be carried back indoors on the cold nights, I stopped carrying out those tomatoes and figured I'd just start over with hardening them off after the cold weather was done with us. So, I think the cold weather is done with us now, and I'll start hardening off the tomatoes again beginning today. The hardest part, though, is that we are staying mostly cloudy, so they are going to be hardened off more to cloudy/partly sunny weather than fully sunny weather. I bet you are having fun gardening with the kids and grandkids. I'd love to do that, but am very hesitant to have our granddaughters out in our garden with all the timber rattlers and copperheads that we have around here. I'd rather be out in their garden with them in their city yard where apparently, so far, there are no snakes. We'll go into our garden to look at everything, but I spend my whole time out there watching their feet to make sure they don't step on a snake. If there was such a thing as truly snake-proof fencing, I'd pay any price to have it so I could make our garden safe for the grandkids. I cannot imagine what your little man did to wear himself out enough that he needed 3 naps! I hope you enjoyed your 12-hour nap, especially since he gave you permission to take such a nice long nap. Rebecca, I'm glad your plants survived the cold snap. Thanks for the report on Lowe's. I'll continue to avoid it a while longer, though perhaps our country one wouldn't be as busy as one in the city. On the other hand, the Lowe's in Ardmore is the only one around for several counties. so people from some counties close to us (where there's a lot more coivd-19 cases than in our county) might be driving to it, so a person cannot just assume everyone there is safe to be around. When I'm finally able to step foot inside a big box store's nursery/garden center again, Tim's not going to be able to drag me out of there until I have a cart so loaded down with plants that I cannot squeeze in one more thing. Texas is trying to reopen stuff as early as next week, so I'll be watching their news to see if another round of new cases starts appearing 2 or 3 weeks after they reopen more stores and such. Jen, It sounds like the folks running your Lowe's had done a lot of preparation and planning and were ready to make safe shopping as little of an ordeal as possible. Kudos to them for that. The thought of a line wrapping around Walmart horrifies me, but it is the reason we aren't even trying to go to Costco or Sam's Club as I've seen their lines on the news. Our little country town Walmarts in this area probably aren't having lines like that or I think I'd see it on the news or on our FB shopping group where people share exciting news like "The Wal-Mart in Gainesville has toilet paper, bottled water and lots of meat!" or whatever. No one has even mentioned any lines anywhere, so I assume there aren't any. One thing I've learned from this group is that all the little mom and pop type stores in little towns scattered around the area have a much better supply of everything than the larger grocery stores frequented by large numbers of people, so I've filed that tidbit of info away from whenever I need something from a store. Melissa, It is so good to see you here. I hope your husband and daughter can stay safe throughout this public health emergency. My daughter-in-law works at the hospital in Ardmore, although not on the floor where they have Covid-19 case, if any, or even the suspected Covid-19 cases they're waiting for tests to clear. I worry about her but she's doing fine so far. Your poor daughter---my heart hurts for her too. She is too young to have to see all that she is seeing now. I cannot imagine being able to handle that when I was 20. The toilet paper thing is mind-boggling. We haven't had any trouble though. We shop at Costco, so as soon as I was aware of this virus, back when it was running through Wuhan rapidly in January, I started picking up an extra package of Costco's toilet paper here and there....maybe twice a month. I think I had 4 big packages of it stored away back when the panic buying/toilet paper drought set in. I gave one of them to our son and daughter-in-law for their family in March when the panic buying began because they couldn't find any then, and we still have plenty. I did not anticipate that there would be panic buying and toilet paper shortages (who could have foreseen that?), but I knew that the Kirkland brand of toilet paper at Costco was made in China, so I figured it would be in short supply at some point because of supply chain/distribution issues. I never expected it would sell out in panic buying. I just wanted to buy it while we could, and I thought that what I had would last forever. Now, of course, it won't last forever, but by the time we are running low, I expect the stores around us will be restocked again. We haven't had any trouble buying anything we need or want, but we were pretty well stocked before the virus became an issue here and, at this point, anything that we don't have is probably something we can live without. Because my husband and our son both work at DFW International Airport and have regular contact with large numbers of people, I know that the odds are they will be exposed to Covid-19 and possibly bring it home to Oklahoma with them, so I tried to prepare in advance so we could avoid stores as much as possible and encouraged our son and his family to do the same (and they did). I sure do miss going to the stores though and, you know, your body is going to crave whatever it is that you did not stock up on in advance. If my horde of chocolate runs out, then a trip to the store will become mandatory. : ) I really, really, really miss being able to wander through nurseries and garden centers and impulse buy plants but just keep reminding myself that no plant that I'd like to have is worth contracting the coronavirus. Of course, on some pretty spring morning I will decide to risk it and just go shopping, but in the meantime, the less I venture out into stores, the better. Jen, I agree about the proper usage of both masks and gloves! Rebecca, I haven't tried bush beans in between onions so have no idea how they two of them do together, but think it always is fun to experiment and learn from stuff like that. Go for it! The only issue I foresee is that if your onions are done before the beans are done, you'll have to harvest the onions carefully so you don't accidentally pull up the bean plants at the same time you pull up the onions. Dawn
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dbarron
4 years ago
last modified: 4 years ago
Hazel, if you want an ID, post a picture ;) It's teasing to us to mention it and not have the picture ready (lol).

I went out and did weed shrub murder (on the rose of sharon and privet nightmares that pop up everywhere and which I'd let go around my hvac outside area)....felt good to prune them off at ground level. I will have to follow up with Round Up when they start to grow again. Sad, but only way to knock the profusion is chemicals.

I also hand sawed off a few of the 'knock your head off when mowing' limbs.

And..umm..umm, someone on here practically forced (well not really) me to go buy some hellebores online (Christmas rose, and some intergeneric hybrids, and Lenten Rose seedlings too). I do enjoy hellebores and would love to include the species (which I did) that would be in bloom right now as well as the Lenten Roses that bloom in March and April. I probably went overboard a bit, but if shipping is gonna be $21, you should buy at least triple that amount before shipping to make it worthwhile, huh? I did. I didn't really need that $80, *grumble* *grumble*. Hope they give me pleasure for years to come.
slowpoke_gardener
4 years ago
I am enjoying reading everyone's post. Amy. I am sorry you and Ron are still ill, Madge and I are doing much better. Because of our age, we are no ball of fire anyway, but we still have a lot of fun.

I get to have a medical procedure Tue. that may set me back a few days, but I plan on still doing a little work around here if the weather holds like it is now. I did not finish my cold frame today, I will work on it some more tomorrow.

I have no plans for a garden now. I will just through something together later. I expect I will be doing things different each year because our health is forcing us to slow down. I will try to work with a few tubs, plant a few thing in the ground, and hopefully plant a lot of flowers and small grain in the wildlife garden. My daughter is still wanting me to try raising quail. Reading Hazel's post about her chickens is not helping my quail itch much either. I would like to try chickens, but we don't eat many eggs or much meat. I was raised on beans and potatoes and that is still what I like to eat, along with a lot of salads.
hazelinok
4 years ago

Sorry, dbarron. I didn’t have time to take a pic before leaving for Ethan’s BD dinner. Then Kane got loose right as we were trying to leave. Here is the plant. I have several of them in varying colors of pink. They aren’t my favorite plant at all but they are tough. Whatever they are took the heat of summer and the freezing temps too.

Amy! I sure hope your new meds work and you feel better soon!

Larry, chickens are so much fun. I love to watch them. I eat eggs every day. But not meat.
Rebecca (7a)
4 years ago
HJ, I think those are dianthus. I still have a few alive that I planted in September 2018.
Megan Huntley
4 years ago
I hope everyone is having a great weekend! It's been pretty relaxed for me but i have been "on" since before Thanksgiving and am worn out, so it was very much needed.

My mom is finally (after a year-and-a-half) moving out - she should have keys to her first apartment in a week or so. I believe she and my dad lived in an apartment when they were first together but this one is all hers. She's scared like anyone moving out on their own for the first time would be and I finally had to sort of push her out of the nest so it wasn't on her time (which would have been never). She keeps making snide remarks about that which just makes it easier for me to keep nudging. I feel confident she's up for it, she just needs to prove it to herself.

The grow lights posted in last week's thread look very similar to some I just bought at home depot. I got grow lights (different than the ones in the picture last week) for Christmas last year from Amazon but something caused all of them to burn out. I don't know if it was a power surge or if it was something to do with the cord. I had 1 of the lights from the year before and when I got the ones for Christmas the cord was different and now that particular light is no longer sold. The oldest one is still working, but the new ones with the different style cord are not. Anyway, I hope the ones from Home Depot last more than 1 spring. I did spring for the protection plan just in case though.

I have been paying attention to the wildfires in Australia, Dawn, because i remember you saying that you pay attention to their summers as they often indicate what we are likely in for. I'm certainly anticipating a polar vortex again this spring and also wonder how much longer this wetter weather can continue. Of course, global warming causes all sorts of weather pattern changes, so I can't help but wonder if wetter springs is part of that equation for us.

I have my fingers crossed that one of you has a couple Vorlon tomato plants at Spring Fling because right now I don't know where I'll get them and that was my best performer last year - one of my best performers in years actually. I'll definitely grow Lemon Boy again and have some seeds for it. I'll grow Bendigo Moon instead of Snow White. It's a dwarf, but not all the dwarf really at 4' tall that is related to Snow White but the fruit was a little larger and it was more tolerant of my growing conditions than Snow White was. I know I'll grow 1 of the microdwarfs again but i'm not sure about others. And then there are dozens of varieties I wanted to try last year and didn't, so I want to try them all but there's never enough room or time or something I need to do all the gardening I would like.

I paid a lot of attention to the dwarf tomatoes I grew last year but didn't pay a lot of attention to the various dwarf basils I grew, so I'll grow all of them again and pay more attention. The rest of my grow list is very similar to last year. I may need to pull back on the number of bells I grow due to space constraints but I ended up with more than I intended last year. I discovered "Potterville" gets too hot and I can't keep the Troublemaker dog (Jill) out so I'm migrating more stuff to my huglekultur area.

I don't feel like I'm as wet as some of you are describing but I know rain has missed us when other areas have gotten it, so that might be why. That or I've just become so accustomed to the dogs constantly dragging in mud that I'm oblivious. I don't have a fall/winter garden this year, unless you count garlic, which means I'm not watching as carefully either.

Lots more to report, especially since it's been so long since I reported in, but I'm getting tired and my alarm is telling me it's time to take my medicine so it won't interfere with me falling asleep. So I'll depart with questions about ground cherries. Who grows them? Do they live up to the hype? If so, what variety should I try?
jlhart76
4 years ago
HJ, I looked up those cucumbers you mentioned and they look like our native creeping cucumber (melothria pendula) or mexican sour gherkin (m. scabra) but with spikes. Now I'm intrigued. If they're like melothria, they can be thugs and once you grow them you have them forever.

This is my purge year so I'm starting off by planting everything older than 2016. Then I'll go back through my stash & decide what I absolutely must grow. So for now I haven't a clue what I'm growing. (Which is pretty much my plan every year)
dbarron
4 years ago
last modified: 4 years ago
Minor note, my English seed order shipped, expecting delivery in 15 to 20 days from international post. Then the seed sowing (or mostly the stratification) can begin.

Hazel, those are dianthus, and probably a form of dianthus barbatus (sweet williams). While sold as annuals, under the right conditions they mega perform their second year, then start (for me) a slow decline and may persist up to about four years. The older forms were grown as biennials. Your initial post made me think that...thus the teasing of not knowing but only guessing.
hazelinok
4 years ago
Rebecca, that could be these little plants. They were cheap and I picked them up somewhere last summer to fill in an area. I really thought they were annuals and should pay attention before buying stuff, right? I don't hate them, but had planned for something else in that area. It's okay though. They are growing on me. I might have stuffed a lot of bulbs into that area too. Remember the bag of mystery bulbs that showed up in the mail? I might have accidentally ordered them but have no memory of it. In fact, I wouldn't have ordered a bag of bulbs like that. Oh well. They are stuffed into that bed too. Could be fun this spring.

I'm not sure, Jen, about the cucumber. Someone on FB loves it... and I think it was Blaze Baxter. I want to try it, but can't find the seed, but am open to try other gherkin style ones. Not sure I want a thug, though. LOL Is the Mexican Sour a thug too?

Megan, I think I've had ground cherries, but they came up on their own. I got them confused with my tomatillos. I never planted them. Whatever it was, it wasn't tasty to me. But, I don't like tomatillos either except in salsa....then YUM!

Do ground cherries just grow wild? What hype have you heard about them?

It was good to see you the other day even if it was just for a few minutes.

So, instead of doing something useful like cleaning or getting my light shelf ready OR starting lettuce seed, I'm trying to make a king cake. I left the eggs out of the recipe! So, I picked up that already kneaded dough, plopped it back down in the mixer and added eggs. We will see how it goes. I'm uncertain about baking a plastic "baby Jesus" in the cake, so I'll just push it in after baking and cover with icing and sprinkles. I hope it turns out well. I'm trying to do an epiphany meal for Ethan tonight and then that will be the last of the "big" meals for awhile. I'm pulling tomatoes out of the freezer to make homemade marinara. And homemade meatballs. This will take all day.

Okay...back to it.
AmyinOwasso/zone 6b
4 years ago
I grew ground cherries 40 years ago. My son thought they were candy, even had their own wrapper. They continued to come up in the yard even after the garden returned to grass. I've grown some here and some popped up that I didn't plant so the birds must be bringing them in. I got Cossack Pineapple from SESE. I think they all pretty much taste the same. I've said if I grew them again I would put them in a pot and fit a cardboard circle under them to catch them when they fall off the plant. They tend to fall on the ground and get wet.

I feel much better today, thank you, Ron does, too. I'm actually debating a little winter sowing. Ron won't like it, he wants the plants off the patio table, but that is the best place to keep them safe from dogs.

I really should purge my seeds, too. I have so many tomato seeds, some from trades that came from all over the country and probably won't grow here.

Larry I hope your procedure goes well.

I just told Ron I was going to do winter sowing. His mind thought winter sewing and sewing machines and cutting tables.

I should get busy.
Okiedawn OK Zone 7
Original Author
4 years ago
Jennifer, We have flies and bees out. This definitely makes it feel very unlike winter. I am hoping for real winter weather too, but increasingly skeptical that it is going to happen. I think we may get short bursts of winter-like weather if not a big, prolonged spell. The worst possible scenario is we have above average warmth in Jan and Feb, and then a bad cold spell in March that freezes all the fruit trees that will bloom too early because of the Jan and Feb warmth. I already have fruit trees acting like they're getting interested in blooming and, if they do, we'll lose the 2020 fruit crop. This morning it was 28 degrees and frosty, which is fairly typical lately, so you'd think the fruit trees would get a clue, but I think the warm days are overriding the cold nights.

The colder areas generally have a longer, milder spring and what we think of as spring weather often continues most of the summer, so they can grow brassicas and many greens almost endlessly. The downside for them is that their growing season overall is shorter than ours and their warm growing season can be so short that it is challenging. They often are fighting hard to protect their tomato plants in late summer and early autumn so their crop can mature before it freezes. Our issue is we have both extremes--freezing cold winters and blazing hot summers, sometimes with very little mild weather in between. Look at how long the heat held on this fall, and then just as soon as it cooled a little bit, we had an insanely early freeze. That sort of wild temperature swing is what makes gardening here so challenging. It seems strange to me to think that some people in some areas can grow cool-season crops pretty much all summer long, largely because I've never lived in a place with weather that mild. For many years, when we kept having "the hottest winter yet" (in the early 2000s), I pretty much stopped growing cool-season crops in Spring because we kept getting too hot too early. That's life here.

You can get West Indian Gherkin at Monticello, and I wouldn't delay because it is rare and obscure and tends to sell out wherever it is sold.

West Indian Gherkin

I am trying so hard to get caught up here and my phone is going nuts because of a large fire out west, and repeated messages related to it, so if I bail out suddenly, that will be why. I know it is visible on satellite and the huge smoke plume is freaking out everyone, including people seeing it from quite some distance away in Texas, but I'm down here in the creek hollow surrounded by trees and I see nothing, which is not necessarily a bad thing. This fire is, at the moment, a fully controlled/prescribed burn of a wildlife management area and those folks are pretty good at keeping it under control, but the wind is picking up and the natives (firefighters) are restless and trying to hope for the best while maybe expecting the worst. I am trying to ignore it all.

I don't know about the broody hens and molting. Ours usually are only broody in Spring. One of them tried to go broody this fall, and the others wouldn't let her...pecking her eggs until they broke. I have no idea what that was about, but after a handful of days she quit trying to set on the eggs.

Your plant is dianthus, and some of them are cold-hardy here while others are not. In my clay, some of them are half-hardy annuals and make it through most winters, but not necessarily the wettest, coldest winters. I've always wondered if they'd survive winter better if they were in a bed of amended sand instead of a bed of amended clay.

Amy, Sorry y'all are sick again. Throat infection? Chest infection? I hope y'all heal quickly. You two have had a rough couple of months this cold and flu season.

dbarron, I am firmly in the camp of ordering enough plants to make paying that shipping worthwhile, so I would have done what you did. Anyway, a person always can use more hellebores. I want to plant some as part of our landscape renovation but they might be in Phase II in 2021 and not in Phase 1 this year. A lot depends on how much the winter/spring fire season interferes with us spending weekends working in the yard.

Larry, I hope your medical procedure is a success and doesn't set you back too far.

There's nothing wrong with slowing down a bit and doing things differently. I was really worried that Fred never would slow down, and he did keep gardening into his early 90s with very little help, but once I introduced him to growing tomatoes in tubs when he was in his latest 70s or earliest 80s, he sure was hooked on growing them that way. Because he had a bad back, they elevated his tubs before they filled them so he wouldn't have to bend over a lot and that made him such a happier gardener. Once he saw how well they produced in tubs, how easy they were to keep irrigated in drought and how pleasant it was to not have to bend over low to the ground, he only grew tomatoes in tubs from that point forward. He had a son who lived with him and gradually took over all the hard physical labor of gardening, probably once Fred was about 85 or so, and that enabled them to keep a garden going until Fred's last year.....at the age of 98. We all should be so lucky! It wasn't a traditional huge truck garden like Fred had grown in his younger decades, but it still supplied them with a lot of produce, and happy hours spent tending the garden together.

Megan, I always am unsettled during the holidays---especially that period after Christmas but before the kids go back to school. I think our schedule just gets disrupted and we aren't on the same eating/sleeping schedule and nothing feels right, at least until everyone is back to school and back to work and the normal routine becomes established again. Tim doesn't even get that much time off at Christmas since police officers work on holidays too, but just the few days he has off completely disrupt my/our routine. Today feels normal. Everyone got up at the usual time, he left for work, I followed the usual daily routine, and life feels "right" again. While Tim talks about retiring, I don't think he'll do it for a while yet---give him more than a couple of extra days off and he is climbing the walls trying to stay busy, and spending a lot of time on his computer and phone in touch with work anyhow, so he might as well be there.

Jen, Might as well use up the older seeds since they won't last forever! Sometimes not having a real plan is the best plan. I like to do things randomly more and more just to break up the routine of always doing the same things the same ways.

Jennifer, One thing I've come to appreciate about dianthus is that mine often are simply covered with flowers in April and May, and the butterflies feast on them, so they fill an important niche before other perennials and wildflowers begin blooming heavily.

There are native ground cherries here. I often see them along the roadside while walking the dogs. Some of the natives may be worth eating, but I have no use for them. Even the cultivated forms I've grown just weren't really all that, and I considered them a waste of space and stopped growing them. The ground cherries just weren't that yummy, even if I had time to bake them into a pie or whatever.

Enjoy your king cake and making the epiphany dinner. It sounds like fun. Think how yummy the house will smell when your tomatoes are cooking! Regarding king cake, I saw on the news the other day that Blue Bell Ice Cream is bringing back their King Cake Ice Cream for the carnival/Mardi Gras season. That ice cream sounds yummy to be, although I've never had it.

I have no real news to report. I am cleaning house and doing laundry, typical Monday chores. Also, I am playing with kittens (as if I could choose not to play with them), etc. If you don't play with the kittens, all 4 come and sit on top of you if you're sitting down and force you to put down whatever you are doing and pay attention to them.

We still have Christmas flowers in bloom in our house: poinsettias, a Christmas cactus plant, and two amaryllis plants. I'm happy to have them still blooming and will miss the blossoms when they are done.

I did want to tell y'all that Chris added up the number of bulbs that he and his family planted last week for spring color in their front yard perennial beds and said it was 1,040 bulbs more or less. I am sure it is going to be spectacular when it blooms. He might have my 'excessive planting' gene after all. To be clear, never ever have I planted 1,040 new bulbs in one year. I think I'm having a big bulb year if I plant 200 or 300 new bulbs.

Are y'all watching your weather for the rest of this week? Ours is crazy. On Wednesday we will have pretty high fire danger, with a forecast high of 70, lower humidity values and fairly stiff winds. Yes, 70. That's about 20 degrees hotter than a typical January day here. However, after a cool down later in the week, we have a slim (I'd say very slim this far south) chance of rain mixed with a little snow on Saturday morning. It probably won't even happen at all, and if it does, the snow will melt as it hits because (a) our ground is warm and (b) our overnight low is forecast to stay above freezing. Is there any place else where you might have 70 degrees one day followed a couple of days later with cold weather and snow? Actually, I'm sure that there's lots of places where this happens, but we always like to think we are special and unique when it happens to us.

Have a great day everybody!

Dawn
Rebecca (7a)
4 years ago
HJ, if it is Mexican Sour, it’s a total thug. I’ve never planted any (I think they’re gross), but I can’t get rid of them. I think birds or squirrels planted them. Late last summer I resorted to Roundup, so this spring we will see if it worked.
hazelinok
4 years ago
Thanks for the West Indian Gherkin link, Dawn. I'm going to order some.

Jen, do you want me to order a packet for you too? Anyone else?

It feels really good to sit down. I was on my feet in the kitchen most of the day. The King Cakes turned out very well. Even with me adding the eggs in at the very end.

The marinara sauce was wonderful. I used frozen Juliets. The sauce was an orange color instead of red. I do need tools for tomato processing--grown up tools like a tomato press of some sort. Made from scratch, homemade food really is so tasty, but exhausting. Even the little touches like fresh basil and parsley add so much. Parsley is living in my garden and basil on my window sill.

Wow! I'm impressed by Chris and family's bulb planting!

Dawn, my hens were broody in the late spring/early summer. But because they pull out so many feathers during that time, I wonder if their bodies think they've already molted....

We are showing possible snow on Friday, I think. Or maybe it's Saturday...

I forgot to cover the brassicas, so I'll need to go do that. But sitting feels so good.
Nancy RW (zone 7)
4 years ago
Wow--it doesn't take long to fall far behind on the posts! I had a long day in Tulsa yesterday; took a friend to the doctor. And had a long day of company on Saturday. While I was gone yesterday my shade native seeds came, as well as a large packet of spinach and kale--AND two books I'd ordered, and a Food Network magazine and a seed catalog! It was like Christmas when I got home.

I brought Garry a giant sub. I'm getting better at finding my away around Tulsa/Broken Arrow. Amy reminded me there is Tulsa and then there is Broken Arrow. I tend to call south Tulsa Broken Arrow.

YES Dawn!! Absolutely crazy weather! So warm the next couple days (60s) and 60% chance of snow on Saturday with a high of 36! What the!

Nothing going on here. . . but stuff NEEDS to be going on. I know. I'll read for two hours, then stratify more seeds. Okay. I have a plan. Now execute. Best to you all.
hazelinok
4 years ago
last modified: 4 years ago
Santa came while you were in Broken Arrow/Tulsa, Nancy! How fun.

Today I am trying to get back to normal. Luckily I wasn't called in to sub. The house is in order now, although it needs to be cleaned. I'll probably do that on Saturday because we are having a group over on Sunday night. We are going to discuss the enneagram. Nancy, have you done that one? It's the trendy one now, although it is a very old system--like ancient old.

I'll get some seed started on Wednesday/Thursday/Friday night--one of those. I'm going to drag my light shelf outdoors in a bit to clean it off. There's just that nasty dog hair/dog dust stuff all over everything in the utility room. It's where the dogs sleep, it's where their crates are, so no avoiding that. I'm going to start lettuce, kale, and spinach seed first. I won't start tomatoes until March 1. That seems to work better for me. Those years of hardening off 2 foot tall plants because I had started them too early was miserable! Dawn, didn't you start tomato seed in December at one point? I want to do that, but just can't.

Had a close call this morning around 10:30. Something told me to step outside onto the back patio...and there it was. A coyote standing at the back of the chicken yard, just outside the fence. It could easily get in because we still haven't repaired the fence from when the colt tore it up AND the fence is only 4 ft tall. It was interesting because when I first went out, the coyote and donkey appeared to be having a stand-off of sorts. My dumb chickens were still out in their yard...and one was trapped in the broody pen (with the door to it wide open-duh!) Not sure why Jean Luc wasn't alerting them. Maybe he was and that is what alerted me....but I don't remember it. They all lose their minds when I step outdoors because they think I'm bringing them some goodies--so it's possible he was in the process of getting them into their pen/coop. I shoo'd the coyote away and it went to our neighbors to the east. I quickly messaged her--she was on her way back home. She didn't go in for her gun first, and the coyote took one of her chickens. I feel horrible about that. I shooed them away from our property onto hers.

Everyone enjoy the warm day!
jlhart76
4 years ago
HJ, sure! I'm always up to try something new.
Rebecca (7a)
4 years ago
I think I’ve heard someone say they like Kitchen Garden Seeds?

And is there a secret to growing cockscomb celosia?
hazelinok
4 years ago
Jen, our seeds are ordered. How do you start cucumbers? I normally just plant them directly in the garden.

Rebecca, I can't help with either of your items.

Our neighbor shot the coyote--the husband of the woman who lost her chicken. As he was coming home from work late this afternoon, he saw the coyote on our property--hanging out with our dogs!

Tom heard the dogs barking and went outside just in time to hear the gun.

Started back to pilates tonight, so I missed it all.
hazelinok
4 years ago
Wow. This place is...quiet.

I stopped at Walmart for a few things and got a couple of boxes of peat pellets. Probably tomorrow night will be lettuce seed starting. Maybe it's early, but I'll eat them right off the light shelf if so....and start more seed. There's all sorts of gardeny things at Walmart. Seed starting trays, potting and seed starting soils. All things garden. Except seeds and plants.

I'm on the second round of friendship bread. I'm already tired of it. haha, but will probably make it all and give the loaves to friends. I don't really feel like baking tonight, but might as well get it over with.

Pretty sure one of my hens is dying. I noticed that she had put herself in a nesting box instead of roost bar last night. Not that unusual. However, as I was cleaning the droppings boards this morning before work, I noticed that she was still on the roost bar. They all fight to get out to their pen as soon as I open their door. That's where they eat, so it was unusual that she wasn't scrambling to get out.

I dumped pine shavings in the chick brooder and put her there with some water. She had a warm bath tonight and I checked her vent...but I don't know. She is drowsy and not moving. I doubt she makes it through the night. It's Sweetie Pie, the hen the showed up in my friends (in town) yard December '18.

Sad. She's in a box in the bathroom so I can keep an eye on her.

I sure didn't notice anything odd about her lately. There was the coyote distraction yesterday, so maybe I just didn't pay attention.

I hope everyone is busy with fun/interesting/exciting/relaxing things--whatever you need.
jlhart76
4 years ago
HJ, usually I just direct seed cucumbers and hope for the best. I've found if I plant 3 per hill like "the experts" suggest, none germinate. But if I plant 5, all 5 will sprout and then I have to choose which seedling to murder. With the cucamelons, I grew them in a container one year and a few ripe fruits fell to the ground and the next year I had dozens. Now they just plant themselves. I'm hoping these new ones will do the same.
Okiedawn OK Zone 7
Original Author
4 years ago
Jennifer, When you grow your West Indian Gherkin (Cucurmis anguria) this summer, you'll notice they are really spiny, which I think is helpful because if you have any of the naturalized creeping cucumbers (Melothia pedula) pop up nearby, the lack of spines on those will tell you that they are invaders to pull so you don't mix the two together when harvesting. Mother Nature was helpful in that way.

Regarding Friday's weather, some of us are in the Enhanced Risk Area for severe weather and others are in the Moderate Risk area, so keep your eye on the skies and your ear on the radio for weather news (or your eye on social media). At least part of eastern OK has a chance of flooding because the rain is supposed to be so heavy there. Tomorrow is the 11th anniversary of the EF-4 tornado that hit Lone Grove, in Carter County. Tomorrow's weather set-up is very similar to February 10, 2009, except the risk area is a bit further east. I mention this because we tend to forget tornadoes can happen any time and can be destructive and deadly in any month. In the Lone Grove tornado, 8 died and 46 were injured. Let's hope this sort of tragedy does not occur again tomorrow. I'm not liking how similar the set-up is, nor the way the higher risk areas keep moving westward each time the SPC updates the Convective Outlook. A slight chance of snow remains in our forecast for sometime after midnight Friday....maybe we could have a snow-nado.

I did start tomato seeds early one year to see if I could get my plants to be as large as the Bonnie Plants transplants that were arriving at stores here every February around the same time I was sowing my seeds. The answer is yes, I could get them that big if I sowed seed in December, but I couldn't transplant them out because we were too cold. By the time it was warm enough to transplant out those big tomato plants, the SunGolds has almost full-sized fruit on plants in 1 quart pots. It was ridiculous and I won't do it again, but it was nice to know it could be done. My plants outgrew the light shelf because I held them indoors so long, so we had to buy another shelf with adjustable shelving to hold them. It was such a big mess, but often experiments are.

That donkey, assuming it is a full-sized one and not a miniature one, could have taken down that coyote if it wanted to. Donkey actually are used to protect herds of livestock some times, and even have taken down cougars. Of course, I think it might depend on the personality of the donkey---maybe a bolder, more confident and more aggressive one would take down a coyote and maybe a less confident and more laid back donkey wouldn't do it. I'm sorry about your neighbor's chicken, but it isn't your fault. It was the luck of the draw. I cannot tell you how often I have had that sixth sense to walk out the door and discovered a coyote lurking near the chicken coop....and the chickens were in hiding and not making a peep. Sometimes the dogs alert me if they spot a coyote, but if one comes from the south, they usually don't see it before it gets a chicken. The usually see them coming from the north though.

Nancy, It does sound like Christmas at your place now. Enjoy it.

Rebecca, Hmm. No real secret to growing celosias. The seeds are very small and they do not need sunlight to germinate. What they do need is to stay moist and to stay warm. They germinate pretty quickly for me at 75-80 degrees. I don't get in a hurry to start them indoors too early because they reach a nice, transplantable size after only 3 or 4 weeks. My celosias often reseed for me directly in the garden, and then I end up with celosias all over the place. There are worse problems to have.

If you mean John Scheepers Kitchen Garden Seeds, I have bought from them in the past, but it has been a few years. Their seeds always have done well for me, and back when I still was receiving it, their catalog was lovely and their customer service was good. The issue, really, was that it got to the point where everyone else was carrying the O-P heirloom varieties they had long carried, so there was no real reason to go specifically to them any longer.

Jennifer, Sometimes chickens just do that. They are not necessarily long-lived birds, though every now and then we'll have one live 7 or 8 years. Not very often though. Sorry about Sweetie Pie.

Megan, How funny that y'all met each other there!

Nothing special going on here this week, but I finally did sit still long enough to order some seeds today. Between kittens rampaging all over the house and a big puppy named Jesse who has turned into a 50-lb lapdog, I get no time to myself, or at least precious little of it. There's always an animal climbing on me or sitting on my lap....or 4 little animals sitting on my lap. When Tim gets home, they all are excited to see him and abandon me to go to him, and I am okay with that.

Dawn
hazelinok
4 years ago
last modified: 4 years ago
Thanks, Dawn, Sweetie Pie did die last night. I don't think she suffered long. I don't recall her acting like she felt bad until Tuesday night.

I started lettuce, kale, and spinach seed tonight. Most of the seed is sort of old, except 2 lettuces, a kale, and a spinach. I think I am going to order new lettuce seed. Let me list a few and see if any of you have an opinion on them.

Anuene Batavan Crisphead

Bronze Arrow

Crawford Bibb

Drunken Woman

Jericho Romaine

Read Sails

Specked Bibb

Thai Oakleaf

It was weird that I went out when I did. I didn't expect to see a coyote...but something led me out there. The dogs were indoors, so they weren't barking or anything.

I have one shelf equipped with lights. It's up and ready. Unfortunately I lost another light this year. Or maybe fortunately. These lights were very old and used for something else before I repurposed them for seed starting. So, now I get new lights. Yay!

This warm weather has put me in the gardening mood. Tomorrow night will probably put me back in check, which is good. I do have some indoor projects that need attention.

I think I'm going with intermediate onions this year. I've always done short day varieties before. Anyone have a favorite?
slowpoke_gardener
4 years ago
It is nasty here, more rain, and more expected tomorrow.

I could pick some greens, but I expect they will be tough.

No sign of any wild flowers coming up. Clover is doing okay in the wildlife garden, winter peas are doing pretty well also. I even have forage collards coming up in the lawn where I had torn it up with the tractor. I just wanted to see what would happen if I tossed some seed out in the area.

Madge and I are still not feeling great. We seem to get better and then just slide back. I have a lot I need to do but just cant get in the mood.

I enjoy my helper when he is able to come over. I could do things much faster by myself, but just not able. He really seems to enjoy the things he does and the things I show him how to do, and is a very good worker. I have a list a mile long for him to do if I dont run out of money.

I am tired, I feel like maybe I should just get off the field and let the big boys play now.
dbarron
4 years ago
last modified: 4 years ago
In the hopes of inspiring someone as GardenGal did to me, lol, I want to share the hellebores that I ordered Sunday that arrived yesterday. The emphasis was mainly on getting the early December bloomers. Of course as previously mentioned, I decided to also get the six pack of baby hybrid hellebores, since I was ordering anyway. You may note the mottled foliage that the intergenerics have...nicer than plain green.

First hellebore niger (the Christmas Rose) in same shot as intergeneric hybrid Frostkissed 'Charmer' (I'll attach a photo from the PK website of Charmer opened fully last)

Then I also got xericsmithii 'Shooting Star', which looks enough like one of it's parents (h. niger) that I didn't figure I needed an open h. niger shot.
And the baby oriental hybrids hellebores for a March showing (probably next year):

Lastly a closeup from PK website of xFrostkissed 'Charmer' (the pink one from above.

I was really pleased with the size and apparent vigor of the plants and I've umm texted photos to all my gardening friends (like I had a new baby or something). And no, PineKnot isn't paying me for publicity, but maybe they should (*lol*).

I liked one of my friend's responses to the text: 'Too bad you have to keep them inside'. I laughed, because they're outside where they *should* pass a 20F stress test tomorrow. Unfortunately, it started raining about 15 minutes after they arrived, so they didn't get planted yesterday and may have to wait several days on that.
Okiedawn OK Zone 7
Original Author
4 years ago
Jennifer, I'm sorry Sweetie Pie didn't make it, but relieved she is not suffering.

For an intermediate daylength onion, you cannot go wrong with Candy, which is a yellow-skinned, sweet onion that gets huge (larger than softballs) with good moisture levels. If I could grow only one onion variety, I might choose Candy (or I might choose TX1015 supersweets, which are a short day type). If you want to try a variety of intermediate day length types, Dixondale has the Intermediate Day Length Sampler, which is a mix of Candy, a white one called Super Star that is a very close second to Candy, and a red one called Red Candy Apple, that we all thought would be the red version of Candy, but it really isn't....it stays a lot smaller and you have to push it along hard with extra nitrogen to get it to make onions that are a decent size. Candy always amazes me with its huge size. I think they get larger for me than TX1015Y just because they grow for a few more weeks during a time of year when we usually receive good rainfall amounts.

Of the lettuces on your list, I've grown all except Thai Oakleaf and Bronze Arrow. Of those, Crawford, Jericho and Anuenue produced the best and for the longest period of time. For me, all three have produced deeply into June, which is rare in my hotter area. Usually lettuce starts bolting here by early June, sometimes earlier if the heat comes too soon. I think Jericho has made it until July some years if I grow it in morning sun/afternoon shade and never let it get too dry. I have grown plenty of oakleaf types and they also do well here, but not as well as Crawford, Jericho and Anuenue.

Hooray for new lights! I'm thinking about buying new lights because mine are so, so old. I just need to stop thinking about it and do it.

Larry, Our weather was gloriously warm yesterday---70 degrees and mostly sunny, but also was windy. Today is a real mixed bag for us with potentially severe weather beginning around noon and lasting until the evening hours and then, after a cold front rolls through, snow possible by morning. You just have to laugh at our weather sometimes.....even when it gives us nice weather, it makes us pay by following it with nasty weather.

If you cannot get in the mood to do anything, I think that is your body's way of telling you to rest and recover from your recent illness a bit more before you return to your usual work pace. I feel like it took me quite a while after the flu to get back to feeling 100% again, and my energy level was so slow to return. It drove me nuts, but I tried to listen to my body and to honor its need for rest and recovery.

I'm glad you have a worker to help you. Just pace yourself and do what you can. As we get older, we all have to adapt to lower energy levels, more aches and pains, etc. I was fortunate to be able to watch how Fred handled it over the last 20 years and, admittedly, he only grudgingly hired help, accepted help and slowed himself down to what was manageable based on his physical condition, but he did slowly make concessions to his age. That allowed him to keep doing some physical labor in his late 80s and lower 90s, which I found remarkable. I believe he would have worn out himself earlier if he'd tried to keep going at the same pace as always. I'll be happy if I can do half as much at any given age as he did. When the time comes that I need to retire to the porch, deck and patio and just have plants in containers, I'll do it happily, knowing that we have to listen to our bodies. Don't get off the field and let the big boys play, but maybe make the playing field smaller and more manageable? I think that I could be happy with a dozen large containers sitting near the house beginning right now if that was what age and time dictated was doable, though it would be hard for me to abandon the front garden that I have spent 20 years building and improving. I wouldn't miss dealing with all the garden weeds for sure.

dbarron, Thanks for sharing! Those hellebores are stunning! I hope to be planting some next year after this year's landscape renovation creates a place for them.

This weather suddenly does not lend itself to planting, does it? Oh well, maybe in a few days it will improve and you can plant them.

Y'all, please WATCH YOUR WEATHER today. The first Severe Thunderstorm already has popped up in western OK, and the first Severe Thunderstorm Watch was issued a few minutes ago. This watch includes parts of western, northern and northeastern OK. Storms were expected to form by 8 a.m. and they surely have begun. Remember that, depending on your location in the state and region, all sorts of severe weather is possible in advance of the cold front/snow, including severe thunderstorms with hail, strong winds, some heavy rainfall and potentially a few tornadoes. The further south and east you are, the higher the tornado risk. Later on, this stuff moves on and the cold comes in, dragging along snow behind it. Welcome to Oklahoma and the ARK-LA-TX , where we sometimes have all 4 seasons pretty much in 1 day.

Dawn
dbarron
4 years ago
It's sunny right now..and little rain fell last night. I think I'm going to go outside and plant the hellebores before the rain decides to return (and hopefully nothing more severe than rain). I may not get the six pack planted...still pondering where to plant those somewhat.

Be safe everyone.
jlhart76
4 years ago
So it looks like Cliff's friend/practically a sister will be moving back in with us, which means I lose the closet I was planning to use for seed starting. Now the only place to set things up will be the garage. I have a couple of those mini greenhouses for shelving, a couple of fluorescent bars for lighting. I know I'll need more lighting, but what about heat? If I start them inside where it's warm, could I then move them out after they sprout and not worry as much about heat? I know a lot depends on how warm the garage stays and how much heat is put out by the lights, but I'm still trying to work things out before I tell him "oh, I'm going to spend a bunch of money on my "weeds". "(As he calls them)
AmyinOwasso/zone 6b
4 years ago
Larry, I'm sorry you and Madge are still ill. We are, too. The doctor yesterday says Ron's has gone to pneumonia. We just don't seem to be able to kick this. I am tired, too, and I'm sleeping way more than usual. And I'm bored. Tired of solitaire and Netflix.

I have ordered seeds from several places. Already got my Missouri Wildflower seeds back!

H/J, I like Drunken Woman lettuce. My favorite is Chadwicks Rodan, which has gotten hard to find. Pretty sure I have seeds for Red Sails, but no memory of it's performance. I'm sorry about your chicken. I know what that's like.

I'm going to go look at my seed list and see if I can find something to get excited about.
dbarron
4 years ago
Amy, what'd you order from Mo Wild Flwrs?
AmyinOwasso/zone 6b
4 years ago
From Missouri Wildflower.

Asclepias tuberosa Pleurisy Root (milkweed)

Phlox paniculata Garden or Summer Phlox

Vernonia arkansana Curlytop Ironweed

Viburnum rufidulum rusty blackhaw

Verbesina helianthoides Yellow Crownbeard

Rusty blackhaw is out of stock, but I want it.

These are items I was looking for that are natives Tallamy recommended. I also ordered 4 or 5 things from Prairie Moon. I have a bunch of plants I want, but that is so expensive I've been holding off.

Okay I'm worried about Nancy. She had weather awfully close to her. So if you see this Nancy, pm me.
dbarron
4 years ago
I sure miss being able to grow Orange milkweed...it's too wet here for almost any. Not even my swamp milkweed did good really long term. If well drained, it's a long term plant and much beloved.

The native phloxes are great, but I have problems with competition with them (I plant too crowded..my bad).

The vernonia was excellent when I lived near you! It doesn't like all my moisture though.

I loath verbesinas (lol)..but your mileage may vary.;

Oh yeah, rusty blackhaw was native all along the road from the highway to my house..and I had one in yard I planted, very very excellent shrub. Loved the berries and it would take baking drought or spring flooding without blinking.
AmyinOwasso/zone 6b
4 years ago
last modified: 4 years ago
BTW, I heard from Nancy. She's ok.

The crown beard was a last minute impulse. We'll see what happens. I wanted some native sunflowers till I figured out they might take over.
dbarron
4 years ago
The native sunflowers are somewhat aggressive, but not that hard to get rid of (imo)..but if you want it care-free, they're not for you.
Nancy RW (zone 7)
4 years ago
Amy, thank you for checking in with me! We had sirens going off all over. I drove into to town this morning. While in there having coffee with friends, the sirens went off. Going in, coming back, torrential rain and could barely see for a while. Got home and then the sirens began going off here. LOL SHEESH. We had 3.25" between 11 am and 6:45 pm. I emptied the gauge and it has been pouring since then. So we'll probably easily have 4" for the day.

Dbarron, I have a perfect and empty bed just waiting for hellebores. BUT. it is on the north side of our shop, which we would never see. Not from the road, not from the house. So the only point would be just cuz. And those little suckers are pretty expensive for "just because."

I have been so distracted of late. I have to give a presentation to a group at the end of this month, and it is VERY important that I get them to realize what a worthwhile thing this is. . . so I've been reading reading reading, studying studying. Jotting down an outline, now beginning to write. Painful. What I need to do, I decided, is to pretend I'm Dawn, and just go on. Except I'm not. Dawn--can I just hire you to come up and give my presentations, logically, common sense stuff?

I'm giving a gardening speech about responsible stewardship to the Methodist Church. What could go wrong, right? LOLOL Truly it's cracking me up on the one hand, but is very serious, on the other. I'd highly recommend Doug Tallamy's "Bringing Nature Home," and if you're in a Christian frame of mind, "Tending to Eden," by Scott Sabin.
hazelinok
4 years ago
Glad you're okay, Nancy. I think you'll do great with your presentation. You have a lot of passion for the things that you believe in...and that will come across.

We got very little rain. It started pouring on my way out of our neighborhood this morning as I was leaving for work. It must have not rained much, though, because the rain gauge is basically empty. What's funny is, we had the kids on the playground at 10:30 this morning. No one had on jackets.

We often don't get rain when everyone else does. There are a few times that we get too much...but it's often when everyone else gets WAY too much.

We do have a lot of wind. We often have a lot of wind.

The Monticello cucumber seeds arrived today. That was fast!

Jen, I'll hold on to yours until SF unless you want them before then. I can bring them to you at some point if so. If anyone else wants a few seeds to try, I'll share my packet with you, just let me know and I'll bring them to SF.

Thanks for the input on the lettuce. I appreciate it!

There was another coyote this morning at the back of the chicken yard. The chickens had not been let out of their coop into their pen at that point. I shoo'd it off and it went somewhere...? The chickens stayed in their pen or coop all day. The didn't get chicken yard time. I had to go to work and didn't trust Ethan to keep an eye on them.

It would have been fine, probably, because we finally have good internet! Cox came out and did the fiberoptic (sp???). Wow. What a difference. Bye-buh hillbilly internet! There was a lot of outside action going on that would have kept a coyote away---that's what I mean by that.

The brassicas are covered. And that ugly bed of herbs and pansies/violas (it you saw that on FB). It's not a pretty bed, but it's green and living and I don't want to lose it all. In my mind, it will be pretty in March. If it doesn't freeze out.

That's all from me!
OklaMoni
4 years ago
last modified: 4 years ago
I am trying to be better and keep up. But the names throw me.

Lisa, Dawn, Kim, Nancy and now Megan all have faces for me. The others... yes, I have met a lot of you... but your real name, and your online name here are different, and that messes me up.

Dawn, a long time ago and would have a chest freezer full of gallon milk jugs with water/ice. Every day I would haul 4 up, and put on the roots of my peach tree. That was one of those years in the 80's, when we had a very warm January. That procedure kept the tree from budding out to early.

Everyone, it was a joy to meet up with Megan. She was in line in front of me, and I read her name when I signed in. Of course, I turned and looked where she was... and introduced myself. What fun.

It is cold out. Darn cold. Hard to believe I was out riding in shorts yesterday... got home before the wind had turned. Put on my overalls, and out to work in the yard. I knew, I didn't have enough time to make a dent with digging Bermuda grass, and got my snake tool out and weeded instead.

It cooled off fast. Went in and got a fleece top and eventually had to abandon weeding and go in to stay.

60 yesterday when I got up. 69 while riding. 38 around 8 PM, 22 when I got up this morning and a projected high of 34 for today.

It's sure weird weather January! :)

But, I saw a blooming dandelion in my back yard, and I left it. :)

Hope everyone is warm.

Moni
slowpoke_gardener
4 years ago
I have been watching you Ladies post with interest. I want to grow for pollinators also, as well for other critters. One of the items on the list that the small land owners biologist sent me was "Partridge Peas". I know nothing about them, but, I think they may work for me. Do any of you have any words of wisdom about them? Egyptian wheat was also on that list, but, I am thinking that it would be too much of a fire hazard.

The weather STINKS here. Its 34 degrees and supposed to drop to 24 by this afternoon, with mud and water everywhere.
hazelinok
4 years ago
We didn't get much rain. We didn't get much snow. It IS cold, though. I'm still laughing about us being on the playground without coats at this time yesterday.

Moni, I had a yellow dandelion this week too! It made me smile.

I can see how you're confused about the usernames/nicknames/real names. I'm probably the most confusing. I like the name Hazel, so chose it for this forum. (I didn't use my real name at first because I had a bad experience at another non-garden related forum with stalking and all.) I'm not worried about it any longer, but if I could rename myself I would choose Hazel. In the past year, I've come to know 2 babies and one preschooler named Hazel, so it's making a comeback, I guess. When Nancy first came here, she mentioned a TV series called Hazel. I don't remember it, but looked it up. It might have been on TV before I was born. Just yesterday I was watching a rerun of Seinfeld and George mentioned that TV series...comparing his Mom to Hazel. I don't think it was a compliment, though...haha.

ANYWAY....I'm sure I've made it even more confusing.

My name on the forum is Hazel.

My real name is Jennifer

Nancy nicknamed me HJ.

There's another Jen here. She's just "Jen". But sometimes people accidentally refer to me as Jen.

Sorry for the confusion. I've seen you post on FB--you're friends with Dawn and Lisa and someone else. I'll send you a friend request.

We have met in real life, at the SFs.

I'll try to post a couple of pictures of myself, but am having a hard time finding recent pics of just me. I'm always standing in a group. (and I'm not taking a selfie right now. LOL)

I am short and my face easily is forgettable. I tend to blend into the background, but maybe you recognize me.

I'm cleaning today. And shopping. And stopping by a friend's husbands 50th BD party. So far I've been lazy and only have done a load of laundry and a load of dishes. And am considering a nap. LOL. Maybe just a short one.
dbarron
4 years ago
Rain is slithering down, and bouncing off ground (yes frozen pellets). I stay in (vs going anywhere) most days, so another day or two won't make much difference to me. I pulled car into garage for first time in months last night.

I will carry in a few potted hardy plants that I am not sure if sub-20 would hurt in their pots, to the unheated back porch, which should keep them above 25. Venus fly traps, pitcher plants, sundews, blueberry (little buds expanding because of the warmth lately), fig, and cumberland rosemary. I will get most of them in the ground as spring comes, but for now, their home is their pot, because I wanted them to get bigger before facing a winter in ground where I couldn't bring them in.

I would say good say for soup, but I had this week already...so I think fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and whatever else I figure out.

Keep warm all.
OklaMoni
4 years ago
Hi Hazel/Jennifer

I remember we met. It's just that name thing. Thanks for the pictures and the friend request.

I am lazy so far today. Still thinking of trying another loaf of bread a family member posted a recipe for on facebook. It's a not much fuss recipe, but in German. I think, I hadn't let the yeast get totally dissolved when I tried it before. Otherwise, I am thankful for a rest day. :)

I also know and met Mia... but forgot her when I made my post above. :) Mia, are you still posting?

Moni
Okiedawn OK Zone 7
Original Author
4 years ago
Jen, I'd start out by buying one of those inexpensive indoor Min/Max thermometers that Wal-Mart sells (the store nearest us has them with rain gauges on a row right beside the paint aisle) and put that out in the garage. Check it daily for a week or two and log your results and you'll know pretty quickly what the temperature range is in there. Then, you can make choices accordingly.

With a light shelf, up to a certain point, the fluorescent lights create their own heat. When I have all five shelves on my light shelf in use (2 4' long light fixtures per shelf, with 2 tubes per fixture, so a total of 20 4' long fluorescent light tubes in use at once), they heat up a standard bedroom so much that I have to keep the blinds closed to exclude heat from the sun, the ceiling fan running 24/7, and the HVAC vent into that room closed and the room still heats up about 15-20 degrees warmer than the rest of the house. Sometimes I have to open a window to cool down the room because if it stays too warm, the plants grow too quickly and outgrow the light shelf while it still is cold outdoors. I haven't used one in an unheated space like a garage, so I am not sure how much they would heat up the garage overall, but they should at least keep the plants near them pretty warm. Of course, if you use LED lights, you won't get the heat. I would think if y'all keep the garage doors closed, that would help hold in the heat. Our detached shop/garage is very well-insulated but not heated, and it will stay around 18 to 20 degrees inside even when we are in the single digits outdoors. That is why I have been able to over-winter some tropical type plants, like brugmansias, inside that building some years, but I haven't raised seedlings in there. Before I had a greenhouse, I often would move the tomato plants out to the garage once they were outgrowing the light shelf, so probably in March, and they did fine in the unheated garage even though we had some freezing cold nights.

If you find your garage gets too chilly, you could try taping space blankets (those shiny ones that look a bit like aluminum foil, often sold in camping section at Wal-Mart) to the back and sides of your shelving unit to reflect the lights' heat and light back onto the plants to keep them warmer. Having the shelf enclosed on 3 sides but with the 4th side open for good air flow should ensure the seedlings stay healthy.

Amy, I'm sorry you and Ron are stuck with lingering illness and hope your health continues to improve.

dbarron, I just hate that your wet soil means there are plants you cannot grow. My dry soil does the same thing to me, lol, but at least I can add moisture (up until the point that the water bill gets too scary) to my dry soil, while you have no way, unfortunately, of vacuuming up all the excess moisture to get it out of your soil. Am I the only one who things we all are crazy to try to grow plants we love in our erratic weather? As soon as I figure out which plants (including natives) will tolerate a dry year with 19" of rain as well as an excessively wet one with 78" of rain, I'll let y'all know. All I've learned so far is that plants that will tolerate the 19" year generally die in the 78" year and vice versa, and that does include many natives. So, even the natives here ebb and flow and completely disappear at times. It can take them years and years for them to come back after either a very dry or a very wet year. Why can't they all be like Johnson grass and just live through it all? Nothing kills that Johnson grass.

Amy, The native sunflowers here don't take over. They do aggressively reseed sometimes, but generally the first ones to grow and get taller pretty much shade out the shorter ones and that is the end of that. The ones that are shaded out just fade away on their own, and the taller ones grow, bloom and reseed.

Nancy, You can do it! Just organize your thoughts, speak with authority and encourage everyone with love. Your presentation will be great, and your messages will come shining through.

Jennifer, My experience is that coyotes will come back daily for a while once they find a potential food source, so keep your eyes open. They seem to go in spurts, so will be around a while, and then will disappear for a while as they move on to a potentially better hunting area. January and February are usually the worst months for them.

Moni, That is just more work than I am going to do for fruit! I am at the point now that either it grows and produces, or it doesn't.

Larry, Partridge peas are easy. They grow equally well in sandy soil or clay here, shrug off both excess rain and heat/drought, reseed themselves, and attract tons of pollinators. They do have a slight tendency to be invasive, so keep them out of your good soil. They are perfectly happy in native soil that is not amended. I had one pop up in a raised bed in the garden once, reseeded from a nearby pasture and I thought I'd just leave it there for the pollinators. Well, in the good soil it grew three times as large as they do out in the pastures and started taking over everything, so I had to hurry up, cut it back before it could reseed, and dig it out before it became too well-established for me to ever get rid of it. I had a hard time digging it out and it only had been there a couple of months---those roots went deeply and they had spread out very wide. Lesson learned!

Our weather has been bonkers. We awakened to 68 degrees yesterday and it felt like a May morning with lots of good moisture in the air. Then, over the next 24 hours we had this: light rain at first, severe thunderstorms, tornado warnings, kids stuck at school in tornado shelters after school had ended for the day because of tornado warnings coming our way from Texas that made it risky to let the kids leave the schools, heavy rainfall near dinner time, flash flooding, flooding, hail, more rain, more flooding, high winds and, eventually, temperatures that fell like a rock, wind chills down near 10 degrees, freezing temperatures, sleet and snow. The sun just came out a few minutes ago, sort of....it is peeking out from behind clouds sporadically, so our temperature just now made it up all the made to 33 degrees and the sleet and snow are melting. We aren't expected to make it out of the 30s today, but the warm-up begins again tomorrow and we're supposed to be in the 60s next week.

It is a good day to stay home, stay indoors and avoid all the mud, the muck and the mess. Lunch is going to be homemade chili, served with shredded cheese sprinkled on top and crackers on the side. I didn't even have to make the chili this morning because not too long ago I made a big batch and froze it in 2-cup portions in plastic freezer boxes, so all I had to do was defrost it and heat it up. The roads are a mess here, with icy overpasses and ice on elevated roadways and people sliding off into bar ditches, medians, roadsides and such. On the Texas side of the river, where heavier snow and sleet fell, the roads between here and Denton are a mess. Just over the river in Texas, on I-35, roads southbound out of OK are closed down by numerous semi trucks jack-knifed near the Red River. At times, the traffic backup extends into our county, so no one really is able to head southbound into Texas from here this morning. I imagine it will take a while to get all the semis towed and the roadways reopened. Like I said, a great day to stay home....not that we have a lot of choice in the matter.

Have a great day everybody and stay warm.

Dawn
Rebecca (7a)
4 years ago
I canceled Audrey’s post surgical appointment this afternoon because of the ice we got and snow that was on the way. We got maybe a dusting. We had maybe a 30-45 second blast of heavy hail yesterday afternoon at work, small but came down hard. Glad all our vehicles survived it.

I have a lot of housework to get done this weekend, and I did just get the laundry started, but right now I’m going to enjoy my breakfast sandwich and hot tea, watch a basketball game, and seed shop.
Nancy RW (zone 7)
4 years ago
Is Audrey back to normal? So happy they were able to help/fix her!! I'm doing a little laundry myself. . .

I got up late, at 8. . . but Garry slept WAY late. I asked him when he got up if he had trouble sleeping last night--he said NO, he guess he just decided to get 10 hours of sleep for the heck of it. LOL He NEVER does that.

At any rate, I had a great morning reading reading reading. Then got detoured in one of the books and had to go take a geography detour online. I'm loving it. I think I need to study more. I love geography but haven't studied it much the past 6-8 years. Especially not since I've had my head buried in reading about gardening in OK!!

Moni, I got a great laugh about the meeting between Megan and you. WHAT! Yes it is cold! Yesterday was WARM. Dawn--your mention of the min/max thermometer. That is one of my favorite gardening things I've bought. That and the rain gauge. And the hori hori knife.

AND, my day is going to be just like YOURS. I made an extra big batch of chili last time, also, and it is a chili or soup day. Because I am feeling so so lazy and not wanting to do ANY more work than the one load of laundry, I will opt for the chili.

Speaking of fried chicken, dbarron. Had a weird thing happen. I decided I'd fix friend chicken 3-4 days ago. Garry and I both prefer dark meat, and I always get deboned thighs. But I wanted to fix some fancy chicken and noodles for give-away meals, so bought a big pack of boneless chicken breasts. I went ahead and used them for our fried chicken meal. . . yummy with all the fixings, Usually. The weird thing is that the chicken breasts were actually very dense and TOUGH! I've never ever experienced such a thing. They were very moist, not overcooked, but just tough. Any of you ever had that happen? Had I known, I would have flattened them out with a meat mallet first. I'm still grumpy about it, so am fixing for easy this evening.

And Dawn, you got an actual guffaw from me--it's a wonder I didn't wake GDW up. Speak with authority! LOLOL Still laughing. I'm thinking of many folks on FB OK Gardening who speak with such authority, one swears they know what they're talking about. Hahaha, still laughing. OKAY! I shall speak with authority!

Amy, I really can't even believe the cold turned into pneumonia! Yours didn't, did it? How are you two feeling today?

HJ--you cute pretty thing, you--you most definitely do not have a forgettable face!
hazelinok
4 years ago
last modified: 4 years ago
It's so strange that we got nearly nothing as far as rain/ice/snow go. I didn't even have to worry about Ethan driving home from work last night.

It is sunny here, but cold. The dogs were dying to go out, so I put them out. They'll probably change their minds soon enough. Right now they're too busy sniffing all the spots where the coyote walked.

Moni, Mia doesn't post here very often.

Dawn, I saw the story you posted. So sad.

Enjoy your chili. I love pulling already made food out of the freezer. In fact, I have a couple of meals in there I should feed to Tom and Ethan this week. Thanks for helping me remember.

Dbarron and Rebecca, enjoy your yummy food and cozy day. I sure wish I didn't have to go to this BD party in a few hours.
Rebecca (7a)
4 years ago
last modified: 4 years ago
Cleaning out seed boxes and trying to figure out what I need. I have Fortex pole beans, but I’d like another bean. A regular green bean, as mom prefers.

Sorting flowers next. That’s always a free for all.

Mia does pop her head in on a rare occasion. Maybe she’ll see this and say Hi.

Moni, I’m not sure if we’ve met yet. I’ve only been to the last 2 SF events.
OklaMoni
4 years ago
I just had to get out for a bit, and walked to HD and back. Finally got keys cut. I always forget, and then last time there, the machine kept the key.

Thus, I had two made... and have a spare now. ;)

6000 steps done. I am tired. need to open up the package that came while I was gone... I had actually left to drop a birthday card off at the mail drop box near the corner.. as there wasn't mail yet by 3:00 PM. It usually comes earlier.

Need to see, which book came.

Moni
jlhart76
4 years ago
Ya, I'm the "other Jen". My husband keeps harassing me that "Jen Hart" doesn't exist and I should change my username, but I've been "jlhart" for 25 years. Changing my maiden name was easy, but don't expect me to change my social media name!

Larry, I grew one partridge pea a couple years ago because it was a "pretty flower". Every year I have some pop up, but mostly in the yard so they get mowed down. I keep a few and usually put them in containers, so maybe that's why they haven't gotten invasive for me.

Thanks Dawn, I figured that's what I'd have to do (the thermometer thing) but was hoping someone had experience with it & could say definitely yes or no. At any rate, it's either that or don't start seeds, so I don't have much to lose.
slowpoke_gardener
4 years ago
Ladies, thanks for the reply on the Partridge peas, it looks like I will have to order some for the wildlife garden. I hope to have the garden reseeding itself while my health holds up, because I know my daughter wont look after it the way I do. If I can get the wildlife garden growing on its own, except brush hogging every three years, I will be a happy camper.