And Lowe’s has a whole shelf of Bonnie long day onion plants. 🤦🏻‍♀️

Besides the crocus that I think I already posted, hellebores, and winter aconite were open and photographed today.

These late winter heralds of spring are quite welcome.

Wow. So much to comment on and I know I'll forget most of it.

From the other thread. Dawn, I don't want to read the Worst Hard Time again. It really is disturbing, the human and animal suffering. I can think of it

and realize how blessed we are without reading it in detail. But, I'm probably not a very strong person. I'm so disturbed by things like that, that I can't sleep.

I have letters from my great uncle to back home during WW2. At one point, even the soldiers weren't well fed, I think. He mentioned in one letter that they were only getting 2 meals a day and one of them was soup. BUT, it might have depended on several things. Maybe some of them were better fed depending on where and what they were doing. I love how he asks about the farm in all of his letters. That was the time of the Victory Gardens too, I think.

I'm helping a friend (he was my best friend in high school) write a book about WW2 (only it's different that the actual WW2 events). I'm his girlfriend back home and he is a soldier. So, my part is writing the letters to him. Tom and I have had fun with that. Writing in 1940's verbiage isn't easy. He's had books published and I hope this one will be too.

Today was BEAUTIFUL! My favorite kind of day. I actually got hot in my long sleeved sweater. I would be happy if we never got hotter than today. It was perfect. I worked until noon and then came home ate and rested. It was too beautiful to rest for long, though. I needed a new spot to compost, so I dug a spot behind the shop. Dug up the Bermuda and weeds, put down cardboard, framed it with some boards, added a layer of woodchips, and it's ready. That area has been a dumping spot for coop cleanings, but it went back to grass/weeds last summer. However, the soil is beautiful about 3inches down. Then, you get to the red clay. Someday it will be the spot of a lovely wildflower garden and a beehive.

It felt so good being outside. I had to change to a short sleeved t shirt.

I'm tired so my post is probably choppy and stupid sounding.

The seedlings got to go outdoors for a sunning today. Can you believe it's Feb. 2 and I'm setting out seedlings??

I know it's going to get cold in a couple of days.

BUT, it's supposed to be an early spring according to the groundhog.

My little banty cockerel went missing yesterday morning. In my gut, I knew he wasn't taken by a dog/hawk/coyote. I knew he was around somewhere. I don't know how I knew that...except I often know things.

Our plan was to go to the OSUOKC farmers market and then to my cousin's daughter's baby's memorial service. (we did make it to both places) As I was getting into my car, I thought I saw something at my neighbors' barn a couple of acres away. So...I messaged her and said, "one of my dumb chickens in on your property. I'm going to get it. Don't shoot me." Her jeep was at their house, so I rang their bell. They have one of those things that sends a picture to their phones when someone rings their bell. She wasn't home but told me over the "thing", to go get the chicken.

Y'all, it's the weirdest deal. Something is very wrong with him. He was totally fine that morning. It could possibly be a head injury or botulism--his symptoms match up with those two issues. It's possible their bratty colt kicked him. But, normally the horses ignore the chickens. (I realize that my chickens should not be on their property at all). He was standing just outside the horse pasture on the other side of their barn. He could easily go under the fence and back home, but would not go back into the horse pasture. I picked him up and brought him home. He was jerky and shaky.

I don't know. Maybe it's botulism. If you read about it online, it says stupid things like don't let the chickens drink out of standing water or scratch in compost. Really? Let's all get real. It rained a LOT and of course there's standing water. (although it's dried up now) And how do you keep chickens from scratching in the compost piles? Anyway. I'm rambling, I know.

I think it's an injury of some sort though. He's in the chick brooder and I fed him water with a syringe tonight. I don't know what to do. If it's something he can heal from, I don't want to put him down. He doesn't walk much and he's holding his body in a weird way. But...he's bright eyed still. I think something happened in that pasture. What? I don't know.

Okay. Back to gardening.

Some guy at the farmer's market said to cut the leaves off the brussels sprouts to encourage the edible part to develop. Is that for real?

Also, I bought some tiny white turnips at the farmer's market. About the size of a radish. They are delicious. Does anyone know of such a turnip? The girl running the register didn't know.

Jennifer , you cut the lower leaves off to divert the plants energy from growing the leaves to making the bulb. Here's a couple of vids on growing brussel sprouts:

At 3:00 , she talks about that

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSjuj8P71C0

At around 6:50 he talks about it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N46a4sc0G6c

About turnips , there's a variety called " Tokyo Cross"

https://www.vermontbean.com/product/V04015/102

They grow bigger but you can pick them small if you want.

I'm keeping a close eye on this winter storm coming up. I usually start thinking about getting my onion plants about this time but don't want to have to hold them too long for the weather to get better.

Sounds like we're gonna get snow this time.

I'll be getting my seed potatoes too before long. Onions and potatoes go in first in my spring garden. Later half of Feb into early Mar as conditions allow.

okmulgee boy

Jennifer when I dig, I usually don't dig more than a 36X36 to 48X48 inch plot. My soil is so clay rich, it's still clammy. I hope to have soil like you described someday.

I wish we didn't get snow or rain for all of this week.. as I have plans to finish the project.

I am digging a drench (while removing Bermuda) to divert the water run off from the back neighbor to a trench I have dug all along my yard on the east side, to force the run off out the front and to the street.

I just hate this waterlogged yard. So hard to do anything in it, and hard to grow stuff.

Things would be so much easier if I had a way to get a sod cutter here (remember I drive a mini cooper) and have a strong person to run it. But that costs way more than I am willing to shell out... thus, I am on a never ending quest to get rid of the Bermuda.

Moni

I suppose everyone here had a gloriously warm and sunny day yesterday like we did? Tim took the dogs for a walk while I was putting away groceries, and came inside complaining it was too hot and that he and Jesse needed water. You would have thought it was a summer day.....but it was 83 degrees, which does indeed feel hot in January when you're not used to it. I had noticed the house felt hot and turned on the air conditioner while they were out walking. Bees, flies, birds, moths, ants, butterflies, lady bugs....everyone was out, and why not? Today will not be quite as warm but still will be really nice for February. The local TV meteorologist said a few minutes ago that the sunshine abandons us today and the clouds will dominate. More of the weather roller coaster, I guess.

Here's yesterday's official high temperatures per the OK Mesonet. Look how uniformly warm the whole state was:

Maximum Temperatures Recorded Sunday

dbarron, I am so sorry you're sick and wish you a very speedy recovery. It seems like everything like you described is going around here and tons of people are sick. We are having a mixture of Flu type A, but mostly cases of Flu type B, strep throat, and a lot of bronchitis and pneumonia in our area. I have a friend who works in the hospital in Ardmore and she's been sick as a dog...she tested positive for Type A flu, Type B flu, strep throat, has a double ear infection, bronchitis in her lungs and....just to make things even worse she also has a UTI. I have never heard of one person having all of that at the same time. Since she works at the hospital (in one of the business offices), she did have a flu shot back in the early autumn, not that it appears to have helped her any. She'd been sick for 2 weeks now. Tim and I had the flu right after Thanksgiving and it was pretty awful, but we've stayed healthy since then. Knock on wood. All the cedar trees here are very heavily loaded with pollen and we are fighting the standard allergy crud but are grateful it isn't worse. Our oldest granddaughter has flu type B and strep throat.

I wish witch hazel would grow here. You are so lucky to have it! You know that I have the wrong soil, wrong weather, etc. down here for witch hazel, but I'd grow it if I could. Does it count that I have a bottle of witch hazel in my linen closet?

okmulgeeboy, I'm fairly used to seeing coyotes, even in broad daylight. Perhaps it is our location so close to the Red River as it is less than a quarter mile west from our back property line with only one old ranch between us and the river and it also is a couple of miles east of us. We get a lot of wildlife passing through here that cuts through our lightly populated area traveling from the river bottoms area to our west to the river bottoms area to our east. I have had more coyote encounters in my lifetime since moving here than I'd care to count, but only a couple have been really scary. The worst one was with a dog-coyote hybrid that our friend, Jesse, had warned me was roaming around our area. He told me that such hybrids (naturally occurring, usually from feral dogs and coyotes mating) are more dangerous to us humans because there's enough dog in them that they don't turn and run when they see us like coyotes do, and I found that to be true. Unfortunately, there's enough coyote in them to make them dangerous to us and our pets. It definitely tried to engage the dog and I, out in the middle of the road, and it wouldn't leave or back off, so I had to retreat back home, walking backwards facing it and tugging the dog and telling it to stop growling and come along. Luckily we weren't far from home, and the coyote finally turned and took off. We have them in our yard a lot, and have had them right outside the chicken run, trying to figure out how to get in. I've opened the front door once to let a cat in and there was a coyote literally coming up the porch steps to get the cat. It turned and took off as soon as I opened the door, and the cat made it inside safely.

Not long after we moved here, I saw that a neighbor had shot a coyote and hung it upside down from the fence. That seemed unnecessarily cruel to me, so of course, I had to ask why. I learned the ranchers often hang a dead one from the fence to serve as a warning to other coyotes to stay away from their livestock. The part that grosses me out is that they leave it hanging there as it decomposes. No, no, no, I just cannot handle that! So, even though I have seen that, I don't care for it. We went to a huge wildfire down in Love's Valley along the river once, probably in 2011 or 2012, and had to drive past a ranch that apparently was having big coyote issues--they had 6 or 7 dead coyote carcasses hanging from their fence, all together, like soldiers lined up in a row. That also grossed me out. Maybe it is because I'm not a rancher so don't have young livestock threatened by them. One year, not long after we moved here....might have been 2003, 2005 or 2006, it was a drought year and the coyote population was huge that year (it cycles up and down) and the coyotes were desperately hungry and were running down foals and calves and killing them 24/7, riling up the ranchers and horsemen. It was so bad that the state sent in sharpshooters to shoot and kill the coyotes from the air in order to protect the livestock from excessive predation. There, now you've got all my coyote tales, pretty much, in one paragraph. I won't go into the hideous details about what a coyote-dog fight is like, or how badly an animal can be torn up even if it survives, or what our dogs and our friends' dogs have been through in those circumstances. It isn't pretty. I will say that just about the worst sound I've ever heard was a dog-coyote fight, and it was so bad that the next door neighbor came running across the pasture, calling my name, to see if our dogs and I were okay because he thought a coyote was getting us. I had been worried it was getting him or his dogs and was out west of our house looking for the fight, but as we listened to it, we could tell it was west of both of us probably a couple hundred yards or so, perhaps somewhere along our western fence lines. It was just awful, and was the second worse animal sound I've ever heard since moving here. You don't want to know about the worst one.....

Kim, Yep, living in the country sure is messy. When we first moved here to the middle of nowhere, we had a dirt road. Not even gravel. Just dirt with a bit of gravel here and there. You couldn't keep your car looking nice. Eventually they put down more gravel, and then we got that hideous white gravel dust all over everything, including plants in the garden, all the time....like, every time a car went up or down the road. Eventually our road progressed to what they call oil (I call it tar) poured on the roadbed with a layer of gravel poured over it, and that is what passes for a paved road here....but it certainly is much nicer than a dirt road, especially after everyone has driven on it for a while and packed down the gravel.

Larry, It still is too wet here, which frustrates me terribly too. I cannot do anything, and all my boots and shoes are muddy and dirty. I keep hoping it will dry up. It is going to be hard to redo the landscape if we stay constantly wet and under water like we have for the last couple of months. I know that we cannot rent a sod cutter to take out the Bermuda grass until we are a lot drier than we are now because if your ground is too wet, the sod butter bogs down and won't work.

I bet you have enough native plants around to support bees, but you'd likely have to supplement feed them in winter. They're always out on winter days here, desperately searching for flowers in bloom, fruit (you can cut open a melon and lay it on the ground for them) or anything at all....the native bees here will feed on the corn dust in hen scratch and cracked corn.

Rebecca, I hope you enjoy your birthday weekend trip and your milestone birthday, and I personally think a trip to Central Market (one where you can stay and shop and look and soak it all in all for as long as you want) is absolutely, positively the best way to spend your birthday. We were just there 2 weeks ago, and I have withdrawal if we don't go there at least once every couple of months. I'd like to go more often, but it is such a long drive, and we usually tack it on after a trip to Costco.

Normally, I'd say just go to the FW Botanical Gardens and see what is happening, but I hesitate to say that now because (a) they've started charging a pretty hefty admission price that I think is $12 or $12.95 for adults, and less for kids, (it was free my entire life until recently) and (b) rose rosette disease caused them to pull out their huge, extensive rose planting several years ago, really changing the gardens. I haven't been there since they took out the roses, and don't know what they planted in their once large formal rose garden beds instead, and don't know if they came back and eventually put in more roses after a few years, or what. I do love the botanic gardens, but prefer to visit them later in spring---they are exquisite in March, April and May and still look great all summer, but how great depends on the rainfall and/or degree of drought. Back when we used to go there a lot, they had a test garden where they tested annuals and perennials and that became my favorite part of the garden. There's a place on their website called "what's blooming now" or something similar, though I am not sure how often they update the photos. Let me find it and link it. Regardless, I guess it depends on what you're looking for. There's so many evergreen plantings that it always is pretty, and the Japanese Garden is gorgeous. However, it has been 6 or 8 years, I bet, since we last were there, so my memories are not necessarily the same way that it is now. I've read lots of criticism online about how it has been allowed to deteriorate a lot. I think that is the reason for the new admission charges---they need more income in order to restore the gardens to their former beauty. Then, there's the 10,000 s.f. glass conservatory filled with tropical plants. When you walk inside, it is like being in a rainforest, even on the coldest winter day. I don't know what it looks like now, only what it used to be like. After a severe and extremely damaging hailstorm (must have been gigantic hail) in 2016, they had to close it down for a few years to repair and rebuild. I heard it finally reopened in 2019 but haven't been there to see it since then.

Here's their website:

What's Blooming Seasonally in the Gardens

I enjoyed the Super Bowl, rooting for native Texan and KC Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes. We've been following his career since his impressive college career at Texas Tech University (our niece attends school there and is about to start grad school). So, we had the game on the TV and I tried to watch most of it, but I wasn't staring at the screen 100% engaged like Tim was. I was on my computer and kinda keeping one eye on the computer and one eye on the TV. I multi-task like that a lot, which drives Tim crazy. He thinks if you are going to watch the Super Bowl, you should only watch the Super Bowl, but I just don't focus in on it the way he does.

I didn't do any seed starting yet. I intend to, but maybe not until later in the week. I just have a lot of little projects going on here around the house and have been insanely busy with all of them....too busy to give much thought to gardening yet. I know, I know....how crazy is that?

Long day onions are not impossible here, but it certainly depends on the variety, and there's only a few long day types that I have found do well here, namely Copia, Red River and Highlander. The others I've tried just do not bulb up well this far south, though that might bulb up a lot better in northeastern OK than they do down here.

The stores here probably are relieved they don't have a lot of plants in the stores yet because we have a Winter Storm Watch and are expecting 2-4" of snow here Wednesday. I'm trying not to get too excited about it because if I start expecting the snow, you know it won't fall at all....we'll just get rain and mud. Maybe....in the meadow we could build a mudman, instead of a snowman.

dbarron, What lovely flowers! Thanks for sharing the photos.

Jennifer, But that is exactly why I re-read it....so I remember what they went through and how awful it was. Most of the real old-timers who remembered it first-hand here are gone now, but they used to tell me stories of how awful it was right here in our county and even our neighborhood, and I appreciated hearing their memories and perspectives. When we are having one of those awful drought summers like we had in 2003, 2005, 2008 or 2011, I read the book to remind me that as awful as things seem at the time, it has been much worse in the past. It helps me avoid getting in a "poor me" funk for myself and the garden. At least we have water and can irrigate, for example, and we aren't going to starve if our gardens fail...we'll just buy more stuff at the grocery store.

My dad and uncles were on Navy ships that always seemed well-supplied, but I bet it was different for the soldiers in the field or even those stationed at more remote bases. Can you imagine the logistics of trying to keep ground troops fed? I've always thought that this must be one of the hardest parts of waging war (and I'd rather the world live at peace with no war, but that seems unlikely, doesn't it?).

I don't doubt that spring will be early, but.....I know the cold isn't done with us yet. I don't know how I know, but I know. Perhaps February brings the last of the really cold weather though. I know the trees here are waking up quickly and I hope they don't begin blooming too early and get bit back by later cold weather.

I am so sorry about your cousin losing her baby. That must have been so incredibly painful. I know that the absolute worst funerals/memorial services I have been to were for infants....seeing the tiny casket covered in tiny sweetheart roses punches me in the gut every time. Many years ago, a gentleman I worked with lost two grandchildren---born almost exactly one year apart to the day.---shortly after birth. His poor daughter in law and son went through that painful process twice in just over a year, and it was so devastating. I think grief just about drove that poor young lady out of her mind.

I hope that your little roo is okay. With poultry you just never know because they can get into so much trouble as they dig, scratch and eat. I hope he is better today.

Do you have any sprouts developing yet on the brussels sprouts plants? I do not necessarily agree with removing the foliage to encourage the sprouts, but I know why people do it...the stress of losing the leaves often stimulates a survival mechanism in the plant. You know, since the plants' purpose in growing is to produce seeds to perpetuate their species and ensure it survives, they can bloom more after having leaves stripped...but they really need to be at the point where they are starting to produce sprouts anyhow, or it won't happen. If they aren't producing sprouts at all yet along the stalks, removing the leaves can send them back into making more leaves, instead of sprouts, in order to recover. So, check your stalks for the little buds that will be sprouts and don't remove any leaves if they aren't there. I wouldn't remove many leaves anyway, but that's just me. Mine produce just fine if I leave them alone and let them be and let them produce in their own time. It all is weather dependent anyhow, so if the weather is on your side, you'll get sprouts, and if it isn't you won't. As early in the season as we are, your overwintered plants ought to produce just fine without any forcing when they are ready.

Any turnip can be sweet and tender when harvested as baby turnips. Since you got white ones, my best guess would be that they are White Lady or Baby Bunch. They also might be White Egg or an older variety like Tokyo Cross. Really, you can harvest turnips at any usable size, so if you like them small, then harvest whichever variety you grow when it is at the smaller size. I think that White Lady and Baby Bunch produce a harvest in 30-35 days or maybe 40, depending on how small or large you harvest them.

I want to start gardening, but it is a real mudpit here, so I'm not. I also feel like the weather doesn't want me to get into too much of a hurry. I'm also trying to back off from growing so many veggies this year so I can focus on the yard, but it is hard to get excited about working in the yard when it is all mud and standing puddles of water...while the garden has those nice, well-draining raised beds. Y'all can guess how much this is making me lean towards growing more veggies this year than I had planned, but even if I do that, there will be tons of flowers because there's absolutely no nightshade veggies going into the garden since I need to rotate them out to break the disease cycle. It would be nice to dream that the leaf-footed bugs and stink bugs won't find my tomato plants in containers in the back yard this year, but they will. I know this because they found the six tomato plants I had in containers in the back yard last year, but the spider mites didn't find those 6.

Dawn

We love the salad turnips, too. I have gotten Tokyo Cross and Tokyo Market (open pollinated) at Kitazawa. They didn't offer Tokyo Market this year. It is available several other places though. There is also another hybrid called Hakureis Sorry about your rooster H/J. I know how it feels. Sorry you're sick dbarron. Heaven knows we've dealt with that this winter.

We had a lovely lunch Saturday with Nancy, Eileen (she's been sick, too) and Rebecca.

Sunday we went to Bartlesville for my dad's 93 birthday. He was in the Navy, too. He got in late on WWII. I'm not sure he was out of training before it was over. Then went back in for Korean war, which he spent on a ship at Key West, Florida. He had it rough, huh. Pretty sure he ate just fine and a Minnesota boy in Florida? Maybe he suffered from the heat.

The closest I've come to gardening was seed exchange at our lunch.

Thanks for the videos, Okmulgee Boy!

Moni, I only dug up a 4'x 4' spot yesterday. I'll compost there for several months. Then do the area next to it...and so on. The shop is 40' long, so I've a ways to go. Although, the composting I did last year and the year before really improved the soil there even though it's been overtaken by Bermuda and weeds again. I'm just "lucky" that I have lots of chicken droppings and bedding, I guess. Maybe in a year or so, I can make that wildflower type of garden I want. The back of the shop faces the smaller back garden. It's only 3 raised beds in a U shape with a circular bed in the center of the U that has red bee balm (thanks, Nancy.).

Dawn, coyotes got our neighbors' dog, Walter, 3 years ago or so. It was awful. He was such a cool dog.

My cousin's baby lived for 12 days. She had some type of syndrome and they didn't expect her to live that long. She had so many issues but was bright eyed and could follow you with her eyes. Her severe issues made her ineligible for further treatment. I'm glad she lived as long as she did, though. I'm also glad that her family got to hold her and know her. My mom tells awful stories about how women of her age would be medicated and the baby whisked away without the mother ever holding or kissing or loving on their child. They grieve more horribly, I think, because it's like their baby was never acknowledged. As someone who has lost a young child, it's very important that we know that our young children mattered. It's hard to explain exactly.

Sisko seems better today. I fed him some yogurt and water this morning and tonight. He stood up in the brooder, so I put him in one of the broody hen/mother-baby chick pens to get some fresh air. It looks like he ate some feed too. He's still holding his body in a weird way.

It was nice here today. And then it wasn't. At 3 it was 68 and at 5 it was 48. We walked the dogs around 4. It was cooling off by then for sure.

Amy, so glad you got to meet up with Eileen, Nancy, and Rebecca. Do you think we'll do SF at Thunderbird again? That's just around the corner. Maybe for once we won't have something else scheduled. It seems like every year we have to leave early.

We had another tragedy in our community. A man ran over some kids outside of Moore HS. Killed a girl and put 3 others in critical condition. This all happened next to the duck pond. Our first house (that we owned) was in that neighborhood. Our neighborhood has a Norman address, but all the kids go to Moore schools. I was folding towels and watching Dr. Phil when it broke in. Who, who, who? That's all you're thinking. Who was killed? Who was hurt? Who ran over them? Was it someone I know? Watching it all from the helicopter cameras....you can see teachers you know standing down there. Very, very sad.

I am happy to have another day off work tomorrow. SOOOOO happy. I got all the winter décor put away (and now it's going to snow!) and did some other things that I had been putting off. It was a good day for sure. Until the tragedy at the HS.

Jennifer, I just drove by Elison Feed store . Looks like they got their onion plants out in their shed thing there. I didn't stop to see what they had as it was after dark and they were closed. They usually have crates of Dixondale onion plants of various varities like Yellow Granex, Candy ,Sweet Red ,Red Candy , white and yellow Bermuda and some others. I'll try to go in and see just what they have this week depending on what this winter storm thing does and give a full report.

Something to consider if you want to get your onions there instead of ordering.

I'm pretty much a regular there when the plants start showing up.

Yeah that thing in Moore sucked . What an idiot.

okmulgee boy

I love our little OK GW quartet, meeting up in Tulsa territory. Amy, Eileen and Rebecca. SO good to see you all! And I love the bond we have developed. Rebecca, you MUST get down here--not that far! NOT a big deal. 30-45 minutes! Besides, your curiosity is killing you! So get down here. Wait til April, though, when everything is prettier. . . .? Rebecca is thinking that maybe their family place was on the same road we're on, or very near. Will be fun to get her down here.

I checked out on gardening and ordering and planting the past couple months. I was obsessed with natives and reading up on them, and about environmental emergencies world-wide. GREAT reading, great blessings.

But now, all of a sudden, it's time to put the pedal to the metal and get busy. Get those little grow cart seeds planted, finish stratifying various plants.

Amy, Happy Belated Birthday to your dad. You are so lucky to still have him! My dad never talked much about the Navy years except to go on and on about how awesome the food was....well, of course it was, to him....after growing up largely on red beans and cornbread or corn mush or corn fritters. In the last years of his life, he suddenly began talking about Navy training in Norman, OK, of all places, but his Alzheimer's Disease was already diagnosed and in full force by that point so he never could fully explain what he did there. We think that is where he learned how to repair aircraft and maybe some things on ships, but were never sure. He seemed to remember his Norman years fondly. He was there, apparently, for 18 months and, long after he had forgotten I was his daughter and Tim was his son-in-law, what he did remember was that we lived in Oklahoma, so he'd talk to us about Norman whenever he saw us.

The worst part of the Navy was that if you couldn't swim, they threw you off the ship into the water, he said, and you learned how to swim quickly out of desperation. It almost didn't work for him as they had to fish him out of the water twice so he wouldn't drown, but the third time he was tossed into the water, he swam. His favorite places to visit while on board the ship were Hawaii and The Philippines, but he said mostly they were at sea, away from port, and working hard to keep all the war machines in working order. The tropical areas must have been quite a sight for a Texas farm boy who had never left the farm, really, until he went into the Navy. Two of my uncles never came back to Texas, except to visit, because they fell in love with California when they went through their basic training there, fell in love with California girls, etc., married them and built wonderful lives there after the war.

I've been walking Chris through seed-starting, garden design, etc. and yesterday he dropped by our house to borrow the pick-up to go to Lowe's and get the lumber to build their raised beds after he and Jana designed them on the computer. So, most of my gardening lately has been mental....does that count? They are turning a 20' x 32' section of their back yard into a potager garden and it is going to be so pretty. Hopefully it also will be productive.

Jennifer, We have had several neighbors lose pets to coyotes. It is just awful and heartbreaking every time it happens. We've lost cats to them, but not dogs, but then we have our dogs in their dog yard and don't let them run free any more, and haven't for quite a few years now. In the past, we'd let some of our dogs race around our property for 30-45 minutes and they'd mainly just run through the woods and come back all hot and sweaty and worn out and happy. After a couple of them got into a fight with coyotes one day (the worst thing to hear when you know it is your babies fighting those coyotes.....and you're frantically trying to get through dense, overgrown woodland to get to them), that was the end of running and playing outside the dog yard.

I'm glad your cousin had those 12 days, albeit surely bittersweet days, with their baby. Our niece lost her first child, who was stillborn, about 15 years ago and I thought the hospital handled it pretty well. They took photos of her and it seems like they made a plaster cast of her footprint so our niece has those two things to remember her by, but it still was so very hard.

I'm glad Sisko is better. Maybe he suffered some physical internal injury that just needs time to heal.

Yesterday was pretty nice but no comparison to Sunday's warmth, and the clouds made it seem a lot less sparkling and bright. I hate the endless clouds. Today will be a lot cooler and tomorrow will be flat out cold.

In the garden, the warm temperatures have pushed all sorts of perennials to emerge, including daylilies that are about 6" tall and about to get snowed or sleeted upon, silly things.

I thought of you and your family when I saw the news story about the cross country kids getting hit by a vehicle...while they were on the sidewalk. It is such a horrific thing, and it is hard to believe a sweet girl lost her life because somebody probably was driving impaired. I am sure they'll be able to confirm that after blood tests of the driver, and I hope he faces criminal charges for killing her and injuring the others, even though it will not bring her back. The whole community must be in shock.

My winter décor is put away as well. I knew that it was early to put it away, but there has been so much nice weather, at least sporadically, that I wanted Spring stuff on the mantel, and so it is. The snow storm will be sort of a hit and run, just here a day or two, and then we'll warm up again. I'm going to be really disappointed in this snowfall misses us, as the others have this year, but our local TV mets are adamant that it is coming and we are going to have nice snowfall, so I'm going to believe it is going to happen.

okmulgeeboy, Why do the stores get everything in stock as snow is arriving? The weather here surely must drive them crazy the way it drives us all crazy.

I saw on the website of one of the OKC news channels last night that the driver's son also was involved in a horrific car accident just a few days ago. What in the world? Like father, like son.....and not in a good way.

Nancy, I bet y'all's lunches are so much fun.

I'm starting to get in the mood to garden, but have been a slow starter this year, other than getting the wildflower seeds into the fridge to stratify.

Today I want to clean up and reorganize my pantry. I don't know who messes it up all the time, but since there's only the 2 of us here, I guess I do have a pretty good idea, and the answer is that it is both of us but he is worse about it than I am. I've discovered that the issue with pull-out pantry drawers is that the ones that are roughly waist-height to chest-height get things tossed back in to them because they are the most convenient drawers, even though those items "might" have a proper, permanent place in another drawer. So, today I'll be trying to fish out everything that is not in the spot where it belongs, and then put it back where it belongs. It is a thankless task that I have to do several times a year. It always looks so nice and neat and well-organized after I spend time restoring it to some semblance of order, but that order never lasts for long. And, because somebody doesn't put things back where they belong, I'll find him standing in front of the pantry pulling out every drawer and trying to find this or that. Because he didn't put it back where it belongs, I can't just automatically tell him where it is. I can tell him where it should be though. It is sad that the highlight of my day might be that work on the kitchen pantry, but the weather starts going downhill today and this, at least, is an indoor task.

The same thing does happen with my perfectly organized kitchen drawers. For example, I have all the cooking utensils in a drawer next to the stove. Makes sense. I have all the baking utensils in a drawer next to the mixer and the pantry. Makes sense. Everything is stored right next to where you're going to be standing while using it. There is a certain amount of logic involved. Yet, somehow, all the utensils end up in the one drawer next to the stove, and then I have to dig out all the baking utensils and put them back in their drawer. Why is this so hard for him? He doesn't even do the baking unless you count mixing up pancake batter as baking. Honestly, I'd rather unload the dishwasher myself and have items put back in their correct spot than have someone else unload the dishwasher and put things in random places. He's staying home sick from work today, so I just hope he stays in bed or sleeps on the sofa or whatever and doesn't come into the kitchen and try to reorganize things to suit him. Tim's dad was really bad about that even though the only cooking he did was to turn on the Mr. Coffee machine. He retired before Tim's mom did and decided one day while she was at work that he'd reorganize her entire kitchen and put things where he thought they belonged. Since he never did the cooking, this was a truly bad idea. He then spent the rest of the evening, after eating the dinner that she angrily prepared after working all day (and there might have been a few choice comments about someone reorganizing someone's kitchen, lol), putting things back the way my mother-in-law had them before he went on his reorganizing quest. It scares me how much Tim is like his Dad in this way....and some others.

We miss the sunshine already, the indoor plants and I. They were greedily sucking up all the sunshine coming in through the windows on Sunday, particularly since this whole winter seems like it has been gray and cloudy. Yesterday we only had morning sun for about 1 hour early in the day, and then the clouds came back and the plants and I were not happy about that. I'd like to get two sunny days in a row. Well, maybe that will happen after the snowstorm arrives, drops snow on us, and then moves on elsewhere.

Clearly I haven't ordered enough seeds this year, so the seed companies must think I didn't receive their catalogs. I did receive them, but there's not much I need this year. Anyhow, the second round of catalogs is beginning....as in duplicate catalogs....as if to remind me that I haven't ordered anything from them yet. Sending me a second catalog will not push me to order seeds from these companies though.

Our weather is so goofy. If anyone had asked us on Sunday, we'd have described that warm weather as summer-;like. Tomorrow, however, will be winter-like. I guess today is more like Spring, and I think Summer returns this coming weekend.

Dawn

" I saw on the website of one of the OKC news channels last night that the driver's son also was involved in a horrific car accident just a few days ago. What in the world? Like father, like son.....and not in a good way. "

He sure needed to take his stress someplace else.

" Why do the stores get everything in stock as snow is arriving? "

I don't know but I might check out the feedstore today while we can all still drive.

okmulgee boy

That's funny, Dawn, that the seed companies are sending you duplicates.

I've never ordered huge amounts of seed. I doubt I get a second round. I thought I was done for the year other than onions, but I'm not. I forgot to order a hot banana pepper. And I want to get that lima bean and black bean seed y'all were talking about. I think I'll put them in when the onions come out in June. Y'all said they liked the heat, right?

We need to reorganize our panty too. We have what's called a "chef's pantry" and not a walk-in one. I really miss my walk-in pantry from our last house. This one holds a lot, but it has folding shelves and all. Not quite as easy to use. I'm grateful for it, though. Tom and I definitely have different ideas about how to organize the kitchen. The thing is, he cooks too. So...I have to share. If we were super rich, I would put a kitchen in his shop. I wish we had running water in the shop. I wonder how expensive it would be to put it in....

He already has a freezer, refrigerator, and his 2 smokers in there, along with a lot of supplies. When our dogs pass, I'll add a refrigerator to the utility room that will be only mine. He has a fascination with condiments and jarred sauces/pickles etc. There's tons of them on the top shelf of the refrigerator and it drives me nuts. It's hard to find stuff.

He's a good guy, so I'll just deal with it. haha! And he did agree to move the spices to a side area of the chef's pantry instead of their current location. It will be a GREAT move. I'll be able to see everything (and so will he. Maybe he'll stop buying multiples of spices we already have.). Hopefully at some point soon, I'll start drying herbs again.

Rambling.

I'm about to head out to the store. I want to get a few items in case it really is bad tomorrow. I'm not that worried about it, though.

I might stop by Hobby Lobby too.

I meant to tell y'all that I had another jar of pumpkin puree crack in the freezer. Pretty sure my issue was overfilling the jars.

I guess I'll put the chickens in the pen and head to the store.

Jean Luc is romancing the young pullets (which is creepy because they're his daughters). He's taking them around the chicken yard, and pecking at whatever on the ground and giving it to them to eat. Just him and the pullets. They've started laying eggs. The older girls are in the pen. Animals are interesting, huh? He's a good rooster.

My favorite pullet is red. She's named Jorie, after my girl, Marjorie, that died several months ago. She is very tame and likes to be held. Another cool thing about her is I'm pretty sure she hatched from Sweetie Pie's egg. Sweetie is the hen that died last month.

This year, I'm ordering chicks from My Pet Chicken to slip under the broody hens. I want some specific types. I'll wait to see how many broodies I have before ordering though.

Stay warm Everyone!

Jennifer ( and anybody else)

I stopped by Elisons, on the way to work and here's what they have:

Dixondale onion plants $2.25 / bundle :

Super Star

Red Candy

Candy

Walla Walla

Texas Legend

Texas Early White

Southern Bell Red

Yellow Bermuda

White Bermuda

White Granex

Yellow Granex

Sweet Red

1015Y Super Sweet

Onion Sets , $2/lb:

Red , Yellow , White

Shallots , $6/lb

Garlic , $0.50 a bulb

Seed Potatoes , $1.50 / lb , $57.00 / 50lb sack :

Red Pontiac

Kennebec

Yukon Gold

Also Purple Seed Potatoes for $1.50/lb

Cole Crops , $ 3.00 / 6-pack ( about 3 inches tall or thereabouts)

Kale (no name)

Collard (no name)

Brocolli (no name)

Califlower ( no name)

Brussel Sprouts (no name)

Cabbage : Copenhagen

Early Flat Dutch

Round Dutch

Early Jersey Wakefield

Red Cabbage

Lettuce : Butter Crunch and a couple of others I can't remember.

That's whats there right now . They said there'll be plenty , they keep getting them in.

Back to work.

okmulgee boy

" And I want to get that lima bean and black bean seed y'all were talking about. I think I'll put them in when the onions come out in June. "

Jennifer,

I would plant those a little earlier like in late Apr/ early May when the ground is good and warm enough. (after no frosts)..about the same time as green snap beans.

It takes a while for black beans to mature to the dry stage. I plant Southern peas in early/mid June after the onions and potatoes come out. They produce about the same time okra starts producing in my garden.

My opinion. It could depend on how hot a summer we get ( or how wet).

okmulgee boy

I planted seeds with my little neighbors. They were so excited.

glad I didn’t waste time cleaning the car

Sadly, the news coming out of Moore this morning is grim as another student, a female sophomore, has passed away and one other student, a senior, remains in critical condition. The good news is that one student has been released from the hospital. There must be just an unfathomable amount of shock and grief there today.

The "suspect" has a long criminal history, detailed in some of the news reports, and fled the scene of the accident, though he was caught a couple of blocks away. Last night the news reports were hinting that his son had done something similar, but that was not exactly the truth--they had that part wrong. What they are saying today is that his 29 year old son actually was the victim killed in a hit and run incident a few days ago, also in Moore. What a tangled mess all of this is.

Ha! I stay away from stores when snow is in the forecast because if they are foolish enough to have plants that cannot tolerate the snow and cold, I want to buy them and bring them home to save them....and with 4 kittens running all over the house, the last thing I need is plants that would need to be protected from the kittens. It has been a very long time since we had kittens in this house, and I've forgotten what destructive little beasts they can be---nothing is safe from them, and that's interfering in a lot of projects I'm working on.

Jennifer, Lima beans like heat. If the black beans you're talking about are snap beans or pole beans, they don't like heat. They drop blossoms just like tomatoes when the heat arrives. For all snap beans, I plant as early as I can (usually latest March but only if the soil temperatures are warm enough for them to sprout) to guarantee I'll get a good harvest before the summer heat arrives. After the heat arrives and the blossoms start dropping off the plants, I yank out the snap bean plants and replace them with heat lovers like southern peas. I usually plant Lima beans in mid-Spring so they are producing a harvest not too long after I take out the snap beans. The exact timing varies depending on what the weather is doing. The summer heat controls what I do in my garden and when I do it much more than any other factor, and the later the heat arrives, the better. I don't know how many here were gardening in 2011, but we were hitting the 90s Easter Week at our place when a lot of people didn't even have their tomato plants in the ground yet, which was really discouraging. People here still were planting tomatoes in May when there was little hope they'd ever get a ripe tomato---and most did not. My garden was pretty much done by June because the 100s were arriving and no rain to speak of. Most years are not that extreme, but every now and then we get one where it gets too hot too early and many plants suffer and fail to produce.

Wouldn't a kitchen in Tom's shop be wonderful? Tim likes to cook, but since his daily commute is so long, he really only gets a chance to cook on the weekends...but then I spend the rest of the week figuring out where he put stuff, finding it and putting it back in its rightful place. After he retires, it may get worse because he may cook more. It is good to have men who cook because not all men do. I remember that after Fred's wife, Jo, passed away, he and his son, who lived with him, really struggled because neither of them ever had cooked, knew how to cook or wanted to learn how to cook. With the two of them, it was like the blind leading the blind. We had another neighbor whose wife had severe osteoporosis that confined her to her bed, and he never had been involved in the cooking. First he started complaining to me how bad the Meals-on-Wheels food was because it wasn't seasoned the way he liked it. Then, as I continued to give them veggies from the garden, he asked me to come over and cook it for them. (sigh) He was a difficult person, at best, and I wanted nothing to do with that idea, so I told him that he could cook it himself or get his daughters-in-law (both of whom lived very close) to cook the veggies for him because I was busy with my house, garden, family and fire department and didn't have time to take on another task to do. He wasn't happy and kept whining about it, so I stopped his whining the only way I knew how--I stopped dropping by their house and giving them veggie since it seemed unlikely they'd get cooked and I knew they probably would go to waste. So, for reasons like that, I certainly am happy to have a spouse who cooks, even if it means I find kitchen utensils put away in the wrong places.

Kim, What seeds did you plant?

I'm in no big hurry here. We're supposed to hit 20 degrees a couple of nights from now, so some of the plants emerging too early are likely to get bitten back by the cold, and I'm glad there's not more of them to worry about. The parsley has overwintered and was starting to look really good but it probably is about to get bitten by the cold again. Even as the days get decently warm on the warm winter days, we still are on a roller coaster where the nights cool off drastically and the cold days are really cold. I'm not feeling like I want to do anything too early this year and then have to cover up plants---I can do it, but it gets tedious and old really quickly.

We had rain overnight--about 6/10s of an inch because, you know, our mud puddles might have been in danger of drying up or something. That much rain wasn't in the forecast, but we got it anyway. A concrete yard with the whole garden in containers sure does sound good when the weather persists in raining, raining, raining, not that I ever would go that far.

Dawn

A few years back, starting in 2011 when I had my knee replaced and my hips were so bad I was basically bedridden, Ron and my oldest son did all the cooking. Ron is an excellent cook and HE taught all my children to cook. My cooking, well the joke is you can eat it 4 days out of 5. I'm really good at getting burned stuff off of stainless steel pans. Ron completely rearranged my kitchen. And now, he has to put the clean dishes away, because I don't want to ear it if he can't find something ;)

I hate the "S" word, but I hate the "I" word even more. I hate winter. I slipped on ice when my youngest was 4 months old and broke my ankle. You can bet I won't be venturing outside during this weather.

We set up the light shelves today. No excuses now.

I got a Pinetree and a Territorial catalog yesterday, I don't remember if they sent them before.

I haven't had much inclination to do anything lately. I thought I could at least do some planning and work on my spreadsheet. So yesterday I did the tomato list. It's on the tomato list thread. I bought 2 new cherry tomatoes, what was I thinking? I hate picking cherry tomatoes. And 3 canning types. I hate canning. What a weak moment.

XOXO

Okay, Okmulgee Boy, I'll put the peph peas in after the onions. That's what I've done in the past. I'll rethink the garden layout....

I have the black bean variety written down at work. I thought someone said they were heat lovers, but maybe it was the lima beans, Dawn.

I'm not doing regular pole beans--what I call green beans this year. I am doing bush beans. I found a few Fowler seed leftover from last year. Yay! And I have some Blue Lake bush beans too.

I have noticed that men of a certain generation often struggle with wanting to cook. Most of those men have probably passed away OR are in their 90's now. My grandpa was only about 66 when my grandma died. He was like Brad Pitt when she passed. Women came out of the woodwork. (I realize Brad Pitt isn't the current hunk, but I can't think of anyone current). He refused to learn to cook or work the microwave or washing machine even. He found a wife easily and quickly. She took all of his money and forced him to sell all of his property so there was nothing left for his kids. (she tried to get his kids' share of the farm/mineral rights, but luckily that belonged to my grandma and something about the will protected those things). He got what he wanted, though. She cooked and cleaned for him.

Yes. Another girl died from the incident yesterday. Found out that Tom actually worked with the son who died on Sunday. Supposedly, the son rear-ended a car and the car behind him hit him so badly that it killed him. That driver ran. The son had been involved in another accident several months earlier. That accident had mangled his leg. Tom said he wore a cage-like thing over his leg to protect it and was still recovering from that first accident. I wonder if he was on pain medication. So...maybe the father (who hit and injured/killed the children) was upset and drinking? I don't know. Apparently he had issues before. For whatever reason...it's awful.

So...will we actually get snow and sleet? Will they cancel school?

Amy, your talking about the tomatoes have set my mouth to craving one!

Jennifer , that black bean was "Black Turtle" https://www.vermontbean.com/product/V01253/203

I would plant them about the same time you plant bush beans. The bush beans should produce first while the black bean pods are filling on out and then they should dry later in the pod around late June/early July when it "first starts getting really hot". They are a dry shell type. When they dry , pick them before it rains or they'll start sprouting in the pod and the pod splits spilling them out on the ground.

" So...maybe the father (who hit and injured/killed the children) was upset and drinking? "

I'm sure he was , but that doen't excuse what he did. He should have have took his grief out some other way that wouldn't hurt or kill anybody else. It all just plain sucks.

" So...will we actually get snow and sleet? Will they cancel school? "

Yes, it's already starting out west and southwest and heading this way after dark. I've been watching the weather news all day, looks like it's going to do it up the I-44 corridor clear to Okmulgee/Tulsa area.

OU is closed tomorrow . I'm sure all schools will close. The roads will be very slick and bad .

Take Care you all.

okmugee boy

Black Turtle! How could I forget that name?

School has been cancelled and my other job is closed too! Looks like I get another day off. After last week with zero days off--including weekends--I'll take it!

I started a large project of moving furniture around, so I can finish that up. Maybe organize the kitchen too. Maybe.

If we get the amount of snow that they're talking about, managing the dogs will be interesting. It's been a long while since we've had that much snow.

just don't try to drive anywhere. stay put.

And hope your power stays on.

okmulgee boy

Jennifer, The news out of Moore is just so dreadful. Prayers for the families and the larger school family for peace and healing.

I have wondered if the father's behavior stemmed from the son's death, but then the father already had an extensive history of DUIs in the past, so it seems that there is a pattern there. I still feel bad that he lost his son, but the answer to his pain was not to go out, behave irresponsibly and kill somebody else's children.

Your comments about the women coming out of the woodwork when your grandpa was widowed reminded me that the same thing happened with Tim's dad. I just hate that your grandfather's wife took his money and property. That is just terrible. Tim's dad had a lady friend for a while after Tim's mom died, and then it kind of ended after a few months. I think she wanted more glamour and excitement and he just wasn't in the same place---he really just wanted to be taken care of.

They surely do say the snow and sleet is coming. We never have expected much here, so they left us with the Winter Weather Advisory because we aren't supposed to get enough snow (4") to qualify for a Winter Storm Warning. They also have slightly downgraded our chance of snow and slid in a higher chance for sleet and freezing rain. That figures.

We've been getting all sorts of info from our local Emergency Mgmt folks this afternoon and evening about responding on motor vehicle accident calls overnight, and I sure hope we don't have lots of those. It is incredibly dangerous for our cops, medics and firefighters to be out on the icy highways with people sliding around. Tim's at a house fire now. Well, the back porch is on fire and I am sure it was started by some kind of heat lamp or heater put out there to keep a pet warm. Why can't people just bring the dog or cat indoors on a cold night or two? We get calls like this every year...houses on fire from a heat lamp or a heater (especially if they are plugged into extension cords or surge protectors, which is a huge safety issue) because someone was trying to keep an animal or animals warm. Sometimes it is even worse---a barn on fire. I hope this is the one and only call like this tonight.

We did bring the semi-feral cat, Big Boy, into the mudroom to sleep. He is such a vagabond and disappears for days at a time as he roams around, but he showed up on our front porch tonight, wanted to be fed, and then curled up to sleep on a blanket in a storage tub we have out there for him. This is the first time in at least a week that he has shown up here. We decided it was too cold for him to stay out, so Tim carefully picked him up (he doesn't like to be touched by humans) and put him in the mudroom with a blanket, food, water and a litter box. At first he was an unhappy cat who just sat by the exterior door wanting to go outside. After his frozen body thawed out, his brain engaged and told him it was nice to be warm. So, he ate dinner and curled up on the blanket to sleep. I hope he sleeps well all night long.

Tomorrow is supposed to be really cold, with winter precip of various sorts, and kind of gray and dismal. It seems like a good day to stay indoors and read a book, or flip through gardening catalogs or whatever. The kids and grandkids were here this afternoon, so I sent them home with my Snowman Kit (it has all the parts you need to make a snowman...just add snow) because they are supposed to get 4-7" of snow at their house and they might actually be able to make a snowman. We're only expecting 2-3" here and I have no plans to go out into the yard and make a snowman.

Dawn

Dawn, I'm shocked you and Tim aren't planning to make snowmen and snowwomen :)

LOL LOL LOL. Do you know how many times we have snow in the forecast and get nothing? Pretty much 99.999% of the time. So, it rained all night. Rain. We have massive puddles. It is raining now. Big, wet raindrops falling at a steady rate onto heavily saturated soil so it is forming big standing puddles that aren't soaking in. No snow, no sleet, no ice and, as near as I can tell, no freezing rain yet, although our thermometer here at the house is fluctuating between 33 and 32 degrees, and has been all night. At this point, our February weather remains a poor rerun of our January weather.

I went and looked at the Mesonet temperature map just a minute ago and the freezing line at the moment cuts through our county and, in fact, almost cuts right through our place. The western end of the county may be getting freezing rain or sleet at this point, but we aren't.

Tim and I are too old to go outside and make mudmen, madwomen or mudangels, and the likelihood of anything white falling is decreasing by the minute. After an NWS briefing last night, our asst Emergency Manager sent us all the latest info and said our best chance for winter precip was between 5 and 11 a.m. Well, here we sit at almost 8:30 a.m. and it is nothing but rain so far.

As I was typing the above, a GroupMe from our Emergency Management group hit my phone, saying indeed that out west they have snow and ice and the roads are a bit slick. Northeast of us they have rain mixed with sleet. Perhaps we'll soon get that messy stuff if the freeze line, which they confirmed has been stalled right over us for a while, ever moves further east. I'm not holding out any hope for snow though. At best we'll probably get freezing rain.

If any of you are getting snow, I hope you're enjoying it. We are not enjoying our rain.

I hope our son's family is getting the snow. They're about 25 miles north of us, so at least they have a chance that whatever is hitting the western part of our county may reach them since it is moving from SW to NE. I guess we are too far south again, here, to actually have winter.

I am profoundly disappointed that I am not looking at big, fat, fluffy snowflakes or even teeny tiny grains of snow or even some sleet masquerading as snow.

Dawn

I’m sorry you didn’t get your snow. This is the first significant snow we’ve had in a long while. Seems like we always had a real snow at least once a year when I was young. Then we had a few yesrs...maybe 2010 to 2014 with fun snows.

It has rained all night here too...and it's just a big sloppy muddy mess. The dogs didn't want to go out (even though rain is light)..but managed to finally screw up enough courage to pee at least.

It's coming down in pretty big flakes right now at my house.

Norman has 4.5 to 6 inches in places.

We're supposed to get another wave or two in lighter amounts .Another inch or two on top of what we already have and then wind down late in the day.

It's going to get down cold toight , around 15 or lower , pipe bursting.

Jennifer , protect your pipes.

Dawn , at least you all don't have all the accidents like we are having. Part of I-40 was backed up for miles up around OK City this morning. Jacked-knived semi's and all that.

okmulgee boy

Okmulgee boy, I missed your list until just now. That's quite a selection at Elisons!

Also, I didn't comment about how excited I am for your kids' potager garden, Dawn.

There's probably other things that I've missed too.

Has Larry posted lately? Larry, you okay?

Some of the others I see on FB, so even if they don't post here, I see that they're okay.

Mason went to Costa Rica yesterday. She sent a picture early this morning before I even got out of bed. It was a picture of her hand with a big diamond ring on it.

Wedding planning now.

The animals are bored. Kane actually enjoys the snow. I wish I could just let him out without worrying about him running off. He always comes back, but there's always the risk of him getting hit by a car or some other harmful thing. We think he's a Wheaten Terrier mix...and I think they generally like cooler weather.

I've been watching garden videos but need to get up and do something productive. Tom and Ethan are home, so that makes me less productive for some reason.

I want to put the little roo back with the others. He is bored too. But, I want to wait until the snow is gone and I can observe. See if he's fully healed from whatever happened to him.

Maybe I'll start some flower seed today. Maybe.

Jennifer, I am fine, just sitting in the house watching it rain. The temp is supposed to drop all day, down into the 20's, so we may get snow, but I dont expect much, if any.

I have been laughing at the other post. They sound like they should be mine. i am not laughing about the pain, Amy, I have enough that I know it is not funny. Amy, I am also not a cook. I can do simple things well enough to get by, but Madge just almost will not let me into kitchen. She says I make too big of a mess. If I wash dishes I just stack them on the bar, no matter where I put them, it is in the wrong place. I do not put dishes in the dish washer, I dont do that right either. In no way am I permitted to wash any of her clothes, I dont do that right either. I do wash my clothes if she is gone. I can even get the tough stains out, I guess she must be nastier than I am , lol. We have a joke between us " that if I want to wear the same clothes two days in a row, I have to sleep in them". Anything I have on, if it hits the floor it goes into the washing machine. I dare not to lie down on the floor to pet the dog, or we both go into the washer.

I taught my son to cook also. I use to like camp and hunt. I was married to a different woman then, but a lot of the things were the same. My gun was the only thing I could keep in the house. All my camping tools along with my bow was stored in the shop. My son and I would sometimes cook for his mother and sister. We would sit the camping table up in the breezeway , along with my camping stove and camping utensils and make the meal and take it into the house. We could sit down and have a meal, and a clean kitchen. While we were eating I would tell them that Fredie ( our dog ) was outside doing the dishes, and he may have been, but I would re-do them anyway.

I have greens that should be harvested in the north garden, but I dont think Madge wants me to bring them in, I doubt that it gets cold enough to harm them, plus I really dont want to wade the mud to get them.

I notice that onions and cole crops are as Ace hardware and tractor supply, I expect they are at Atwoods also, but I have not been there.

Madge and I are spending a lot more time together, we are at the stage in our life that spending time together is one of the easiest things we can do, also the most enjoyable.

Ha ha ha, Larry, Ron is not allowed to wash my clothes either. He can load the dishwasher, but if I finish it, I will rearrange it. I'll tell you a secret, it's not that it's wrong, it's that I have learned how to get the most into it and if it's not done my way, I can't finish it. But on the other hand, he empties the dishwasher, he SEES where I put things. Why does he do the opposite?

There's an old joke about a preacher who went to dinner at a parishioner's home. The plates didn't seem clean. He made a comment and the woman said they're as clean as soap and water can get them. After the meal, she called the dogs in, "Here Soap, here Water". Ron used to love that joke.

My dad has dinner every night (at 4:30) with 5 or 6 ladies in the retirement center's dining room. He may not leave his recliner the rest of the day, but he's not late for dinner. My sister takes care of him otherwise, so he doesn't have to find another wife, but I'm pretty sure he could.`

Congratulations to Mason! We have a wedding in Nov. Bought the dress recently.

We have snow. Looks kind of like H/J's picture. Ron took a vacation day. 3 of my kids are working from home today. I won't have to worry about them. My oldest worked overnight and had to deal with the morning mess. He probably has to go back tonight. DIL works at the hospital, she might have been early enough to miss the mess.

As I was using a broom to brush off the snow off my vehicles windshield and such I was reminded of something.

Back when I was a boy we used to make "Snow Ice Cream" . We would scoop up a bowl of clean snow ( not the yellow snow, please) and squirt some vanille extract on it with a little sugar and milk and stir it up. It was about as good as any home made ice cream. That's what I'd be doing now if I had the vanille.

Jennifer , I enjoyed that picture you posted. Was that your chicken coop. We had chickens when I was a boy. I remember their cakacling sound around in the middle of a hot summer day in the back yard.

It was a pretty good snow here in Norman.

okmulgee boy

The ongoing thought is that todays rain water (or snow) may not be pure enough for consumption.

I did that too, but I think I'll pass these days.

my bad ( and my shame)

okmulgee boy

The roads are refreezing now.

Watch it you all

okmulgee boy

When I was growing up we would make snow ice cream also, but that has been many years ago. I dont want the stuff that may be in the snow now.

It is 37 degrees in Ft. Smith, it wont get cold enough to do any garden damage to night, I dont think it will tomorrow night either.

My Dad always made snow ice cream for us with vanilla, sugar, and milk too. Honestly, I didn't like it much, but ate if because it was fun! And Dad made it for us.

Schools are out again tomorrow. I'll probably try to go to my "main" job because I've got stuff to get done. I'll probably wait until noonish, though.

Okmulgee boy, that is my chicken area in the picture. It's sort of a mess right now, and not only because of the snow. The larger structure is the main coop and (somewhat) protected pen. On the right side of the coop is their yard. It's fenced, but barely. As you can see, it's pieced together with a hodge podge of stuff. It worked pretty well for the first year, but it's been damaged. We are going to try to get a better fence up as soon as it warms up. The other little coop is my first coop. It's used for broody hens and hens/baby chicks now. Then behind that is an old dog kennel that we roofed. At "broody" time, we put a broody box into the kennel for the mother and babies.

It has a shanty like feel, but it works and I have plans to beautify it.

Larry, I'm with Amy on the dishwasher loading. It's not that Tom does it wrong necessarily, but if I finish it, I too will rearrange it. I want to get as much into it as possible, and for all of it to actually get clean. I'm glad you're enjoying your time with Madge.

So...while Tom was napping, I rearranged the spices and pantry! I like it a lot. I hope we can keep it organized.

I didn't start anymore seed today. Just watered the seedlings.

It was beautiful out at the lake today... I walked over. :)

Cliff does laundry and dishes. As long as they come out clean, I really don't care how he does it. Besides, he has mad tetris skills so he should be putting them to use.

Office was closed for the weather, so I spent the day puttering around. I ordered a set of lights and a heat mat so I've got them set up ready to go.

My grandmother used to make snow ice cream whenever we got enough snow. There are some things I miss about being a kid.

Ron has mad tetrising skills, too. You should see our freezers. I don't even try to find anything. But he does the dishwasher the opposite of me. He does everything the opposite of me. I don't dry my tops. Had too many things shrink. So to make it easy, just don't wash my clothes. He must have when I was in bed, I don't remember what we did then. He washes everything on heavy duty and dries it in the dryer. He's not allowed to wash sweaters either. Laundry is the one thing I don't mind doing, though I may not fold immediately and the basket of folded clothes may not find it's way to where it lives....

I'm pretty sure the few times we have snow it wouldn't hurt to have snow ice cream. I never got any as a kid. It's funny, my parents were from Minnesota, seems like something they would have been familiar with.

The grandsons mom has the flu.

We did nothing yesterday. I need to get up and take care of things.

Hi all! I've had my head buried in books and researching grant stuff for friends. I feel so lazy when all I do is read or read computer stuff. And yet that's what I've been doing. And nothing else is getting done and I'm so far behind!

Garry and I were just laughing at Tiny, who was outside walking on the rock border of the big center bed. He does not like the snow. He must have tiptoed over to the rocks, and he walked all the way around on them (I guess--I finally quit watching him when he was 2/3 of the way around). He ventured out farther than the other two, who wouldn't even leave the deck. They're definitely Oklahoma cats. It's still chilly today, and looks like it may be a fairly chilly February.

Amy, you know I'm from MN and also Wyoming--I've never ever once had ice cream snow. Crazy, huh! I'd never even heard of it until now. Seems like folks up north could have capitalized on that and saved a lot of $$ on desserts!

We have to go get pics for new church directory. I told them just to use the old one, but that didn't fly. Oh well. We'll just have to find someplace to have dinner, I guess.

That will make three trips to town in four days. Blach. And I'm not even in the mood to eat out.

Yep, we got snow here.

Haha, just kidding.

Garry is the chief dishwasher-loader here. And the unloader. But since he knows he doesn't know where things go, he leaves large serving dishes on the counter for me to put away.

I just deactivated FB. It's a test to see if I can get rid of it completely. But I already found a couple things I'm not liking! I belonged to a few really nifty groups. So that's a bummer. And I DO have good friends all around the state here, and in MN and WY. If I just leave it deactivated, though, I can still use Messenger, Decisions decisions.

Nice photos, all. Loved the Soap and Water joke, Amy.

How's little rooster today, HJ? I've been seeing your seedlings and I'm just glad I'm so far behind, because seeing yours made me want to plant. BUT I had said I was going to wait until the middle of February. I might fudge a little, might get some planted just before the middle. Like in the next few days.

I'm sorry you didn't get the snow you wanted, Dawn! Love the idea of a potager garden. Actually, that's kind of what we had at the school last night. Considering everything in the huge round bed nearly drowned last year, we ended up with a really decent-looking garden.

Well I best get going. This is what it really looked like here yesterday. Loved those big fluffy snowflakes.

Jennifer, Your snow looks nice! I remember 2010---we had the best snow ever that year, and very little since then. Since it has been 10 years, I was thinking we were overdue for a nice snowstorm and that maybe this would be it.

dbarron, Our dogs mostly stood on the porch and peed. They are just completely over all the rain. We need to build them an elevated boardwalk or something because they've about had it with the muddy dog yard. Maybe this weekend we'll get some concrete stepping stones or something and put those in the muddier areas so they can at least stay above the mud for a part of the time they are outdoors.

Okmulgeeboy, Well, we seem to have had accidents on I-35 even when it barely rains, so Tim had to work a couple, and then he missed a couple today because he was at work, but I'm sure we had nowhere near as many as y'all had up there. The worst one here was quite a bit north of us, where more snow likely fell from that band that had hit the SW corner of our county and was headed towards Ardmore in Carter County. I still whined all day about the lack of snow even though it did mean our roads were safer.

Jennifer, Congrats to your daughter and her fiance'. I thought the photos of them on FB were just precious. Do they have a specific month in mind yet for their wedding?

Amy, It is nice that your dad has some company at dinner time. I always do get a giggle out of the way the widow women flock around the widowers.....maybe it is because there's still so many widows for every widower. Tim's dad had quite a flock of them around for a while, but then he went into an assisted living center and I think dementia must have been setting in by then because he didn't seem at all interested in the ladies there.

Y'all, I do remember snow ice cream. We loved making it in the 1960s and 1970s when I was a kid, and if there was any concern about the snow being polluted...well, we ignored it and made snow ice cream anyway. I don't know if I'd do that nowadays.

Amy, Tim and I do everything exactly opposite too, so much so that it is laughable. If we are in the same store and one of us has the basket, and the other one goes a long way off to get something, we never can find each other again because one of us will be going across the main aisle near the back and the other one will be going across the main aisle at the front and we never can find each other. It happens every single time, without fail. Luckily, cell phones solve this problem as long as one of us didn't forget and leave our phone at home.

We finally got snow late yesterday evening, and it wasn't even in our forecast. On the 5 o'clock news the TV meteorologist said one more late band of snow was headed our way and would hit some of the areas missed by the earlier snow. Well, I was sure he wasn't talking about us. He said it would be a hit and run storm and would be gone quickly, and leave little snow behind. Sure enough, within a half hour it was snowing here and then it snowed on and off for 2 or 3 hours. So, how much snow did we get? It is hard to say. Maybe 2/100s of an inch. Maybe 3/100s of an inch. However, it fell at the perfect time just as the temperature dropped to 31 degrees and the roads and all those rain puddles started refreezing. The result of all the very sporadic snow was that the local school districts very quickly cancelled classes, so the kids here were out of school yesterday because of the snow that never came, and then out of school today because the tiniest smidgen of snow started falling last night. I won't argue with the schools' decisions....given there were many big puddles everywhere that refroze, they could have justified cancelling classes even without our little smidgen of snow. We did not have a lovely blanket of snow covering much of anything...just sporadic snow here and there, mostly on bare soil or vehicle windshields or roadways. Wherever there was grass, there wasn't enough snow to be visible. I hope that wasn't our only snow for this year, but it might have been. This morning's frozen ground and 23 degree temperature ensured the cats didn't want to go out at all and the dogs only stayed out for a minute. As soon as the sunlight hit the snow and ice, it promptly melted. We have more rain in the forecast for this weekend and again for next week. I really hate to say this, but all the rain so far this year reminds me a great deal of last winter, and the last thing I want is another winter and spring that is as wet as last year was. I am longing for a much drier year so it is easier to work on outdoor projects, but I don't think I am going to get what I want.

Dawn

I can't believe it's almost been a week since I started the thread...despite rain and mud, the week has flown by...just a couple days till week 2.

Hey, I have little onions sprouting from two weeks ago sowing. I apparently switched pots (in my mind) and thought I was looking at a pot of begonias. No sprouts on the begonias yet :)
Since I'm allergic to eating alliums, I've never grown any form of onion from seed, so this is a new experience, even though this is like a chinese chive.

I have one baby Brussels Sprout hanging on and one volunteer spinach plant. 2 big kale plants are hanging on and, I swear, one of the kale on the compost pile has new leaves. I filled some pots with potting soil yesterday. I'm going to plant leaf lettuce in them today for indoors. Maybe I will have the grandson help with that.

Does anyone grow micro greens? I know you can grow them in potting soil, or use coir? Which is better? That is my next project. Why do I feel like it's still January?

Amy, you should feel like it's almost March, flowers are blooming :)

Well, I just had to go out into the garden, even tho I should not have. My Brussels sprouts are making babies, but there seems to be a lot of mold on them. I pulled some of the henbit from around a few of them and quit. It is just too wet to work out there. My soil is in good shape and the weeds are easy to pull. I have to hit the root ball against the hoe handle to knock the mud off. The mustard is starting to bolt, I wish I could remember what kind I planted, because I would like to keep a mental note on the bolting part. I picked a couple of turnips, both had some hollow parts, one bad, one only on the top part of the turnip. I ate the best looking one and it was very good. I have planted Barkant turnips the past 3 years, the past 2 years it was the only type of turnip that I planted. They are a forage turnip, and I like the taste better than the purple top turnip. They seem to be more hardy and get larger, also they seen to be worse about getting hollow, but that seems to happen a lot on turnips when they start their second growth. I have a lot of cabbage plants that have made it through the winter. I had some red cabbage plants that were going to be thrown away at the Co-op, and they were just given to me at the end of fall planting time, they are the prettiest plants in the garden. The cabbage really looked bad when I planted them, but about half of them lived. I do not have high hopes on any of these plants, except my Egyptian walking onions. I think you could cut them up and put them in the freezer and they would still grow, well maybe not, but I think they are about as hardy as bermuda grass.

It is a very pretty day and I have rested enough for now. I am going back outside and see just what all I can get into.

Oh, the collards That I planted in the garden a few weeks back look pretty good. The collard seeds that I tossed out into the lawn dont look so well. I think most of them drowned.

Up til this year, I've used the dining room table for my planting seeds. I'm roughing it this year. There's no reason I can't use the card table in this room. Besides, I can watch good documentaries while I'm doing it, too. I intended to get going early this afternoon. Oops. . . maybe right after dinner. I cannot believe I didn't get more seed starter yet. Well, I'll just make do until tomorrow or Monday.

We have a few jonquils blooming, dbarron. I saw on FB someone in OK (surely south?) had iris blooming!

Not that pretty here, Larry. Lot better than the past two days, though.

I have nothing outdoors except the garlic, little cilantro patch, a bit of spinach, pak choy, some sort of wildflowers in a 4x4 patch. And maybe, hopefully, in the back 40 in the clearing. Since it was a mix, have no idea what they might; indeed, whether they are wildflowers or weeds. And out front, I think I saw some tiny aquilegias.

Amy, are you and grandson planting? I think I'll plant some of that this evening, too--and some wildflowers that were stratifying. I'm going to put them in totes on the deck and hope we have a few more cold spells.

Yes, more rain this week for us, also, Dawn, and like you, I'm not that enthused. I think this is the wettest winter we've had since I've been here (starting into my fifth year). Well, except for the flooding all at once in December 2 years ago. And in fact, really, it hasn't ever really dried out this fall/winter.

Yes, Jennifer and Amy-- weddings in 2020! Yay. It was fun seeing the photos on FB.

Doesn't look all that organized? (Hahaha, it isn't. ) But I'll get er going. Best to all.

Nancy, when I bring potting soil into the house I get it everywhere. I need to get some seeds started soon, I hope I can do that outside, then bring the flats in the house and place them under lights, Madge did tell me that I could bring my old light shelf into the house and set it up in the center bedroom.

I went across the highway to check on the wildflowers, where I tossed the seeds a couple of months ago. I did not know what I was looking for, but there is a few things coming up. I had pulled the disc through there a few times so the seeds would make contact with the soil. I want to buy one more bag of seeds to plant over there. I thought pea and grain seeds were high, but they cant touch the cost of flower seeds. I will have have over 4 # of flower seeds planted in the wildlife garden by the time I get them all planted. That along with the extra clover I plan on planting should make some bees and butterflies happy. The henbit is blooming, along some of the mustard in the north garden, I will let all that go for the bees because I dont see anything else blooming.

I need to get some containers ready for Madge. We want to try to grow some tomatoes and peppers on the deck, maybe a few other things. Container gardening is new to both of us. Its a good thing that I have a lot of compost to help with the container filling. I some times use old hay to go in the bottom of containers, but that was for flowers and I was not much concerned for them, but it seemed to work. I made a couple of self wicking containers a few years ago for my daughter, but they did not work too well. I think she had then on the south side of her house and did not water them enough.

dbarron, The time is flying by, but I think it is because I'm keeping myself busy with other projects since gardening is a dud so far. Tim and I should put all these long-standing water puddles to use and open a fish hatchery, because we're never going to dry up ever again. We have more rain in our forecast for tonight, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. After that, we are supposed to have a few days with no rain. We'll see if that happens. Our soil is squishy and squishy is not good.

The only flowers we have blooming here are wildflowers, but they are early. The little Spring Beauty flowers have been in bloom (at least on the occasional sunny day or sunny portion of a day) for about a week, so they are slightly behind the henbit and about six weeks or so later than the dandelions. Normally the Spring Beauties do not bloom this early, but once we had that 83-degree day last week, all the plants here declared that it is Spring and they are rushing headlong into blooming....probably too early and undoubtedly they will suffer from later cold weather. We walk past a big Burford Holly each time we walk in or out of the mudroom's exterior doorway. I only have to take a few steps south of the door to look at that holly up close, and so I did...and there's tiny flower buds all over the stems. They aren't nearly big enough to bloom yet, but their presence this early is a bit shocking. I want to knock them upside the head and remind them it is only early February, but they probably wouldn't listen.

Larry, You have a lot going on in the garden considering how wet it has been. We have winter grass (poa annua) dying now, leaving bare patches where the dormant Bermuda grass is visible, because the poa annua cannot handle all the standing water. I wish the Bermuda grass would do the same, but it won't.

Nancy, All the plants are so confused, and it alarms me. Most years when we get the really early blooms combined with the erratic temperatures, we get enough cold later on to freeze back the plants that have bloomed really early. It is different when we have a consistently warm winter....the early bloomers sometimes get away with it, but not in the yo-yo winters. Just in the last week our temperatures have gone from the low 80s here to the low 20s and back up into the low 60s. Most nights have been pretty darn cold, in the 20s, and with frost, so it doesn't matter if you have a lovely 60-degree afternoon as you're still likely to have a 20-something degree morning. It drives me crazy, and I'm guessing the plants don't love it either.

I noticed poppy plants popping up in the front wildflower meadow. They must have been in the wildflower seed mix I sowed back in November...or October....or whenever it was. Normally the poppies don't pop up here until late March or early April, so it is odd to see them sprouting in early February. Everything is odd this year.

I still have no veggie seeds sown indoors. Maybe Monday. I won't get it done any earlier because the grandkids are here and they are keeping me busy. I'm totally not in the mood to grow veggies this year---I wanted to focus almost 100% on renovating the landscape and just let the front veggie garden be mostly all wildflowers, but the rain is ruining those plans. You cannot rent a sod cutter and cut up remove sod that has saturated soil (and standing water), so we cannot start on that most important part of redoing the landscape and it is making me crazy. I'm wondering if it will stay too wet all Spring to work on the landscape. That really would drive me crazy. I may have to revise my plans and postpone the landscaping (and I am not happy about that prospect) until we dry out this summer, and just plant more veggies than intended in order to keep myself busy and out of trouble. I hate this rainy year already.

Larry, I am planting tomatoes and peppers in containers this year, and will fill the bottom half of the containers with old half-rotted wood, chopped/shredded autumn leaves, twigs and compost....hügelkultur style. I'll then fill the top half of the containers with a good soil-less mix.

I've been "consulting" with our son on his gardening all week...starting seeds, building raised beds, etc. I even picked up some supplies for him today while I was out grocery shopping because he was at work. It is fun watching him getting heavily into gardening. They have a new worm bin and are really getting into vermicomposting so the girls can learn how that works. He knows more than he thinks he knows because he always helped me with the garden when he was a kid, right up until the time he got his driver's license and decided he had better stuff to do. I think he fears he has forgotten everything he ever knew about gardening, but I can tell that he has not. The apple does not fall far from the tree....

It is late, I am awake and everyone else is asleep, so I'm going to go start next week's thread before I go to bed myself.

Dawn