Hello, Al. We had some electrical stuff going on here and my power conditioner was going nuts. Today I had to chkdsk my drives and just got back online. I'm not sure yet what it takes to get started. No idea how much of anything I need, though I know I'm not ready to make large quantities yet. I would be mixing in small amounts since I would need to use a container that fit on my rather small table in the garage. If I only need three ingredients, I suppose I could talk my husband into storing three large bags, though I'm not sure what large means since fifty pounds of a lightweight material would be a lot larger bag than fifty pounds of stone. Would the T67 Soil Sieves at $17.97 be sufficient? They don't seem like they would be heavy. Someone mentioned esj collanders. If that's like the one I drain pasta or greens in, it sounds managable. I'm thinking a dishpan to mix the ingredients would be easier than something larger. Mid May seems so close! I know you say it wouldn't be a hardship to come early, but it feels like it would be such an imposition. At the same time it sounds so promising. I could check with my daughter (who has offered to help me) and see if she could be here to work with us and keep my brain less scattered. Since the fibro has gotten worse I get overwhelmed easily. Frustrating because I used to be easy going. I would need to get started now to have things here that we need, especially if I have to order them. Would you give me a better idea of what I would need to have ready and set up? Meantime, I'll check with Mary (my daughter) and see if she would be free on the 13th. Please, if anything comes up that makes it inconvenient, don't hesitate to let me know! Just a side note. One or two of the plants I bought seems to be planted in some kind of bark. The water just runs down the side of the pot and doesn't absorb at all. Is this a danger with bark or did they use the wrong kind/not enough other things mixed in. I don't usually let plants sit in water, but it seems the only way these can get a drink. I don't mind watering often; in fact it would be better because I would be less apt to forget if it was a more regular routine. Reminds me, I need to have pots also. So much to think about. Will wait to hear from you. I don't manage to get online every day but will try and check often. Bless you so much for your willingness to help, Al. Peggy

THE OLD MAN AND WOMAN STRUCK AGAIN! Friday night, they left the garage door open ajar because of below zero temperatures (minus 16 to be exacct) and were worried about our cat Toeby. (The old sweeties really are caring and sensitive at times.) I'll post a picture of Toeby below. (He has 6 toes on each foot.) Well, this led to our pipes freezing and bursting in our furnace/pump room at 3 a.m. In the night, I heard the sound of rushing water, ran out to the garage, and freaked as I tried to turn off the pump in frigid temperatures. The plumbers came later in the day and fixed everything and gave us a $650 bill! Remember, our hot water heater incident earlier in the week cost us $1000! So, the whole time we were writing a check, the old man and woman were laughing! Oh, after the plumbers left, Carol wanted to do a load of laundry. Well, the Old Lady and Man had frozen the drain pipe and water went everywhere in our laundryroom. I had enough! I had them pack their bags and shipped them off on the train with a one way ticket to....! Are they headed your way? Be prepared! I'm exhausted from Winter Break! I need a vacation from my vacation! LOL Bear Hugs! Kirk

Susan, It is more complicated than you think because it depends on when the drought began, and it depends on whether we're only abnormally dry at planting time or if we're in worse condition....like maybe in extreme drought. I have to try to "guess" which crops will be worth irrigating if the drough conditions continue on throughout the growing season. If the drought begins in the fall and already is pretty serious by spring (which seems likly to be what we have occurring now), I try to choose short-season varieties of veggies that will mature more quickly than the varieties I'd choose in a year with more normal rainfall. If winter rainfall has been good and I feel like summer drought is inevitable but still months away, I'll plant our favorite varieties in spring, but won't plan on any succession plantings. Normally, I am constantly succession planting....as soon as one variety of bush bean slows down for example, I'm yanking it out and replacing it with something else....but not in a drought year. I'll use corn as an example of the kind of choice I make when facing drought. Usually, I'll plant Early Sunglow for a very early crop. If I plant it the last week in March, I can harvest before Memorial Day weekend. But, I'll also plant either Country Gentleman shoepeg corn or Texas Honey June corn (very earworm resistant) sometime in mid-April thru late-April and will be harvesting that in July. However, if we are already months into what seems to be an ongoing drought, I'll only plant Early Sunglow and not plant a succession crop of corn to follow it. Sometimes, in a mild spring with lovely rainfall and prospects of much more (like 2004 and 2007), I'll plant Early Sunglow in late April, Country Gentleman about 3 weeks later and then Texas Honey June about three weeks after that, but that's only if I expect the pretty good rainfall to continue. With tomatoes, if I expect drought I'll go with more early-season types and more determinates or compact indeterminates. I'll plant a lot more in containers and a lot fewer in the ground. Any variety with heavy PL or rugose foliage is more likely to make the Grow List if I'm expecting drought because the foliage provides better cover for the fruit on the intensely hot summer days. With other veggies, I try to select varieties that mature as early as possible in case I have to turn off the water faucet in July and walk away from the garden. There's just a limit to how much we'll spend on irrigation because, as one of our neighbors always reminds me, there's a point where the cost of the water exceeds the value of what you're growing and you start losing money. I also tend to go with bush varieties of veggies in a drought year instead of vining varieties, so I might pick 'Raven' zucchini instead of Cocozelle or Costata Romanesco. I also only plant the smallest melons in drought years---say going with Blacktail Mountain, Yellow Doll and Sugar Baby instead of Black Diamond Yellow Belly, Orange Tendersweet and other larger melons. Fall tomatoes probably are out of the question in a drought year if the drought has not broken by June because it will take too much water to get them from seedling size in late June to the ripening stage in Sept. or Oct. Or, I might plant a few for fall, but only in containers. The tomatoes that have performed best for me in drought are the Livingston tomatoes. They produced in 2005 and 2006 with no irrigation at all after July, even though everything else except eggplant (they are remarkably heat- and drought-tolerant) and okra died after I stopped watering. There are some specific varieties of each vegetable that seem more heat-tolerant and drought-tolerant than others, and it is those varieties I'll turn to during drought periods. Instead of succession planting bean plants all summer long, I'll plant a lot of beans in spring and try to fill up the freezer with them and then not plant a succession crop of beans to follow them. Instead I'll plant a lot of southern peas, probably Knuckle Six-Week Purple Hull and Purple Hull Pink Eye because heat doesn't bother them. Okra is the same way....heat and drought don't stop it at all, although the heat might slow down production a tiny bit during the worst part of the drought. The big area where I make a lot more cuts is with the flowers, though. If I am expecting drought, only the toughest, hardiest, most heat-tolerant and drought-tolerant types get planted. Even zinnias will wilt, brown and die without irrigation in the worst droughts, but portulaca, gomphrena and verbena bonariensis usually won't. In a bad drought year, the only pumpkin I'll grow is Seminole because it laughs at drought, and I never plant big pumpkins in drought years because big pumpkins guzzle water. Some things that I grow "for fun" like ornamental gourds might not get planted in a drought year because I'll need to be using the water for stuff that really matters. I also start irrigating much earlier in a year when ongoing drought is present at planting time. In 2003 and 2005 I kept waiting for the rain to start falling and didn't water much at all. That was a poor strategy because the rains never came. What I have done in more recent drought years is to water very well in spring if it is droughty, hoping that with good irrigation the plants will produce a good crop before the temperatures skyrocket . Finally, in some cases, it isn't that I choose to plant something else or to water earlier, it is that I'll plant peppers, for example, in containers instead of in the ground so it will be easier to keep them evenly moist, or I'll plant them on the westernmost edge of the garden where the pecan tree will shade them in the afternoon. I also will sneak more veggies into the mixed tree/shrub/perennial borders around the house because they will be watered no matter what, so any veggies planted there likely will produce better than those in the garden whose water gets cut off in July. When we first moved here, there was a wonderful gentleman a couple of miles from us who planted his garden April 1st and stopped watering July 1st. It drove me nuts that he arbitrarily just stopped watering July 1st, but after going through several southern Oklahoma droughts since moving here, I see the method in his madness. As time goes on, I'm becoming more and more like him, except I don't necessarily have an arbitrary cut-off date when I stop watering. Instead, I look at how dry it is, how much water would be reguired and look at the long-term forecast to see if I can maybe baby the garden through a hot spell and expect relief soon. That's what happened last year. I was about to give up on keeping the garden watered in July and then we had a big rainy spell that lasted a few days. Then, I watered some in August in the hope a tropical storm would send rain our way.....and in September Hermine gave us 9" in a couple of days, which kept the garden going a bit longer. At a certain point, if we are in extreme or exceptional drought, I am so busy with the VFD that it doesn't even matter what my garden is doing because I won't even be at home long enough to harvest whatever is producing. It was that way in July of 2006. We had as many as five fires a day and most of them lasted at least a couple of hours, if not days. If I wasn't at fires, I was rushing to the store to buy groceries and Gatorade or busy cooking at home so I could take meals to the firefighters. When drought is that bad, the garden becomes irrelevant and you can imagine that I don't like abandoning my garden at a time like that, but it is necessary. Hope this helps a little, Dawn

"digging in someone else's trash is a 'good thing'" cj, I just tell myself it's karma. When I was growing up, my mother had a friend who was a florist. One day when my mother drove by Celeste's house/shop, she saw a zillion pots of mums sitting at the curb for the trash man. Celeste told her that the plants had been forced to bloom for football corsages, & that she was finished with them; it was cheaper for her to buy new ones next year than to coddle these over-stressed plants.... & she told my mother to take all the plants she wanted. thought I was gonna die of embarrassment. Every night-before-trash-day, my mother found some reason to run an errand that, coincidentally, took her right past Celeste's shop, & she *always* went through the floral "trash". & would she *ever* go by herself? Noooooo...Sylvia had to go with her. I was mortified, & I swore I'd never do anything like that ever again. Karma hears you when you say things like that.