My turn... with Ark's blessing I'm going to post some fall pics taken in Fort Smith yesterday. Unfortunately, the trees peaked 2-3 days before I could get the camera out and most trees lost a LOT of color, especially the sugar maples. Some pics were taken at my house, some on the side of the road and some just off the road in town. Let's start with sugar maple pics: Acer saccharum By jp_42_82 at 2011-11-10 By jp_42_82 at 2011-11-10 By jp_42_82 at 2011-11-10 By jp_42_82 at 2011-11-10 By jp_42_82 at 2011-11-10 By jp_42_82 at 2011-11-10 By jp_42_82 at 2011-11-10 By jp_42_82 at 2011-11-10 By jp_42_82 at 2011-11-10 By jp_42_82 at 2011-11-10 By jp_42_82 at 2011-11-10 By jp_42_82 at 2011-11-10 Liriodendron tulipifera By jp_42_82 at 2011-11-10 By jp_42_82 at 2011-11-10 By jp_42_82 at 2011-11-10 Prunus spp By jp_42_82 at 2011-11-10 By jp_42_82 at 2011-11-10 By jp_42_82 at 2011-11-10 By jp_42_82 at 2011-11-10 By jp_42_82 at 2011-11-10 The camera really did not do justice to the last two pics above. Beautiful oranges... Carya spp By jp_42_82 at 2011-11-10 By jp_42_82 at 2011-11-10 By jp_42_82 at 2011-11-10 By jp_42_82 at 2011-11-10 By jp_42_82 at 2011-11-10 By jp_42_82 at 2011-11-10 By jp_42_82 at 2011-11-10 By jp_42_82 at 2011-11-10 By jp_42_82 at 2011-11-10 By jp_42_82 at 2011-11-10 By jp_42_82 at 2011-11-10 By jp_42_82 at 2011-11-10 More coming...

Well, I just can't believe it. I dropped the 2 pounds that I had gained. I don't know how that happened - probably fluid. I'm feeling much better. Each day is an improvement but still need lots of rest it seems. I've got good movement in the arm now without it hurting and it isn't hurting to lie on that side now. I'm supposed to take the tapes off on Monday if they haven't come off themselves. There is no sign of them loosening. I'm dreading doing that. Wish someone else would, but I don't really have anyone to ask. Good luck wild chicken. You can do it. Letting others put you down is not a good thing to do. Putting others down is not good either. I have a sign on my desk that says " Don' take unfair advantage of any person and don't let any person take unfair advantage of you" I don't know where I found those words, but at the time they were meant for me. It knocks all the confidence out of oneself until you decide to take action. It appears you have reached that point. I'm sure that will motivate you. Just perseverve and you will lose that weight. Think how happy you will be!!! Please keep us updated. That helps, too. I know it helped me. All the best to eveyone.

HONEY!!!! --Sorry, just answering Besh's question about sugar. Yeah, I've really been reading labels closely for about a month (to eliminate high frutose corn syrup) and got rid of sugar last week. No sugar at all now--just local and Canadian honey. I don't miss the sugar at all. I also cut out coffee at the same time. I switched to tea. So far, so good. No headaches -- yet. Here are my meals today on the Mediterranean Plan: Brekky: Cottage cheese with pomagranate and a little honey. Snack: tea with honey Lunch: Mediteranean Egg Salad: chopped eggs, olive oil, crushed cashews, green CANNED Italian olives (NOT salted jarred ones!) on a 2 slices of Tuscana bread (drizzled with olive oil and balsamic vinegar. Snack: Honey gold apple. Dinner: A slice of baked chicken (stuffed with a whole sliced lemon, oregano, garlic, 1/4 red onion, and salt-n-peppa. I baked it at 500 degrees in a convection over for 45 minutes.) The outside was crispy and the inside was so moist! Served cous cous (cooked in very low-salt chicken broth) with it and some mezethes (Greek appetizer plate) a few chunks of feta and tomatoes drizzled with olive oil, a few green olives, and a sliced peeled cucumber. Dessert: A cupps tea with some honey. Tonight after dinner, I mixed the leftover cous cous with feta, green olives, crushed cashews, a smidge of olive oil, and voila, lunch for tomorrow. I'll bring the cherry tomatoes a client brought by to add to the cous cous and toss in an apple for my snack. Right now, I am going to turn down my crock pot that I have some lamb cooking in. I rubbed the lamb with lemon zest, chopped garlic, oregano, and Meditteranean spice mix. Then I tossed some carrot chunks & red onion in the pot with the meat, poured some chix broth in there and dumped a 10 oz bag of fresh spinach on top of the whole thing and on went the lid. I'll let that cook overnight and finish it in the morning. Dinner will be easy! Okay, enough food talk! But I'm having fun cooking all these NEW recipes!

Megan, I am so concerned about everyone in Nebraska---of course, I think the farmers and ranchers are getting the worst of it, but then there's all the local businesses whose livelihood depend on the farmers and ranchers too. It is so heartbreaking and so devastating and really, simply stunning, when you read the first-hand reports and see the videos and photos. My mind is boggled. How in the world does anyone recover from such utter devastation on so many fronts---not just the loss of their financial livelihood, livestock lines they've been breeding forever, buildings, equipment, land that may be silted, badly eroded and ruined for some time in terms of being able to use it properly and start working on recovery, etc., but then the loss of homes, personal belongings, family heirlooms, paperwork, etc. Then there are the communities that will be crippled with overwhelming financial needs---roads, water treatment plants, and other infrastructure that need to be rebuilt, etc. My heart goes out to all the people there, and I think Nebraskans overall are such good, strong, salt-of-the-earth folks who are used to taking care of themselves and their neighbors, and I worry about the mental and psychological toll all of this will take on folks like that who aren't used to asking any form of government for help. They are going to need all the help they can get. There is the larger worry about other states too. Water flows downstream, and all those crazy-heavy winter snows are going to melt, and then the ground will thaw in the cold states, releasing even more water that currently is trapped as in-ground ice, etc. The flood outlook for much of the country looks really bleak for the next few months. My mind goes back to 1993 and the massive flooding that year, and I wonder if this year's flooding could come close to that. At the present time, only mild flooding is expected to touch Oklahoma so I don't think most of us have to worry about flooding, but we still do have heavily saturated soils already and our rainy season really hasn't begun yet. It really doesn't take flooding to create garden struggles---just heavily saturated soil alone will do that. I read an outstanding blog post about the spring flood outlook on WU yesterday, and it was very sobering to read it and to think about all the lives potentially to be affected by the coming Spring 2019 floods. I hope you have a productive weekend and can get gardening things done. After a productive last couple of days, I feel much better about the spring garden overall, even though my soil moisture still is horrifically high, even in my raised beds. I am trying to file away all those concerns about soil moisture in the category of "that which I cannot change" because even well-amended, raised beds that function just fine 90% of the time still are going to be wet after months of being 100% saturated plus. At least there are no puddles standing in my raised beds. Jennifer, I will start by saying that I do not believe four o'clocks form long running roots like that--they form huge potato-like tubers that can get to be the size of a human head in just a few short years, but....having said that, those little plants, including the one you're holding in your hand, look quite a bit like emerging four o'clocks....not seed-grown four o'clocks, whose cotyledons are quite distinct and not visible in your photos, but returning four o'clocks. So, I guess the question is whether or not you have any four o'clocks to compare these little plants to, and if not, what else do you have growing that has similar foliage. I think they are a weed because those little heart-shaped leaves look so familiar, but I don't know the name of them. What I remember about them is that I removed little ones like that from our garden by the hundreds for several years in our first decade here until they finally all were gone. The thing about those little greenhouses is (a) they don't keep plants warmer outdoors at night unless you run a heater at night because the plastic has virtually no heat retention value and they are too small to have enough mass inside to hold heat....so on freezing nights, without a heater, plants will freeze; a person might be able to mitigate that a small bit by placing them on a concrete or stone foundation like a patio or a corner of their driveway though. (b) Strong wind will bend them, break them or carry them away---I have seen this happen to people over and over again who loved their little portable greenhouse until the first strong wind it faced destroyed it. Sadly we have no lack of strong wind here in OK in some months. (c) The smaller a greenhouse, the harder it is to properly regulate the temperatures inside, so keeping the plants warm enough at night and cool enough during the day is a real challenge. Even small hard-plastic 4' x 6' greenhouses are hard to regulate (I had a neighbor with one and an uncle with one) temperature-wise. I know folks who have gone off to work happily, leaving their plants in their little portable soft-plastic greenhouses like this, only to come home on a hot Spring day and find the plants pretty much roasted, toasted and dead or dying because they forget to unzip the door to release heat or they chose not to unzip the door because the morning air was so cold when they left for work. A person who is home all day and who can unzip the door and open it to vent out heat might have more success with them, but there's still the issue of them not holding in heat at night. I always like them when I see them and picture plants inside sheltered from the wind and then toy with the idea of buying one just for hardening off plants right inside the garden, but I don't buy one because I know how hard it is to regulate temperatures inside my much-larger hoophouse style greenhouse, and it has 4 operable vents for air flow and cooling and two walk-in doors that can be opened to facilitate air flow and cooling too, and I have a large evaporative cooler I can roll into it and use as well, and I've been gardening long enough to know the smaller the greenhouse, the harder such temperature and air flow regulation is. The best use for these little things is either inside a garage or barn to protect seedlings from cats, mice and such, or inside a house if cats are a problem, or maybe inside a larger greenhouse or hoophouse for plants that need extra cold protection or perhaps if you need to do serious plant propagation you could do it inside one of these because you could hold in the humidity better in such a small confined space---sort of like a propagation chamber. Be grateful you don't have standing water...it breeds mosquitoes and ground that has been saturated for months develops a sour smell that smells worse than a swamp. I am sure that all the grasses and wildflowers are dead in the areas where water has been standing almost nonstop since September. I always hope for rain to miss us here during March and April when it is time to plant because wet, soggy clay is hard on seeds, often rotting them before they can sprout. I can water if we are too dry, but I don't have any way to extract excess moisture from the soil. When I was planting brassicas this week, I hit standing water about 2" lower than the depth at which I was transplanting seedlings, and that is in a raised bed, albeit a raised bed at the lower, more soggy end of the garden. Sadly, that well-amended clay seems to wick moisture upward from the wetter ground beneath the raised beds. So, my brassicas may not make it and if they don't, they don't, and I'll just move on to the next thing. I am worried about what Spring rainfall will do to an already soggy garden but rainfall is one of those things over which we have no control. The sad thing is that we could use this moisture in June, July and August, but those are the months when rain can become quite rare to almost nonexistent. Jen, I am watching our forecast and thinking that the cold nights are almost done with us, so maybe you can squeak through this Spring without having to do too much more plant protection. Our soil temperatures, at least in the raised beds, are coming up pretty rapidly too. We just need for the nights to stop dipping into the 30s because that is keeping the soil from holding its nice daytime temperatures, which are in the 60s. I probably could plant tomato plants in the ground today, and certainly could plant them in containers, and feel like the soil mostly is warm up for them, but our average soil temperatures keep lagging behind our daytime soil temps because the nights are still slightly cool on some nights. We also haven't had much really strong wind....say, gusts in the 30s or higher, since the bomb cyclone moved on, so I'm hoping that March, which did come roaring in like a lion here, is now sedating departing like a lamb. This has been a pleasant change as the tomato plants are out all day long now and get enough wind to toughen them up but not so much wind that they are damaged. It is supposed to rain on and off here all day, so there's probably no hope to get in any gardening at all. At least everything that I transplanted into the ground earlier this week should get some nice light rain, and hopefully no big downpours or I'm going to have to build raised beds on top of my raised beds, which would be ridiculous. Almost "everybody" is back now....Purple Martins, hummingbirds, monarchs, etc. to add to a plethora of bees, bumble bees, wasps, yellow jackets, all kinds of moths and butterflies, craneflies, etc. This week Spring absolutely exploded into being here, not only in name, but in the reality of the flora and fauna, and it is so good to finally feel like I can start spending at least a part of every day in the garden. As long as the grandkids are still living here, it likely won't be all day every day because the 4 year old gets bored after about 4 hours of gardening time, but Chris and Jana are working on the last big project---that 14' long closet that is almost big enough to be a room and, once they finish that, they can move into their home. I'm going to miss them, and I haven't minded adapting my garden time so I can spend more time with the girls---it truly has been a gift to be able to spend so much time with all 4 of the---the big kids and the little kids---over the last month and the house undoubtedly will seem too quiet, too empty and sort of lonely once they are gone. Dawn