Here are some pics of the blowing snow I have in Joplin. Since it is blowing so much. It is deep in one place an next to the grass in the next spot. [IMG]http://i49.photobucket.com/albums/f280/jspeachyn5n5/snowing/GEDC0212.jpg[/IMG] [IMG]http://i49.photobucket.com/albums/f280/jspeachyn5n5/snowing/GEDC0213.jpg[/IMG] I could not believe how cold that wind was until I started trying to clean it off the walk. Then a nice young man stopped an asked if it would be ok for him to shovel my top drive. I almost thought I was seeing things for a moment. I guess I just was so used to doing it my self. Thank you who ever you were. Hope this works been a long time since I tried to post pics. Bonnie

dbarron, I'll probably have to start all mine indoors too. Then I'll build the plants little boats and they can spend the rest of the spring and summer floating downhill, slipping through the garden fence, slipping and sliding across the front wildflower meadow and sliding happily down the embankment into the bar ditch, and then they can travelthrough our creek until they end up floating down the Red River. Maybe they'll wave bye as they float away. That is how discouraging all this rain is. I already can visualize my plants floating away before I've even started seeds. Yesterday when everything was frozen solid, our soil looked dry. It looked so good from inside the house, though walking on it wasn't that great when I went outdoors. Then the frozen ground thawed out during the morning hours and turned back into mud. I'd start hoping for drought, but I've been watching the videos of the 400 million locusts destroying Africa and headed into Asia, and I don't really want a drought because that's when our grasshoppers try to turn sort of locusts. Although... I should point out that it was a couple of rainy years that have given rise to the plague of locusts there in Africa, and we have had more than a couple of rainy years here....and I saw grasshoppers hatching out and growing in both December and January. I haven't seen many lately, so I'm hoping they drowned in the rain. It is just so wrong to have grasshoppers here in the winter, and in previous years when they were hatching out in the winter, we had a horrible problem with them all summer long. Those usually were drought years though. Jen, There have been years I've grown too much basil and I'd say you're about to have one of those years! The good thing is that it is a great companion plant and if you truly have too many plants taking up too much space, you can cut them back relentlessly....and they'll grow right back. If you have more than you can use, and more than you can dehydrate or make into pesto, you can use basil as fillers in bouquets, or tie together a lot of sprigs artfully to form a swag to hang up in the kitchen...and it will perfume the kitchen for ages. Larry, The wading pool idea sounds like a winner to me, but wouldn't work here because the 4 kittens would think it was just a big kitty litter box. I already have trouble keeping them out of the houseplants. Nancy, I always had too much lemon balm, but I just pulled out excess seedlings or dug up excess plants. I figured I'd never be rid of all the lemon balm. Then, in 2015 we got around 79" of rain and the perpetually wet soil finally killed the lemon balm plants. I was not sorry---for once, having dense wet clay was an advantage. Every now and then a lemon balm plant will pop up here or there in a raised bed, but not in great abundance like we once had, and that is a relief. Chris has been building the raised beds for their potager garden in their back yard, and he's just had to work around the rain. He has it about half built. I think he'll get the other half built this week. He needs to---he has seeds started and tons of plants all over the place and they are going to outgrow his light shelf soon. We are praying for an early last freeze so he can get those babies in the ground. He is at a much higher elevation than we are, so he probably will be able to plant before we can even though he is further north. Microclimate is everything. This morning, the nursery delivered his dump truck load full of garden soil that he intends to use to fill the beds in the potager garden. He's already dug out and removed all the grass from the potager garden area, which wasn't too time-consuming since he has loose, sandy soil. Anyhow, his driveway is fairly narrow and slopes sharply uphill and they didn't think the dump truck could back up that driveway with the load of heavy, wet garden soil, so they dumped it at the base of the driveway, covering his driveway, the sidewalk and a great deal of the yard. Ooops! Wanting to clear the sidewalk off and regain use of the driveway, he and Tim spent a long, hard few hours pushing wheelbarrow load after wheelbarrow load of heavy, wet garden soil up the steep driveway. That effort got it to the top of the driveway, but they couldn't wheel it into the back yard because it is incredibly wet (of course). So, they spread out the soil in heaping piles, covering up about half their driveway--the upper half, which leaves the lower half available to park their vehicles. Chris is hoping the soil will dry out quickly on the concrete, and then he can load it up again and wheel it into the back yard. The important thing to him is that the rest of their driveway is usable and the sidewalk is clear. The two of them went to lunch afterwards and had a nice father-son day together, and I predict both with be sore and achy tomorrow. I was home with our animals, letting them in and out as it pleased them, and doing housework and stuff. I didn't really want to shovel and haul dirt uphill so was smart enough to stay home. The cats and dogs were happier today, but we still have a ton of puddles and mud. Amy, I'd be happy if I only had to go to one store, but since we occasionally drive all the way to the metroplex to go to Costco and Central Market, I make a list and we stop at every other store we need to visit so we are getting the most bang for our buck after using all that gas to drive down there. It drives me crazy, though, and I cannot get out of the metroplex and back home quickly enough. It doesn't even matter if we only go to Gainesville or Ardmore, I've still had 'enough' of it after one store and just want to rush through whatever else we need to do to get home. Rebecca, Your poor nephew! Tim was about the same age when he slammed, face and teeth-first into a tree while sledding, and much expensive dental work ensued. I'd say an early Spring definitely is happening overall, even though we still have occasional nights in the 20s. All our Spring birds came back around 4 weeks ago, and everything here is sprouting, budding and leafing out, including trees. We went from sort of 0 mph to 60 mph overnight. I am sure more cold nights, and the threat of snow, will keep Spring from plowing ahead too enthusiastically, but she definitely is here. I noticed today that trees along the Red River are really leafing out now, though ours here at the house are a bit further behind and are only either flowering or budding. For those of us with allergies, I am sure the pollen counts are about to go off the charts. Jennifer, You do have a long list! I have a perpetually long list as well. The Stone Barn at Blueberry Hill surely will have blueberry plants, won't it? Otherwise, why the name? Some people have success with blueberries here, as long as they amend the soil to very acidic levels and put in an irrigation system to pamper those plants through our long, hot summers. The further northeast a person goes in this state, the easier it is to succeed with blueberries. Regardless, whether they have blueberry plants or not, I'm sure it will be an awesome place for a wedding. Hopefully Diana will adjust in the long run. She just may need time. Some cats take a long time to relax and calm down and become comfortable. We have a busy day planned tomorrow, but Monday I plan to be out in the garden at least doing some garden clean-up and weeding. I may have to carry out a sheet of plywood to put down in the pathway to kneel upon so I'm not soaking wet and muddy, but I've done that in the past and it has worked pretty well as far as keeping me above the mud. The next couple of days will be nice, but then the rain comes back. Honestly, can we not have one single week without rain? I'm so over it! Dawn

Farmgardener, I am so sorry about your tomato plants. Being rural with lots of herbicide-loving people around, we get drift every year and, yes, it is heart-breaking and frustrating beyond measure. Some years we get it once or twice and other years we get it 5 or 6 times a year. So far this year, I think we've had it only twice, and only tomato plants were affected. One year they got virtually all our okra and watermelon plants, a lot of flowers and some of the tomatoes. I grow peppers near my tomatoes and they rarely get damaged. I don't know if it just luck on the part of the pepper plants or what, but they always come through it in much better condition than the tomato plants do.For years and years it seemed like we only got Round-up Drift because the people nearest us were using Round-up along their fencelines to control weeds. After about 5 or 6 years of that (and I don't know why), everything abruptly changed (maybe they were hiring someone new to spray) and the use of Grazon-type herbicides exploded here and everyone began using that crap and now we seldom see Round-up damage, but we get broadleaf herbicide damage several times a year. It is heartbreaking, and I now raise about a dozen tomato plants a year in large containers that I have tried to strategically place where no drift can reach them. They still were damaged last year, but so far this year, the tomato plants in containers haven't been hit like the ones in the garden have. There's just a couple of hundred feet between them. Jennifer & HU, The survival garden looks great! Y'all are going to be getting some great harvests out of that. Y'all know that you can grow lettuce indoors on the same light shelves where you raised seedlings, right? Or microgreens. Or sprouts. With all the heat we have here, that's about the best option for fresh, home-grown summertime salad greens. HJ, Lilies are fascinating and we grow more and more of them every year because our granddaughter, Lillie, believes we should. : ) I am amazed at how much further ahead were here this year with the blooms of the lilies, but perhaps it is because ours bloomed really early considering far south we are. They finished blooming here about a month ago. I think the warm of days in the 90s in late March or early April set them off early, and once we returned to cooler weather, it didn't matter---they already were set to bloom early. We have them in a lot of different colors, including white, pink, red, yellow and peach, and I have to grow them either in containers or in tall, hardware cloth-lined beds because voles will come out of the woods and into the garden and eat all the lily bulbs if the bulbs are not well-protected. There are not many types of bulbs that voles won't eat (mostly allium, garlic and daffodil) so I'm limited in what I can plant. Well, also crinum lilies never have been bothered, and neither have cannas, and daylilies. I think they can and sometimes do eat daylilies but just haven't done it in recent years. Nancy, I've always gardened for the pollinators as well as for us, but we have ample sunny space, plus we never wiped out the native plants that existed when we bought our land, so that made a huge difference. All I had to do was plant to supplement what was here to begin with. In our first handful of years here, the old farmer crowd gave me hell for growing "weeds" (i.e. herbs and flowers) in my garden, telling me that Tim and I couldn't eat those. I just had to point out that the pollinators could and would eat them. Those guys meant well, but were trying to turn me into a row farmer with monoculture rows of veggies and no herbs and flowers and I wanted to be a raised bed gardener with all of it mixed together. So, in that sense I won....but it was, of course, the pollinators who won. Later on, I had more of a monoculture row garden in the back garden after we built it in 2012, but then the voles are a terrible plague back there, so that area is not utilized as much as I'd like---it depends on how much I want to fight the voles. The girls and I spend endless hours outdoors when they are here, and they love the butterflies and moths as much as I do, so much so that they hate to see bad caterpillars, like army worms, put to death. Now, I'm trying to teach them not to be afraid of the seemingly dozens of kinds of bees we have here, while also teaching them to respect the hornets and wasps and give those guys a wide berth. Yesterday when the kids were out of the pool for a snack break, a butterfly came and sat on Lillie for about a 15 minutes and she was so mesmerized by it. It sat on her bare skin part of the time and on her neon bright bathing suit the rest of the time and was in no hurry to fly away. Jennifer, I think that if the only flowers we had were the front wildflower meadow, the pollinators still would be deliriously happy, particularly this year. Between the overseeding of that area with a wildflower mix from Wildseed Farms last spring and the abundant moisture, we have the best mix of wildflowers in there that we've ever had. It is starting to drive Tim crazy---usually he can mow the wildflower meadow down after the Spring wildflowers have gone to seed and before the summer wildflowers are coming on strong but this year the spring flowers lingered a bit longer than usual and the summer wildflowers started up already, so his need to control the meadow by mowing is dead in the water, and the wildflowers and I are delighted. He had to content himself with mowing only the yard and the back pasture yesterday, where there were not nearly so many wildflowers this spring, perhaps because of drainage issues back there and all the standing water. Perhaps I need to overseed that area back there with wildflowers next fall. Would that be too diabolical? It might interfere with him mowing in that area if we got a better stand of spring wildflowers back there. I would think just the acre around the house would give him enough mowing to keep him happy, but he could be happy mowing all day long. He starts twitching and practically breaking out in a rash when I discuss our plans to replace lawn around our house with hardscaping and raised beds. He is afraid I won't leave enough for him to mow, and I keep telling him that having less to mow as we age will be a blessing and to just wait and see. Nancy, We live in what is usually a dry grassland area, so I've never wanted a weed torch. I think they can work for people in some situations, but am not convinced I am one of those people. Maybe it is because we spend so much time fighting grassfires in our county in the summer, winter and autumn...and sometimes early spring in the dry years. We also don't have stone pathways to maintain and I can see where one would come in handy there. Marleigh, You've got to kill whatever you've got to kill to keep your garden going. Over the years I've found I have to kill less and less because all the beneficial creatures take care of a lot of it for me. There is a huge difference in wet years like we've had in 2015-2020 so far, and the dry years that mostly plagued us from 1998 when we still were clearing our land prior to building the house all the way through 2014. In the dry years, the pest level rises along with the drought and I spend far too much time and effort on killing excess damaging pests. The way I grew up was that you planted about four times as much as you wanted/needed so that the wild critters could have what they wanted and you still had enough left for yourself, and that seems about right here in OK. The only area where planting extra for the wild things doesn't work is with fruit---they want it all, no matter what, and you have to fight them so hard for every bit of fruit you grow. I have gotten to where I grow less and less fruit as the years go on because I get so tired of the endless fruit wars with the wild things. Our cats have become much more indoor cats than outdoor cats over the years. As they age, most of them have seemed content to sleep in the sunroom, where the sunshine and views of the great outdoors are endless, and now are happy most days just to go out for a quick hour or two and then come back indoors. They don't bother wild birds much because I trained them (with a water gun....everyone needs one Super Soaker to blast cats away from little wild birds) to leave the wild birds alone. Now, when I am out and the cats have done the brief tour outdoors and want to come in, they come and find me and meow for me to come up to the house and let them come inside. This year's perpetually wet, puddled ground probably has contributed to that a lot. Tim and I joke that our cats have become too conditioned to the great indoors---dry "ground", no snakes or annoying biting insects, no bobcats or coyotes chasing them around, and perfect climate control so they're never too hot or too cold. There's a lot of truth in that though. Even Pumpkin has become very much an indoor cat even though he's not as old as they others. When our cats are indoors and the coast is clear, the feral cats, neighborhood barn cats, etc, come over to visit and hang out. As long as I grow catnip, we'll never be cat free. We were outdoors more than we were indoors yesterday and the weather was just perfect---clear, sunny skies, not too much wind, and neither too hot nor too cold. I think most of this week will be that way, but our highs are moving into the 90s by the end of the week, so it looks like June weather is arriving right on time. I was looking forward to mealtimes as a way to use up a lot of tomatoes---BLTs for lunch, tomatoes on hamburgers at dinner time, chopped up in salads, etc. but then I harvested more tomatoes and brought in just as many newly harvested ones as we had used up in our meals so the pile of tomatoes on the counter is the same. I haven't even harvested the cherry tomatoes yet this weekend, but I'm going to do that today. You know that the tomato harvest is going well when we're looking at the tomatoes on the counter and hoping we can hurry up and use them up before I bring in more. lol. That's a change from looking at them longingly on the plants and wishing they would hurry up and ripen. We're probably about to get to the point of needing to make salsa in the next couple of weeks just to stay caught up on the harvest. The tomato plants in pots are doing great, and the ones in the ground that were planted much later because of the nonstop rain are coming along pretty well. Mosquitoes are a huge issue now, and I am sure that will continue for weeks until we get good and dry. It is the end of May and we all survived it, with a lot less weather disruption than we have some years. Well, the heavy pounding from the rainfall was disruptive, and so was the hail when and where it fell, but it seemed like we had a lot fewer tornadoes statewide than usual. The nights still feel kind of cool to me for this late in Spring, but I bet that's going to change in June. Dawn

Jennifer, We don't usually buy tomatoes in any form except I'll buy organic sauce and organic paste if making/canning Annie's Salsa in large quantities because they are part of the recipe that makes it the best home-canned salsa ever. They give it a texture like popular purchased salsas and I never was truly happy with home-canned salsas until I found Annie's Salsa. Hopefully, my days of canning large quantities of salsa are behind me now because I burned out severely on that in the years I was making almost 300 jars per year so Tim could give them away at work at Christmas time. Now I just make it in small quantities for us, so the canned organic tomato sauce and paste I have in the pantry now will last us forever. I no longer make and can catsup, bar-b-q sauce, pizza sauce, etc. either, and I have no regrets. It was great doing that when I grew gazillions of tomatoes and had to use them up, but now that I grow significantly fewer, I no longer feel like I have to slave away in the kitchen all day every day during peak tomato season and I'm more than okay with that. Been there, done that, over it. lol. If I'm not making salsa, I don't use purchased tomato sauce or paste because it is just so easy to cook down preserved tomatoes and make pasta sauce or tomato soup from scratch. I was just looking at the tomatoes on the kitchen counter last night and thinking I might make La Madeleine's tomato-basil soup this weekend. It is a very popular soup from the bakery/sandwich shop of the same name in Fort Worth, and I suppose the recipe has been around since at least the 1980s. It is so simple to make and so tasty. The local Fort Worth Star Telegram food writers use to publish the recipe every year in the newspaper because people couldn't get enough of it and wanted to make their own. So, having raved about how good it is and how simple it is to prepare, here's the recipe: La Madeleine's Famous Tomato-Basil Soup A great way to have this soup and to use up more of those tomatoes piling up on the counter is to pair it with BLT sandwiches or wraps. We really don't like grocery store canned veggies either, much preferring frozen or fresh ones. In general I don't like the texture of home-canned vegetables either other than pickled products, so that is why I don't can veggies except for some tomato products. Every now and then, like maybe twice a year, we'll buy a can of Rotel tomatoes/peppers and Velveeta cheese because Tim is craving Rotel dip. We don't make it often enough that I think it is worth my time to can our own Rotel type peppers and tomatoes, but there are canning recipes out there for people who want to make their own. If we made our own Rotel style peppers and tomatoes I guess one batch would last us about 3 years. I do remember the mama cat and kittens. I don't know what it is like in your neighborhood, but in our rural area, the smart cats learn quickly to hide and stay put up at night. Those are the ones that survive. The ones, whether feral or pet cats, that stay outdoors at night tend to live short lives. I have tried and tried to tame the feral cats and kittens and get them to sleep in the garage at night and they just won't do it. The mama cats will keep the kittens in there for a few weeks, but being feral in nature, they abhor human things and don't like being closed up. In our area, it usually is the coons that get the cats. Coons are horrifically vicious killers, and I hate having them around. I'm sure bobcats and coyotes get their share of outdoor cats, but they don't openly hang out in your yard trying to catch them all that often. The coons will be out there every night, and sometimes during the day. Our pet cats are taught from Day 1 that they have to be indoors before dark. The yellow canna with orange speckles could be Yellow King Humbert or if it is a dwarf variety then maybe Golden Lucifer. There are a ton of cannas that look like that and nowadays they have been corrupted and lost their original names and often are sold under various other names, which makes it all so confusing. Nancy, I hope that Jerry makes a quick recovery. There are some upper respiratory infections that cats get that are highly contagious and spreads quickly among cat families. Most upper respiratory infections in cats are caused by either feline calcivirus or feline herpesvirus. Most healthy cats recover just fine but it can take them a way to get over it. Larry, Groundhogs are one thing we do not have this far south and I am glad. I hope yours doesn't do too much damage. When we visit Tim's family in PA, you see dead groundhogs along the rural roadways and highways everywhere just like you see dead armadillos alongside roads in TX and, to some extent, OK. I understand that groundhogs can be very destructive. Tim said they had to fight them hard to keep them out of their garden when he was a teenager. I'm getting ready to head out into the garden in just a minute in an effort to beat the heat/heat index. I thought I had a bad day yesterday with all the heat and such, and then Tim came home from work where they had had a bomb (unexploded) in a vehicle, long story, and he had the phone glued to his ear all night long as the ATF and FBI continued to deal with that car and a second bomb found as they were attempting to deal with the first one. It really had nothing to do with the airport, other than the fact that a stolen/recovered rental car from some other city was towed to one of the rental car lots there because it belonged to that rental car company and that set off the whole chain of events. Every time he got off the phone, it rang again....and his division doesn't even include the bomb squad, but his patrol officers were assisting. On a day like that, it is like his job is 24/7 and he cannot even enjoy a nice dinner at home followed by a walk with the dogs. In other news, y'all know that last year was horrible with so many of our neighbors in particular, and a handful of relatives, getting very sick and dying, one after another after another. All of 2019 has a big black cloud over it that we'll never forget. Now 2020 is trying to make a repeat of that year. Just last week we lost our next-door neighbor/friend after a brief battle with stage 4 cancer, and now another dear friend/neighbor is hospitalized with double pneumonia and the phone call we got last night said they were calling in all the family to come see her while they still can, so that sounds a bit ominous. We all have to enjoy our good health, y'all, and not take it for granted because as long as you have decent health, you have everything. In horrible local news, Covid-19 cases in the Texoma region comprised of counties along both sides of the river are up 50% this week over last week (but not in our specific county). We'll be staying home more than ever while this new surge is happening. In our part of Texoma, it seems worse on the Oklahoma side while a few counties further east and still in the Texoma region, it seems worse on the Texas side. Tim must love this pandemic (not really, I'm being silly) because it is keeping me at home so I'm not out gallivanting around spending money shopping. I'm glad we were able to get out and plant shop last weekend because I don't know if I'd want to do the same this week. Well, I might. At least plant shopping can be done outdoors where you're not confined in a enclosed air space, so I feel safer at an outside garden center, for example, than inside a grocery store. Dawn