April 2020, Week 1
Okiedawn OK Zone 7
4 years ago
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Okiedawn OK Zone 7
4 years agoNancy RW (zone 7)
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March 2020, Week 1
Comments (88)Jennifer, I have started seeds--about two weeks ago. Getting ready to pot them up to larger cups this week. I am so hopelessly behind on this thread, y'all, because we have had the granddaughters here for a few days and that is where all my time and attention has been going. I may be behind on gardening and everything else, but we have made slime of all kinds....color-changing slime, glow-in-the-dark slime, crunchy slime, glittery slime....you name it, we made it. I know all of you are jealous of our lovely slime collection. lol. I wish I could find a gardening use for slime since we have so much of it. Yes, the Weston tomato press is the one I've used forever. I watched for a good deal on it for a long time (you may not have that same luxury of time since we probably can assume it is imported from someplace and supply chain disruption is such an issue now) and got it with the set of 4 screens for basically the same price as buying it with just the one screen, which I think is the sauce screen. It cuts the time spent processing tremendously and I cannot imagine life without it. Back in the day when I still was trying to make Annie's Salsa for everyone who worked for and with Tim, I canned up to 600 jars per year of tomato products (not just salsa, but sauce, canned tomatoes, ketchup, chili base, pizza sauce, etc.) with it. That never would have been possible without the tomato press. Even though I can less now, it still is a big part of canning efficiently. Our Saturday was lovely. We took the grandkids out for lunch at noon before heading to the Y for Lillie's birthday swimming pool party. It was amazing to see how much taller/older all her friends have gotten since last year. She turned 11 and some of her friends are already 12 and look like they've grown 6" since last year as some of them (too many!) now are taller than I am. A bunch of giggling girls at an indoor pool party with a heated pool...they had such an awesome time....and we adults somehow survived all the laughter, screaming (hilariously), shrieking (poor lifeguard---having to listen to it all), giggling, and chattering. It was sort of sensory overload for our 5-year-old granddaughter at times and she had one meltdown before calming down and realizing all the noise and horseplay was in good fun and not mean-spirited. HU, I agree we all need to be growing and canning more this year as it the coronavirus is pretty much worldwide now and we don't know what effect it will have on the food supply or supply chain in 2020 or beyond. I've already been stocking up on canning supplies (vinegar, canning salt, Mrs. Wage's mixes, ReaLemon, pickling spices, citric acid, liquid pectin, powdered pectin, etc.) now before the stores run out like they did in 2008 when a lot more people planted gardens and took up canning during that little economic downturn. I've always got a lot of jars and lids, so have been focusing on the consumable items that you need once the canning starts. I remember how hard it became to find any canning supply item of any sort in 2008 so stocking up in advance will be a huge time-saver, and will eliminate a lot of frustration this summer. Amy, Despite my best efforts to keep things labeled, I end up with mystery plants too. They grow as well as the labeled ones and it is fun to see what you get. I switched from flimsy black flats to silver aluminum roasting pans long ago, and even those can get too flimsy once plants are potted up to 16 oz. or 20 oz. Solo cups, but then I just double the roasting pans to get a little more strength. Larry, I hope your doggy is doing well. All of ours had one health problem or another once they hit doggy old age, and we just dealt with each situation as it arose. It does get expensive. We only have one old dog now---Jersey is 13 and still healthy so far, but really slowing down and spending most of the day sleeping now. She still loves to go for walks with Tim on the weekends and it seems to put an extra spring in her step. The other three dogs are 5 and 1/2years old or younger. I still refer to the 5 year olds as 'the puppies' because they were puppies when they came to us and our other dogs all were so much older. It disappoints our youngest granddaughter when I call the two 5 year olds 'the puppies' because it makes her think we have brand new actual puppies, and then I have to tell her no, no new puppies, just the two younger dogs that she loves so much. Nancy, That's a gorgeous new round bed. I'd be all excited too. I'm fine, just busy with the grandkids. We waited a long time to have grandchildren so spend every minute with them that we can. Aurora still remembers living with us temporarily last year while they were buying their new home and constantly tells me she's going to come back and live with us again 'forever' one day. I'd love that, but it isn't going to happen. lol. Rebecca, Spring has sprung here, but we still are having a couple of nights a week with low temperatures around 33-34 degrees here in our cold microclimate, so I'm not getting overly excited and planting much in the ground yet. Soon, though, soon. What is truly awful is all the tree pollen in the air. I just hate it as our allergies have ramped up, but eventually all the trees and shrubs will be through flowering and pollinating and the pollen levels will decline. Blooming fruit trees are losing their flowers and putting out leaves now. It is amazing how quickly that happens. Soon tiny fruit will become apparent, and hopefully a late freeze won't get the fruit. Larry, Your place always is going to look amazing. I know it will. I agree that getting older takes all the fun out of work, but I know you'll keep going as long as you can because you love doing it so much. So will I. Nancy, I'm so glad you are there to teach your new best friend. When the student is ready, the teacher will appear, right? I haven't been in the grocery stores this weekend to see if we are having many bare shelves yet, but our Wal-mart has been out of hand sanitizer for weeks and weeks, and cold/flu medicine and OTC painkillers, rubbing alcohol and hydrogen peroxide are very low and sometimes nonexistent on the store shelves. When I see some, I buy them, but I'm not seeing a lot lately. I've been trying to think of what we'll need for the summer months and have been buying it now while the stores still have it....sunscreen, insect repellent, swimming pool chemicals, Chigger Rid, cortisone ointment for itchiness, etc. Oh, and band-aids for all the kids' (and adults') little boo boos and owies. Jennifer, Thanks for the shopping report. I'll have to let y'all know what we find on the store shelves (or don't find there) today after our shopping trip. Bleach has been hit or miss lately, and the same is true with water. They never run out completely so far, but the stock gets low at times. Toilet paper has been low on the shelves at times, but not sold out yet in local stores, except for at Costco, which apparently is where America goes to stock up on such things. I have seen all sorts of photos and videos online of huge lines to get into Costco stores this week, especially in Washington state, New York and California and am thankful it is not like that here yet. We're not planning on going to Costco this weekend, so it could be bad down there and we wouldn't know it. We only have time to do local shopping today due to a full schedule today. I probably would stockpile eggs in case things do get bad. You can freeze them (without the shells) you know. Just crack each egg into one section of an ice cube tray and freeze the whole tray. Once the eggs are frozen solid, you remove them from the tray and they do pop out pretty easily. Put the eggs in zip-lock freezer bags and store them in your freezer, using as needed. Everyone should have a garden this year! You know, like everyone had Victory Gardens back in the WWII years. None of us can know at this point what coronavirus does now that it is here in the USA. Will it be relatively contained? Will it run wild? Will it affect our farmers? Will it affect the truckers who move the produce across the nation? Most of us here on this forum are spoiled because we grow our own produce during the garden season anyway, but I think hoarding of fresh produce will hit new highs among the general population if it becomes short in supply and people panic thinking that there might not be more produce on store shelves the next time they shop. If everyone had a veggie and herb garden, they'd know that they would at least have some fresh produce on hand. Unfortunately, a lot of brand-new gardeners may not understand how to plant for the weather they have, and may plant some crops too late in spring to get a new crop, so I hope they are researching as they go along and avoid having that issue. To follow onions, one can plant any type of warm-season crop. I tend to plant southern peas and lima beans heavily, but you also can plant more summer squash/winter squash and pumpkins, okra, roselles, cantaloupes, muskmelons, watermelons and other miscellaneous melons, sweet potatoes (a bit late if they follow onions but not insanely late), yard-long beans (which are more like southern peas than beans), more peppers, more tomatoes (for an autumn harvest), and warm season greens like Egyptian spinach, New Zealand spinach and red or green Malabar spinach. Swiss chard does well for me all summer as long as I remember to harvest the leaves when they are younger, smaller and more tender. I can plant kale late and get a great crop as long as I keep it in morning sun and afternoon shade, and keep the chickens away from it because they will devour it otherwise. Because of all the coronavirus cases on the west coast, I had become increasingly uneasy about Tim and some of his employees traveling to Las Vegas in mid-March for some sort of huge law enforcement conference, but I never tried to convince him to cancel the trip. They send a handful of people to it every year and I guess it is a big thing for them to go to it. I figure he's a grown man and he can make his own decisions, so I kept my mouth shut and hoped he'd make the right decision. So, Thursday night he told me he'd talked to his boss and cancelled the trip. Yippee! I felt relieved. Then on Friday he talked with his employees who were scheduled to go on that trip to tell them that he had cancelled the trip for all of them, and every one of them expressed relief that the trip had been cancelled as they had been feeling uneasy about attending a convention right now too. Then, later in the day, Tim got a message that the entire conference had been cancelled by whatever organization puts on the whole thing, which I think was a wise decision. This just doesn't seem to be like a good time to be hopping on an airplane and traveling anywhere. And, at his work, they are implementing the same stringent financial cutbacks they had to implement after 9/11 due to less planes flying (drastically less) which means a lot less airport income from landing fees. I think they are smart to have done this as early in the situation as they have and it indicates upper airport management is at the top of their game and being very proactive. Airline bankruptcies are not out of the question in the coming months as the airlines operate on fairly thin profit margins even in the best of times---it is a really tough industry to succeed in these days. So, it is Sunday and a new week, and now that I'm caught up on the old week, I'll go start the new weekly thread if someone else hasn't already beaten me to it. Dawn...See MoreApril 2020, Week 3
Comments (92)Kim, Thanks for the info, but with all due respect, we are avoiding the entire DFW metro area like the plague and staying closer to home since there's over 6,000 coronavirus cases down there. Up here where we shop, we have or have had 2 cases in Carter County, 2 cases in Love County, 4 or 5 in Cooke County, TX, 4 or 5 in Montague County, TX and a few dozen in Grayson County, TX, so we're staying close to home until the case load falls significantly in the DFW metro.....and I think that is why I'm going stir-crazy. You know that almost all my favorite places to shop are down there, not up here. Nancy, I'll have to give the full report later, but we went to the meat market in Muenster TX on Saturday very early and then hit Wal-Mart in Gainesville to get a few things. We were home by 10:30 or 11:00 a.m. which is pretty good because Muenster is a far drive and most of our time was just spent on the road. Then, on Sunday we hit Home Depot as soon as they opened and breezed right in and out, and then ran over to the Sam's in Sherman, largely because I wanted to buy a couple of new water hoses and we like their 120' long ones since our gardening spots are so far from the house. We were at Sam's Club when it opened, and there was quite a line to get in, but by the time we parked and walked to the door, the line was gone, so we walked right in without waiting. Sherman was a real experience, and not necessarily a calm, soothing one. More about that later. I hope your shopping trip was successful. Now that I've been out and relieved the cabin fever and bought a few of the things I wanted, I think I can stay out of the stores again for quite a while. I know we'll be staying away from Sherman for reasons I'll explain later. Larry, I understand the feeling of being behind. I've never been this far behind in planting, and I am trying to stay calm and not be overly worried about it. Since our rain basically stopped, we are rapidly going from lakes and puddles and flooding to dry, cracked ground---you know how clay is about doing that. No rain is falling in meaningful amounts and it is getting hot fast. Our rainfall totals for April are far below normal but we're still above average for the year since January, February and March overachieved drastically in the rainfall category. I should be worried about both the early arrival of the heat and the seeming lack of rainfall over the last 3 or 4 weeks, but I'm so happy to be able to play in the dirt that I am not. I miss having cool-season crops, but had I managed to get them planted, they would have rotted anyway in the wet ground, so I just have to accept that this is how it is this year. Since it is getting so hot so fast, I'm going to plant mostly southern peas and only a small amount of green beans today. I can plant larger amounts of green beans for a fall harvest. When the rain almost totally stops in a rather abrupt manner and the temperatures spike quickly, that usually means a hot, dry, miserable summer is ahead and I don't care right now. I'm just happy the rain has stopped. Marleigh, Can you order the mower part online? That's what Tim has done lately, and the parts ordered have arrived within a few days each time. We did go to HD this weekend and he got some parts he needed for something while I bought plants. We were there shortly after the store opened and got in right away, found what we wanted and got out. By the time we were leaving, there was a line waiting to enter the store. Since we haven't been out shopping, I didn't know this was happening, and I was quite shocked. I do not think I would wait in a line to get into any store, and I hope I don't have to eat those words later if the shopping situation worsens over time instead of getting better. Nancy, I have grown legumes both with and without inoculants and I am not sure I ever could tell a difference. If you are growing beans or peas where any sort of legume has grown in recent years, you don't need the inoculants anyhow. The inoculants might be helpful in newly broken soil, but it would depend. We have lots of clovers and vetches growing here on our property, likely surviving remnants from when our place was part of a family's farm, so I haven't worried much about using inoculants over the years. Amy, There's nothing wrong with random thoughts! Was Margaret's open and did you get to have some goulash? My dad loved goulash and used to make it on the weekends when he took over cooking to give mom a break since she didn't like cooking. Rebecca, I hope nothing in your face is broken. I bet you have turned kinds of pretty colors by today. When Lillie hit that parked car while on her friend's hoverboard a couple of months ago, her face turned delightful shades of yellow, green, blue and purple. These were her first black eyes and she wore the colors proudly after she got over the shock of it all. She had swelling around her nose, but it wasn't broken. I think she was a little embarrassed to go to school with her injuries because she is quiet and shy by nature and didn't want for everyone to be staring at her, but she got over it pretty quickly, and her bruising actually faded more quickly than we had thought it would. I hope yours does too. Jennifer, I would bake my own bread (and we have stored the ingredients to bake at least several months worth of bread, so we could do this) before I'd stand in bread lines. I'm not worried this will be a reality for us though. I might be slightly more concerned that the end result of all the closures of meat-packing plants due to high infection rates of Covid-19 among their employees might result in higher meat prices or in some types of meat being temporarily in short supply. I hope Finbar is going to be alright. Chris has had to drive a couple of his birds to the vet in Dallas within the last few weeks, and his vet is not playing around with the virus. The lobby/waiting room at the vet office is closed. There are Do Not Enter signs on the door. They meet you at the car, greet you, have you fill out the paperwork there, and then they take the pet indoors to be examined while you wait in your car. This is a super busy vet practice because it is one of the few that actually sees and treats tropical birds (among other pets, not a pure bird specialist). When they are done, the return your pet to you, you pay electronically, and they give you whatever medications or supplies you need. He said the vet techs that come to the car are masked and gloved, and of course, you can speak with the vet on the phone if needed. I have to agree with dbarron that throwing up in a purse is a classic cat revenge move. Did somebody or something upset Finbar? Larry, I am glad you are able to get some things done. I hope the rain stays away this week and you can make more progress in the garden. There, it is Monday morning and I am at least caught up on last week. Now, I need to feed my pets and head out to the garden. Just to vex me, the sky is very cloudy and they threw a 20% chance of rain into the forecast. I'm just going to ignore it and carry on as long as there is no lightning. Dawn...See MoreMay 2020, Week 1
Comments (72)No frost or freeze damage here because we only dropped to 46 degrees, 3 degrees above our forecast low of 43. I think our Mesonet station dropped to 41 though, which is so bizarre. It is at a slightly lower elevation than our place, but not much. Tim's sisters in PA were expecting snow yesterday (and not happy about it). May weather has been so goofy so far. Larry, That looks great! So your soil finally is drying out some? The weather at our house did a total 180 and we are getting exactly the opposite weather the last month from what we had previously, so we are veering towards dryness and not flooding, but I am just thrilled we no longer are water. Rebecca, Of all the things to break in the car! I've dropped zip ties like that before, and just hate it, but otherwise I love them for attaching cages and trellises to fence poles and stakes. They are just so handy in the garden. Kim, I am sorry, but we aren't entertaining visitors at this time. We are still socially distancing as much as we possibly can, and not just for our own safety. Our very dear to us next-door neighbor just was diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer and starts very aggressive chemo soon. Because we are medical first responders with the VFD, we are trying to stay distanced from everyone so we can respond to his house safely (for his sake) if he needs quick medical assistance. We couldn't go, in all good conscience, if we'd been out and about seeing people and might have been exposed. We could get to him a good ten minutes before an ambulance coming from Thackerville or Marietta could get here if he needs anything. I'd hate for a call to go out that he needs help and for us to feel like we couldn't respond to help him because we might have been exposed to Covid-19, so we're just going to stay locked down as much as possible for as long as possible. I hope you have a fun trip and also stay safe. Jennifer, It is very stressful when a friend suffers a major loss. Fifteen years ago this month, Tim's best friend died of cancer on my birthday. When the phone rang at our house around 4 a.m., I knew it was his wife and I knew that he was gone. One of the reasons we had moved here was to live closer to them. We immediately threw on our clothes and rushed over there to sit with her and their children in their home until the guys from the funeral home could come to pick up his body (it took them a couple of hours to get there). I'll never forget that. It was an extremely distressing time and yet felt extremely comforting to be right by their side. We already had been at their side as much as possible since his stage 4 cancer diagnosis around Easter, and then we were with them a lot that week and for a period of time thereafter. You feel their grief so deeply even as you are dealing with grief of your own, and you're trying so hard to help them in every way that you can. That is what friends do. I hope you have a calmer, less stressful week this week because you deserve that. Larry, Our son and his wife have been the same way, but finally are easing up some now. I think it finally sank into their brain that Tim could bring it home any day from work, though I hope he doesn't, just as either of them could bring it home from the fire station or hospital on any given day too. The risk from seeing them doesn't seem worse to me than the risk of seeing Tim here in our own home, but for a long time they worried that they would infect us. So, we see each other about once every couple of weeks now, which is better than not seeing each other at all. Everyone still sits further apart, etc., isn't so huggy and all, and everyone worries because the case numbers still are going up in the D-FW metro where Tim and Chris work, and in fact, Dallas and Fort Worth keep reporting new record numbers of cases several days a week, and even our little quiet area is seeing more and more cases. I think we're all doing our best to stay safe. Meanwhile, I have relatives in the DFW metro out running around all over the place, sort of like the virus is just magically gone, and I think that is a mistake, but they're making their own decisions and we are making ours. I'll be perfectly happy if we don't venture down there until a family wedding in August. Maybe by then the case loads of virus patients will be much lower. I am relaxing enough to go to at least 1 store every weekend. It is so good to be out even if only for an hour, but we are very careful still to go only early in the day while the stores are still very quiet, and we try really hard to maintain proper social distancing and to not talk with anyone if we can help it. A lot of people here are still wearing masks so I think that shows they are trying to be cautious. It is a beautiful day today but my allergies are simply awful today so I'm indoors now trying to avoid all the pollen that apparently is in the air. Dawn...See MoreJuly 2020, Week 1
Comments (73)Marleigh, Your rain news is so exciting! I always think that rain in July is something to be thrilled about, because all too often, it is rare. Larry, You're not only raising a fine herd of deer, but also a wonderful crop of grasshoppers. This must be your lucky year. We have a stunning shortage of grasshoppers here. Perhaps I should offer to buy all the heifer grasshoppers you can send me, and then they can produce a herd of hoppers for us. Amy, We had about your luck with our rain today. By the time we noticed it had started raining, it probably was almost over. I was hoping it would rain enough to water the plants-in-waiting in pots in the garden, but the 0.05" in the rain gauge told me it did not. I watered all the plants in pots and gave a quick little drink to anything planted in the last two weeks, but the weather was cooler---when I was out there this evening our heat index as already below 100 degrees, making it the most pleasant evening all week. Amy, Okra generally doesn't need fertilizer and I don't fertilize ours. Fertilizing okra can give you big leafy monsters with tons of foliage that are slower to start producing pods. My soil is like Larry's--maybe it is a clay thing--naturally high in P and K and I suppose our continual composting must provide enough nitrogen. Larry, I agree with them not testing for nitrogen since it can vary so much just because of temperatures. When folks get their soil tested in cool weather it can test low in nitrogen, even though it has plenty. There's just some reason the nitrogen isn't available in cooler weather, though I don't remember what it is. Neil Sperry, about 2 decades ago, came out with a nitrogen-only fertilizer formulated for Texas soils that only need N and not the P and K. He was probably two decades ahead of the rest of the world to acknowledge that all the soils in N. Texas where he works as a horticulturalist have plenty of P and K and only need nitrogen. He used to sell it at his annual All-Garden Show, which went away years ago I guess, but now some of the Texas nurseries carry it. Amy, Why does Houzz do anything that it does? It drove me nuts trying to get this thread started last Sunday and it was putting up weird colored boxes and stuff---I had no idea why they were showing up or what they were doing, but then Houzz deleted everything, including every word I had typed, so I didn't have to worry about the odd colored boxes. I swear, it is like they are trying to drive us away on purpose. I hope you're having fun with the grandkids today. We had fun with one of ours last night. The other one is at her father's house this weekend. Larry, The pumpkin party sounds grand. I hope you can calm down after all the excitement and get some rest. You'll need all that energy (yours and the two girls' energy combined) to harvest those pumpkins in the autumn. I'm glad you got the rain. Jennifer, Hopefully the rain, scant though it was, and the watering everyone was doing will be enough to help prevent fireworks-related grass fires. We'll be picking up debris forever too. Chris and Jana picked up a huge trash bag full of debris last night after a spectacular show of a lot of really huge, really loud fireworks, but Tim and I will be finding and picking up scattered bits and pieces from the fields for a couple of weeks at least. At this time of the year, I feel like nothing I do can keep the floors clean for more than a few hours. You'd think it would be harder in winter but I guess since we rarely if ever have snow or ice, and rain is scarce most winters, they are not too hard on the floors. Spring and summer have me wearing out brooms, mops and Swiffers trying to stay on top of things. Farmgardener, I like Baby Bubba too because it stays manageable. Long ago there was a dwarf variety named Little Lucy that I loved to grow, but then its seed disappeared during those years when larger seed companies were swallowing up smaller seed companies and dropping their entire seed lines, and the Little Lucy seed I had saved didn't sprout and grow. It does sound like your rainfall was perfectly timed. I wish you had fresh tomatoes right now--they are so good. We're still struggling to use them up fresh as I'd rather not have to can them. I'm enjoying having a break from the bigger garden and all the canning. I've planted far too much for far too many decades, and it is such a break to not have such a huge amount planted this year. I guess I'm burned out on doing too much of everything and don't know if my love for canning even will return or if I'm just over it. Nancy, We don't have a Roomba because I feel like our 4 dogs would eat it or otherwise destroy it. Chris and Jana have one and love it, but they only have one dog and he weighs about 6 or 7 lbs so isn't a threat to the Roomba. All employees in the restaurants we've been to are wearing masks, and I get the impression it is mandatory and they have no choice, whether they like it or not. I like that they are wearing them. Burgundy okra was probably the first non-green okra I ever grew, and I liked it. Nowadays there are tons of other red and burgundy okra varieties available, and they all look pretty much the same to me. Even a variety called Jing Orange that I grew one year was burgundy, not orange. Jennifer, Sorry about the BER on the melons. They must have run short of water at some point and that is all it takes. I'm not sure how long ladybugs take from eggs---maybe 3 to 5 days? If yours were mating, you'll have larvae soon as long as something didn't eat the eggs. What eats lady bugs and their eggs? Practically everything: many bird species, praying mantids, spiders, assassin bugs, ants, tree frogs, lizards, skinks and anoles, dragonflies and some other kinds of lady bugs. I don't think the big wasps eat ladybugs or their eggs, but there is a species of tiny parasitoid wasps that use their eggs to raise their own larvae. I just don't worry about the lady bugs too much---they are a part of the ecosystem and everything in the garden ecosystem eats something and is eaten by something. We always seem to have enough lady bugs that survive the predators so it must balance out somehow. Lady bugs actually taste bad, so that deters predators from eating them up to a certain point. I hope you all are enjoying your Fourth of July holiday. We had a great celebration last night with the kids and one grandkid, with a spectacular fireworks show that Tim and I just sat and watched while they did all the arranging and setting off of the fireworks. It was a pretty decent night, though the heat index still was 100 degrees at 8:30 p.m. or so when we started. I don't know how much money Chris spent on those fireworks and I do not want to know. Some of them were big boxes of 20 shells, and you left all the shells in the box, lit the fuse and then watched for several minutes as one spectacular firework after another went off. Someone on the property behind us was setting off fireworks but (grin) ours were much better. It took the kids about 2 hours to set off everything they had brought with them. I think that after tonight, most of the residents here will have set off all their fireworks, and the folks visiting from Texas will be headed back home to get back to their jobs on Monday. It all should quiet down here in our neighborhood quite a bit after tonight. One family to our south has a huge family reunion/campout with dozens of people attending and they always do a big show. It isn't always on Fourth of July weekend, and seems like sometimes it is the next weekend, so I don't know if we'll have that in our neighborhood this weekend or later. The older couple who were the driving force behind the reunion passed away a couple of years ago and I don't know if all the younger ones are carrying on the reunion with the same enthusiasm. There was no gardening for us today, just me watering the plants in containers. I would have loved to go plant shopping like we did last weekend, but it is just so horribly hot. We did mask up and go to Sam's Club to stock up on products we're running low on, like pet supplies. We got there as early as we could---around 9:30 a.m. and that wasn't early enough to beat the crowd, although we were ahead of a lot of it---the store was much more crowded by the time we left than it was when we arrived, and we weren't even in there that long. It was crazy busy, judging on how full the parking lot was as we were leaving. The unexpected find? A multipack of Chlorox cleaning wipes, the first ones we've seen in the stores since we stocked up pre-Covid-19 in about February. There was a limit of one, but who would need more than that? They were in six packs and six of those cannisters will last us for months. We still have one intact six-pack from the pre-Covid shopping days, so I'd say that we have enough to last the rest of this calendar year and possibly beyond. The item they were out of that kinda sorta surprised me? All paper products. This was not totally unexpected (and we didn't need any) and I had joked to Tim as we were driving down that with Dallas now reporting 1,000+ new virus cases daily, the toilet paper panic shopping might have started up in earnest again in the metroplex. I was mostly joking about that, but then it turned out to be true. Unless you wanted the commercial paper towels that go into wall-hung dispensers, there was not a single paper product to buy---that row was glaringly empty, although they had tried to fill it with cases of water, spaced out one deep all along the row. Otherwise, the shelves seem fully stocked and they had all the same stuff they've had all along. The only thing we haven't seen on any store shelves (and we don't need any, but I watch it as a barometer of how well the supply chain is working) since Covid arrived is rubbing alcohol. I am not sure if it all is going to hospitals and nursing homes or if people are hoarding it, but the store shelves remain empty of that product. I wonder if I can twist Tim's arm and get him to go plant shopping with me tomorrow? It might be possible. I feel like the window is closing to buy anything to plant in July. The stores down here strip their garden centers pretty bare, clearing out plants soon after the July 4th holiday, and then they don't get planting stock back in the stores until probably September. Usually, on July 4th weekend, they are pushing summer merchandise aside to start stocking back-to-school supplies and clothing. I wonder if that is happening on schedule this weekend? I need to find more shrubs, and I have a list of what I want if we do go plant shopping. I might not find them until autumn though. Ardmore's Covid-19 numbers soared dramatically over the last week and we talked about not going shopping up there at all, but it is tempting to go to Lowe' and see what they might have. I feel safe shopping outdoors in a garden center wearing a mask, especially when we get there early and avoid the larger crowds. The Lowe's in Ardmore is only about a 40 mile round trip for us, which is a lot less than a trip to the second closest Lowe's. That's the only drawback to moving to the middle of nowhere---you have to drive so far to go anywhere. Dawn...See MoreOkiedawn OK Zone 7
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