Sometime when you have ample time (winter?) you're gonna have to tell us what all you have in that bed awaiting planting. Ie, what did you buy ? :)

I am still having trouble with the deer, mainly in the wildlife garden. I have planted about 3 or 4 acres of clover and small grain for them, and plan on planting forage collards, turnips, and a wildlife mix for them this winter. It looks like they would not mind for me to borrow about 3000 sq. ft. for me to plant some people food. They seem to be fine with that, but they look at everything I plant as deer food. They have damaged my pumpkins really bad. All most all the leaves have been eaten off, and some of the runner were eaten or broken, several plants have been pulled up. I am covering 6 hills, many with only one plant stub left with with mineral tubs in hope of saving till my 12 volt fence charger gets here. I dont like spending the extra money for supplies, but I am unsure what the economy is going to do and growing food may become very important.

We had a nice rain, about 1.3", which was nice, but the wind that came with broke some plants. My larger roselle are all leaning wsw, but look fine. Some of my summer squash was not so lucky.

Would some of you suggest some fall and winter crops I can plant for people food. I often plant turnips, mustard, radishes and mustard, but I would like to know about some of the Asian greens that do well in this area? Thanks for the information.

Good morning. It’s Monday!

This is my last “off work” Monday so I will especially enjoy it. It will be hard to start working on Mondays when for years they’ve been my day off.

Just a quick post because I’m on my phone. HU and I canned 18 jars of mixed greens last night. Thought I would show y’all a couple of pictures. I’ll be back to catch up in a bit.

Point oh six. .06. that's how much rain I've gotten from this drought buster. It has gone around me every time. We put out 2 soaker hoses yesterday. I bought 2 50' soaker hoses on amazon for a decent price 2 years ago. Only put them out this year. Thought I was ordering the same package deal this year. Nope I only got ONE hose. So while looking for another I read a review that said Harbor freight had them much cheaper. I looked it up. $8 and change for a 50' soaker hose that looks just like the expensive one I got. Ron got all they had on the shelf when he went in. It was an in store only purchase. He had been out the day before and found a 25', so that is in the lonely bed. It was pretty cute figuring out how to snake those things through already growing beans and cowpeas, plus he had already put up cattle panels that blocked access to 2 sides of the asparagus beds. He got a 12 foot pole and tied the hose on it and poked it through. We were probably pretty comical. But now, all the beds have soaker hoses except the onion bed. I usually just lay the hose in that anyway. I even have a short piece of an old hose Ron drilled holes in that circles around the 5' fabric bed I put sweet potatoes in. I'm thinking about taking the last one and draping it over things in kiddie pool row.

Larry, Asian greens should like your climate. I like komatsuna https://www.kitazawaseed.com/seeds_komatsuna.html

Sometimes you can find it on a seed rack as tendergreen. I also like misome. https://www.superseeds.com/products/misome-green-30-days

If you can eat turnip or mustard greens you will have no problem with any Asian green. I don't like turnip and mustard greens, so those two are milder. Tatsoi is a cool weather green, and pretty, too. There is always bok choi. There are Asian mustard greens like mizuna. Look through Kitazawa's offerings under leafy , you will be amazed at the different things. I've never had trouble growing them, sometimes confused about the best way to eat them.

You all, I've grown a cabbage. My first. In a fabric pot! It is a Pixie and I am very proud. LOL. I've always had trouble with cabbage.

Have a good week!

Houzz is being obnoxious today. It keeps deleting words for no reason. Above should say leafy greens. For some reasons greens kept being deleted.

Who stole your topsoil, Kim? And YAY on going to market.

Amy, Houzz does weird things. Congrats on your cabbage. We didn't do any this year.

Dawn, I'm excited that your deck and landscaping plans are getting closer!

dbarron, I actually made a list of everything that Dawn bought last fall when she found plants on sale and then planted them in her garden to hold them until their backyard landscaping was complete. Now, I can't find the list. I mean...I actually wrote down each plant that she listed here. lol

I ate the first okra pod of the year. Just raw and it was tasty. It was a burgundy one.

I haven't been out much today other than to take some pictures. I'm canning beans by myself too. Hope I didn't mess it all up. Scary.

Finally got some rain last night! About half an inch, but beggars can’t be choosers. It’ll keep me from having to water for a second. We were supposed to have some more tonight but the forecast has gone from 50% down to 10%, so I think I can count that out. My squash plants doubled in size overnight. I actually did a double take when I went out this morning. Hah!

My tomatoes are finally coloring up! Should have some ready in the next day or two. Trying to be patient. Tap, tap, tap.

Larry—I love mizuna. It’s one of my favorite greens. Makes excellent salads (it isn’t as spicy as arugula) and I find it very nice tossed with warm potatoes or beans or whatever until it just wilts. I picked up some komatsuna to try this fall. We’ll see how it does—none of them like heat much.

—Marleigh

Canned mixed greens! Which greens, HJ? How interesting!! I like the idea. And okay, I have a confession to make. I thought I must be the only person around who doesn't like green beans. I grew them this year--not very many here, and more at the school. Fixed our first batch a few days ago. I sautéed them first, in bacon grease, then steamed them til done. They were delicious! Wow.

What an amazing set-up you have there! I am so impressed and a little bit jealous. Now THAT's the way to can!

Some villainous insect beasts have been nibbling on our okra here--but the okra at the school all looks great--though not near producing yet. Aphids, I'm thinking. And the pumpkin-on-a-sticks and ground cherries at school were pretty much stripped early on. But all survived and now look really good.

Dawn, I'm so sorry to hear about Covid 19 infiltration. That stinks! I'll be interested in watching the numbers around here, after the rally. I'm thankful the crowd was smaller than predicted. Still, since the numbers had been rising in Tulsa anyway, I'll be watching over the next couple/few weeks.

Yep--congratulations on your cabbage, Amy! You've inspired me. I think I'll give up on potatoes next year and go back to cabbage, but this time with floating covers. Also. . . . the kale here have all kept right on growing like crazy. What fun!

Dawn, please fill us in on some of the plants you're getting for the landscaping (though I surely probably couldn't plant many of the same ones). And yes, getting excited for your new stuff.

The bronze fennel in the center bed is 8 feet tall. I can't believe it. Bee balm everywhere. A couple of the volunteer summer squash will be ready in a couple more days. When the shade moves over the potatoes later today, I'm going to go pull those out. What to put In there?

I had so much fun posting this picture on FB, thought I'd share it with the rest of you. Dawn and Sharon set me straight on these leaf-footed buy nymphs. Well rackle fratz. Computer's acting up. I hate GW's spellcheck. Where was I.

Kim--I can't believe you are going to market! Wow, you certainly got THAT garden going! Good job!!

And a couple of the school.

And the bronze fennel at home. . .

A mixture of Swiss Chard , kale and collards. Along with a little mustard and beet greens.

Super healthy.

HU

Thank you all for the suggestions on the greens. I have tried rape, turnip, collard, kale and different mustard, and liked them all. I have tried different types of lettuce, I even like arugula also, but it and mustard is a little spicy. To best of my knowledge the only Asian green I have tried was Blues Chinese cabbage, which I liked very well, but it was too large. I had rather grow something that had a smaller head. I will list the greens y'all suggested and start studying on them. I plant quit a bit of forage brassica, which I like also. I can plant enough of that, that the deer are not a problem. The deer dont eat much of the brassica, they seem to like the clover and rye better. I have forage collards growing in the wildlife garden now and deer seldom eat them, but I am not watering them and I am sure the deer dont think they are fresh and tender, but I was not watering the sweet potatoes either, and they are gone.

dbarron, I'll try to make a list today if I can venture out to the garden---rain is about to arrive here but I don't think it will last all day or even all morning.

I'm buying for four separate areas in the back yard and side yard, so everything on the list won't be in the same spot. Some of it will be in mixed shrub/perennial borders on the south and east sides of the house's wraparound front porch. This is the area from which we are removing 20-year-old monster sized holly shrubs. Some of it will be in a mixed perennial border alongside the planned fence that will keep out the deer and will run alongside the driveway. This is the part I'm most excited about because the fence will mean I finally can have flowers near the house without the deer eating them all. Some of it will be west of the planned deck that we hope to start building in July. I wanted it done by the fourth of July but that's not going to happen. Tim is hoping to order the deck materials from HD today or tomorrow. He's been working on his to-scale drawings and materials list for the last couple of days. Some of it will be along the planned walkway that will be built running from the deck to the driveway, where the fence will have some sort of gate and entry arbor. I suppose I should keep 4 separate lists so I'll know what I have for each area and don't get confused about it. (grin)

I don't remember specific varieties that I bought on Sunday, but I bought one of the dwarf chase trees that the plant label says gets 4-7' tall and 4-7' wide. I'll be careful where I plant it just in case it gets larger than they say. I bought some coreopsis that were exceptionally tall and had pale yellow flowers. I bought several kinds of echinaceas. Some were only the seed-grown Cheyenne Spirit types that come in a multitude of colors, and it looked like each pot had 3 different plants in separate colors, so I can divide those when I replant them in their permanent location., some were a sort of mango orange and were one of the fancier hybrids that (supposedly, according to some people who have grown them) do not come back as reliably as the non-hybrid purple coneflowers, and a couple were just standard purple coneflowers. In general our soil, even in the raised beds in the garden, do not provide enough drainage for coneflowers to survive wet winters, so I will need to make the new beds near the house much better draining than the raised beds in the veggie garden. I bought one of the dark-leaved Midnight Marvel type hibiscus plants. I think the one I chose has pinkish flowers. I bought two kinds of autumn sage---several plants of a gorgeous purple-flowered one that I do not have in the garden border at present, and one standard red one like all the ones in my garden border. Hmm. There was more. I believe I got 5 Gloriosa Daisy plants and several Veronica plants that might have been "First Glory". I was intending to shop for the shrubs that would be the backbone of the mixed shrub border around the porch, but didn't find shrubs I wanted at the small Home Depot in Gainesville, although I did find lots of perennial flowers. We are going to have to drive to a larger HD in another city, maybe Denton or Sherman, to get a good selection of shrubs. The garden center at the HD in Sherman is more than twice the size of the one in Gainesville. The Lowe's in Ardmore had a decent enough selection but someone had been lax about watering the shrubs and a lot of them looked bad. I didn't want to take on half-dead shrubs as a reclamation project so I didn't even look at all those.

One plant I'd buy more of in a heartbeat if I can find them are the Mango Popsicle red hot poker plants that we bought last fall on clearance at Lowe's. They have been in the veggie garden since last fall and have been most spectacularly in bloom for weeks now. Massed together, they'd be awesome in a border. They aren't as awesome in the veggie garden because they are lined up like little soldiers all in a row since it is a temporary holding bed for them. The 'Sunshine' privet (sterile plants) from the Southern Living garden collection still are very small because they were only from 1 gallon pots, but their color is spectacular. I'd like to find them in 3 or 5 gallon pots for more of an instant impact in the new mixed shrub border if I can find them in pots that large.

Larry, What is it with the deer this year? They are stomping their way through our yard like it is the dead of winter and there's nothing to eat, when there should be plenty of available food after all the gazillions of inches of rain we had all winter and spring. I can't feed any of the bird feeder birds at any time of the day without the deer immediately showing up and trying to clean out the feeders. They must be lurking in the woods and watching me fill feeders or put seeds on the ground for the ground feeders. They are driving me crazy. About the only way to feed the ground feeders at this point is to put the feed on the ground and then stand there and defend it from the deer until the birds have eaten enough, which is ridiculous...and I have to be right there within a few feet of the feeding birds or the deer muscle their way in, chase off the birds and eat the food. The wild turkeys are having to fight the deer for every bite they can get. If it is this bad in June, what will it be like in August, especially if the rest of the summer is dry?

We got another 6/10s of an inch of rain yesterday, bringing our weekend total to 3.1" so we are wet again with big standing puddles everywhere. Today's rain will add to that a little bit. I don't expect the standing puddles will last as long in this heat as they did in the Spring's cooler conditions. I guess we'll find out soon how long the puddles last. Mosquitoes are going to get bad again though.

Jennifer, Nice job of canning! After canning so much for so long, I'm sort of over it and doing less and less of it every year, but I'm glad you're enjoying it. In a lot of ways the veggie garden/food preservation has been my "job" for decades, and I'm slowly backing off from doing both in huge quantities so I guess I am sort of semi-retiring from it all. Right now the freezers are so full of meat that I don't even have a lot of room to add frozen veggies, but I didn't plant a lot of veggies because of the flooding rains, so it all works out.

Amy, I always have loved soaker hoses and drip irrigation lines, but voles love them and eat holes in them in the summer, so my watering capability seems to get more difficult instead of easier over time.

Why is house deleting words? That is just so weird.

Marleigh, Any rain is better than no rain at all. Hopefully you'll get more rain soon. While I'm glad we got rain, there are several Cherokee Carbon and Brandywine tomatoes ripening and I was worried all the rain would water down their flavor or cause them to split, so I hurriedly harvested those fruit to try to save them from the rain. In our area this year, as in so many other years, the rain is feast or famine---too much at once or none at all. I'd rather have it come in a slow, steady stream of moderation, but OK weather doesn't do moderation well.

Nancy, When Chris was in college, a friend of his from high school (she still was in high school) came to live with us for a few weeks while her stepfather and both grandparents were up in OKC fighting separate cancers. Her mom was up there looking after everyone in the hospital, and we didn't want her staying at home alone at her age. (Her dad was undergoing a bone marrow transplant, which saved his life, and her grandparents' treatments were successful and they both lived at least another decade.) Anyhow, I cooked garden-fresh green beans with bacon grease and bits of bacon broken up in them and quite a bit of salt, pepper and garlic for dinner one night when she was here. She'd never had green beans prepared that way and was crazy about them. I told her to remember that bacon and bacon drippings improve the flavor of most any green veggie. We had a lot of fun having a young lady temporarily in the house and I look back on those days fondly.

So many people get excited when they see the leaf-footed bug nymphs because they look very similar to a specific species of assassin bug nymphs. We have to disappoint a lot of people by giving them the correct ID, but it is better to know what they are before they disperse all over the garden. Did you notice that Linda Workman Smith is bagging her tomato fruit in organza bags this year to try to keep the leaf footed bugs and stink bugs off of them? I have considered doing this in past years but discarded the idea because I grew so many tomato plants that the thought of bagging all the fruit seemed daunting. It also is a great way to protect tree fruit from certain pests. If I had only a few tomato plants I'd bag the fruit. Or, I could just pick out a few favorite varieties and only bag those, but having to chose which tomato varieties get saved and which ones don't seems like trying to choose a favorite "child". Who can do that? I did notice some Cherokee Carbons and Brandywines I harvested yesterday had minor stink bug or leaf footed bug damage on the fruit, though I haven't seen any of those pests on the fruit.

It is raining again. I had hoped the rain would fall overnight and I could be out early weeding today, but by bedtime last night it was apparent the storms were moving slowly than previously expected and wouldn't be here until this morning. I guess I'm going to have to wait for the rain to end this morning before I can do any planting or weeding. This rain is most uncooperative.

Dawn

Dawn—We didn’t get the deluge that it looks like you have at the moment, but we did get some more rain overnight. Yay! Being from the desert foothills of Southern California, having any rain at all in the summer is still kind of a treat for me. California weather doesn’t do moderation, either—hot, dry, and crunchy brown from March-October, it’s like living in a convection oven. It doesn’t have the same humidity, which makes a difference, but it costs a fortune to keep a garden alive.

I am seeing a ton more stink bugs this year, as well as bean beetles and striped cucumber beetles. I haven’t had any hornworms yet, and I know the armyworms and blister beetles will make their appearance soon. 😑 The squash bugs have been manageable through hand picking for now (my squash have been so slow to start that I am still checking for them, but I’ll stop once they’re big enough to handle the damage, yay Seminole!). We’ve seen curiously few ticks so far this year, though fleas and mosquitos are everywhere.

Given the relatively mild and soggy weather in spring, I’m very curious what fall will be like this year.

—Marleigh

Jennifer there has been much turmoil bulldozing tearing out trees etc since January. My niece had a bigger mobile home moved in and the company that did it didn’t know what they were doing. It has been a nightmare until they finally got done. Then the friend of the family that got this al started got a new place and decided he would just get some of the soil/sand out of the garden area. It has been sickening and my father in law would have ran alll these idiots off including his daughter and granddaughter .

Marleigh, I wish so very much that our rain could have flown right over our place and come straight to you and Amy this morning. Y'all need it and we don't. I poured 3.1" out of the rain gauge last night, and we had huge standing puddles everywhere in the areas where we have red almost 100% clay that is highly compacted. Obviously I build highly amended beds anywhere I wish to grow anything and rainfall that comes in a feast-or-famine progression of all or none year-round makes this necessary. For a few weeks we had a famine, now we have a feast of rainfall.

So, this morning the forecast was for something like 1/10" to 1/4" of new rain, except if you received a thunderstorm. I looked at the radar this morning and saw a huge majority of the storm W/SW of us with just a small portion moving north so had low expectations. Of course we received a thunderstorm, followed by a couple of hours now of very light rainfall. There's currently 1.5" of new rainfall in our rain gauge this morning, and new puddles in places that water normally does not puddle and pond.

For anyone who's counting, that is 4.6" of rainfall here in the last 4 or 5 days. slightly more than our average rainfall for the whole month of June, which is 4.4". I forget when the rain started, but it is supposed to end this morning for a while at least. I think we have very slim chances of more beginning again around Friday. I looked at the OK Mesonet map to see if it was capturing our rainfall accurately. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it doesn't. I can see our Mesonet station, a good distance west of us, hasn't had nearly as much rain as we have had and, as usual, Thackerville to our south has had more. Do y'all wonder how much rain you've had? I'll post the 5-day rainfall map and you can see what it shows for you. The colors in areas where there is not a mesonet station is from radar-indicated rainfall and that works pretty well as long as they have it set to the right mode. For example, if they have it set to the regular mode and we instead get the torrential downpour type tropical rain, then the radar can undercount that. This is why we have our own rain gauge---because we know how often the Mesonet's is not able to measure as correctly as we'd like.

While this much rainfall sounds wonderful if it isn't falling at your place, what it will do is split over tomatoes right and left, and reduce their usual wonderful flavor and texture to mushy nothingless. Yesterday I harvested all the tomatoes that had broken color so that more rainfall couldn't ruin them. It is likely to ruin a bunch of the big green ones still on the plants though.

So, that's my morning rain report and here's the map. For anyone wondering about our location, look at Love County and see the 2.14" at the Mesonet station. Then look at the "finger" of land that pushes down into Texas between Marietta and Thackerville along I-35 if you can visualize I-35 running north-south right down the middle of the county. We are within that finger of land that sticks down into Texas which is why I often say that Texas sits to my west, south and east. The orange band that signifies the higher rain is at Thackerville, and we are within the yellow area just barely north of that orange. It is the yellow and orange parts of the county that are waterlogged this morning.

5-Day Rainfall Accumulation Map

I'll be back later. I need to go chase the deer out of the yard.

Dawn

Re: bagging tomatoes, I tried to post on Linda's thread but facebook failed me. I know the moth is a nondescript brown thing. I have never seen a pic of the eggs. Apparently the eggs are laid on foliage (or silks in the case of corn). I was concerned the eggs would already be on the tomato. I think if it came down to having to bag I would build a screen cover for a bed. Except that would exclude beneficials, so you're darned if you do and darned if you don't. I know I don't have the patience to bag. I tried bagging for seed saving one year. Not one single truss I bagged produced. That was 2015. It wasn't a great tomato year for me (and I had sooo many varieties). Oh well.

H/J, I'm glad Ron doesn't read this forum, he would be expecting me to can with propane in the garage. At least there was a chair. ;)

Kim, it seems you can't get a break!

I need to do something. Trying to figure out a watering pattern. 7 soaker hoses. Dawn, I realize different water pressures and all, but when you say you water "deeply" what does that entail? Is an hour from a soaker hose every three days sound right? Every 4? I know, I know, I will have to check the soil, LOL.

I am okay this year Amy. I have a huge productive garden at my daughter and my pea patch okra and melons are okay at home. I need to get out and hoe to divert all the water we are getting.

Kim, It sounds like a mess, and I bet your father-in-law would hate it. That friend of the family really had some nerve coming and taking soil like that. I would have been furious.

Marleigh, We moved here in a multiyear drought with little rain for the 2nd and then 3rd year in a row and I had a heck of a hard time digging in dry, hard, sun-baked pure red clay that had had inadequate moisture for 3 years running. We laughingly called it claycrete, but it was not funny at all. It was torture. It was slow-going building the raised beds because we were not importing someone else's worthless top soil to fill our raised beds, we were amending the clay and letting the amended soil fill the raised beds. In our worst of our early years here, we had less than 19" of rain for the whole year, about half of "normal" average rainfall, and the grasshoppers ate the bark, leaves and small fruit off our young fruit trees after they already had devoured the garden plants, and then after they ate the trees they came to the house and began eating the fiberglass window screens (we have replaced those with metal screens), the cotton rag rugs on the wraparound porch and the cotton pillows on the porch swing. When you were outdoors they would land on your clothing and attempt to start chewing on it even as you were trying to knock them off of you. It was a very trying period of time and my hatred of grasshoppers began around then.

We always have had more drought years than wet years, at least until 2015 arrived and brought us a long, miserable multi-year wet spell that appears to be ongoing even now. After 16 years of mostly drought, you'd think I'd welcome the wet years, right? Well, 2015 (following the drought years of 2011-2014) brought us almost 78" of rainfall, including 12+" in one day that flooded parts of town including our county courthouse and 20" in one month. Post oak trees, including a huge one in our yard, couldn't handle that much rain and began dying---they are adapted to hot and dry and need good drainage, and too much rain killed them slowly over the next 3 or 4 years. Anyhow, after those wet years, I determined that I prefer, and always will prefer dry years to wet years, because I always can add more water to the soil/plants via irrigation, but there is no way to suck up moisture out of heavily waterlogged soil. I long to go back to a more normal weather pattern where the summer is hot and dry because my garden and landscape are engineered for that. This constant flooding of the land gets old.

One day long-term drought will return and I'll rue the day I wished for it, but right now a good, old-fashioned, no-rain-is-falling-and-my-garden-is-toast drought is just what I'm missing and hoping for. Of course, this rainy period, prolonged as it has been over several years, has pounded into my brain that the most important part of redoing our landscaping will be the building of raised beds to keep the roots of all the new plants well above the grade level where water can sit for weeks on end. The veggie garden always has had raised beds, but the landscaping around the house was at grade level with as much amending done to the clay prior to planting as was possible at that time. We choose shrubs, trees and groundcovers that could mostly handle sporadic waterlogging, but for the new landscaping we'll elevate the beds well above grade level. And, ironically, the one type of shrub I thought would best handle waterlogged soil turned out to be the ones that died first in 2015. No matter how long one has gardened, Mother Nature still teaches us her lessons each and every year!

You know, you mentioned ticks and they are not too bad this year, certainly not bad compared to an average year. We have almost none of the pests that everyone else is seeing, which does seem peculiar, but I think we had heavily waterlogged soil for so long...for many months last fall and winter and this spring, that any pest which spends any part of its life in the soil, whether as eggs or whatever, just didn't survive it. I can sit there in our FB gardening groups and identify pests all day long for other people, while saying to myself "wow, I'm sure glad I don't have those yet this season". We do have fire ants, which I was hoping would not be here when we moved here. Years ago in Texas, they thought the fire ants never could survive much further north than the D-FW metro area....and all those experts were wrong. The fire ants preceded us and were here in OK when we bought our land here in 1997. They've only gotten worse since then. In the hot dry years you can almost forget they exist because they mostly live underground, but then in the rainy years their mounds pop up everywhere and we look like we've been invaded by gophers or moles, but it is 'only' the fire ants. Believe me, I'd rather have the ants than the digging and burrowing rodents.

Our falls down here have followed a really predictable pattern in these wet years. September stays almost as hot as August so it is really hard to get a fall garden going. Back in the drought years, we usually got our first good drought-breaking rainfall near the end of August, and then September was a fairly dreamy month for a gardener with more moderate temperatures and at least adequate rainfall. Now we have to wait for October for the pattern change, and last year we didn't really get it in the way we had hoped. We got an early freeze around October 11th or 12th and the beginning of months of heavy rainfall and people's fall garden plants froze the earliest we've seen it happen except for one year (1999, when it froze at the end of September). At the time the rain began falling regularly in the fall, we had no idea it would keep falling in abundance month after month after month. I've never been so disgusted with rainfall as I was here all winter long in 2020. Too much is just too much!

This week's rain is too much, but it is late June and unlikely to last, so it doesn't bother me as much. When rainfall normally is scarce in summer, you try to appreciate it when it does fall.

Still, I wonder when the multi-year rainy period will end. Probably not in 2020. We were headed into a flash drought, but this rain has knocked that back further west for some of us.

Dawn

It has made me heartsick here. The old home place has been wracked not improved. When you tear out trees for absolutely no reason it tells about your character.

dawn I was going to need a chat for fall gardening here. TX has one but I don’t feel it starts soon enough. Couldn’t I use the Oklahoma one. It’s only fifteen miles to the border.

Super sad, Kim. I'm sorry.

About canning...

Dawn, I'm sure you're worn out on it all. You've canned so much over the years. I doubt I'll ever can so much. I am enjoying it, though.

I prefer many things frozen too. BUT, when you have a power outage that can be an issue. Ask HU about that. He lost everything in his Okmulgee freezer last week.

Tom and I need to invest in a generator. Also, we have freezer space limits at this point. More than likely we'll freeze most of the okra. And there's going to be an insane amount of it. Insane amount. I want to save freezer space for the okra, chopped onions/peppers, asparagus, and a few bags of fruit and green beans. So...everything else will need to be canned.

Amy, we had both of the canners in the shop going AND my little canner inside. Canning in the shop is good, but there are some inconveniences. No water in the shop and no hot water near. After cooking the greens on the shop stove, poor HU had to carry the enormous pots to the kitchen where we jarred them.

It will be worth it. Just have to find a place for all of the jars. I don't want to store them in the shop. It's insulated, but has no cooling or heating system. This means, they'll need to be stored in the house. We will buy a pantry cabinet, but where to put it is the problem. Somehow we'll cram it into the utility room. This would work well if the light shelf could go to the shop. But is the shop a good place for starting seed? I just don't know if they would sprout. Our dog crates take up so much space in the utility room, but these dogs can't be left unsupervised in our house.

I sure miss the giant walk-in pantry at my old house. There was always extra room in it. Same with my giant walk-in closet. I didn't even use one side of it.

Oh well...that house is long gone and didn't have space for a big garden anyways...

Kim, I don't know what you mean about a fall gardening chat. Start one here? Use the OK Fact Sheet? I think you could use the OK Fall Gardening Fact Sheet for dates. Here it is:

OSU Fact Sheet: Fall Gardening

Texas Gardener magazine, available on the magazine racks at Wal-Marts everywhere, always has a fall planting chart for all the regions of Texas in one of the summer issues too.

With the way coronavirus cases are exploding in Texas, especially in the Houston and the D-FW metro areas now, I think fall will be horrible and it will pay to have a really robust and healthy fall garden that can produce as deeply into winter as possible. I think a fall garden will be more important this year than ever before and plan on planting a big one.

We have a generator for our freezers that we can use, if necessary, Jennifer although we never have had a power outage last long enough to make such a thing necessary. I feel bad for HU that he lost the food in his freezer.

In one of my crazy canning years when I canned over 800 jars of stuff, I moved everything out of the downstairs coat closet and upstairs to the bedroom closets and converted the coat closet to a canning closet....and I apologized to nobody for doing it. That year, it was more important to have a place to store the jars of food than to have coats, hats, gloves and boots in the downstairs coat closet. Nowadays we have the mudroom, so the coat closet is an overflow pantry to store everything that doesn't fit in the kitchen pantry.

With all the extra food and supplies I bought and stored for the Covid-19 pandemic, even the extra pantry overflows, but we are just dealing with that as best we can. I love not having to go to the store every week, especially as case loads down here skyrocket, but there is a limit to how much storage space any home has. I feel like ours is about maxed out, and whatever I can this summer or fall will have to be squeezed into pantries that already are too full all the time.

I bet you do miss your walk-in pantry. I'd love to add one to the north side of the house, just off the laundry room, but it is the kind of project that won't happen until Tim retires, and by then maybe we'll be too old to care. I really, really need a place to stockpile some of the big things that take up a lot of space, like the big bags of dog food and cat food and the big boxes of canned pet food....and all the canning supplies, which are tucked into cabinets here and there and not all in one spot. They had their own spot until we bought extra dry goods for the pandemic, and now they've been tucked into nooks and crannies all over. I love being able to shop less often, but when you buy in bulk you have got to have a place for all that stuff.

Chris' tiny house would be great for overflow storage if it were about 100' closer to the house. It is in just enough of a snakey area that I hate walking from here to there, though that distance doesn't seem to bother him and Tim.

Dawn

Aaarrghh! I lost my original train of thought and forgot to tell y'all that it is still raining here and I haven't stepped foot in the wet, soggy garden where the lumber that creates each raised bed also serves as a dam that holds water in the pathways. The rain is light and I don't think it will add up to much more in the rain gauge, but the constant drip, drip, drip is just annoying. The cats and dogs are beyond bored but have absolutely zero desire to step foot outdoors. Jersey won't even look at me when I say her name. She squeezes her eyes shut and pretends to be asleep because she's afraid I'll tell her she has to go outside. See how quickly we get sick of all the wetness here?

Dawn

all I can say is auto correct

I meant chart

thank you for posting. In the meantime I found six different fall planting guides for this area and they are all different. Some by three weeks. That’sa big difference

H/J, when our kids still lived at home Ron built a bookshelf that sits in the hallway. (It only narrows access to one room.) It now stores home canned items and beans and such stored in jars. It's not very deep, but it is basically floor to ceiling.

Most of the homes I have lived in did not have enough pantry space, so I would modify the pantry of closet a little. One thing I have found useful was making storage behind the door going into the pantry. The home we live in now only has room for one can or jar deep, but you would be surprised at what you can store at just one item deep. I would make a void where the door handle would not open into a jar. I would also cut gauge blocks so I was very accurate at locating the shelves so there would be no wasted space.

I did the same thing for the hall closet, only those gauge block were used as spacers also. They were made into an "L" shape, so they would stand alone. I would have sets of 4 spacers for each shelf. I had extra spacers so the wife could change the spacing, or height of the shelves. Some spacers might be for a quart size jar, some for pint, some 303 size can, or what ever. You could make different sized spacers at any time if you had a new need for storage height.

I just noticed that I did not even hit submit after typing this. I have been over in the wildlife garden covering up my pumpkins and turning my electric fence on the south garden.

Thanks, Everyone, for the storage ideas. This house is really just a rectangle and there's not many hidey hole places. We have one hall with 5 doors--the 3 bedrooms, 1 bath, and the AC/Heater thingie. There is a door at the end between two bedrooms, and it opens to a storage closet. But it's full of light bulbs, bandaids, wrapping paper, medicine. The hall is narrow so no room for a shelf.

Each bedroom has one double door closet. Tom's is the master, mine is the 3rd bedroom, Ethan's is his rooms. Under our bed are flat tubs of our family pictures, photo albums. Under the twin bed in the 3rd bedroom are flat tubs of the "important" papers.

We don't even have a coat closet. We seriously got rid of 90% of our books when we moved out here. I wish we had the funds to enlarge our bedroom--push it back about 10 ft. and make closets.

The answer lies in the utility room. SO glad we enlarged it when we did the remodel, but even still, it's not big enough! haha.

I'll figure it out somehow.

Hope everyone has a nice day. I'm about to walk over to the kindergarten.

Might try to build your own pantry shelves with some cheap lumber , boards. Then you could build them to fit whatever space you have in the utility room instead of buying a pre-built store bought shelf to have to make room for. I made my own pantry shelves at the house to fit over to one side of a spare bedroom. ( Another project for me and Tom perhaps ?).

https://www.google.com/search?q=building+pantry+shelves&rlz=1C1GGRV_enUS751US751&oq=building+pantry+shelves&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l7.13832j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BshLWnesV94

https://www.google.com/search?q=canning+pantry&rlz=1C1GGRV_enUS751US751&oq=canning+pantry&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l7.7175j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

HU

Generators. With all the crazy machinery and tools Garry has, you'd think a generator would be one. Nope. We have no generator. He has a big welding machine; air compressor, log splitter, a couple weed eaters, big leaf blower (which I have no relegated to the "don't use" category). . . a great big shop full of useful and not so much. No generator. Up in Minnesota, my son, who is a general contractor and builds or remodels homes, bought five of them at one point when we were without electricity for six days. He had his father-in-law buy four of the five and bring down, since all the stores in Mpls had sold out of them. Wade was very popular with our neighbors. He also used them in rentals or houses he was working on. Oddly, we tended to have electricity outages more up there than I've seen down here (knock on wood); we have them occasionally here, but so far, for not more than a couple hours at the most. Hahaha--Wade just called. Haven't talked with him for a long time. I reminded them of that time, and we all got a laugh. I was living in my "mother apt" with them at that time, and my little apartment was flooded. So on top of no electricity, no little home for me. Ahhh, good times. LOL

I have a situation. Was visiting with John yesterday at the school. We had fun noting how much everything's growing, and he opened the bluebird house so I could see the hatchlings. (We haven't bothered ours here . . .) But then. . . he said he'd like to add a third row of cement blocks to the raised beds. I asked why, and he said so he wouldn't have to water as much. Well. . . I told him I didn't know anyone who had beds that high except old folks so it'd be easier for them. My objection is first, cost. Of the extra blocks and the extra dirt. Second, I don't think it would solve the problem of having to water frequently. Third, then one wouldn't really be able to see the big center bed. But. What do you all think? I'm not sure there's an easy answer for watering those raised beds. He has soaker hoses wound around the big center bed, and they seem to be doing a good job. I would think perhaps a drip irrigation system might be good, if one has the money and could work up the plans.

Sigh, Jennifer. How big IS the utility room? Good luck. My grow cart is in our dining room! LOL With just the two of us here, there is room everywhere. In fact, how often I've thought we could easily live in a house half this big. Not that it's so enormous, but it is enormous for us. I live in my big room, but there's plenty of room in here for storing whatever canned supplies I might have. I have a shelf full of pickles from 2-plus years ago. What was I thinking? We don't eat pickles. We only eat one meal a day most of the time, and are way too full to eat pickles on top of the meal. I made the green tomato mincemeat but only I will eat it, so there those sit. We don't really eat jams or jellies. I DID use the tomato sauce and salsa. So will do more of that this year. And since discovering I like the green beans, I'll begin growing more of those in the future. We both love summer squash, but don't know that I'd like it canned or frozen. Cabbage--yeah. I'll put it on the grow list.

I saw HU's post before submitting this. Yes, Garry built my great shelves in this room, out of sturdy plywood. I covered the shelves with contact paper. The shelves are 8 feet long with a sturdy center brace, and there are five shelves, 15" deep. They were initially for my quilting fabrics, but now I keep some canned stuff and some gardening stuff there, too. This room is anything but fancy, but I love it.

Dawn. . . keep us posted as to when it will be dry enough to work outside again. I still can't even believe some of you had so much rain when we had nothing.

Do any of you watch the Oklahoma Gardening show (on Saturdays?)? I haven't, since we don't have regular channels on TV. I suppose I could watch it on You Tube. Maybe I'll check it out.

Oh! Garry and I noticed that my favorite tomato plant at the school had some leaves curling--especially on the side that is closest to the end of the bed. I wasn't all that upset, just thought I'd keep an eye on it. I don't know much about herbicide damage, but seemed likely. Further, of the approximately 25 tomato plants in those beds, it is the ONLY one that didn't look 100% healthy. Then John asked me about it yesterday. I asked him if he'd seen anyone spraying. He said the city sprayed for mosquitoes a few days ago in the neighboring field (which is just about a dozen feet from the edge of that bed). That wouldn't affect a plant, though, right? I'm wondering if they sprayed for anything else in that field, like thistles or something. At any rate. . . if there was an herbicide drift, I expect the plant will be fine, since just one part of the plant seemed damaged. ??

Kim, Just plant them and they will grow. Then you can write your own planting guide based on your notes on what did or didn't work. You'll never find any two planting guides that align perfectly.

As far as vegetable gardening goes, I was taught by Neil Sperry to plant fall tomatoes about the last week in June down there in order to have them large, healthy and ready to fruit when the temperatures fall back into the right range in late August or in September. He'd let you slide a little and not get your fall tomato plants into the ground until early July and if you want to add any new pepper plants for fall then those would go into the ground about 2 weeks after the tomato plants, and he would advocate getting your pumpkins in the ground in early July as well in North Texas. Pretty much everything else down there wouldn't be planted until at least August (partly because July weather is just so brutally hot and dry). So, I got out Neil's latest book, "Lone Star Gardening" (available on his website) and his planting list for August for North Texas shows the first week of August as the time to plant beans, cukes, squash and corn. For the middle of the month he shows: broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts. For the end of August he shoes leafy and root veggies like lettuce, spinach, carrots, beets and radishes. Hope that info from Neil helps.

The difference in planting dates is easy to understand. Some years North Texas has a real cooldown in late August and fall gardeners can take advantage of that by planting early (especially if you are psychic and know the early cooldown is coming, which sadly, none of us are). Some years North Texas doesn't cool down until October. So, I think depending on different years and what they have experienced, the people who produce those planting guides are slanted towards planting earlier or later. I haven't found that planting earlier hurts at all as long as you are willing to make the extra effort to baby the early plantings through the heat. The risk in following a guide with later dates is that if the first frost/freeze comes ultra early, like it did in early October of last year instead of late November or early December, then late plantings may freeze or stall before they ever get to produce. That is why I lean towards favoring earlier dates. Anyhow, if you are going to sell at market, the early bird with the first of the new crops usually gets the worm!

Amy, Well it depends on how long it has been since I watered, how dry the soil is/was, etc. but usually anywhere from 2 to 4 hours gets the water deeply enough, and I prefer to get it wet 6-8" down. (A stake loosely hammered into each bed so it is easily removable to check is how I check down deeply.) . Before this latest round of rain arrived, I was watering about every 4th or 5th day and we were not yet classified in anything on the Drought Monitor but I felt we were a week or two away from being classified as Abnormally Dry. The western portion of our county that was classified Abnormally Dry is deep sand and dries out before we do even when it has had plentiful rainfall, and I don't think they've had nearly as much rain as we have had in the last 6-8 weeks.

Usually, by the time the Drought Monitor says we are Abnormally Dry, we are what I consider horribly dry and I am contemplating how much longer it even will be worth it to water because you reach a point of diminishing returns where you are spending more money watering the veggies than the value of the produce you're harvesting. I usually worry and fret about the watering through at least the end of July but keep doing it. Sometimes I stop then and take a break until September. Most of the garden, surprisingly perhaps, will survive a month of no irrigation even in August. It won't look good, but it will survive. Since our normal summer weather already is hot and horribly dry, by the time we reach Abnormally Dry we are almost too dry for irrigation to make a big impact. It took me a few years to learn that.

Now that it has rained I won't have to water for a while---I suspect my soil is wet down at least a foot, and I'll find out this afternoon when I plant the new dwarf Chase Tree in one of the raised veggie beds that will be its temporary home until the new landscape area is ready for it. The veggies should be pleased that the landscaping plants will live amongst them temporarily because that pretty much guarantees the garden will continue to be watered this summer no matter how hot and dry it gets. I can't let the landscape plants die before they even get a chance to be planted in the landscape where the deer, voles and others then will do their best to kill them. Of course, I'll be doing my best to make sure that doesn't happen.

The shelf Ron built sounds nice and in a handy location. I thought about doing that with the upstairs hallway, but I hate the thought of having to go up those stairs more times per day than I already do.

Larry, The house I grew up in did not have a pantry and mom just stored groceries in cabinets, which seemed fine to us since it was all we knew. When Tim and I got married we bought a house just up the road from my parents and it had a small reach-in pantry. I was astonished at how much more organized that seemed to be. I haven't been without some sort of pantry ever since. I have seen some people take down sheetrock and create a 1-jar-deep type pantry shelving system there in the wall between the studs. Generally it is possible to find a way to store more canned goods---we just have to be creative sometimes to find it.

Jennifer, You have about as much storage in your house as we have in ours, which is to say not enough. I don't know how we would have survived without under-the-staircase storage that is our walk-in overflow pantry for big items and extra stuff. It just ends up with too much extra stuff thrown into it. I love the pull-out drawers in the built-in pantry in the kitchen and wish we had found a way to put in two of them, but there just wasn't space for that unless I was willing to sacrifice counter space, which I wasn't. Overall it was the right decision, but there's times I wish we had more pantry space. We were so careful when we chose this house though because we wanted it to be big enough and yet not too big after Chris grew up and left home, and I'd say the overall size of the house is fine but I wish it had come with a few more closets, which of course, would have meant more square footage.....so maybe it would have been worth having another 100 or 200 square feet if it could have been storage space.

Nancy, I cannot help thinking the power outages are a regional thing and might depend on how well trees are maintained around power lines as well as how well any given utility maintains its poles and lines and such. We never had a power outage that lasted more the 30 minutes for probably the first 18 years here. Then a year or two ago we finally had one that lasted 4 hours and I was beginning to think we needed to crank up the generator when, suddenly, the power came back on. Our electric co-op focuses big time or tree maintenance and line and pole maintenance because one year, about a decade (I think it may have been in March 1989) before we moved here, a big ice storm brought down trees everywhere which then brought down all the power lines and poles in our county and many, many trees--beyond what anyone could count or quantify. The time and cost of recovery was immense. They had to cut down so many trees on private property in order to restore power that they left them lying in huge heaps...and you still could see the huge heap of decaying trees lying basically beneath the power lines decomposing in place when we bought our land in 1997. Since that experience, the electric co-op has done everything they can to ensure it never happens again. They are great in their approach though, coming to talk to you with a tree map of your property and power lines in their hands and discussing what they need to do and why. They cut carefully and with consideration, trying to avoid the butchered tree look. They don't have to have your cooperation but they prefer to have it. We always have told them to cut down whatever they need to cut down to ensure all the power lines that pass through our property are safe from falling trees. I'd rather lose a few trees to their contractors' saws than ever have the power out for a substantial period of time.

It is dry enough to weed and I've been doing that all morning. My feet are soaking wet from walking through wet grass, puddles, etc. but the rest of me is relatively dry. I'm indoors to cool off and eat lunch in a minute. Lunch will involve tomatoes!

Your tomato has physiological leaf curl. At this point I cannot see any clear sign of herbicide damage which usually gives your leaves that bizarrely curl up like pigs tails or that stretch and shrink and look very oddly shaped. Your leaves look fine just curled. Physiological leaf curl is often a reaction to drought, or heat, or sunny days after a string of cloudy days and it tends to correct itself. It is not odd to have just 1 or 2 plants exhibit the leaf curl---plants are not all clones of each other and are as individual as we humans are, so some of them just don't like heat or dryness or wind or whatever as much and show their displeasure by rolling up their leaves.

Somebody wanted a list of the plants I bought Sunday, so here it is: Purple Coneflower--Pow Wow Pink (2); Echinacea Double Scoop Mandarin (4); Coneflower Cheyenne Spirit (3) (and yes I have grown these from seed in the past and they did well in the back garden until one year they didn't); Bee Balm Balmy Pink (1) this was a sick plant on the clearance rack and bee balm doesn't like our clay either, but it was near death and I wanted to save it, so I bought it; Coreopsis Big Bang Star Cluster (3); Autumn Sage Mirage Purple (3); Autumn Sage Mirage Red (1); Hibiscus Summerific Berry Awesome (1) this one has dark purple foliage like the Midnight Marvel ones and lavender flowers, and is a Proven Winners plant; Gloriosa Daisy (1)--they had plenty of them and now I don't remember why I bought only one instead of 3 or 5 so I think I need more of these; Veronica First Glory Blue (3); and Dwarf Chaste Tree Blue Puff (1). So, mostly it is perennials for the fence-side perennial border and not shrubs for the beds beside the house.

The plants I bought last year are doing spectacularly in their prime spot in the veggie garden. I don't remember where I listed them last time, so here's that list: Sunshine Privet (9)--this is a sterile privet with yellow foliage that is stunningly beautiful; Red Hot Poker Mango Popsicle (11)--in bloom for a month now and the most lovely glowing mango orange color; Coreopsis Big Bang Cosmic Eye (5); Dwarf Mondo Grass (3); Millennial Ornamental Garlic (6) gorgeous and I'll love to have a few dozen of these to mix throughout both borders to repel voles; Coral Bells--Apricot (5) and Carnival Coffee Bean (3); Sedum Autumn Joy (3) and Sedum Raspberry Truffle (5).

The next few weeks I need to focus on finding shrubs that will fill the border alongside the house. It is just that shopping for perennials is much more fun than shopping for shrubbery.

I need to finish this, eat lunch and get back out to the garden to pull weeds. I made great progress this morning as the ground is nice and soft after all the rain.

Dawn

Kim—I have had good luck with the Johnny’s seed starting calculator for spring, so I’m using their fall one this year. The times line up pretty well with Dawn’s suggestions, but you can download the spreadsheet for yourself here: https://www.johnnyseeds.com/growers-library/online-tools-calculators.html

Nancy—My tomato plants get physiological leaf curl every year. This year, only two so far have shown it, primarily on their uppermost branches, and they are in a spot where they don’t get much shade during the afternoon. I tried to plant to create some shade in all my beds to see if that would help the leaf curl, so that certainly seems to be a yes. You may want to see if there is a way to generate some cooler afternoon temps for your curly friend. 😉

—Marleigh

I have yellow squash plant damage, it looks just like deer damage, but I cant find a deer track anywhere. This happened today, the plants were 30 from the back door. There were no pieces of the leaves left on the ground. I also had some cucumber plants eaten and pulled up. Someone please tell me what is getting in my garden. I have a pulse type fence energizer that is supposed to be here tomorrow for the wildlife garden, and I have 2 constant voltage energizer I can install. Does anyone have a better idea? Can deer fly?

I have never had deer damage and not fine some type of sign, even if it were just teeth marks where they had pulled off part of a leaf. I have 2 rows of peas between the cucumbers and the squash that are about 8 " tall, why would a deer skip over the peas and eat the scratchy leaves on a squash plant?

Well its time to go to the wildlife garden and cover the pumpkin plants, if there is any left.

Larry...rabbits? Raccoons? Moles/voles?

Nancy, Oklahoma Gardening is a great show. If you don’t want to watch it on YouTube, you can watch it with an old fashioned rabbit ears, if you can get reception with your trees. If not, there are upgraded antenna that you can install outside. You’d at least get public television and local networks (for weather advisories) that way. I’m sure GDW could install easily.

Anyone having more trouble than usual with BER this year, than usual. Only ones affected here are Fourth of July and Heidi. This month I’ve watered and fed pretty regularly, so I’m guessing it’s leftover from the spring rain? I’ve probably removed a dozen affected fruit this week. Also having trouble with broken branches on the tomatoes, but I’m blaming those more on Fatboy and his associates than weather. Still, I’ve lost 8-10 productive branches in the last week. Fatboy actually hung in a tree no more than 2 feet from me, the other night, and laughed maniacally as he looked directly at me. I know I’m still losing tomatoes, but at least he’s hiding the evidence better.

Fourth of July did live up to its name, and gave me 2 tomatoes this past week. Most days this week look pretty decent for pollinating too.

Hi Farmgardener. I can never remember what your name is. Not Carol? Okay, I'll try to catch a few episodes of OK Gardening. I love Joe Lampl's stuff. I enjoyed hearing about how you preserved produced in the past. . . you all know the song, "I did it my way. . .. 'regrets, I've had a few, but then again, too few to mention,'" I've had a few. Not so much regrets for things I did wrong (well and there are a few of those, too), but regrets that I didn't get to do such and such. Regret that I wasn't able to keep horses in my life all the time through the years. Regret that I never was able to grow gardens all the time through the years and harvest the produce. I was a single Mom for half the years my boys were growing up; and then single for most of my working life. Worked long (often stressful) hours at law firm jobs. I always had flowers/shrubs, but not veggies. I'm pretty new to the larger gardening world that includes food. I grew up with it. I remember the incredible garden my folks had. I can distinctly remember all the rows and even the order they were in. I loved helping plant; I loved watching the plants grow. I didn't mind weeding. I didn't mind harvesting. I HATED snapping the beans, shelling the peas. . . and I confess I hated Mom's canning. My two brothers were off doing fun little league or scouting things. I was helping in the kitchen, washing and drying dishes or doing housework so Mom could can. And I recollect washing a lot of the canning asides.

Not only that, but I didn't much like the canned goods when we ate them during the winter. To this day, I don't buy canned goods much. No peas, corn, beans.. . . Freezing produce wasn't used much back then, in the 50s and 60s. . . but I actually did freeze some stuff through. 4-H and thought, "This is the way to go."

Mom had so much weight on her shoulders. She grew up with a skid-row alcoholic father; her mother, such a beautiful person, was fairly helpless in being able to provide monetary support for the family. (My Grandma--and Grandpa--two of the most wonderful people in my life. Grandpa quit drinking when Mom was 22. And so I never knew how he'd wrecked his family. The Grandpa I knew was perfect.). So I perfectly get that Mom had major issues with NO money; the only way her mother and her brother and she were able to scrape by for several years was with the help of her father's three sisters. But I am so sad that it so affected Mom's approach to life. To this day, I grieve that she couldn't just engage any aspects of life with joy.

I can remember when I was probably 7,8,9 loving the flowers. The only thing my parents grew at that time was the vegetable garden. We had an area next to the house around one long side that was sidewalk-ed off with a 3' wide area of "flower area." Only no one planted any flowers there. I saved allowance money and. bought marigold seeds to plant there. I "planted" them but had no idea what I was doing and they didn't sprout. I tried it a a few times and then gave up.

Dawn, I laughed so hard about the power outages. The last 10 years of my working life were spent with the major electric/gas company in the Midwest region, in the law department. Xcel Energy in Mpls. I do believe that company is one of the bests in the nation. Yes, we had more long-term outages up there than I've seen down here, those (3 of them) were caused by tornadoes that ripped through the metro area and all within 1-2 miles of us. . . trees down everywhere. . . Though down here we tend to think we are the capitol of tornados (and I'm sure we are), Minneapolis-St Paul are a major branch of tornado alley, if you all didn't know. And when a tornado rips through a city, gonna take some time to get the power back up.

Trip through the past. . .

Thank you Dawn and Marleigh.

the Johnny’s will help. Also just remembered I have a book from Howard Garrett and I can use it also as a gauge.

i do want to develop my own guide. I am going to be at my daughters a few days with kids so I can work on that

Farmgardener, it sounds like you have a nice set-up. My generator is only 7000 watts, but I can back feed through the shop and power enough appliances to live in a power outage. The generator will not power the central heat and air. The only time I needed to save food was when the freezer went out, and by the time we noticed, it was too late.

We did not can much when I was young, so I learned very little from child hood, other that some about tractors. Dad bought two old tractors after we moved out on this small farm. I was only 8 or 9 years old, but I got to drive the small tractor, I thought I was 10' tall. Watching dad trying to keep all his junk running left its mark on my life. I have two old junky tractors and some worn out equipment. Nearly all the work I do is from a tractor seat. A lot of the time I spend in the garden I am on my hands and knees, that is the reason I try to have strong trellises, I can use them to help me get back on my feet.

I am going to drive more tee post today and try to run a hot wire around part of the wildlife garden and save the people food I have planted over there. I will have to run a wire around the north garden also. I dont understand why I am having so much deer problems, as much rain as we have had this year there is deer food everywhere. If it is this bad now, the hot wire wont save my garden when it really gets dry. I am hoping to plant a lot of fall garden, turnips radishes, collards and a deer mix. I hope by planting a lot that I can share with the wildlife.

I only have 3 water melon plants, I wish I had more. I would like to have more sweet potatoes also. I could cut slips off the vines I have now, but they are covington plants and mature a little slower than many of the others.

The "Mail Lady", just delivered my fence charger. I wish I had gotten off my backside and had more of this work done, its starting to get hot, but we do have a breeze blowing.

Marleigh, Some years I shade tomatoes on purpose with a shade cloth and some years I don't. Now this is interesting. My plants almost never get physiological leaf roll. Never. Maybe 1 plant with it every 4 or 5 years. Hmmm. I'll have to ponder that. Maybe it is because the soil is in such good shape now---it was truly horrid when we started, but just gets better every year.

Larry, Coons are pretty destructive and won't necessarily leave paw prints unless the soil is pretty wet. Lately we have a coon in the yard every night.

Rebecca, Not a single fruit with BER here yet (and I am sure there will be one tomorrow just because I said that) and I expected it with the plants in the ground because of the flooding rains. I guess the fact that they haven't had BER must indicate the raised beds drain well enough.

You need for the mafia to send some of their associates to your house to take care of Fat Boy and his associates. We have a feral mama cat who had kittens here. She had them outside in the rain and we moved them into the garage where she raised them. They are about 6 weeks old now and have fled the garage, likely because we humans come into it all the time, so now they are living the feral, wild life. Anyhow, she is teaching them to hunt, and they are hunting squirrels. At least she is. She kills a squirrel and brings it to them and they look at her like "where's our kitten chow?" Once a human being like me has fed those babies kitten chow in a dish, they are spoiled and do not want to eat squirrel or anything else she kills. She is quite vexed about it all. They'll never be tame---they run when they see me coming, but when it is time for breakfast and dinner, they are lurking near the food dishes.

farmgardener, Some other people have had that happen. I don't think I've ever seen it, but sometimes somebody's post will just disappear from the middle of a thread, and then be back in place later. It is strange.

Nancy, A lot of the women who grew up here (they are old enough to be my mother) had those same experiences of helping their mother with the garden and the canning and hated it so much that they neither gardened nor canned as an adult.

How very sad that your mom had such a rough upbringing and couldn't get past it and enjoy life more. It is amazing how some experiences can scar people for life.

Oklahoma has had a lot fewer tornadoes in recent years. I remember our first few years here were horrible, but lately the different weather patterns seem to have benefited OK, probably at some other state's expense.

Larry, It is exactly the same with the deer here and I don't understand it either. This year out of all years they should have plenty of forage to browse, and they don't care. They're coming after our stuff regardless.

Heat index values here were pretty awful today, and I think tomorrow will be worse. I need to get out early if I am going to get out there at all. As soon as I opened the back door to let the dogs go out very early in the day, I could feel that humidity hitting me in the face and knew just what a challenging day it was going to be. The temperature wasn't that bad, but the heat index was discouraging.

I didn't get as much work done in the garden as I had hoped today, but I got a lot done indoors.

I harvested a lot of tomatoes and there's too many to eat fresh, so I am going to have to use some of them in cooking I guess.

Dawn

intermediate day onions harvest. HU and I pulled them

tonight.

anyone recognize this canna? Someone gave it to me at SF maybe 3 years ago. It’s lovely.

Quiet here. I guess everyone is at the other place.

Nancy (and others), do you (y'all) buy canned tomato sauce/paste or canned diced tomatoes or canned black/pinto beans for recipes and such?

It's rare that we buy canned vegetables just to eat alone, but do often for recipes. It will be nice to have our own canned diced tomatoes and such.

Dawn, do you remember the video of the kittens/mother cat that I sent several weeks ago. They disappeared from my elderly friend's yard. I hope they are okay.

We are cleaning out the utility room tomorrow and will add a pantry/cabinet and remove the light shelf. I have until January to figure out the light shelf situation. Maybe an idea will come to me by then.

Great day. I actually got the entire lawn mowed. HUGE. But I've been worried about little scrawny puny Jerry tabby cat. He came down with a cough. . . I think this is the third day. It really sounds quite horrible. Sounds like a cross between a cough and a sneeze, but must be a cough, since he has coughed up phlegm with it. Scary to witness in a cat. So we just made the trip to the Animal Emergency Center in Tulsa--second time in 7 months for Jerry (first was a 3-inch long scrape on his right shoulder). I called the Wagoner clinic, but they were seeing pets by appointment only, and only taking phone calls from 9 to noon. So we called the ER vets in Tulsa. I feel more comfortable with them anyway. Of the 3 cats, if we have to take one to a vet, Jerry is the dream patient. He slept most of the way up there, after I opened up his crate so he could see. . . and ditto coming back. He got a steroid shot, and an antibiotic prescription. I'm worried but hopeful.

It gave me the time I'd been wanting to spend figuring out how to stream music from my new iPhone to our new truck. I HATE all this techy stuff. But I DID it!!! My head is ready to explode even without the Oklahoma Gardening Network posts on FB--HAHAHAHA.

I signed up for Amazon music and had a special playlist for Garry's Country. I'd started it a year ago. . . I hate country. Okay, I hate 2/3 of country. GDW loves classic country, not new stuff. But I never heard a Don Williams song I didn't love. And there are many others I enjoy. And all the ones I enjoy, Garry likes. And many of the other ones Garry likes, make my stomach turn. I could explain it if we were all in a big circle and I had the music floor for 10 minutes. LOLOL. So my GDW playlist so far only has 75 songs on it. But I had never been able to figure out how to link it to our vehicle until just today. We drove all the way to Tulsa and back with my special GDW playlist. Garry was beside himself. He LOVED it--even better, so did I.

In the garden--all of a sudden I had 4 c moschata Kitazawa summer squash. . . from the volunteer plant, no less!! LOL. I did a summer squash casserole thing yesterday. . . I like MY idea better. Mine is just sliced thin, in 9x9 casserole baking dish, mixed up with buttery cracker crumbs and then topped with more buttery cracker crumbs mixed in with a lot of paramesan. NOW. The ones I planted on purpose are also going to be ready in just a couple days. I LOVE summer squash.

We yanked out the potatoes. Great potatoes, but small output, and not big enough to want to try them yet one more year. These will last us through the next 2-3 months. More green beans, another couple batches.

I have another question for you all. How tall do thornless blackberry bushes grow, and which are your favorites?

Dawn, I saw the critter that is tearing up the house gardens today, it is a half grown ground hog. I got a shot of at him, but I think I missed. I don't see as well as I use to, plus I wobble and weave very badly when I an standing free style. I have been noticing what looked like where something has been going under my shed floor for months. I did not think much about it, I just thought it might be a critter that was helping me keep the rats and mice away. I never once thought it might be a groundhog den. From the path worn under the edge, there may be others under there. I have my work cut out for me trying to get rid of them. I had a groundhog problem about 15 years ago, but I was a much better shot then and I soon had no problem, but they can really be destructive.

I want to have a pumpkin crop this year and I can just see me fighting deer and groundhogs all summer. I want to plant more seeds, but I expect I may be running out of time. I have a few old timey cornfield pumpkin seed, and some butternut, but I cant find any more Seminole seed, and that is the one I wanted the most because it keeps so well. I checked at the farmers co-op in Greenwood today and the dont have any of the seeds I want. I like to buy forage seed to plant in the fall. Even though the co-op does not have any in, and may not get a good supply in for fall, I still have enough seed from last year to keep me and the deer happy till next spring.

Nancy—I grow Arapaho, Chester, and Triple Crown. Stark Bros. sells them as a mixed pack, and they all flower at different times for a staggered harvest. Arapaho is the easiest to grow. Can’t kill it, and I dig up dozens of volunteers every spring. I find it prolific, if a little seedier. Chester has the best flavor, and Triple Crown took a long time to establish but is very healthy and more upright than the other two. Next year’s canes are now well over six feet; I need to top them, but I’m not doing any maintenance until I pull the old canes in the fall. I need to fix their supports.

—Marleigh

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

Dawn, your tomato soup recipe posted above. I make something similar but no basil and add equal parts pumpkin puree to the tomatoes. I actually prefer it chilled in summer, and it works well that way (imo).

Dawn—I suspect the physiological leaf roll is a result of poor soil, but the shading helps to mitigate the effects once the plants are in the ground and you can’t do anything to fix the soil. I have spent four years working to improve our soil and this is by far the best year for leaf roll, but I do still see some affected plants—though much less so than previous years. I keep amending and I mulch very heavily, but the clay is just ferocious. Even with regular watering and a consistent moisture level, I know the plants struggle during the worst parts of summer; I can feel the difference in the soil myself vs. spring when I dig in it.

I hate raccoons. Sneaky, devious, five-fingered jerks. I shoot them when they come around and feel no remorse. We had two feral cats we adopted to live here, but they weren't much on coming in at night. Only one is left, but she is the smart one—she prefers to squeeze under the porch at night to being locked up. I’ve had coyote-dogs that hang out in our woods and watch the house, and I’ve seen more bobcats this year than ever before (in broad daylight!) so I never know what is after our animals. In California we always kept our pet food in airtight, twist-on containers because of ants and raccoons. The coons would come sniffing around, but couldn’t twist off the lid. One night we caught two of them rolling the entire container (filled with 35 pounds of cat food) away. They were dealt with, but it was a valuable lesson in their level of craftiness.

Marleigh, I get upset with the critters also. I have not seen any coons here, I know we have them because I see a lot of tracks. Late yesterday I went over to cover what was left of my pumpkins, and my neighbor was outside working. He told me that 3 doe and 3 fawns came out of the thicket to check on the pumpkins. They did not eat anything and went back into the 5 or 6 acre thicket. It remind me of our welfare system. The deer were getting along fine before I started the wildlife garden, now it seem as though it is a way of life. I am not knocking welfare, but it should be a safety net, not a way of lift. I will continue planting food for the critters, but there is no shortage of food for the critters at this time. We have had a lot of rain the past two years and everything is overgrown. It just reminds me of a remark I make often, " all energy follows the path of least resistance ".

The deer got into my north garden last night, and in the south garden night before last. I put up a hot wire along the north side of the south garden ( I almost never have to close in the whole garden, but I may have so many deer hanging around now that I have to). Most of the time I can string a hot wire around one garden, and then just string a wire around part of the other garden. Once the get in a hot wire, they seem to think all wires are hot.

I will go string some wire around the north garden and some of the wildlife garden. I wont try to close off all I have planted over there. I only want enough for some extra food for me, and to save seeds from some of the plants that are harder to find seeds for.

I hope to plant some collard and cabbage seeds today, I know it is too early, but I have too many seeds, and they are getting old and I would like to test them now, it they come up I will plant more later. I made a comment that the deer were not eating the collards I planted about 2 or 3 months ago, I lied, the deer are eating them also, but not many.

Well I have rested enough, back to working on the garden fence, then mowing the lawn.

Groundhogs/woodchucks. We had a huge one that lived nearby. . . As big as Titan is, that woodchuck gave him a run for his money. Titan would chase it until it didn't want to run; then it'd turn and chase Titan. It was all fun and games until the woodchuck bit him, then Titan chased it all the way down the little nearby creek--the woodchuck finally found refuge under some large logs there. Here was a new one on us; we just learned about them yesterday--myocastor coypus (called nutria)--an invasive rodent moving north from Florida. Our friends who moved here from Florida say they're seeing them in Wagoner. They thought they were woodchucks initially--said they're somewhat smaller than a woodchuck.

Thanks Marleigh. John wanted to know if thornless blackberries would be tall enough to put against the fence to kinda hide it. The fence is 6 feet tall, but then has the 2 feet taller barbed wire at the top, that kinda leans out. John wanted to take that off--I asked him why and he said because it looked like a prison yard. I said yeah, but you don't see any deer--or vandalism--in the garden. . . lol. So then he came up with the idea of growing shrubs that would be tall enough to kinda hide it and asked about thornless blackberries. I said I'd ask you all. Also, there has to other berry bushes. . . serviceberry and Sandhill/Chickasaw plum. . . and then it occurred to me. The problem isn't a lack of tall shrubs, understory trees, or tall plants. The problem is the Bermuda grass, and once having removed it, how to keep it at bay. Hmmmmm. I hate Bermuda. Coral honeysuckle seems like a no-brainer--minus the Bermuda. I've been reading up on understory trees and shrubs for the past couple hours. Suggestions welcome.

I have two too many summer squash plants here at the house. That's okay. I'll find folks to help deal with them. My first two big tomatoes are nearly ready. What a beautiful color they are. Giant Belgium. These two ARE cat-faced, but others on the plant don't appear to be. I'm anxious to taste them. The only other tomatoes I have so far are Heidis and SS100s. The Heidis are tiny. I'm wondering if I mislabeled them. On the other hand, I didn't grow any grape tomatoes. So they have to be Heidis. They're really only a bit larger than a grape tomato.

Okay, no I've just used another couple hours reading up on butterflies and trying to figure out who is who among the butterfly pics I've taken in the past few days.. I am SO good at finding stuff other than work to do. The melons are getting lots of blossoms. I hope that will translate into melons. Later, all.

Nancy, I hope Jerry is better!

We just planted blackberries this year. I think they vary in size and can't remember how big mine are supposed to get. They are very small still. The varieties are Arapaho and Navaho. The 10 berries I've eaten are very sweet and tasty. I'm hopeful.

Larry, speaking of Seminoles. I have a total of exactly 20 left. We cleaned and organized (and added a pantry cabinet to) our utility room and I found that many tucked in here and there. Need to use them up before the other winter squash is ready. We have butternut, Penn. Dutch Crookneck...and some more Seminole around the burn pile (It's surprisingly not doing that well). I also still have some puree in the freezer.

Dawn, that soup sounds amazing. I would probably even like it cold like dbarron suggested.

I wish I could remember who gave me the pretty canna.

Whoever (I keep thinking it was Amy but maybe it was someone else) gave me the hardy hibiscus...well, it's blooming and is beautiful! Another friend gave me a plant as well. They are both deep red and just lovely. Even with the grasshopper nibbles. Grasshoppers must love hibiscus. I've killed probably 30 this week just on the hibiscus plants.

Marleigh, I know it's not really funny, but the image of raccoons rolling away a tub of cat food is a little funny.

I'm terrified of them getting to our chickens. Our chickens are pretty secure at night. The only thing that I think could get into their coop is a snake with some effort....but I'm never confident in that. I just secure them as best as we can.

We spent last night downtown OKC and enjoyed being away for a night and eating at our old favorite restaurant...back when we were barely more than kids. There's some really impressive things going on downtown. Scissortail park will be amazing when the trees grow up a bit. There's meadows of Oklahoma native wildflowers and grasses and such.

The splash pads and playground have a really cool design. We took the K there a couple of days ago.

This morning Tom and I went to the farmer's market. I always want to buy stuff there, but don't need to because about everything they are selling, I already have in my garden. The only things we bought are turnips and a lettuce blend from Looney Farms.

I killed a stink bug on the Chaste tree. Spider mites have killed the few beans that are in the kitchen garden. I have such a hard time with beans and spider mites. I'm glad the beans are doing better in the survivalist garden.

Speaking of beans...are Contender and Buff Valentine the same?

Aphids on the southern peas! Lots and lots of them. Also, lots of mating ladybugs. So...it will probably be between a week and two weeks before the baby ladybugs show up. I would like to keep my plants alive until then. The actual pods are covered in aphids and I'm pretty sure they are becoming distorted. (This is currently in the kitchen garden, not survivalist garden. don't panic, HU) I don't mind sacrificing a few pods to up my ladybug population.

Here's a question that I haven't seen before. IF I squirt the aphids off of the plants, will that disturb the ladybugs and their eggs? I sure don't want to piss them off and have them leave the garden. haha.

Hope everyone is enjoying the weekend. Looks like it will be awhile before we get rain again. I hope that is not true. I watered everything but the SG this afternoon.

I've never yet seen a blackberry that I needed a ladder to pick and I'm 5.6. :)

dbarron, Your soup sounds terrific! I have mixed tomatoes before with peaches, but never with pumpkin. I'll have to give that one a try.

Marleigh, Eventually you'll win the battle to improve the clay. It has taken me more years than I care to admit (we are in our 22nd year here) to get our clay in the veggie garden to the point that I can be truly proud of it, but we're finally there. Our first few years here were drought years where the soil was baked so hard you couldn't break it by hand, and a rear-tine tiller just bounced off of it. The early years were really, really tough. Finally we got a couple of rainy years (2004 and 2007) where the ground was a lot softer and easier to work, but I haven't forgotten the misery of trying to improve the clay when it was so hard that you couldn't break it up in order to mix in soil amendments.

I am laughing at the mental image of those coons trying to roll away your food container. They are so evil and I hate them. They will kill chicks and full-sized poultry without remorse, and friends of ours twice lost mother cats with litters of kittens to them....and they had tried to keep these outdoor cats safe at night by putting them in a dog crate with a plastic body and metal grid type door with small openings in the metal grid. The coons reached through the small metal grid openings and pulled out the cats and kittens piece by piece in the most gruesomely horrendous mess ever. Our friends were just devastated---they were trying to establish a barn cat population in their large metal shop to take care of the rodent population there and the coons made it completely impossible to do so.

Larry, I love your analogy of the deer and the welfare system. It is so true!

Well, I thought I'd have time to type more, but if I don't get off this computer, Tim is going to go to the store without me and the girls. I'll be back later.

Dawn