okmulgeeboy, My dad loved wild greens and always had at least one poke plant and one lambs quarters plant in the back corner of the yard right by his compost pile in the 1960s in our little Fort Worth suburb. No one ever really ate the wild greens except him. My father-in-law, who lived in Pennsylvania, was that way with dandelion greens in late winter/early spring and my husband still talks endlessly about dandelion greens. I tell him they are out there in the yard if he wants to collect them, clean them, eat them, etc. but he doesn't do it, so I think they probably weren't all that great---but they remind him of his dad who's been gone for 16 years now. I tried to grow dandelion greens for him in my garden and never could make it happen, but I got credit for trying. It always struck me as funny that I failed at growing dandelions from purchased seed and giving it a serious effort, but they reseed themselves all over the place naturally and grow in the yard and pastures with no help from me. Jennifer, I love The Worst Hard Time. I re-read it every summer when the droughts get tough here to remind myself how easy I have it compared to the folks back then. My dad would tell you that they made stuff grow even in the worst years because failure was not an option---they had to grow their own food or die of starvation. The few remaining photos from those years so people I barely recognize---my dad and his siblings looking so horrifically thin, but they survived. They lived across the Red River in Spanish Fort TX just SW of the southwestern corner of the county where I live now, and they were so close to the river that the kids would walk to the river, fill up a bucket with water, and walk back to the garden to water one plant...over and over again. With 9 kids (there were several more, but they didn't survive the first year of life), there always was someone fresh to haul water, but it was a never-ending task. They mostly raised what would tolerate drought and heat, so field corn and pinto beans, and they ate them for three meals a day....cornmeal mush for breakfast, cornbread for lunch, and beans and cornbread for dinner. In spring they had greens...turnip greens, collard greens, whatever was green and edible. For my dad's entire life, he ate red beans, greens and cornbread for dinner every Wednesday because he loved it and because it reminded him of his childhood. It wasn't much food compared to how we eat nowadays, but it kept them alive, and they supplemented the meals with milk from their cow, eggs from their hens, occasional meat from a hog they had slaughtered, etc. All the kids quit school to go to work around 3rd or 4th grade because the dollar a day they each earned from, for example, picking cotton from sunrise to sunset, was the only cash income the family had to buy shoes, sewing needles or salt or whatever they needed from the little general store. I admire my grandmother for being able to feed her family on almost new money and erratic crops. Even when she had cream and butter from their cow, they almost never got to enjoy it...she took it to the general store to barter for something they needed more desperately. My grandfather worked so hard to raise their animals, the few that they had because those animals put protein in their bellies and milk in the babies' bellies, and to farm, but it never paid off for him financially. I didn't understand until I was an adult that my grandparents were poor white sharecroppers their whole lives. For their entire lives, until the day they died (and my grandparents died young before my dad even had grown up), it was just a daily struggle to survive that I find hard to imagine. I think they were a million times tougher than we are. When World War II broke out, it saved my dad and his brothers...they couldn't leave the farm fast enough to join the military. They were patriotic, their nation needed them, and they wanted to serve. They had no idea when they left the farm that they'd be eating three square meals a day and it was all kinds of wonderful food that they'd never had growing up....plenty of meat, potatoes, a very wide assortment of veggies, fruit, etc. They all gained a lot of weight in the military, they said, and they still were skinny when they came home after the war. For the rest of his life, my dad spoke in glowing terms of how wonderful the food on his navy ship was, and he was still in awe that they always got three meals a day, three "good meals", as he put it, while in the navy. He never had three guaranteed meals per day until then. As children the only fruit they ate was basically one orange per year, which they each received as a Christmas gift--their only Christmas gift. Imagine those poor children growing up and then being on a navy ship and then having fruit of some sort available most days. It must have seemed like Heaven to them. I wonder how many of us would thrive under those conditions and struggle nowadays? I love your memories of the farm, even the spiders! Those country women were strong and tough, and I guess it is because they had to be in order to survive. My dad's family survived a tornado by running from the house and into their tornado shelter/roof cellar during dinner one night. Dad would tell us that the tornado picked up the house with the food on the table and the kerosene lantern lit and sitting on the table, and sat it down about 50 feet away (no foundation, just a tiny wood frame house sitting on four cornerstones, and the tornado didn't move the cornerstones) and nothing on the table spilled. They came out of the cellar and finished dinner. This story both fascinated me and horrified me when I was a kid. For them, the worst part of it was that the house was moved so much farther away from the cellar and the water pump than it had been before. I am sure there was an outhouse when they were kids, but by the time Dad took me to see the old house in the early 1970s, the cellar had collapsed, the outhouse was gone and the guy who owned the place was storing bales of hay in what remained of the house. That little house where they all lived would fit into my living room/dining room now, and it is hard to comprehend their living conditions in that tiny little shack. Nancy, I think everyone has some sort of pressure canner horror story. I don't remember my dad's canner ever exploding, but remember it locking up, pressurized, and he couldn't get it unlocked to remove the lid. I guess, as a kid, I stopped paying attention to what he was doing with it but he must have gotten the lid off of it at some point and that batch of jars removed because we continued using that canner for years. My mom hated canning and wanted nothing to do with it (all her life she described herself as inherently lazy, and she was being truthful), but my dad made her can with him when he was canning stuff. Her "I am lazy" excuse just didn't fly with him. lol. I never would have learned to garden, can or sew as a kid if my dad hadn't taught me because she wasn't going to. Without realizing it at the time, my dad was teaching me to be self-sufficient in ways that mattered to him, even if they didn't matter to my mom. I'm grateful to him for that and so much more. okmulgeeboy, That jiggling of the weight is, to me, the sound of summer in the kitchen. Well, that and the sound of the jars as the lids ping and seal---a favorite sound. I remember the old canners that had the petcocks on them, and don't miss those. The canners we have nowadays seem so much safer. I do still wear a water-proof oilcloth apron when canning---and if you ever knew anyone who had some sort of steam burn or spill burn on their body from a canning accident (I never did have such an injury like that myself but knew plenty of older relatives who did at some point in their lives), you know why I think it is important to wear that oilcloth apron. Larry, I love your memories! My mom's parents farmed and ranched but not successfully and never had two nickels to rub together, not even long after they gave up farming and ranching, moved to the city, and took paying jobs. So, they qualified for some sort of government food assistance program in the 1960s and the 1970s and they gratefully accepted the food, though it really hurt their pride to take it. What I remember from all that is that we kids thought the government cheese was the best cheese on earth and we loved eating it at my grandparents' house when we went to visit them. One of our neighbors when we first moved here in the late 1990s used to tell me stories of coming to Oklahoma in a covered wagon when he was three years old. He was in his late 80s when we met him, I guess, and I loved his tales of Oklahoma's early days. His uncle came here first and lived in a dugout on the banks of the Red River, not far at all from where we live now, and one by one all the other brothers moved here and brought their families so they all lived pretty close to one another here on separate little farms. He remembered that dugout of his uncle's (and didn't have much good to say about it either), but his family built an unpainted house from lumber when they moved here and he was grateful they didn't have to live in a dugout like his uncle's...even though they were too poor to paint that house after they built it. One cool thing about this part of the country is that those days are not so far behind us....we still have a couple of really old folks here (older than 100) who are like walking history books of our county. Fred's house was built by his uncle in the early 1900s, and that uncle must have been pretty prosperous because there was a second structure, located maybe 70 feet from the house, that had a nice hip roof and lots of windows, and it was their summer kitchen. It was still standing when we moved here and I believe it is still standing to this day. How cool is that? I'd love to have a summer kitchen so our house wouldn't heat up on canning days too. Also, that house had a front staircase and it had a back staircase that came right down into the kitchen. At first, I thought the back staircase was just for convenience, but then I came to realize it really was a safety feature because if the house caught fire when everyone was upstairs sleeping, there were two routes to come down to escape the fire instead of just one. I've always loved that house and hope Fred's family keeps it in the family now that he is gone. There's just such a long family history in that house that I'm afraid a new purchaser wouldn't appreciate. My dad's family did all those outside chores under a tree, no roof, but were grateful for the shade of the tree. They did have a smokehouse to smoke the meat after they butchered a hog, but the smokehouse was no longer standing by the time I got to see their childhood home once I was a older child (I think I was about 11 or 12 the one time my dad and his brother took my cousin and I to see it, and we were the only kids from our families who ever got to see it). My dad used to joke about them being sharecroppers. The man they rented the farm from had given up on farming and moved back to Tennessee. They were, of course, supposed to farm on shares and send him his share of the profit from the farm in lieu of rent every year after they sold the cash crop. Of course, they never made a cash crop and never sent him any money, so once a year my grandfather had to write that letter to explain about the heat and drought and lack of a cash crop and that there was no money to send him, but surely next year would be better. Then, they lived in fear of being evicted off the farm until they heard back from their landlord that he understood---he couldn't make a living on that land either, so he didn't expect my grandfather could as well. When my dad would talk about the pigs and the chickens and the milk cow and all the crops when I was a kid, I thought it meant they had plentiful food if nothing else, but later on I realized that despite their hard work they barely had enough to survive. Yet, all their memories really were happy ones. My dad got a stick (like a twig from a tree) and a piece of string for Christmas one year, and he thought that was the best thing ever---it was really the only toy he ever had, just a stick and a string, but he was a little boy and entertained himself with it. Another year there must have been more money and they each got an orange and one piece of hard candy, and they remembered that as their best Christmas ever. It wasn't until my great-uncle Charlie died in the 1970s that I learned he was the source of one pair of new shoes a year for my dad and his siblings, and the oranges and hard candy at Christmas. He must have been a more prosperous farmer than my grandfather was. For all that we fuss over our gardens and work in them and enjoy eating the harvest and preserving the excess, we still don't have the struggle they had to raise edible crops. If I had to walk a quarter-mile to the Red River to haul home water one bucket at a time to water the garden, well then, I wouldn't have a garden! The weather here was nice on Saturday and will be insanely hot (upper 70s) today, and then we turn drastically colder Tuesday and have a chance of snow. I hate the Oklahoma weather roller coaster that we have every winter, and you'd think I'd be used to it by now. I haven't ordered onions either. I haven't started seeds, although today is the day I usually do that, and I might manage to find time to do that late today. If not today, then tomorrow. I do have wildflower seeds stratifying in the extra fridge out in the garage, so at least there's that. I'm hoping today's sunshine and heat dry up the mud in the yard, and then maybe I'll get a couple of days where I won't have to mop up doggie and kitty pawprints off the floor when they come indoors. I swear, it is like the dogs, especially, stomp around in the mud and puddles just to see how much mud they can track in on their paws every time they come inside. Signs of spring really are appearing now, but I'm looking at the February forecast and weather outlooks and thinking spring still remains a long way off. Dawn

Amy, If there is anything worse than looking for the glasses (or two pairs of glasses) perched on your head, it is doing that same thing while also looking for the set of keys that you actually are holding in your hand as you search for your keys and glasses simultaneously. Some days I wonder how Tim and I manage to get out of the house at all. It is almost a given that I leave the house last when we are going someplace because I am looking for my keys or glasses....but then, I finally make it out to the vehicle, and he remembers he forgot something and has to go back inside. Every. Single. Time. We decided we just have to laugh about it together or it would drive us bonkers. A sense of humor is a valuable part of aging. HU, I've been watching the precipitation forecast, and am not happy about it. Then I drive myself nuts by looking at the 6-10 day outlook, the 8-14 day outlook, etc. I am trying to stay calm and not freak out over the coming rain, but of course, I am not happy. Maybe we'll get lucky and it will miss us. No, I don't really think that will happen, but I am going to hope it will. Just when I think the soil will dry out enough to be workable, here comes more rain. The temperatures are lovely though. It was 77 degrees here today at our house, and that's an awesome temperature for the last day of February. The trees know it though---leafing out and blooming and looking so happy. Tomorrow should be equally nice, but the high temperatures and wind will combine to give us High Fire Danger again, which we've had every day for the past week, I think. It is that time of the year. Hopefully there won't be many fires on Sunday. Jennifer, Inoculant is interesting and how much it does or doesn't help depends on what your soil already is like. If you've already grown peas and beans in the area, the necessary rhizobia bacteria might already exist in your soil, so if it does, you don't really need to inoculate. It never hurts to use it though. Think of bean and pea inoculant as a sort of probiotic for your plants. Generally you will get growth that is more lush, green and productive if you've used it because it helps the plants fix nitrogen. Jen, I'm glad you found a chow rescue. Jennifer, I agree with dbarron that one blackberry plant would be fine as almost all modern-day blackberry varieties are self-fruitful. I cannot think of a single variety available nowadays that needs a separate variety as a pollinator. If there was one, the native berries likely would take care of it. With just one plant, though, you shouldn't expect enough berries at one time to make jam or anything like that. Learn about proper pruning because the berries that produce on a plant in a given year come from either floricanes or primocanes, and the plant must be pruned at the right time accordingly. Most blackberry varieties produce on floricanes, but there's some newer varieties that produce on primocanes. Also, do your research and know if the variety you're being is erect, semi-erect or trailing so you can put up the appropriate kind of support. Then, prepare to fight the birds and other wild critters for every single berry. Here's the OSU Fact Sheet on Growing Blackberries in the Home Garden. It will tell you everything you need to know to get started with blackberries. Blackberry & Raspberry Culture in the Home Garden I grew them for 12 or 14 years here in three different locations on our property, and then the voles began eating their roots and I finally gave up. My gardening life was so much easier when the garden had a shorter fence, the bobcats patrolled the garden and the voles stayed away from the garden. Of course, the tradeoff was that the deer jumped the fence and got into the garden, which is why the shorter fence wasn't the best choice overall and was replaced with a taller fence. At the time we did that, I had no idea what a problem the voles then would become. And, yet, the voles don't eat the roots of the native dewberries (trailing blackberries) that invade my garden every year. Dawn

Jennifer, Thanks for the seed report on SESE. About 6 or 8 weeks ago I saw the handwriting on the wall with the coming pandemic and ordered my seeds for both the 2020 and 2021 garden from them. I'm glad I did. And, see there, I am being optimistic and believing I'll survive the pandemic or I wouldn't have ordered seeds for next year. I'm glad you're seeing signs that people are being proactive, and I hate that churches may not be able to have their usual Easter-related services and activities. We have to remember that a pandemic is such an incredibly danger public health risk and daily life, as we know it, is changing a lot. I know that people are not used to quarantining, and I'd rather be out and about than stuck at home all the time, but I truly feel the time to stop going out as much as possible and to stay home as much as possible is now. The new cases in Texas are exploding now, and many of them are community-acquired, meaning that the patient had no known contact with anyone else who has been diagnosed with the disease, did not travel anywhere outside the local area and, thus, obviously became infected from someone in their local community. I expected the numbers to move pretty fast in TX once I saw the initial reports, but they're increasing probably a little more quickly than I was thinking they would. At least we are not in the same condition here yet as a few other states like Washington, California, New York, New Jersey, Florida and Louisiana. Texas was ahead of OK by only a couple of weeks in terms of COVID-19 cases spreading, so we still have a chance to react quickly here and maybe have it not get as widespread as quickly. I am not going to violate anybody's privacy here, but want to say that our family knows some people who are ill, have been tested and are awaiting their test results. It is shocking when you hear news like that, and that is especially true when it is people just like you who have been pretty careful, only going to work and back home again, and just grocery shopping or buying gasoline as needed---no travel, no going to the mall or the gym back when those still were open, no obvious crossing paths with infected people as far as they knew, etc. I think for most people in north central TX near us, the time to stay home and stay away from people probably was about 2 weeks ago, and now that they have community spread, it is almost too late. Their governor is issuing new directives and restrictions almost daily, so maybe they can halt the virus' spread. In OK, if we all start being as proactive as possible now, maybe most of us can avoid the virus as it makes its first official round through our state. OK hasn't had too many cases yet, but I've noticed that as soon as one case pops up in any given county, a second or third one is not far behind. We need to change our mindset now, if we haven't already, to avoid becoming one of those cases. I just hate this, but at least we all can retreat to our gardens and keep ourselves busy at home. I just want to add that Tim and I have one set of rules to keep track of on the south side of the river and another on the north and it is confusing. We'll want to go somewhere, so we'll say to one another "is it safe?" and then we have to figure out if that sort of place is open on the Texas side or the Oklahoma side, or both, or neither. It wears out my brain to the point that I think it is just easier to stay home. I am very concerned about small businesses all across the nation. Here in our county, one guy made a list that since has been forwarded around via various apps and FB, telling us which small businesses are still open, what their operating hours are now, whether you can call ahead and order what you need, etc. We need to remember to patronize our local, small businesses so we don't lose them from our community for good. Nancy, I am angry about all the coverups too. I have been tracking this beast since mid-January and was just beside myself with frustration from early February onward because I thought that was our nation's best chance to stop it in its tracks, and there stood all the politicians implying or even stating it was basically the flu, which it is not, and that it would go away as the weather warmed up, which also is false. The only thing I knew for sure at that point was that the government wasn't going to act in time to protect us, so we had to do everything possible to protect ourselves. I think Tim and Chris thought at first that maybe I was a little too obsessed with it, but then they got on board pretty soon thereafter as they watched it spreading across the world. One of the things I thought was heartbreaking was when Jana told me that she and Chris were going to go ahead and take the girls to the Texas Gulf Coast last week so they could make memories that the girls would have to hang on to "in case anything happened". That told me that Chris and Jana both clearly understand the front-line risks they face in their careers and know that tomorrow or next month or next year is not guaranteed for any of us. How I wish their vacation could have been just a normal vacation with the kids, not marred by fears of what comes next in this pandemic. Both of them expect to be exposed and quarantined, a concern heightened by the lack of proper PPE to keep them safe. No entity---no city, state, county, hospital, fire department, police department, nursing home, etc. has enough PPE stockpiled to deal with this crisis. Since most of it is made in China, and China has been shut down production-wise since early January, there's no quick relief in sight either. I fear for all our first responders and medical personnel. Jen, I agree that modern-day technology offers us options not available in previous times of crisis. I'm glad you're finding a way to make it work for you. Larry, I totally understand how you feel. Tim and I said we wouldn't go out and about when the virus started getting close to home, and then he took a week of vacation and we went somewhere pretty much every day, even knowing we might be exposing ourselves to infection. Sometimes being bad is fun, and I'm glad we were able to eat at a couple of our favorite restaurants in Texas before the governor shut them down at mid-week last week. We do carry wipes with us everywhere, and have hand sanitizer in our vehicle and I carry a mini-bottle of hand sanitizer in my purse. I hope we've done enough to stay safe. We didn't hear a single cough anywhere for days, and then noticed a lot more coughing in public yesterday, so I take that as a warning sign. After a quick trip to the feed store and to Lowe's today, we are officially staying home. Well, except Tim has to go to work each day and that is just unavoidable, but I'll be cleaning and disinfecting everything he touches when he comes in from work. I suppose he won't let me stand at the back door and spray him down with Lysol before he enters the house, will he? I think Tim should pack a suitcase to carry in the car just like he does before a forecasted snowstorm and should be prepared to hunker down and stay in Texas if anyone issues a stop-movement type edict while he is a work, particularly if such an edict prohibits crossing state lines. I don't know if such an edict is coming on either a statewide or national level, but if it is, he'd be in better shape if he has a suitcase full of clothing,medication and toiletries. Remember the good old days when all we had to worry about with the garden was just weather and pests? Dawn

Larry, I am so sorry about your garden and about Madge's pots. Most of your plants should recover. In our worst ever hailstorm we've had here in OK, my tomato plants were between knee-high and waist-high and loaded with fruit when hail that was about the size of ping pong balls busted everything down to the ground. It probably was very late May when this happened. I literally had to cut every plant off an inch or two above the ground and start over, just hoping that at least the broad-leaf plants would come back from their roots. I raked up endless busted fruit and demolished plants and my garden was pretty bare by the time I got all the destroyed stuff out. The compost pile got fed huge, endless amounts of plant matter that week. Cutting back the plants to remove all the damaged parts clinging by a thread worked for tomatoes and peppers, and most of the flowering plants. It did not, of course, work for onions and corn and much of anything else that has a central growing point. I salvaged the onions, though, harvesting all of them early and only half-sized, but chopped and froze them because the bulbs were bruised from the hail and likely would have spoiled quickly. Our tomato and pepper plants made a full recovery and we had a great harvest that year, albeit a late one. I replanted all I could so we'd have more than just tomatoes and peppers. I was so grateful for the garden's recovery. Still, if you had looked at our garden in May with all that damage, you'd never have dreamed how good it would look maybe 4-6 weeks later. This was very early in our years here in OK, maybe around 2004 or 2005. We've never had such bad hail since, for which I've been exceedingly grateful. We had experienced baseball to softball sized hail in Fort Worth a couple of times and, needless to say, garden plants just did not recover from that but, honestly, we had so much damage to the house and vehicles that the garden was the least of our worries. I'm always so impressed with Loren's skills and her willingness to tackle whatever job must be done. She is learning to be so self-sufficient and such a great handywoman, and she is learning that from you! You should be proud, and you should brag. Your daughter was so lucky to have you and Lauren then repairing whatever you could. I hope her house is going to be alright. You know what, I am glad you hugged your daughter. We did all the proper social distancing for 5 or 6 weeks, but once the kids started bringing the grandkids over again, we all started hugging again and it just felt so right. I have noticed that our neighbor (stage 4 pancreatic cancer) has been surrounded by his kids and grandkids, and now nieces and nephews and their kids, this past week....and why not? If they cannot be with him now and hug him now, then when? While everyone is praying so hard for a miracle for him, the unspoken thought in my mind in his case is that sometimes God doesn't give us the answer to our prayers that we were hoping for. Our preacher used to say "sometimes the answer from God when you pray is no or not now" when I was a kid and I've never forgotten that, so why can't our friend's family just be with him now while he still is here? Who knows how long he has, especially since complicating factors have prevented them from starting chemo as planned. None of us are guaranteed tomorrow on this earth. Sometimes families may have to choose love and togetherness over social distancing and I believe that is okay. We cannot let this pandemic turn us into robots who stay six feet away from everybody we love forever. The government asked us all to be careful and to self-quarantine in order to slow the spread of the virus and we all did that, but even they do not expect us all to self-isolate forever. We slowed the spread. So far our hospital systems have not been overwhelmed, but we also have to go on living. I can tell you from going shopping on Thursday that most people up here in OK are completely over social distancing, and few are wearing masks. People down in Texas don't seem to be doing much social distancing, at least not when we were in the DFW metro last week, but they were much more likely to be wearing masks. And, of course, they should be taking it very seriously down there because just the DFW metro area has well over 15,000 cases and that case load alone makes me think they'll keep wearing masks down there for the foreseeable future. I think everyone is trying to do what they can, within reason, while getting on with living their lives. It seems to be a rather delicate balancing act. Nancy, I want to dig out my annual veggie raised beds next year in the off-season and fill the bottoms of them with hügelkultur materials and then pile the dirt back on top. Of course, heavy rainfall could ruin those plans too, but we have tons of wood to use if only we can do that. We don't need more beds, but we need to feed the beds we have and I want to feed them with hügelkultur materials that will keep them happy for years. Ever since we moved here, I have focused on improving the soil first and foremost. Maybe no one but me ever will understand how much it has improved, but at least I will know that I left the soil here much better than I found it. We also have tried to heal the land. Our property is essentially 14.4 acres of creek hollow, with three creeks and numerous ponds and a swamp. It was so badly eroded when we moved here because almost every bit of it slopes downhill. Only the part where we have our house and detached garage is flat and fairly level. So, for years, we have healed eroded gullies by filling them with hügelkultur materials and letting all those materials sit and decompose in place. It is amazing how such a simple thing pays off. The gullies stopped eroding and the native plants returned to them, filling in the bare denuded soil and covering it with grasses and forbs that have reclaimed those eroded places. Because so much of our hügelkultur material was tree limbs and such, the wildlife flocked to the gullies to nest in the piles of brush we placed there. It was a win-win situation. We'll always have sloped land. We'll always have heavy rainfall flowing downhill from surrounding places that are on higher ground than ours. We'll always have some erosion, but that doesn't mean we can't work to minimize the erosion, to fix the land and to control the flow of water and to improve the soil. We just do what we can. All we really have to do is stop the erosion and keep the soil from washing away, and the native plants come back on their own and take over. To me, that's a huge improvement we can see that pays off in terms of the native floral and fauna. It rained overnight and again this morning, so we remain lakefront property at this point. What can you do? God is sending us rain and we shall have rain. Tim, being type A and OCD was going to lose his mind yesterday over (a) the HVAC not working and (b) our HVAC guy being on vacation. So, he spent his whole day (and my whole day) obsessed with fixing it himself. He couldn't even think of anything else. Couldn't talk about anything else. Didn't want to do anything else. Guess what? All the parts places are closed on the holiday weekend too. He went everywhere, he called everywhere, he was relentless. He finally found a guy in Muenster, TX, who had the two parts he thought he needed to fix the HVAC, so off we went to Muenster to this very nice man's house, because he runs his HVAC repair business out of his shop building on his property. He was such an angel because, you know, it is his holiday weekend too, and he found the parts, pulled them and had them waiting for us when we arrived. Once we were home, Tim fixed the AC, with a little telephone guidance from the gentleman in Muenster. Now, I want to be a fly on the wall when Tim explains to our usual HVAC repair guy that, um, never mind and forget the discussion we had on Saturday morning---I fixed it myself. lol. Most of those guys aren't overjoyed if you tell them you need them and then turn around and tell them "never mind". It isn't even that hot this weekend, only the mid to upper 80s, but my husband acted like we were going to die if he didn't get the AC working this weekend. On the other hand, it was too muddy to do any of the other 99 things on his To Do list, so at least he had something to work on. Amy, I'm glad you got your goulash! Did you find the refrigerator? Jennifer, Fire ants are not the same as red ants. If you have red ants, those probably are very beneficial in the garden. We have giant harvester ant mounds outside our garden and those ants have worn pathways through the grass and into the garden. I see them in there all the time, carrying out whatever food they find (seems like they like seeds a lot, and the bodies of dead insects) and working quite diligently. I like them. Most all ants are beneficial in the garden, but fire ants are not, and the damaged they do just to the gardener is bad enough to make you work hard to keep them out of your garden. Red imported fire ants are tiny compared to harvester ants, except for the queens which are much larger than the rest of the fire ants, and they sting like crazy. I will tolerate all ants in the garden, except for fire ants. Here's some info on Red Imported Fire Ants. I think they probably were what you were seeing in 2015 because all that rain was hard on them. Red imported fire ants Congrats on being able to enjoy a strawberry pie from your own strawberries and I hope your lunch with your friend was nice. Larry, My sweet sister recently was hanging a new shower curtain, and she was standing on the edge of the tub to hang it on the rod when she slipped, fell, and broke her foot. It is impossible to get up out of a slippery tub with a broken foot. Thankfully someone was home when she fell. I cannot imagine what it would have been like if she'd had to lie there for hours waiting for someone to come home and find her. I hope Madge heals speedily. I always take my cell phone into the bathroom with me so I can call someone to come rescue me if I fall in the tub. Tim's gone to work for so many hours per day and I'm usually home alone, so I have to be super careful. My friend, Jo (Fred's wife), fell once at the mailbox at the end of their driveway and broke her pelvis and couldn't get up. She didn't have her cell phone with her, and their private road, with just their house and one neighbor's house, gets very low traffic when everyone is gone to work, so she laid out there for several hours waiting for someone to come driving along and find her. I learned from her ordeal and had made a habit ever since of taking my phone with me everywhere, even if I am just going to the garage, garden, chicken coop or whatever, just because I want to be able to summon help for me if I've fallen and can't get up. Heck, if you fall here, the fire ants right now are going to come over and start building a mound right on top of you. I haven't been having to use the water hose, and the fire ants have built numerous mounds right on top of it. One of our friends was thrown off a horse last year and laid on the ground with a broken hip for several hours. By the time someone found her, she had fire ants all over her, just adding insult to injury. I had started making aging adjustments at a fairly young age---around 54 or 55. When Jo fell and laid out there on the hot ground in the sun for so long, it made me more serious about carrying my phone if I am home, or letting people know where I am going if I am not at home, because I realized what happened to her could happen to any of us at any age. I'd rather be smart and proactive and face the fact that every year my body finds it a little harder to do all the things I used to do, than to live in denial, like the man I'm married to, and pretend I am not getting older. There is nothing wrong with getting older---it is, indeed, a blessing, but we have to be smarter as we age and we have to have a plan in place to help ourselves if we fall or otherwise get injured in some way. So very many of our older friends here remained in excellent health well into their 70s and 80s (and some of them, their 90s) and drove their adult kids insane by always being out on the tractor, on the horse, etc., until they fell off the tractor or the horse and laid on the ground for hours waiting to be found. I've tried to learn from them (and all of them did have to learn to always have that phone on their person just in case). I also learned that a stubborn person who is insistent that they will heal and return to the tractor and/or horse tends to do so. For all of them, a broken hip, tail bone or pelvis was just a temporary impediment to living their life normally. One injury does not keep a good person down, and for many of them, the motivation to do all the physical rehab after breaking bones was that they wanted to get back on the tractor or back on the horse. I guess for me it would be that I wanted to get back into the garden since I don't have a tractor or a horse. If this rain keeps up, my whole garden is going to drown again, and all I'll have left is what is in the containers. I'm so grateful for the container plants because there's a ton of rain in our 10-day forecast. Dawn