I make tartar sauce similar to Country Sunshine's, but I put chopped stuffed green olives in mine. Here is my recipe for Shrimp Gumbo. I don't measure anything, but this is the basics. 2 ribs celery 1 bell pepper 1 onion Chop and set aside. In heavy skillet or stock pot, make roux of approximately equal parts flour and oil. Bacon grease is actually best...so if you have that...use that. I'd say about 1/3 cup each or a little more. Stir without stopping over medium heat until roux is very brown, but do not burn. Don't stop stirring either. Add chopped celery, onion and bell pepper. Stir it in and turn off the heat. Transfer if using a skillet to pot or if using a stock pot, add 3 to 4 cans chicken broth. Stir until the roux is dissolved, and on low heat, add a small can of tomato sauce. You can add more or chopped tomatoes. I don't like tomato pieces in mine....so I go with the sauce. I just want it to color the gumbo. The gumbo will not have a pretty color at this stage, but will as you finish it. Bring to a boil and when the celery, onion, bell peppers are cooked done, add a bag of frozen, chopped okra. When the okra is done, add shrimp. I use a lot of shrimp...and if I have crabmeat, I put that in too. You can put in any kind of seafood. Some people put in sausage, but I don't because it over powers the flavor of the gumbo. When I don't have seafood, I use chicken. Season to taste. I use Tony Chachere's creole seasoning and thyme. Tony's is flavored salt, and I use it like salt when cooking. Do not over cook the shrimp. As soon as it turns pink, or the liquid starts to boil, turn it off. Sprinkle a liberal amount of gumbo file and stir in well. That will also change the color a little bit. Stir it well so it doesn't kind of make strings in the liquid. A handful of minced green onions is good to add now too...or parsley. Serve over hot, cooked rice. (When you make the rice, put a big lump of butter in it to give it richer flavor.) My husband shrimped for 45 years...we still have couple of shrimp boats. I have cooked hundreds of pots of gumbo and this is recipe that I have worked on over the years. You could make stock from the shrimp shells, but I have found that chicken broth gives it more flavor. It doesn't taste like chicken...so no worry there. A lot of people don't like okra because they think it is slimy. Frozen okra has been blanched...so it isn't slimy. You can use fresh okra too, and it won't be slimy but I doubt any one who doesn't eat okra would believe me...so I say use frozen.

LOLOLOL. Doofus. No one was mean! Not at all. Just that they don't like folks going onto the site and doing something different. I can really actually see their point. It'd be different if I'd been winter-sowing for 5 years. It'd be like a brand new gardener coming into the FB forum and telling everyone they're going to plant their entire garden in hay bales. Or stuff like that, you know? What was a little exasperating was that some of them didn't read the post entirely and so it wasn't really a dialogue. No matter. All is good. But if they're mean again, I'll sic you onto them. ROTFL! AND, can't you find anything that contains collagen on a vegan diet?? (Not being vegan, I would not know that, you know.) Rebecca, I'm not as worried about them frying, I mean there are a ton of holes in them. Further, cross currents are usually more effective at bringing breezes through than from just one direction. I will say, that even had I put holes in the top, I still would have put holes in the sides, too. But. Okay tell you what. I'll go put a couple holes in the tops of some of them! LOL My larger concern is the bottom watering, just because I haven't seen anyone else doing it. I can't imagine why it won't work, since the indoor seedlings prefer bottom watering. But I'm still nervous about it. Could you please give me your thoughts on that? (Our first row of holes above the bottom is 1 1/2 inches high, which was exactly as much water as it took to dampen all the pots.) At any rate, yes, if I notice anything going awry, I'll spring into action to correct. I would say in Oklahoma ANYONE who WSes is in danger of frying the plants! We ALL need to keep our eyes on that possibility, right? But yes, with you working, you're not around to hover over them like I am. NOW. In the horrible event that I get called out of town for emergencies, I'll have to hire my nearby gardener friend! . . . Then I'd probably move everything closer in to the house for a minimal amount of sun. But then so would a lot of the rest of you be in trouble, too. Last year, I spent a good bit of time scooting my 15-gallon fabric container pots back closer to the house (and under the half roof on that part of the deck, either to get them out of the sun, or to protect them from the rains POURing down. I can certainly do that with the totes, too. Yes, Dawn. . . . Rebecca's cute little daisy was discussed in this article. I loved it and got a good laugh. http://dailyimprovisations.com/fun-flowers-to-grow-from-seed-cape-daisy-or-venidium-fastuosum This hybrid. . . . I think it'd be great to actually get even just a few seeds to see if any of them turn out to be true to the type--that would be very cool. If I live another 4 years, Dawn, I won't be winter-sowing anymore either, as I believe I'm growing everything I'll ever need to grow (perennial/herb/hardy annual-wise) this year. Hmmm. Who am I gonna unload these totes and pots on. Here I was thinking it was going to be one of those depreciation items. Perhaps not. . . .LOL Oh, Dawn, that is very upsetting about something scary out there. Please keep us posted. And along the subject of pets, I also would rather watch puppies OR kitties than almost anything. We are loving Tom and Jerry. . . even Titan is just fascinated. These guys certainly are not anything like Daffy. He sees possibilities with them being entertainment. But occasionally gets over-enthusiastic. He thinks it's fine for him to lunge at them as they race past him (and it's not, we tell him), but he is VERY touchy so far when one of them tries to attack his tail or foot. We think it's very funny of course, but he at least hasn't snapped at them, just kinda growled/woofed them off. That is VERY good on his part. Also when they would approach his dinner. . .THAT is his wild animal trigger response. We've worked and worked and worked with him on that one. We normally shut them in the cats' room (formerly the art room) to be eating their own dinner, but before we got wised up to that, they'd go over to HIS food dish--I almost got bit once, as did Garry once. There were severe penalties involved. Also a bratty 3-yr old liked to tease him with it--unfortunately, he was the one who paid--but so did she. So it was fairly miraculous that when the kittens tried to interfere, all he did was growl angrily and boy did they back off quickly. We're feeling very good about the kittens and Titan, they all three are fascinated with each other and full of good cheer. But Titan IS part wolf, after all, and we always are very aware of him--in unexpected situations. I am 100% certain GDW and I are gold with him. But I always keep an eye on him when he indicates he's uncomfortable with someone or a certain situation, and usually take him into the house then. The kittens are his first test situation with trust, and he's doing SUPER, but we still keep an eye on him. Little thinker, Tom, has now finally decided GDW is okay, too, and so now is landing on HIS lap and in HIS way. They're just precious, both of them. Kim, I missed your supportive post earlier, that was SO sweet!!! Thanks for believing in me--you KNOW I believe in you, too. You are a marvel! We're both kinda Ruth Stout people, I think. Ruth definitely figured out what worked for her and followed that path! But if the rumor Amy heard about Ruth is true, that she gardened naked, I know neither of US is gonna do that. I don't even like wearing short-sleeved T-shirts while gardening. Gardening is like full armor down here! Okay okay, I admit. Oklahoma gardening is not easy!!! It's the damn bugs!!! The critters! The aphids, the bad beetles, the slugs, the ticks, the chiggers, the fleas, the voles, the gophers. .............................................. a person in OK would have to be insane to be gardening in their shorts and tank tops and flip-flops and bare-handed, in my opinion! Let alone naked. Amy and Eileen, tomorrow our trip to Broken Arrow. Our whole day affair. Short notice, so maybe we can actually plan the next trip. But if you can meet up, let me know. However, Amy has a good point--will have more seeds if we meet up in a couple more weeks--maybe we should start talking about that--the seeds we have to give. Aldi, then back through Wagoner for buttermilk and candles, and then back home. We have been SO hunkered down here. And you guys who are so tired of winter? We are, too, of course, but you know what? I've made my peace with it, somehow. I wasn't allowed to hunker down in MN or WY, working every day all through the winter nonsense. It was COLD. Not easy, especially with vehicles. Those of us smart ones (sometimes I was smart, sometimes not so much so) had engine heaters for the cars plugged in for overnight. When I lived with my son and his family in Mpls, we had a street-level garage, but the rest of the property sloped steeply up. When it snowed, we'd have great fun the first few snows in December; partying out there in the driveway--with the snowblower and the others using shovels. By February or earlier when the drifts next to the driveway were up to 5-6 feet, not so much fun. It was so MUCH colder and more brittle and so much dryer in WY and MN in the winter. But I don't care. It's COLD here. I'm with the rest of ya. I used to trot out on my patio in Mpls when it was -10, in my short nightgown, for a last cigarette. It's all just so weird! Well, HJ, speaking of rambling!

Kelley - I think if my little valencia every produces I will try to grow from seed just to see what happens. Every January I setup my seeds, heat mat and grow lights in our kitchen to start all my plants for spring. I will add that to it if it every happens! MyerMike - thanks! I have been on here posting the pics since about 2016 when my poor lisbon and bearrs lime were sunburnt when i first put them in the ground. It was my first time planting a tree(we had just got the house) and I couldn't figure out what was wrong with them and I just didn't want them to die. I'd killed plenty of trees previously on a patio that was in full sun. Even my local nursery gave me BAD advice. I couldn't believe it. The good folks here have helped me get my trees thriving. I've since added a few more trees(and I want to buy more every year). I'm so thankful for this forum and all of you! Helped me help my trees. Nules - those lemons and limes are so beautiful! What do you do with them all? I hope to one day have a lime crop like that!!

So, I'm back now to read thoroughly and try to respond. Amy, I do treat lima beans pretty much like snap beans except for planting them slightly later since they are heat lovers and I'm using them to fill that legume role after the snap beans are pretty much done. I have tried planting lima beans at the same time as snap beans, and in my location it doesn't work out well. Maybe that's our cool spring microclimate getting a bit colder at night than the lima beans like or something, so I tend to plant them about a month or six weeks after snap beans. However, I plant snap beans sort of on the early side to beat the heat and the spider mites, so maybe the limas just don't tolerate being planted too early as well as the snap beans do. One thing I do ponder is this: if I have snap beans, the spider mites are going to show up on them...sometimes insanely early. Why, then, do the spider mites not bother the lima beans at all? Beans are beans, right? I wonder if anyone has researched this. We are not big fans of celeriac either. We have tried it, but about the only way I use it nowadays is chopped up in a big pot of vegetable soup. I don't blame you for being mad at Wal-mart. Ours never has enough electric carts for all the folks who need them, and they've taken out the benches they used to have at the front of the store. I guess the benches got in the way of one of the little banks, or the vet, or the hair salon or whatever that now populates the front of the store outside the checkouts. I fight the blahs in dreary, cloudy winter weather too. I need sunshine! This winter has been tougher than most because the sun has been hiding behind the clouds almost every day, and often (I blame the warmer temperatures for this) we have had fog until noon. I feel like we've sort of had Pacific Northwest weather this year with all the incessant fog, mist, clouds and drizzle and I have not liked it at all. Jennifer, In my garden, beans as a group are relatively pest free, except that the spider mites really love them. Some years the mites arrive early and are horrible, and other years the beans pretty much finish producing before any spider mites arrive at all. You might see occasional damage from Mexican bean beetles. I will see a little of that here and there, but not enough to worry about. Some years, if there is a heavy population of stink bugs (like we had last year), they will be on the beans. I have noticed that southern green stink bugs are more of a pest on beans than the brown stink bugs are. I run across the green stink bugs on the plants when harvesting beans so I try to always have my garden scissors with me so I can snip those stink bugs in half. (Don't squish stink bugs with your bare fingers unless you want for your fingers to stink all day long, even after you have thoroughly washed them.) Because you have coyotes in your neighborhood, I would not have a miniature cow unless I also had a guardian livestock dog (like a Great Pyrenees, for example) to protect the cow from the coyotes. Or, maybe a donkey. Donkeys are great at protecting livestock as well and even will take on large dogs and cougars to protect their herd. Okmulgeeboy, I have grown a gazillion types of beans over the years. There are hundreds of varieties available commercially and it has been fun to experiment with all the different kinds. If a person is going to binge on something in the garden, beans are a fun crop to experiment with. I do not grow dry beans. They are so incredibly cheap to buy in bags at the store, or in bulk at some stores, that they just are not cost-effective to grow in the garden by comparison. That's why I don't grow pinto beans or black bean, and I always harvest our southern peas green, not leaving them on the plants to dry. I prefer to use the garden for fresh legumes that I can harvest weekly, and then either snap or shell, and eat fresh. We just freeze the excess for winter when I grow more than we can eat fresh and that is possible because we have three freezers in the garage, though all of them are not full year-round....one of them usually empties out as we devour our fresh-frozen food over the course of the fall and winter months. Then, as soon as the harvest starts in Spring, I refill that big freezer with garden produce over the course of the growing season. It is a big chest freezer divided into compartments by blue plastic dividers, so I fill each section with a different veggie, which keeps it organized and makes it easier for me to find what I want when I'm removing frozen produce from the freezer to use in meal preparation. Larry, That is great cow advice! Rebecca, I have hesitated to try to put words to how I feel about this year's winter/spring weather because I am getting mixed feelings about it. Does that make sense? I don't have a strong feeling that we will have late cold weather. I don't have a strong feeling that we will have early warm weather. It all just feels sort of "blah" in my brain. Good heavens, I hope I'm not losing my garden intuition as I age! That would be terrible. So, my best guess based on my garden intuition is that we are going to warm up early in general, but need to watch carefully for late rounds of cold weather. We aren't going to warm up extraordinarily early. You know, there have been some years when January was so warm that I actually put tomato plants in my 4' round galvanized metal stock tank in February...around the third week of February, and I did so expecting they would do well and would produce early and they did, though I had to cover them up on 2 or 3 cold nights. Well, this is not one of those years. It doesn't feel the same as those years. This is more of a middle-of-the-road year. I want to believe it will warm up early and stay warm, but there is a little voice inside my head (picture a miniature Three Stooges type guy jumping up and down in my brain, yelling at me to get my attention) warning me not to get into too much of a hurry to plant too early. Do I wonder where that voice is coming from, given than the signs around me outdoors have been hinting at an early Spring since at least December? Of course I do. I've learned not to question the voices in my head (hope I don't sound like a schizophrenic here) because they are coming from somewhere I cannot explain. I just know that when I follow my intuition, things tend to work out well in the garden. So, I'm not getting in a big hurry with anything, but I'm also not going to drag my heels too much and start seeds too late relative to the weather we are having. I have wondered if my garden brain is being lazy this year because I'm not planning on a big veggie garden? Because I'm rotating my favorite crops, all the nightshades, out of the front garden and replacing them with a lot of flowers as a form of crop rotation, am I losing my focus and not listening to my usual garden-planting intuition? I suppose that is a possibility. However, I am strongly feeling the urge to plant veggies even though that really is not supposed to be a part of my gardening in 2020 since I want to focus on renovating our landscape. I'll talk about that more sometime this week in the Week 5 thread as there are some rational reasons for that, and maybe one irrational one. So, now I'm thinking the front garden won't be 100% flowers and herbs. Maybe it will be 60% flowers and herbs and 40% veggies. We'll see. I promise that when I am starting seeds and planting and transplanting, I'll say so, and just by my actions y'all should be able to see if I'm feeling an early spring sneaking into the garden...or not. Early for me is much earlier than early would be for those of you further north, so if I start things early or on time, you all still have plenty of time to start things early too (and Jennifer is ahead of me this year, I've noticed, and there is nothing wrong with that--I think she is listening to her intuitive garden brain too.) My biggest fear as an intuitive gardener always has been that my garden intuition will fail, one of these years, to send me the right messages and I'll plant too late, but it really hasn't happened yet, so I try to listen to the voices in my head and behave correspondingly. This year, as usual, I expect to start seeds on Super Bowl Sunday....which is next week! Yikes! In a way it is sneaking up on me, but I already have seed-starting supplies and seeds on hand, so I'm ready to start the seeds next Sunday even though it doesn't really feel to me like it should be Super Bowl Sunday yet. I have one plant shelf set up indoors (long story) and the actual light shelf is going to be set up, hopefully today, in the mudroom, so it will be ready for next weekend's activity. Jennifer, I will go find the outlooks and link them, but the last time I looked at them, which I think was early January, they were showing February warmer than usual overall, and were iffy on the rain---no real hint there. At the time I checked them, there were equal chances of us having above average rainfall in February, average rainfall in February or below average rainfall in February. When they put up the EC on the map to indicate Equal Chances, I think that normally means their models are in disagreement so they cannot conclusively predict what might happen. Let me go retrieve the latest outlooks now. This first link shows the quarterly climate outlooks for temperature. Essentially, the tan or brown areas are showing above average temperatures, white will show average or equal chance type temperature forecasts, and if they were showing blue, that would be below average temperatures. Is it scary to anyone else that all the long-term outlooks consistently show us above average? Seasonal Outlooks Now, here's the rainfall outlook. Overall, I find the temperature outlooks to be more reliable than the rainfall outlooks, but since they prepare the rainfall outlooks, I want to post them as well. I'll tell you in advance that there is nothing in the rainfall outlooks that strongly hints at a wet year....and, yet, many of us have had a very rainy January, so I feel like there are mixed signals here. Quarterly Rainfall Outlooks Okay, I'm out of time and need to go make breakfast before it ends up being brunch. I'll be back later to finish catching up. Dawn