Per the Instructions over there on that thread. The deadline to sign up was Nov 23rd, so sign-ups are now closed. The hostess posted this in the thread yesterday. I am working hard on the address list, and will email once completed. ( yes, I am a bit behind this year, life got in the way ) We have plenty of time...I promise to have it to you no later than Dec 1st. hth. Sue...rbb

Didn't make it. Hope it was fun. tj

Good one. Should be quite a hit in the staff room. Maybe even on TV. ole joyful

Nancy, Having cats is about like having small children at times, isn't it? I imagine you blasted all the aphids off before monarchs really have begun much egg laying up there. They're laying eggs down here, but we're always a bit ahead of those of you further north. With QAL and hemlock, the purple streaks on the stem usually are a very obvious indicator. If you look at your plants, you can check the main stalks for very tiny, fine hairs. QAL has those very tiny fine hairs running up and down the stalk, and hemlock's stalks are smooth. My favorite way to tell them apart is that the seed heads of QAL will curl up into a bird nest type shape as the seeds dry. So, if in doubt about any plants that might be QAL or hemlock, just watch the seedheads. We have QAL, but I keep it pulled out of the garden and adjacent areas. I don't mind it elsewhere, just nowhere near where I'm growing anything on purpose because of its invasiveness. This year we have a lot of hedge parsley, especially in the neighbor's pasture due south of us. We've cut it down on our property so it cannot reseed here, but their seeds will wash downhill to us. I don't mind it---it is a host plant for the swallowtails, but at the same time, I don't want it invading my garden and taking over. I'm guessing all the moisture we've had since last Sept. has made every seed that was in the ground germinate and grow. When we moved here we were in our early 40s and this was intended to be our forever home, so I've always had that in mind as I garden---not wanting to create more than we can maintain as we age. Our nearly constant recurring droughts help me a lot in that regard because I cannot create more growing beds than we can irrigate throughout the summer months, and that reins me in more than anything else. We were in the second consecutive year of awful drought and a huge grasshopper infestation when we moved here in 1999, so that helped too---you cannot go crazy creating beds and planting when the ground is rock hard and the grasshoppers are eating every plant in sight down to the ground. You could say that Mother Nature reins me in from going overboard with plantings. Rebecca, That's a lot of rain. We have had less than half than much over the last two weeks. I hope your plants are okay. Larry, It is a hard garden year and the deer are not helping. They keep coming to my garden in broad daylight trying to chase me out of it so they can come in, and they just stand and stare at me like "who do you think you are?" I try to remember to close the garden gate behind me when I go in there so they cannot follow me into the garden. I don't know what their problem is---there's tons of natural food or them. I am pretty sure they want my okra plants, and I don't intend to share them. Jennifer, Sometimes zinnias just do that. I am sure it is some sort of genetic defect or mutation. I don't see it often---just a couple of times ever 4 or 5 years. Echinaceas do it too. What would eat a toad's body? Snakes of many different kinds, hawks or raccoons for sure. Probably other things too. Don't worry. Your kids always will need you, just in a different way. I enjoy the company of our adult son (and nieces and nephews) so much now---it is awesome to see them continue to grow and develop as adults. Then, someday, they'll likely become parents and you and Tom will become grandparents, and that is its own kind of awesome. If the demand for your eggs is higher than your supply, maybe you can refer some of those folks to the Conscious Community Co-op. There's almost always pastured eggs available there. Nancy, It sounds like your water table is coming up pretty high underneath your plants. Hopefully with less rain falling, that water level will begin to fall. I cannot complain about our tomato plants at all. We are reaching the I-cannot-bear-to-eat-another-tomato stage because we've been overdosing on them for 5 weeks now. A lot of my plants look sickly with foliar diseases (not unexpected because I've grown tomatoes in the same soil for 20 years, and they were supposed to be in the back garden this year.....), but they're still producing like crazy. I give the early planting all the credit for this, because I don't think my plants are setting any new fruit now and I don't think anything but the cherry and paste types have set new fruit in the last 2 or 3 weeks. I think the high humidity might be holding them back, because we've only barely been into the 90s at all, and certainly not enough to (theoretically) impede fruit set. I don't even care. Since we've been gorging on all the tomatoes we can eat, if I walked out to the garden tomorrow and all my plants mysteriously had died, I think I'd shrug it off, pull them out and replace them with zinnias and cosmos. Why not? I have 8 beautiful and healthy tomato plants in large containers near the garage that are producing very well if you don't count the minor herbicide drift damage from the neighbor's fence line herbicide spraying. I could be happy with nothing but the fruit from those 8 plants. I'm at the grumpy tomato stage where harvesting them, washing them, sorting them and processing the extras by freezing, drying or canning is annoying me. Life really is a lot easier if you don't grow too many tomatoes. I clearly grow too many, and that is nobody's fault but my own. Every year at this time I swear that I will take off next year from growing tomatoes, but of course, I don't do it. I do wish I had the self-discipline to only plant 6 or 8 tomato plants. My garden is not nearly as weed-free as yours, but I am making good progress. I still have three or four raised beds to weed, and several pathways. I think I have a good chance of getting all that done on Mon-Tues as this is a grandchild weekend and I'm not stepping foot in the garden at all. The tomato-like fruit on the potatoes is the potato fruit (remember, the part we eat is the tuber) which is not edible but contains seeds you can allow to mature on the plant and then sow if you want to try growing potatoes. Some people refer to them as seed balls to make it clear that they are not edible fruit. Google True Potato Seed if you want to read about growing potatoes that way. I did it one year just for fun to see if it could be done (it can!). You won't always get the potato fruit---just like your potatoes do not/will not always flower. I only get potato flowers/fruit in years when the nights stay cool for a prolonged period and those cool nights have to coincide with the potatoes being at about the right stage to flower. I don't have a lot to add about our garden. Although the tomatoes look sickly, I could nip that in the bud if I was willing to spray them with a fungicide, and I don't think I am. Y'all know I hate to spray anything at all on my plants ever. I think I'll just harvest the fruit and yank out the plants one by one whenever I get tired of looking at them. At least the heavy rainfall stopped here a couple of weeks ago, so the tomatoes taste much better now because excessive rainfall is not watering down their flavor. All the beans and tomatoes have spider mites, though not at huge levels yet. Either the predatory mites and lady bugs and other beneficial insects will take care of the spider mites, or they won't. If they do, great, and if they don't, I'll yank out heavily infested plants after the beans are done producing. It is rare for the spider mites to kill tomato plants as the predatory mites usually catch up, population-wise, by July and start knocking back the spider mite population, at which time the tomato plants put on a surge of new growth and rebound. I am concerned about the plethora of grasshopper nymphs I'm seeing and the fact that they are chewing holes in every single leaf on every single plant in my garden. The issue, really, is that our two organic grasshopper bait type control products---Nolo Bait and Semaspore are not available this year, so that is a big problem. I have a bottle of beauveria bassiana and I could use it to control the grasshoppers, but I worry about the effect it would have on other insects inside the garden. I think I'll just try to wait out the grasshopper damage. Or, if I start feeling really desperate about the grasshopper situation, I could spray the beauveria bassiana in a wide band around the outside of the garden fence and hope it kills the grasshoppers as they make their way to the garden. That might be a reasonable compromise. I really don't want to use it inside the garden because it can harm some beneficial insects (not all, but I don't want to sacrifice any of them). Earlier this week I noticed the caterpillar of the Variegated Frittilary Butterfly on my pansy plants. I was getting ready to yank out the pansies and replace them with Profusion zinnias, but now I'll leave the pansies until the Frit caterpillars are done with them. Lillie has been here for a couple of days and nights now and we're about to take her home to spend the rest of the weekend with her family. We tie-dyed 12 t-shirts and 2 pairs of shorts (half for herself, and half for her little sister) so my hands might be looking a little blue, purple and green (and pink, orange and red). lol. I've scrubbed them pretty hard and think most of the dye is gone now. I did wear gloves while tying and dying, but not when I was taking the rubber bands off the t-shirts to rinse them before running them through the washing machine. That is what gets me every time. Now that I've washed the t-shirts and shorts twice in the washing machine with those SHOUT dye-catcher things in there with them, I think they won't fade in a normal laundering, but I'll send the rest of the box of dye-catchers home with her today so they can protect the next few loads of laundry they wash. That worked out well for all of us last year, and now that we have tie-dyed t-shirts for 2 consecutive summers, Lillie has declared it to be "our family tradition". I'm okay with that. Hope everyone is having a good weekend. It is 88 degrees here and starting to feel a little bit toasty. Dawn