I'm flying to Boston on Oct 25th. One night and day there then into Hanover, New Hampshire for 3 days...then driving to Freeport, Maine for another 4 days. Mixing business with pleasure is so much fun. I'm taking a girlfriend along and I'm hoping that the leaves wait for us too. I've been to Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine at the peak and it was unbelievable!! So I'm hoping that she will be able to enjoy that very special part of the world. Susan

Amy, I'm assuming you blanched your okra in boiling water for 3-4 minutes. You blanch smaller pods for 3 minutes or larger ones for 4. Sometimes I don't blanch. I oven roast it instead. I slice it into bite sized pieces and roast it in the oven until it is crispy/crunchy. Then I freeze it. Technically this is not blanching, but it works. The only problem with doing this is that if you sprinkle a little salt on it, the roasted okra makes a fine and healthier substitute for potato chips. I can sit and eat all the oven-roasted okra and it never even makes it into the freezer. So, for me, it is best to oven roast okra just after I've eaten a meal so I won't be hungry enough to eat it all up instead of putting it in ziplock bags and freezing it. Emmitt Smith (technically Emmitt Smith II) was a black tuxedo cat who bore a strong resemblance to Emmitt Smith I, a black tuxedo cat we had in Fort Worth in the early 1990s when the Dallas Cowboys won those three Super Bowls. Chris had named Emmitt Smith I (who simply showed up at our house by getting into the back yard with our two dogs and coming into the house through the dog door and meowing for food....and he never left us) during those great years of Dallas Cowboy super bowl wins. So, when this Emmitt showed up looking like our previous Emmitt (who had died a couple of years before), it was just natural to name him Emmitt Smith as well, even though by then, the Cowboys' glory days were a fading memory. Emmitt Smith II fathered a couple of litters of kittens right after he showed up here, and then we had him fixed so that there wouldn't be any more baby cats, but he was a fantastic father and took great care of his babies up until the day he left us. He considered every cat his child (and pretty much treated baby bunnies or baby squirrels as his babies too) and had the strongest paternal instinct I've ever seen in a cat. He could break up a cat fight just by walking up to the fighting cats and staring them down. No matter what they were doing, all he had to do was give them "the look" (shoulders raised high, head tilting down a little, his jaw jutting out a little and a very intense stare) and they'd stop fighting and go their separate ways---and it worked with stray cats or neighbor's cats that weren't even ours. "The look" must have said something to them that didn't require he even use any language to make his point. He was the alpha males or all alpha males but he maintained his domination without really fighting. About the strongest action I ever saw him take was just to raise a paw and do a little slap-slap to knock two fighting kittens apart, sending them rolling in opposite directions. He was a peacemaker and he wanted his cat family members (and all guests) to get along. Emmitt Smith had a lot of personality. He didn't kill birds and he didn't like for any of the cats to kill birds, so if he saw a cat going after a bird, he'd put a stop to that as well. Our little cat family misses him. His two boys are really grieving his death and have almost completely stopped eating. I hope they'll snap out of it as they are really quite elderly and thin as it is. The younger cats, like Pumpkin and Tiny Baby, weren't his kittens, but he loved them and they loved him in return and I can tell they miss him. Tiny Baby likely takes over as the alpha male in our little cat family now, but Pumpkin may fight him for that position. Tiny Baby is three years older than Pumpkin and about 5 pounds heavier. He sort of has the build of a well-fed, slightly lazy adult male cat. Pumpkin is quite a bit more lean and mean as he still wanders and plays endlessly. I don't think he'll challenge Tiny Baby, but who knows? With the arrogance of the young, he just might do it. We'll see if Emmitt's love of peace has rubbed off on the other cats, or if they start misbehaving now that he isn't here to keep them in line. Emmitt was a great garden cat. Until the last couple of years, if I was in the garden, he was out there with me. He loved to find a shady spot and sleep the day away, and he loved the catnip beyond all reason. He had taken to staying indoors a lot more the last 2 years, but he was in his late teens, so that is not surprising. I really miss him. Thank you all for your kind words about his loss---he was our fur baby for so long and the house seems so much quieter with him gone, although he really was a quiet cat and didn't really make noise. He just had such a great, sweet presence about him. We have had a lot of cats in our lives, but he was really very, very special. Jennifer, I am so sorry to hear about Harry, may he rest in peace, and also about Charlotte. We took in a little stray cat once that showed up at our house in Fort Worth (shortly after our original Emmitt Smith showed up, in fact). She was a small gray cat, so we called her Little Gray. It was obvious from the start that something was wrong with her so we took her to the vet and he diagnosed her with the final stages of Feline Leukemia. The vet felt that she was so far advanced that she was not going to eat (one reason we took her to the vet was because she wasn't eating or drinking much if any at all) so he recommended euthanizing her. Even though she'd just been with us a few days, we were getting attached to her and knew we had to do what was best for her, so we agreed. That was our only experience with feline leukemia. I hope Charlotte's health stays good for as long as possible. The three-tiered spiral bed you're going to make sounds nice. It sounds like a traditional herb spiral or possibly a spiral version of a keyhole bed. I've seen both featured in magazine articles before. It was too hot to be hauling and unloading compost! We mowed this weekend and it really was too hot to do that, but getting it done did lower our fire risk. Or, at least, it left us with shorter grass that would burn more slowly if wildfires start up. It's just about that time of the year, and I'm dreading it. Jacob, Your garden beds look great. It is hard to describe the difference between regular cow peas (by that I mean most crowder types and anything that is a black eyed or green eyed pea) and pink eye purple hull peas but I find the PEPHs have better flavor. It is all in the cooking too, I think. We like them best when I cook them with some bacon fat, a slice of bacon chopped up and cooked in the pot with them, and chopped onions and maybe sometimes jalapeno pepper added to the pot, and salt and pepper added to taste. I can make a meal out of nothing but PEPH peas and cornbread. I don't like plain southern peas just cooked in water with a little salt and pepper---they have to have the bacon, bacon drippings, onions and peppers too. Nancy, I hope you haven't been overdoing it. Just reading about what all you've been doing wears me out and makes me tired. Our four o'clocks have spread like a ground cover beneath the pecan tree west of the garden. Because they are in morning sun/afternoon shade there, they get about 4-6' tall stretching for light. They work perfectly there because they are so tall that the chickens can hide beneath the four o'clock forest when predators are after them. I've never yet seen a hawk come down into the four o'clocks after them. The fact that they bloom and also have such a delicious aroma is just a bonus. I do have to fight like mad (and not very successfully) to keep them out of the garden beds as they reseed vigorously. Getting them out of the beds while they are young enough and small enough to yank out is important because if I let them stay a couple of years, they have big tubers that range from softball sized to larger than a human head and become impossible to dig out. It is those big tubers that help them survive our frequent droughts though, so that's a plus. I'm glad you like them. The night-blooming moths sure love them, so I like them for that reason as well. Nancy, The unflavored milk of magnesia is on the same row at Wal-Mart as all the stomach remedies like stuff for gas, reflux, diarrhea, etc. Our Wal-Mart has two kinds of milk of magnesium in blue bottles---one that is unflavored and one that is flavored. At our W-M, the seltzer water is on the same row as drink mixers like tonic water and ginger ale. Be sure to get unflavored seltzer water too. There is something in the flavorings they add to the lemon-flavored seltzer water that prevents the chemical reaction that makes the magnesium so easily available to our bodies when we drink the magnesium water. I was skeptical when I first made the magnesium water, but taking magnesium tablets always seemed to make my lower back hurt (I think it was my stomach or intestines that were hurting but I felt the pain in my back, so to speak) so I wouldn't consistently take them. Who wants to take a supplement that makes them feel like crap? I sort of thought that maybe the magnesium water might have the same effect but it doesn't Since I started drinking it, I sleep better, feel better in general and have no headaches (I used to have migraines). It is so simple to make and drink and I just love the simplicity of it plus the fact that it seems to work. Hi Denise, It is so good to see you here. I agree that the teenage/pre-teen years are an incredibly time-consuming period. It is amazing how much time all the different activities and interests of kids that age can consume. I bet you've been busy beyond belief! Life didn't really slow down and get quieter here until our son (who is our only child) went off to college and then it was so quiet that it almost hurt. Luckily, he came home on weekends a lot the first year (though not so much after that) so at least we got to have him around a bit during that first year of college----he came home regular as clockwork on Friday nights or Saturday mornings, dragging his full laundry bag home with him. lol. He did his own laundry though. I did try to stuff him full of home cooking when he was home. The college years were really sweet years as we watched him grow into his more mature, adult self. I still really miss having a 'child' at home at times---like, when the school supplies hit the shelves, I feel like I need to find a child to take shopping for school supplies. I guess old habits die hard. I am so thrilled to hear your DH will be returning home soon. Please remember to tell him that I appreciate him and thank him for his service to our great nation. I can only imagine how eager y'all must be to have him home again. Try to not work him to death the first week, okay? (grin) We remodeled our kitchen last year. It was a long, hard job because there's just not enough hours in the day and took us longer than it should have, but I loved every minute of it and simply adore my kitchen now. The kitchen we have now is so pretty and so well-organized and well-planned that I feel like it is so much more efficient than the old kitchen, though there was only a very minimal change to the floor plan. I hope your kitchen dreams work out as well for y'all as ours did for us. I kill lawn and garden equipment the way you've been killing vehicles---just wearing them out from sheer usage. Tim gives me a hard time (in fun) about how I break everything, but then I point out that I break things by using them and that the only perfect machines that never need repair are the ones that sit in the garage/barn without being used. I hope the rain doesn't make your sweet potatoes split. I admit I am green with envy (in a nice way) over the rainfall you're likely to get. We haven't had any rain in the last 30 days or so, and we are only expected to get maybe a half-inch here which won't even begin to close up the cracks in the ground. I just hope we get that half-inch. Often, with these big storm systems, when they are coming our way from the west they seem to rain themselves out before they even reach us. I hope that doesn't happen with this rain system. Unless the weather goes nuts over the next three months, there's no way we will end up with even average rainfall for this year. I think we're currently about 6" short from where we'd be in a normal rainfall year, and it would take a lot of extra rain in Oct-Nov-Dec to make up that missing 6". We rarely have a wet autumn like that here unless we are going into an El Nino weather pattern, which (sadly), we are not. Amy, Isn't that the truth! New parents or parents-to-be have no idea what they are getting into in the beginning, right? I remember that all we thought about before we had a child was the baby years---I could picture having a baby and I knew it would involve tons of work and tons of sleepless nights, but I looked forward to it and all the little milestones like first tooth, first words, first steps, etc. Never, though, did my mind wander 5, 10 or 15 years ahead and contemplate what those later years would be like. Looking back at when Chris and his cousins (the two who lived near us and who were with us all the time back then) were little, I just remember life being a constant whirlwind of us going here, there and everywhere. We stayed busy all the time, but we had so much fun. No wonder I was tired all the time! I miss those days now, but like having a quieter, more slow-paced life now too. Jennifer, I feel the same way about a fall garden, but just don't have the time for one. That, plus the fact that there's been a extraordinary increase in the number of venomous snake bites in our county this year, has led to me not really planting anything for fall except a few tomato plants. I have largely stayed out of the garden because of the venomous snake issue. I keep thinking I'll sow some lettuce and kale seeds, but with temperatures remaining in the 90s even now and no rain in over 30 days, I'm not motivated to even do that. The last few years, I have migrated from the garden to working on projects indoors in the August-October time frame, and I think I am okay with that. There's no way that I can work on indoor projects in the Jan-July time frame when the garden demands so much time, so perhaps this is just the best division of labor for me at this stage in our lives. November and December really are all about the holidays---not just holiday stuff for our extended family and our friends, but also various community events that the VFD participates in, so it seems like if anything is going to be done with the house, it needs to happen from August through October. That's just how our lives have evolved. It's all good. The melons ought to mature if they are a fairly decent size. If the mildew on the plants does kill off the leaves, though, the melons may not mature beyond whatever they'll managed to do before that point. Often the mildew will just make the plants look like crap but won't kill them and the plants will keep maturing. However, as we go into autumn with more moist, humid weather (usually) and more rain (usually), the mildew tends to kill the plants more than it did back in the summer months when we were having hotter, drier weather. That pain you're feeling is a definite sign of overworked muscles. Take care of your poor, sore body and let it recover. I used to always get that sort of soreness in late winter/early spring when I was doing tons of hard work in the garden---and especially when carrying wheelbarrow loads of compost from the big cmpost pile to the garden to spread it all. Now I work out year-round, and work out especially hard in Nov, Dec, and Jan to make sure my muscles don't get too soft and lazy over the winter. I do this precisely so that I will not (or hopefully will not) hurt myself when it is time to be back out in the garden doing the necessary hard physical labor prior to planting season. Football players go to training camp to prepare for the football season----this gardener works out in the weight room (we have a treadmill and a weight machine, free weights and a DVR/TV for workout videos in Chris' old bedroom) all winter to prepare for gardening season. I didn't have to do that when I was younger, but the older I get, the riskier it is to go into planting season unprepared for the physical labor it involves. I'm probably more physically fit now than I was when I was in my 20s way back in the 1980s. Back then, I just had the natural fitness you have while you are young and I believe I took it for granted, but now I have to work much harder to have at least that same level of fitness. I don't mind the work though---I understand it is necessary as one ages to 'use it or lose it'. Good luck figuring out what to do with the dog. You know, you need to make the decision that is best for both the dog and your family. We have had some very challenging dogs, but have been able to deal with each dog's issue and resolve it over time. However, I am home all the time, and that makes a huge difference. If you are not home enough to deal with your problem dog, maybe you should return it to the rescue to see if it can be rehomed. I do not say that lightly----I say it based on knowing how long it has taken us (years!) to get some dogs to calm down and learn not to run wild and roam. With all our dogs, often it just took time for them to learn the rules and to learn to abide by them----and I think I always see the dogs settle down and get with the program once they are 2 or 3 years old. Yes, it is a long painful time of working with them to teach them and to help them mature, but eventually it pays off---but I am home and can do that. You are at work and may not have the time necessary to work that closely with a dog that sounds very high-energy. Sometimes a particular dog is not a good match with the family/living situation, and I think that's especially true when you have poultry. Some dogs learn to co-exist with them without hurting them, but others have such a strong hunting or retrieving drive that they never stop seeing poultry as prey. Perhaps your dog is like that. Jet was like that (he's part lab retriever) for a long time. You couldn't trust him around a free-ranging chicken until he was at least 5 years old so he had to be leashed all the time when he was out in the yard. Now he walks through a flock of free-ranging poultry as if he doesn't even see them---but, let's get real, he is 12 years old and very settled down and mellow. He certainly took many years to reach this point. Heck, he is so old that sometimes I wonder if he even sees the chickens---maybe it is more that his eyes are old and he's half-blind and he really isn't even seeing them more than just the fact that he's learned to leave them alone. He's reached the age where he'd rather be curled up sleeping on his blanket on the sofa than outdoors running wild---but he did have wild, running years. Amy, When Chris was in high school and driving or out with friends who drove, the sound of sirens at night made me exceptionally nervous too. Our street was really quiet, so I could lie awake and listen to the cars come by and know when the two teens next door were home and when Chris was home. Then, I could sleep. Up until that point, if I heard a siren, I'd be trying to remember if I'd heard all the teens' cars come down the road on a weekend night, especially. Ironically, our VFD didn't work many motor vehicle accidents involving kids Chris' age when he was in high school. Since then, though, we have had to work a lot of them and the only difference is now that Chris has been out of school so long, we don't know any of the kids involved in the wrecks we go to---but we often know whose child or grandchild they are, regardless, and I think it is harder when it is people you know or know of. Especially if it is a fatality accident. Those are just the worse---and you know even while you are out there at the scene that some family is getting a phone call that no one wants to receive. Rebecca, It is just that time of the year, you know, and cooler weather (especially nights) and shorter daylength contributes to it all. Sometimes I just take all the autumn decline symptoms as signs that it is time to let the garden go, do the desired cleanup, move on to to other projects and get some rest. You're had a really challenging year with the squirrels and other issues. Maybe your garden is trying to tell you that you've earned your rest and should have it now. Nancy, I believe Titan's illness bonded the three of you together so tightly that he'll never run and roam again because he just won't want to leave y'all. That's a good thing. Many of the dogs and cats we have taken in over the years were dumped 'in the country' by people who didn't want them and were trying to survive by finding, catching, killing and eating wild things like rabbits just in order to survive before they found a new home. It can be hard for a dog or cat that's run like that and learned to hunt for survival to give it up, settle down and become a pet again, but I see it happen over and over again with time and lots of love. There always seems to be some point (more obvious to me with dogs than with cats) where they realize that the new life they have with their new family is far superior to running wild and free and being half-starving all the time. When they reach that realization, they almost become different animals---or at least much improved versions of themselves. I miss y'all when I am not here daily, but I have to stay off the computer when I am working on house projects or I get derailed and don't finish the things I start. Dawn

Nancy, Listen to Rebecca because she speaks the truth about goldfinches. We feed them all winter and have dozens and dozens and dozens of them. We buy the finch seed in huge bags and it still lasts no time at all. I think we had 6 or 7 goldfinch feeders this past winter and I was filling up some of them daily. For such small birds, they eat a ton of food each. Lisa, Did you see Neil's post this afternoon or evening about the live oaks he planted and Barbara Bush's funeral? It was pretty stunning. I wonder how amazed he was when he realized the trees he was looking at on TV during funeral coverage were trees he himself planted decades ago? Kim, I agree with you about the shocking truth about 'organic' strawberries....and many other organic things. When they came out with the National Organic Program all those years ago, a lot of us were disgusted by some of the things they decided to allow....and it is a joke that the foods can be called organic. The only way for us to really know we are eating healthy food is to grow our own and not use that stuff on it, or buy at local markets from folks who don't use those things either. IN order for that to happen, you have to get to know your local farmer/market grower and be able to ask them how they grow the food they are selling. I've always said I prefer to eat food which hasn't been sprayed with anything---including many common and popular organic products. Just because a food is labeled organic doesn't mean it hasn't been sprayed with stuff that we don't want our food sprayed with.....and just because a pesticide, herbicide, fungicide or miticide is labeled organic doesn't necessarily mean it is better for us or safer than one that is synthetic. There are plenty of organic gardening products I never have used and never will use. Never, ever, ever. The advantage of growing our own is that we can decline to use all those things. There are many kinds of greenhouse watering systems available. I don't know if they're too pricey for a small grower to purchase and use---there's everything available from misting systems to irrigation booms to drip lines or flood systems. Maybe you can put a pressure reducer on the hose so it would be usable. For ants indoors, Terro ant bait traps are the best and I believe they contain just borax and sugar. To keep ants out, we spray around the foundation of the house with peppermint soap or an orange oil spray made from Medina orange oil and water (gotta keep the orange oil off plants thought as it can burn them). The peppermint soap (we use Dr. Bronner's) disrupts the scent trail so that ants cannot follow a scent trail left by previous ants. The orange oil either kills them (if you spray them directly or they walk into the liquid just after you sprayed it) by dissolving their exoskeleton. That's what we used to keep ants out of the sunroom when Chris' tropical birds lived there because he didn't want to use chemicals around the birds. For some reason, orange oil didn't bother the birds, but he was very careful about using it inside the room. He preferred to spray outdoors if he could find where they were getting into the room. Orange oil is an old organic remedy for fire ants---you add it to Garrett Juice to make a mound drench. It even was in one of the original organic fire ant products back in probably the 1990s---a mound drench called Citrex. It works on all ants, but I don't really worry about ants or use it unless they're coming indoors. We can peacefully coexist with most ants outdoors, but once they try to come into the house, they are not our friends any more. I am too tired to write more. I'll try to be up early to start the Week 4 thread. I feel like the whole month of April has dragged by in a blur of freezing nights and wildfires. At least the rain adds a different twist to it all. Dawn

Nancy, It is just a sad fact of life that heat + lack of moisture give our hot peppers better flavor, and cooler temperatures and excessive moisture do just the opposite. There's not a lot we can do about it. I am careful to choose peppers that are higher on the Scoville Heat Unit scale for just this reason. While this sometimes means that hot peppers harvested in July and August in hot, dry years can be almost unbearably hot, it also means that those harvested in cooler, wetter months still have a lot of heat since I chose hotter varieties to begin with. I'll even tailor my variety choices to the year's expected weather (to the extent that you can know at seed-starting time what sort of summer to expect). If I expect really hot, dry summer, I may choose jalapenos with a lower SHU and do the opposite if I expect a cooler, wetter summer. It helps somewhat. Deer are just that way. They want what they want when they want it. You can jazz up ham and cheese sandwiches by spreading a thin layer of Habanero Gold Jelly on them! Of course, this only works if you happen to have Habanero Gold Jelly handy. Jen, Whatever your pepper is, I don't recognize it and it didn't come from me. Could it possibly me one of the ornamental pepper varieties? It stayed cool, cloudy and mostly rainy---just a slow, even rain that fell all day long until 4 or 5 pm---all day long and the high temperature here only made it up to 66 degrees. It felt like autumn after feeling like summer for far too long. We ended up with 5.8" of rain, so certainly cannot complain about the rain missing us this time. I think the last time we had 5.8" of rain from one rain event, even a multi-day rain event, likely was back in February. It is nice to see all the moisture, but I'm sure the mud and the puddles will get old quickly, and the mosquito explosion will not be welcome at all. We usually have mosquitoes all winter here, so it isn't like we even can count on cold weather to knock back the population completely. I dread the mosquito part of the equation. We'll see if this large amount of rainfall heals up all the cracks in the ground from this summer's drought. I think it will and hope I'm right about that. My garden is a lake as the timbers from each raised bed sort of serve as mini-dams that hold water when there is plentiful rainfall. A lake is probably preferable to a desert after the summer we just had. One lone hummingbird was spotted visiting the feeders in the rain, and then seen visiting the trumpet creeper flowers after the rain stopped. This is the third day in a row to spot only one hummingbird. I don't know if it is the same one, staying here and refueling before flying further south, or if I'm seeing various single ones. So far the last few days, all the hummingbirds I've seen have been ruby-throated ones. The main crowd left a few days ago. The deer returned in force to feed tonight and were pretty hungry. I hope they enjoyed their dinner. At least I didn't have to drag out the water hose to fill up their waterer for them because the rain took care of it---it was, in fact, overflowing. They might not even drink from the waterer now that all the creeks and ponds have water in them again, but it is there if they need it. I'm thinking if an unwanted large predator is lurking, we'll know it soon enough because it likely will leave tracks in the mud if it comes anywhere near the house, garden, outbuildings or the deer feeding area. Vultures have been circling our woodland and Tim thinks this means some predator has killed and possibly cached its prey back there. I pointed out anything could have happened---just some wild thing could have died of natural causes---and we'd still have vultures circling. Neither of us is willing to venture into the snake-infested woods to see if we can find whatever it is that is attracting the vultures. If this was November and we'd had colder nights, venturing into the woods wouldn't be so risky, but we've been too warm recently and the snakes are still very active. Dawn