I'm at about the same stage. I just picked the last snap peas and pulled the plants. We harvested a big batch of beautiful collard greens, but had to cook them for three hours to get close to edible. I pulled the plants and consigned them to the compost heap. We still have a few beats in the ground, but they will come up this week.

Some of our leaf lettuce is still producing but getting a bit strong. Spinach is done and carrots have been harvested. We had a bumper crop of bush beans, but the first round of those are on their last legs.

I've already planted sweet potatoes, Okra, New Zealand Spinach and various squash to fill the empty spots. Field peas and another round of beans go in this week.

My potatoes are gone, Chinese cabbage gone, broccoli about gone, jersey wakefield cabbage about gone, onions and garlic about ready to harvest. I have open areas but no plans to plant anything now, unless maybe okra, my okra is just not doing well. I may plant another kind in another area. I hope to not get in the high water usage like I did last year, and so far this year looks worse.

Larry

I haven't dug potatoes yet, but I harvested onions today. Most of them were sticking up about 75% out of the ground and the necks were falling over. I could have left them in the ground another week or two and waited for the green foliage to turn yellow and tan, but with a chance of hail in the forecast, I didn't want to risk having hail hit them and bruise them.

I am about to harvest carrots, and that will be the end of my cool-season stuff.

The harvest is already hot and heavy with all the beans, squash, sweet corn and tomatoes, so getting the onions harvested was just one more thing to cross off the 'to do' list. My peas have been out for a couple of weeks now, and I planted muskmelons in their place to climb on the trellis. I left one pea plant as a trap plant for aphids, so check it daily and kill any aphids I see on it, unless lady bugs are on it taking care of the aphids themselves. It looks pitiful, but it is attracting aphids and making them easy to find.

I took out the last lettuce plant from the big garden, and the gone-to-seed lettuce plants from the cattle trough garden this morning. They all were well beyond eating quality.

It hit 98 degrees here today at our house so there's no way any cool season anything has a chance of doing anything from this point forward anyway.

As I've taken out cool-season stuff, I've been planting hot-season stuff like red noodle beans, a gazillion kinds of southern peas, lima beans, more pole beans, three more kinds of bush beans (I planted 7 varieties originally and 4 of those are done, but the other 3 are still producing), okra, winter squash, more summer squash (I have 33 plants now, 29 old ones and 3 new ones, so I am feeding squash to the chickens every day) and odds and ends like Armenian cukes and some birdhouse gourds and decorative gourds. I'm about through with the succession planting, though, if rain isn't going to fall.

I expect we'll have the big deep freeze completely full in a couple of weeks, and after that, I won't care as much if the heat burns up most things.

I didn't really plant any cool season crops this year. Things were running behind so much.

Today I got out and planted my squash plants - well, the yellow, patty pan, and Balmoral (a kind of patty pan that produces fruit along the stem like Brussels Sprouts). Planted a couple of Clammyweeds in the middle of the patch to attract bees. I started on this new bed a week or so ago, digging and removing Bermuda and other weeds, adding manure to the soil and working it in. Hope that is good enough cuz it's just too hot to do much else to amend it. I didn't "hill" up the squash like I should, but am mulching it well, so hopefully that will help some. Am thinking about wrapping my squash stems with aluminium foil - think that will ward off the SVBs, Dawn. I read about this method somewhere. It's just wrapping the very base of the stems at ground level and up about 2-3". Or, will the stems cook in the foil in this heat?

Also got my Pumpkin, Canteloupe (muskmelon), and Watermelon seeds planted.

I haven't done my beans yet - where does the time go? - is it too late? Was planning to do in the next couple days.

I have Zucchinis forming on my Spineless Beauty plants - have 3 plants in 3 5 gal. bags, doing very well.

Okra is growing - Little Lucy - and about to flower. The Lee Okra just now poked thru the soil, so it is a bit later.

I am picking cukes also - Yippee!

Went to Lowes today to p/u mulch that was on sale 4 bags for $10, picked up a pump for my fountain. Haven't run the fountain in awhile and if it's going to be hot, at least the sound of bubbling water will be soothing in the heat.

Picked up a hoe for Kenna. She is wanting to grow some flowers and some tomatos. My extras will go in their garden. I have tomatos, squash, and can plant some beans for them. That should be enough to get them started. Kenna loves to garden and she started very young with the butterflies. Now that I am expanding into veggies, she wants to try her hand at it, too. How can I deny her? LOL! I'll just tell her, there's this lady name Dawn....one named Carol......another named Dorothy, and a couple fellows named Jay and Larry......who had more of a hand in this small, modest beginning than I did.

Got my Japanese MGs potted up and planted some more seeds, with more to go yet.

If I lose everything in the drought and heat, I'm going to be very disappointed because I have really gone all out to work this garden this year, especially for my first ever veggie crop. Not much, but enough for a single lady. Ah, well, such is life in Oklahoma. I will just shift my focus back to my butterflies, which at least are proving productive this year and if I continue to give them nectar plants and host plants, they will be fine, whereas last year there were virtually none.

Susan

I pulled all the peas a few weeks ago. The black seeded simpson leaf lettuce bolted a week or two ago as well, so I yanked it all and threw it on the compost. I still have green star and two star leaf lettuce that hasn't bolted, and it's actually not that bitter yet either. I'm surprised at its heat tolerance so far, though we're not getting nearly as warm as you are, Dawn. I keep waiting on the onions to show me signs that they're ready, but I haven't seen it yet. I still need to pull the carrots, too.

I still need to plant more winter squash and bush beans. As long as it takes for winter squash to mature, do you guys have an estimate on when it might be too late to plant it?

I am almost afraid to type on this thread. I was writing on this thread last night and had typed a very long message. I was watching the weather and thinking that the rain was going to miss us although I could see the lightening on 3 sides and hear thunder. (Craig County got 3.29 inches of rain).

Then I heard light rain begin to fall and I was typing that in the message when the power went out. I waited, thinking it would come back on but it didn't. I found my flashlight and walked into the safe room and automatically hit the light switch and the light came on. I assumed everything was back on, but as I went through the house, only certain rooms had lights and, of course, the air conditioner didn't work, or 2 refrigerators and a freezer. I thought the storm had caused a breaker to trip, so I started looking for that but couldn't find one in the house or the bunkhouse that was thrown. I was getting ready to go check the outside box where power comes in and by this time Al was awake and said he would do it. It was raining a little, but very light.

A neighbor was just coming home from taking someone to the hospital and he saw us in the back yard and came over. He looked at the line from the nearest power pole, and then checked all the breakers again. I suppose that lightening had hit the line, or something else had caused a major power surge and it had burned a big wire at a connector where the power company line connects to our lines. The line was burned totally through and no longer connected about two feet from the back of the house. Our air conditioner was humming because it was getting 110 current only, so we turned off every breaker that ran on 220 so they wouldn't burn up.

The repairman responded very quickly and I took him to the broken line. He said, "I think you could do my job." I said, "No thanks, I'm not getting on that ladder."

He told me if I could hold the light for him, he could fix it very quickly. He went to the truck for tools and wire, and by this time Al is up again because we are just outside the bedroom window. So we held lights while the guy spliced in new wire with new connectors. Then we turned all the breakers back on and checked things. As I walked to the front yard, I saw a big limb in the middle of the road that had broken off one of our trees, so Al got that out of the road, and we went back inside to go to sleep, finally. It was 2:47. That was about my last conscious thought and I went to sleep. Al was so keyed up that he didn't go to sleep until after 4, and he had a doctor's appointment this morning. I had worked so hard outside yesterday thinking that we might get rain that I was dead tired, then adding the nights events to that, all I wanted to do was sleep and I slept half the day away. LOL

Susan, If wrapping the stems with foil was all it would take, none of us would have SVBs. It may work early in the season, but then unless you continually keep wrapping every bit of the vine as it grows, the SVBs will find a way in. I've had better luck with cutting the toes out of nylon knee-highs and putting in the ground around the stems of the young squash plants, and then pulling the stocking up higher on the stem as the plant grows. I use a twist tie or twine to hold it tightly against the stem. Sometimes wrapping stems works, sometimes it doesn't. Some years I have SVBs and other years I don't. So, last year when we had none, if I had wrapped my stems in aluminum foil, I would have raved about how the foil kept the SVBs away. Really, though, there weren't any here to keep away, so the foil wouldn't even have been necessary. With SVBs, try anything. Try everything. Some years they win, some years we win. Will the stems cook in the foil? I don't know. They don't seem to. As quickly as squash plants grow, the leaves will shade the foil-wrapped stem pretty quickly.

Some people cut floating row cover in strips and wrap it around the stems. Like I said, try anything and everything, but just remember that Mother Nature Bats Last.

I'd go ahead and plant beans. I plant succession crops of them every three weeks. At some point it will get too hot for one of the succession plantings to produce, and I'll say "Darn it, I should stopped planting 3 weeks earlier than I did". You know what, though? Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Sometimes heat shuts them down, sometimes they go crazy and produce after a little cool spell with rain, like we're having this week, so why not plant some and hope for the best?

It sounds like your veggie gardening is going great, and it is wonderful that Kenna wants to be involved in it too. It is so very important for kids to know where food comes from and how it is produced. Some of the local schools here have school gardens and kids of all ages and grade levels seem to really enjoy growing some veggies. I love driving by the schools and seeing their big gardens outside the school buildings.

Don't forget to teach Kenna about the magic of herbs--how a little leaf of this or that can add flavor to a meal. Imagine how much fun it would be for Kenna to have a tea party with lavender cookies baked from lavender from your own plants for example? Or a little mint added to iced tea. The possibilities are endless.

We normally don't lose everything to drought, we just find that production slows or stops. Or, sometimes, the cost of watering makes us stop doing it if heavy irrigation is required. Or, in some cases, if water rationing goes into effect, some people may find that they cannot water their gardens enough to keep them productive.

Even in the worst years, we get plenty of stuff from the garden. I may complain that production was poor last year, but all that means in our case is that I didn't preserve very much of anything. We still had plenty for fresh eating. Even with no irrigation, a few tomatoes, most peppers, all the okra, all the melons and all the southern peas kept producing. So did the lima beans, and Tanya's Pink Pod beans produced deeply into the hot season. Was it a bad year? Not really a bad year, just not as heavy of a harvest as usual. If my garden could produce in last year's ridiculously high temps and in the absence of rainfall and irrigation, then I would think most gardens here would do the same. Some things--like potatoes and onions--produced ridiculously large harvests and we were giving them away right and left. That's more of a typical year where some things produce well, some produce poorly and some produce right in the middle. It is a rare year when everything fails, and it is more likely in my garden in a very wet year than in a very dry year. Up to a point, you can add water to the ground via irrigation in a dry year, but you really cannot remove excess water in a year when the rain falls endlessly. Also, constant rain and high humidity cause lots more diseases. Though I don't enjoy drought, it is a fact of life here, and there are worse garden issues to have---like a flooded garden or one crushed by fallen trees or mowed down by a tornado or destroyed by a wildfire.

Heather, I am glad y'all aren't as hot yet as we are, because it is miserable.

You can plant most winter squash at least through the end of July and it should have time to produce just fine. The sooner the better, though. The way the OSU planting publications show it is sort of funny. For the spring garden, they recommend winter squash be planted from May 15 - June 15. Then, in the fall garden guide, the recommended dates for winter squash are July 15-30. I cannot imagine that if someone planted winter squash June 15th, they'd turn around and plant more July 15th unless squash vine borers killed their plants or something.

I was a disobedient Oklahoma gardener and planted butternut squash in April, or it might even have been late March. We already have some that is almost mature. Sometimes it pays to plant early. Really, though, winter squash grows so fast and flowers and fruits so quickly that late plantings work out as well as earlier ones, and usually with less fungal issues in drier weather too.

Carol, Well, I am definitely envious of Craig County's rainfalL! Imagine getting that much rain all at once? If you added up all our rainfall for the last 4 or 6 weeks, it wouldn't even be that much. After all that, I hope your light rain added up to a decent amount in the rain gauge.

I'm glad the power issues didn't set your house on fire or something. There were lots of trees and limbs down here, power out in parts of the county, including in Marietta, and out here in the sticks too, etc. We had more lightning and wind than rain. Up where they're doing construction on I-35 north of Marietta and along Hwy 32 near I-35, those big construction barrels were blowing all over creation and creating havoc on the roadways. It is always something when it rains around here. Why can't we have just a nice little steady rain shower that doesn't cause trouble????

I'm getting ready to make a run down to CostCo for dog and cat food and other stuff. It is too hot to work outside although Tim has done his best to mow every square inch of flat land. Tomorrow we'll have to mow the hillsides and gullies with a string trimmer. I am worried about all the hoppers descending upon us from the tall grassy areas that Tim mowed. I think they're holding a convention in my garden today and I am not happy about that.

I know that several of us have linked the Oklahome Garden Planning Guide pretty regularly this year, but since I mentioned the Fall Garden Guide I'll link it below. It seems odd to be thinking of fall gardening, but it is time to be planning for it. For example, if somebody wants to raise fresh tomato plants from seed for fall gardening, it is about time to sow the seed now so you'll have plants at the proper transplanting size by July 1st.

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: Fall Garden Planting Guide

I got some Black Krim seeds on sale at Lowes yesterday, thinking I might start a few fall tomatos shortly. It has a 70 DTM, which is pushing the upper limits for harvest, but heck, maybe we'll have another nice, long fall like last year since we appear to be headed for a drought again like last year.

I went out and found one of my Clammyweed seedlings cut off close to the bottom, but not "at" the bottom. Left about 1" of stem and 2 or 3 leaves. It should come back. If not, I have back up seedlings.

Dawn, on the beans, I'm just going to stick a few in the ground around the Sunflowers, which are up about 2-3' now, and a few other places where they can climb trees, trellises, etc. I am just so tired of planting at this point, and I don't want to spend a ton more money on potting mix. I would plant Hyacinth and runner beans the same way and they do fine, so maybe I'll get a few beans, maybe not. My stamina suffers in the heat, especially when it just takes everything I have to "maintain" the garden. I want to at least have a break before getting ready to plan fall gardening.

Carol, all that electrical stuff scares me! Wow!

Thanks for the SVB advice, Dawn.

Susan

You're welcome. I haven't seen you online the last couple of hours. Hope the storms missed you.

Wonder what got your clammyweed? Perhaps our enemy, the dreaded climbing cutworm?

Oh my Carol. So glad there wasn't more damage. You know how big the trees are around this place. I would so like to have all these right next to the house taken out but they would have to be taken down from a tall boom truck and it's very expensive. Eventually we will have to, though

Susan, I'm jealous that your granddaughter still likes to garden with you. Mine have lost interest mostly, and it makes me sad.

Dorothy, That is so sad. It happens. Kids get older and get interested in other things. Then, eventually, they grow up and come to their senses and fall in love with gardening all over again. I have faith your granddaughters have a love of gardening deeply implanted in their souls and that this loss of interest is just a phase, though it might last a few years. In my college years I wasn't much interested in gardening, but by my mid-20s I was getting back into it again.

Dawn

The electrical stuff was scary and it is a good thing we were home when it happened. Our neighbor is a contractor and understands a lot more about electricity than we do and he just happened to be home between jobs and came to our rescue and told what we needed to shut down. I'm afraid it might have damaged our new heat pump if we hadn't shut it off because it was running and trying to come on, but couldn't. We quickly turned off breakers to everything that might be a problem and waited for the electric company.

I am glad that it happened night before last and not last night. Last night we had hail, high wind, and a heavy rainfall and only light rain the night we lost power. I have been sick for about 24 hours, but did manage to walk around the garden a couple of times this morning. I don't see much damage in the garden, but it has lots of leaves and small branches on the ground that came off of the trees around it. It appears that it was harder on the trees than the garden plants. I haven't left home today, but from the house, the only limb I see down is the one that came down night before last.

My neighbor, the contractor, had lightening hit a tree in his back yard earlier in the Spring and killed all of his phones and a computer printer. His backyard is just north of mine and we share a fence. It seems something in our yard is attracting lightening. We missed all of the hail last year, and most other years, so I knew our turn was coming.

I don't have a rain gauge at the moment so I don't know how much rain we got, but it was significant. It was just a small band of rain that came across the north end of Delaware County and the south end of Ottawa county, so neither Mesonet station is going to have the measurement.

When I started gardening here, I would have so much mud in my garden that I have had my shoes pulled off as I would try to walk and not fall. Even with the heavy rain last night, I was able to walk all around this morning. The additions to the soil have sure made a difference, especially the leaves.

The hail fell on a lot of exposed onions last night but I am not seeing any damage yet. The storm quickly turned from hail to rain so the ice didn't stay on the plants, but some had to have taken direct hits from the hail.

Susan, I still plan to plant winter squash and melons, but I don't have room until the onions and broccoli are finished. I am hoping to get it in soon, but I have only cut about a fourth of the broccoli and haven't pulled any onions. Most of the onions are down, but still green.

One truss on a Sungold plant is starting to turn orange and that will be the first of the seeds I started. We have had a couple of little tomatoes off of the Matt's Wild Cherry that I got from Dawn. It's a good thing that I plant cherry tomatoes because I don't plant many early plants. I did plant early girl this year, but it isn't ready. Of course, I don't normally get fruit until the last week of June.

Hello everyone!

Just about all cool season stuff is ready to come out as well. My onions are not "falling over" as I call them, but not quite yet, I am still picking broccoli side shoots, the peas came out, they were done. Cabbage is getting heads, but not quite yet, so I don't know if they ever will, same with the Brussel sprouts, they grew tall, got the side leaves coming out of the side, but no "bubbles" that are supposed to be Brussels sprouts. So I don't know about them. LOL

Carol, what type of melon do you plant this late? I was thinking about you saying you were going to plant melons so I tried to copy you. I bought Crimson sweet because it stated 60-80 DTM on the package, but when I got home and looked it up on the computer the DTM seems to be 80+ days. My soil is NOT watermelon soil but I will give them a try anyway.

Larry

Larry, I have a few watermelon plants already growing, but I just meant that I was going to plant cantaloupe. I should have had it going earlier but I like to just direct seed it when I can, and I don't have room to do that until the Spring crops come out. We should still have about five months of growing season here since I normally don't get frost until Halloween.

Carol,

I'm glad, too, that y'all were home when it happened.

I wonder what it is about y'all's little neck of the woods that keeps attracting the lightning?

I put in my muskmelons a couple of weeks ago when I pulled the snap peas. They have not grown very much in the endless heat, drought and hot, dry wind that plagued us for so much of May, so I am hoping they will perk up now with the abundant rainfall, slightly cooler temperatures and (hooray, hooray!) lack of strong winds. I'm growing Carole, Super 45 and Hale's Best Jumbo. I planted the watermelons to grow as a sort of ground cover under and between okra plants since that worked out so well last year. If I remember them all correctly, I planted Blacktail Mountain, Yellow Doll, Yellow Baby, New Orchid and Tiger Baby. They're all small refrigerator-sized melons since I was afraid we wouldn't have enough rainfall to grow the big melons and I didn't want to irrigate endlessly all summer. Actually, I try to avoid watering watermelons at all after the fruit is sizing up for fear I'll water too much and ruin their flavor. I may have planted Sugar Baby. I no longer remember for sure if I actually planted it or just intended to plant it.

For winter squash, I planted carefully-selected varieties that should withstand the onslaught of SVBs: Old-Timey Cornfield Pumpkin. Long Island Cheese, Seminole, Tahitian Melon and Waltham Butternut.

I might plant some winter melons if the SVBs take out the excessive number of zucchini plants I planted. We're getting far too much zucchini (who in American doesn't get too much zucchini, at least until the SVBs arrive?) but I wanted to shred and freeze a lot for zucchini bread, cake, and cookies before the SVBs took it out. Now, with it all producing so well all month, I am tired of it. Where are the SVBs when you need them? (Note to SVBs: if you arrive, feel free to attack the zucchinis but please leave my yellow summer squash alone. Thank you.)

Larry, I take watermelon (and all other)DTMs with a grain of salt. For me, and I think it likely is because of our heat and our intense sunlight, many melons produce a couple of weeks earlier than the DTMs, which are just estimates anyway. I'd think any watermelon planted now should have lots of time to produce well. Our first frost, at the very earliest, should be at least 120 days way. My soil is not watermelon soil either, but I've always had really good luck with melons in well-amended clay. Even last year with all that incredible heat, the melons did really well.

Hi Ezzirah, I think it is likely too hot for brussels spouts to make their sprouts now, unless this week's brief cool spell helps them out a bit. When I grow them, I usually grow them in the fall because the cooler fall temps as they mature are more conducive to flowering than the hotter temperatures they encounter as spring warms up and summer arrive. In a perfect world, Brussels Sprouts mature and produce the most tasty, highest-quality sprouts when the air temperatures are in the 55-65 degree range, or even a bit cooler. When's the last time your daytime highs were in that range? If your weather has been like mine, it was a long time ago.

If you plant them for fall, start them from seed indoors and set them out about 10 weeks before your average fall frost. To give your fall transplants the best chance of producing, you would want for your brussels sprouts plants to be about 6 weeks old (and 7 or 8 weeks likely would be okay too), and have at least 6-8 true leaves and be healthy. Starting with plants that old in summer should put your plants at the right age and size to be forming flowers (the sprouts we eat are flower buds) in fall's cooler temperatures.

You have to keep summer-transplanted brussels sprouts moist for the first couple of weeks, and may even need to shade them to get them through the hot summer weather and to allow them to quickly become well established. After the pampering that first week or two, they usually can hold their own against the elements. However, you'll need to keep them moist at all times because they are not terribly deep rooted so can dry out quickly.

For me, cabbage does just fine even in the hot weather. Some years I don't even harvest it until June or July, but in other years it is harvest-sized by May. I think it is likely your cabbage still will produce just fine for you, but not so sure about the brussels sprouts. This has been a hard spring for cool-season crops since the cool season was not very cool for very long.

I still have potatoes and carrots in the ground but likely not for too much longer. I think some of my potatoes have begun to die back this week, and based on their planting date and DTMs, I think it is time for them because they are a pretty early variety.

I've planted southern peas in the raised bed in the Peter Rabbit Garden where the onions were growing until I harvested them a wee bit early to get them out of the ground before the hail fell. Then, even though it hailed within a couple of miles of our house, no hail fell here. With the onions though, I think it was better to be safe than sorry, so I'm glad I went ahead and harvested them.

Dawn

I always have trouble with carrots, but this year I have grown a few. I have always heard that you couldn't transplant carrots, but saw this guy doing it on line and decided to give it a try. I did it when they were very tiny and it was a real pain, but they did grow. I got a few that had odd shapes, but the majority were just fine when I pulled them yesterday. It's probably more trouble than it's worth though.

My broccoli heads are starting to separate so I have to go cut broccoli today. We have had rain for three nights. Very light the first night, but significant the last two. I think most things will make some quick growth.

I have another experiment going. The Dixondale order that seedmama did, had a bundle of long day onions in it and she sent them to me. Since I am in far NW Oklahoma, we thought if anyone had a chance, it would be me. The plants are quite large, but with long day types, they don't start bulbing until the day length is around 14 hours. It will be interesting to see if they start bulbing now that the days are longer. If they do, they should be some big onions. I would think that all of my intermediate day onions should be ready to take out in the next two weeks. They seem to be every size and I know they could have used more water.