Carol,

Some people have all the luck! How I envy y'all! Our rainfall is down 4" or 5" for the year-to-date. Since we scarcely get enough rain "to get by" in the summer, we're missing that few inches! Still, I know that too much rain is just as much of a problem as too little.

When do you think that first dry day will roll around? Sometime this year? Or maybe next year? LOL

It is just hot, hot, hot here. This morning when I went outside at 5 a.m., it was 79 degrees with a heat index of 85 degrees. When your day starts out THAT warm, you know it is only going to get worse and not better. It was so hot here that I spent the afternoon inside cleaning house and doing laundry (NOT my favorite choice of activity), but I'm going to go out and mow now that it is cooling off a little.

If you get tired of all that rain, send it to us!

Dawn

We could do with a lot less. Very soon we will be up to our total for 2007.

Or even 2008 eh Carol :-)

Yes, I was late for work this morning due to waiting for the storm to abate. I unhitched the hanging baskets and poured out the surplus "moisture" before leaving.

Approaching Grove the road was completely flooded near the visitors centre on Hwy 59.

Forecast is for a dry weekend but more rain Sunday evening/Monday.

Mick.

Carol,

It seems incomprehensible to me that y'all could have that much water again. Once was enough! Having it two years in a row is really rough.

Mick,

Oh, come on now, are you sure you didn't just oversleep? (wink, wink, nudge, nudge) LOL

How in the world are your tomatoes and potatoes surviving all the excess moisture on the foliage? If we had the constant moisture here, every potato and tomato plant I have would be covered in bacterial spot, bacterial speck, early blight, late blight, and anything else that results from excess moisture on leaves.

I hope y'all get to dry out before the next round hits. Also, hope you get to go outside and ENJOY June a little. Too much rain = too many mosquitoes, though, so I don't know how much fun you'll be having.

Dawn

Believe it or not, the only thing that looks really bad are the container cucumbers. I learned that I don't have them in a big enough container. First they dried too quickly, now they are getting lots of water but the leaves are yellow.

I had planted 6 cucumber plants in the ground, and then about 20 more came up around them. They were all looking really pretty yesterday but today they are standing in two inches of water, so we will see.

I took this picture a few days ago when you were talking about how to support tomato plants. I have plants on three horizontal cattle panels, in CRW cages, on stakes, in cheapo cages, and then these that are attached to a trellis made of 2 inch PVC pipe and growing up cords. The horizontal sides are seven feet long so that will give you an idea of the size.

If you look to the lower right, you will see my poor sickly cucumbers but they are covered with blooms, a lot of small cukes and one almost ready to eat.

Dawn - I know that you will say this is crowded even for you, hehe, but remember they are in containers. The angle makes it look even worse than it is because I was trying to get a pic of the trellising system, not the plants.

Here is a link that might be useful:

Carol,

It looks wonderful!!!

I don't think the cucumbers look that bad. Of course, they may look worse and worse if rain continues to fall. My cukes get yellow leaves occasionally but it doesn't seem to affect their productivity.

There's a fine line between "enough rain" and "too much rain" and I think your garden is dancing right along that line. Maybe you won't get any rain for a few days and the soil can dry up just a little.

Opposite problem here, so I watered yesterday and everything looks happier today.

Dawn

It is almost like producing the cucumber makes the vine wear out and it seems like the more it produces the quicker it goes. I usually plant cucumbers twice during the summer so they will continue until fall. I didn't plant any pickling type so I may do that. I have so many growing that I didn't plant, that I don't think we can eat them all. By the time I relized they were there, they were a healthy strong plant, so I just stuck a cage on them and let them grow where they wanted to since I don't have a real garden anyway this year. With food prices like they are now I hate to pull up anything that might produce food.

I visit this lady that has a wonderful small garden that a weed wouldn't dare grow in. Everything is in perfect rows and beautifully green. She brought in compost this year and had tons of volunteer plants come up. She gave many away and decided she had kept an adequate supply of the cucumbers and squash. Last time I went down there, she had the most beautiful squash plants. They were about two feet tall and starting to vine. She has no idea what kind of squash they are. I sure hope they are an OP type and she doesn't get something weird. However, with several of us trying to identify which of the plants were cucumbers (when they were seedlings) we all failed and they all are squash.

The cukes in the ground still look good so far and the standing water is gone, but the ground is still very wet of course. I can probably pick three cucumbers from my container plants tomorrow, so maybe the containers will last until the garden ones are producing, then I will probably need some others ready for the containers so I have some late ones.

My lettuce is now bitter and I will be getting rid of it soon, but I enjoy it in spring more than any other time. We lived in Greece for 2 years and 4 months, and I learned to enjoy salad like the Greeks eat it. It is usually cut up cucumbers, tomatoes, greek olives, crumbled feta cheese, and drizzled with olive oil. Sometimes in spring it would have sweet onion as well. They serve it family style and put a big loaf of bread and a knife on the table with it. No appetizers needed there, because you are truly occupied until the entre' comes.

we received some of your rain down here. Looks like we received 1 1/2 inch.

The rain system seems to have stayed along Hwy 69, spreading out too Ada.

I had plan on mowing today.. LOL

Carol, your stuff looks really good. I am having lots of trouble growing cucumbers. I bought seed from Swallowtail that they call "Home Made Pickles", and only three have come up. I also bought a package of Armenian Cucumbers and only a few of them came up as well. I haven't had trouble with any of the other seed I bought from Swallowtail, so the cucumber problems must be because I am "cucumber challenged". Or else I have a bird or two that likes cucumber seed, maybe? Your Greek salad sounds delicious. I made a bean salad the other day that was quite tasty: drained black turtle beans, a can of chopped tomatoes with cilantro, drained, chopped green onion and green pepper, a little garlic powder, a can of whole kernel corn, drained, and a little Italian dressing. It was good. Better, in fact, the next day. The chopped tomato with cilantro must've had some green chiles in it too, as the salad was a little spicy and that meant DH wouldn't eat it. Fine! More for me!

I just love pictures. Here's a couple from my garden today. In this one I'm standing in the "herb and flower garden".

That's one of my two apple trees to the right, with little apples still hanging in there. That's okra coming up in the patch running in front of the raised beds. My lettuce has started to get bitter too, I just hate to pull it up, it has gotten so big and beautiful. I've given a bunch away in past weeks and probably gave away my last batch. I don't mind a little bit of bitter, but I most people do. My arched bean trellises aren't showing up in this picture. Here's a better view of that:

The following picture is my "herb and flower garden", and as you can see, it's pretty bare because things keep drowning there. There are two raised beds behind the bottle tree. The one that looks full has wild bergamot, feverfew, poppies and a couple of currant bushes. The one to the far left has little blueberry bushes and parsley. There in front of the shed is a trellis DH built for me out of metal fence tubing and stock panels. I have morning glories coming up there. I planted dipper gourds, but they didn't come up and I gave up on them and planted a few rattlesnake beans. When the rattlesnake beans came up, so also did a gourd plant, one on each end of the trellis. Dipper gourds remind me of my grammy, who died when I was 15. I have not grown them for years. The back-drop in this picture is the "screen" my neighbors put up, right up against my chain link. They even dug into the concrete posts a couple of times. It's a shoddy job but it hides their place and that's a plus. Their back yard is full of junk, felled tree branches, dog cages and dog poo. They built the screen because I complained to animal control about the way they treat their dogs. Then they put a sign up on the corner saying "No Trespassing" -- and she hand-wrote below it "Uh,uh,uh, no peeking!" Yeah, like I want to....

Oh, and I got a better picture of Pearl. This is a very good likeness of her. She's such a sweet girl.

Ilene, everything looks so pretty and also nice and healthy. My place is a mess this year. We are lucky to keep up with the mowing with all of this rain. I have a cattle panel trellis like yours in back of my house and it has cukes on one side. I bought Zucchetta Rampicante Tromboncino seed to plant on the other side but didn't get it planted. I think if I can get it in soon, it might be OK since it is supposed to take 60 days. Of course with the weather this year, who knows. We may get an early freeze, but maybe a really late one.

Our little place has had to have so much work done that it just never seems to end. Maybe by the time I have lived here 10 or 12 years we will have it in order. Maybe I can enjoy it from my rocking chair in my old age.

I will have to try your salad (minus the cilantro) because the rest sounds really good.

I know what you mean! We bought this house seven years ago and having a new driveway poured was our last big project, which we did early this spring. But we have replaced all the windows, reinsulated, put on John Hardy siding, built a new carport, built a back porch, built a front porch, added on a small room, refinished the wood floors, tiled the kitchen & dining room, redid both bathrooms, put on a new roof, rebuilt the kitchen... and probably some other things I'm not remembering. We almost bought this old victorian house a little closer to the school before be bought this one. I loved it, but the floors were really sagging, so we were afraid to buy it. It was cheaper than this one and we probably would've spent less money, in the long run, if we'd just bought that house. I'm comfortable in this house and it feels like home now, the back yard's bigger and I love being on the back of the park. But I feel kinda wistful about the victorian house.

Ilean - I can skip the victorian because then I would think it had to look victorian inside and I don't think they feel or look comfortable inside, although they look homey outside.

You have done more than we have done, but there is always something going on and my yard has been torn up so many times.

Yes, I would think living on the park would be nice but that sure puts a little pressure on to keep the weeding done, doesn't it? I like living on the lake but it also has some drawbacks. It is never going to look like a downtown neighborhood because everyone has a fishing boat, sailboat, jetski, motorhome, or trailer (or all of the above) in their yard.

Right now we have far more dogs than I wish we had in the neighborhood, and people are always dropping off stray cats. Since we are not in a town, we have no animal control. Houses are fairly close together but that hasn't been too much of a problem except when the guy in back came in and decided to throw all his junk behind my storage shed and I couldn't get back there to weed eat. Maybe he thought it was his property, I don't know. I moved it back.

Our biggest problem in having no zoning and controls is that we have to maintain the streets as a neighborhood and they don't have ditches to carry the water away. With these heavy rains the water puddles in all of the low places and can't cross the road. This week my DH has been out there everyday with a hoe making little trenches so the water would flow. I told him it is a good thing he grew up on a rice farm and understood levees. I can look at it and it looks uphill but he can make it flow. Now that he has been at home through several large rains, maybe he will be able to convince the neighbors that we need to make some changes. All of them in my area realize this but the ones nearer the lake don't care because they don't have a problem. Their water just runs into the lake.

We have had a lot of rain this year, but when I compare gardening here, to gardening in southern Oklahoma, I will just deal with the rainfall. As I get older, I may have to settle for containers only, but that will be OK also. I am also content with my little house (or will be when we finish) because I am not trying to impress anyone and just don't need a really big one to care for anymore. Everytime we moved, we went to a smaller house as the kids were leaving home. Five bedrooms, then 4, then 3, then our little lake house with 2. That didn't quite work when they came to visit but now we have a place for them to stay and I don't have to clean it everyday.

Your neighbors are lucky to have a guy in their neighborhood who understands drainage!

I don't really feel much pressure about anything, anymore. I do love to have the place look nice, but I do it because I like to look at it. That other people enjoy it is nice but it doesn't motivate me. One year, we were really busy inside, tearing up floors. SUCH a job! The people who had our house before put down laminate flooring and they just cobbled up the job. They didn't even bother to clean the floor before they put the laminate on top. In some places, there was wood. In others, there was vinyl self-stick tile on top of old vinyl glued on ones. In some places there was glued on linoleum. Brown, with red, yellow green and blue spatters on it. There were holes actually worn through it in some places. It was a bear to remove. And every layer was dirty. But anyway, my iris bed was in the back, where my hollyhocks are now. And the Bermuda had taken over. As I was dragging a chunk of flooring out the back door, there at the gate stood this silver-haired little woman. She said to me, "This iris bed needs attention!" LOL Most of the time the passers-by enjoy what they can and let the rest slide. My neighbor's back yard is such a contrast, even when my yard is at it's worst, I'll never have to worry about having the ugliest back yard on the block! Right now I have Johnson grass AND Bermuda in my hollyhock bed. It's just that they don't show. I get out there every now and then and pull some out, but it's such a losing battle. Thank heaven the hollyhocks and sunflowers can hold their own against the grass!

This is the first year I've tried to grow a lot of different flowers, and I have failed dismally. Mostly because of the rain and the condition of the soil where I've been trying to grow them. As an example, there in my herb and flower garden, I planted several purple datura. One was planted in one of the little raised beds because a couple of the little TINY blueberry plants I bought at Atwood's didn't make it and I planted several things there to fill up the space. The others were planted here and there on the ground. The datura in the raised bed is about 18" tall and has huge leaves. The ones on the ground are only about 3" tall. They were sown at the same time and were all about the same size when they were transplanted. They get about the same amount of sun. This fall, I'm going to work on getting the soil in that area amended. I'm growing my peppers in containers this year because they seem to need so much more water than the tomatoes. So far they're doing well, but I have had a couple problems with the drainage holes getting stopped up in all this rain. I threw a handful of alfalfa pellets in each container during the last rain. In some areas, I just took Miracle Gro and scattered it lightly, dry, in puddles! Well I hate to add any more water, you know?

The only thing I can think of that would be better than living on the park would be living on the lake. However, some people think living on the park is a bad thing, that there might be dangerous people loitering in the park. We haven't experienced that. One of the neighbor kids found ladie's underwear in the gazebo once, and once in awhile DGS has had a girlfriend who has sat at the picnic table under the shelter that is across from our back yard and just stared at the house after she has called and been told he's not at home. That kind of creeped me out. Hope that wasn't HER underwear in the gazebo! LOL We do lock our doors at night, though, and we have a dog that sounds a lot more fierce than he is.

Ilene, Everything looks so lovely! I especially love the arches and the bottle tree, and Pearl is such a cutie pie! A bottle tree is on my "one of these days" list.

Now that the veggie garden is more under control, I hope to start spending a little more time on the back yard. My butterfly bed needs weeding desperately, and I need to thin the dogss "sunflower bed" which shades about 1/2 of their dog yard. I need to take out about every other plant (they are 8' tall and about 1' to 2' apart, but have hesitated to touch them since I feel like they hold each other up in the heavy wind. The plants are so thick that the dogs aren't spending as much time under them in the shade as usual.

Well, I don't live near a park OR near a lake. I live in the middle of a cow pasture on an old farm! Finally, though, in our tenth year here, the trees we planted are getting large enough that we have substantial shade in the front yard (kept two pasture trees there, one large native pecan and a post oak) and ever-increasing shade in the back. The problem is that we've been here ten years, so things that were "new" in 1999 are wearing out and breaking down.

This year, it has been the water heater and now it is the stove. I think we're going shopping for a new stove after lunch today. Last year it was the dishwasher.

I just hope the air conditioning unit lasts a few more years! Some friends of ours just up the road about 7/10s of a mile (no blocks out here, so I just use distance instead) recently (May, I think) had to replace their air conditioning unit, and their house is only 5 years old! Another family up the road about 2 miles bought an older home (maybe 20 years old or so?) and their A/C unit went out either in late May or early June too and had to be replaced. Our A/C unit "went out" during the wildfire summer of either '05 or '06, but it was repairable. I remember we came in from a huge, major wildfire....and we were completely exhausted....and the air inside the house was about 88 degrees in the middle of the night. Luckily, one of the local A/C guys is a retired professional firefighter, and he came to our house early the next day and had it fixed in a day or so.

It also is about time to paint the house and I think maybe we'll do it in the fall after the weather cools off. With a house, it is always something and time seems to evaporate around here.

The "To Do" list, of course, tends to come in second to fighting fires and working accident calls (and that is OK with me, community service is important too). And, speaking of fires, we've had a big spike in grass fires in pastures this week, and I am afraid that's a sign of what is soon to come. Often, our county's "winter wildfire season" ends with the spring rains in May, but May and June are both drier than usual and the harvest fire season is starting early. We ALWAYS have a few grassfires during the haycutting season in late July or August, but there have been some already. (sigh) We need rain, but then, we always need rain. So far, most of the grassfires have been west of us, closer to Leon or Burneyville or Jimtown, which have terrain more like Jefferson County and always seem to get dry earliest.

Today I thought the garden looked wonderful, but I did get behind on the weeding during the deer-are-eating-everything period, so I need to spend at least one day this week removing the weeds before they take over. Now that we are successfully (so far) keeping the deer out of the garden, I have been able to relax a little more and not worry that I'll walk outside and find more plants have been devoured.

Our rather large bunch of white-tailed rabbits are starting to diminish. I haven't heard or seen a lot of coyotes yet because they are still denned up with their young, so maybe it is the bobcats.

I have been enjoying having a lot of gladiolus plants blooming, but they are about to finish up. Coincidentally, the fall bulb catalogs are arriving which makes me want to order and plant some more bulbs for spring color.

Our biggest problem also is people who dump animals, and we have no animal control in the county. Someone abandoned a dog about 6 weeks ago and it is still living on the corner where they left it, waiting for them to come back and get it. It breaks your heart. A lot of people drop off food there for it, but we all worry that the dog is going to get hit by a car. Several folks have tried to catch it and are willing to take it in and give it a home, but it won't let anyone get near it. It runs off and hides. Also, a lot of people dump trash (including tires, old refrigerators, etc.,) in the bar ditches. If they dump it on your property, you have to clean it up....the county doesn't come and do it. It is disgusting.

Dawn

Our dog, Sonny, was abandoned like that. Someone from our local SPCA found him and his sister along the road. They named them Sonny and Cher. By the time we went looking for a dog for the grandsons, Cher had been adopted, and Sonny was in his cage looking so forlorn, it was enough. His face was full of sand-ticks and he came down with kennel cough soon after we adopted him. I called the SPCA to let them know he had kennel cough, because that would mean some of the other dogs might have it too, and they apparently thought I was trying to get them to pay for his treatment, because they told me I could bring him back and exchange him for a different dog. Well, how in the world could I do THAT? I knew they'd just euthanize him. So, after several hundred dollars worth of treatment, he did get better, and we've had him for seven years now. He growls at men but will go to a woman right away. He howls every time somebody comes in the door. But he's afraid of a lot of things. I took him walking with me for awhile and if we'd come upon a van, he wouldn't walk past it. We'd just have to turn around and go another way. The meter reader came through our gate and opened an umbrella at him early this spring and after that he was afraid of EVERYONE but us. Won't even go to the gate anymore to get his usual treat from one of the men who walks the park. That's really saying something because he just will do nearly anything for a treat. Once, right after we moved in, one of us left the gate open and Sonny came up in the front yard where we were working. When we paused long enough to put him back in the yard, he was nowhere to be seen, UNTIL we went into the yard. He had gone all the way around and was waiting at the gate in the back! Since then, if we leave the gate open, he will not go out of it unless we are there and tell him it's ok. He has become DH's shadow and is a terrible beggar whenever ANYONE has ANYTHING to eat.