Welcome back! All this rain; so not the norm! I am having hose withdrawal, my "hose hand" is shaking and frozen in a permanent hose holding position, lol! The 9-day forecast looks pretty damp.

Are you a veggie and/or flower gardener? I'm a butterfly/moth gardener, growing nectar and larval host plants to hand raise many species. I do grow a few veggies, e.g., tomatoes and peppers, and also a few herbs.

Glad to see you here!

Susan

That sounds wonderful! I love the wild, uninhibited garden. As a city gardener. I have to be a bit restrained so the neighbors will not complain. I had a lot of natives at my former home, but few here. I have a couple Asclepias incarnatas, partridge pea, Pseudognaphalium obtusifolium )Cudeed---American Lady host), Boehmeria cylindrica (Red Admiral host), Passiflora incarnata (Gulf Fritillaries host) (if it comes back up). The rest are annuals like lantana, pentas, zinnias, salvia coccineas, Centrantherum intermedium (Brazilian Button bush), and perennials like Buddleia x bicolor, Buzz Magenta, Salvia 'Black & Blue', green and bronze fennel, Rue, Echinacea 'Pow Wow Wild Berry', Monarda didyma, Caesalpinia gillesii, Lonicera x 'Gold flame', Anisacanthus quadrifidus var. wrightii (Flame Acanthus). I grow both white and lavender moonvines for the nocturnal sphinx moths.

I adore the birds! Lots of Carolina Chickadees, House Finch, Cardinals, 3 species of Dove, Wood Thrush, Jays. I am waiting for the hummers to be back in July. We have a chubby little squirrel who allows us to toss him sunflower seeds about 4' from where he sits in the grass! We are working to get closer eventually. I luv wildlife!

Susan

Well, why didn't we go tour the road ditch then Molly ? :)

Hi, Danny! It was good to see you Thursday.

Hi! Welcome back!

I am a flower gardener, and thanks to Susan, a butterfly gardener as well! I am currently raising pipevine swallowtails. I have also raised black swallowtails and gulf fritillaries. Susan, I picked up some false nettle today! If this flood doesn't kill it, hopefully I will finally have host food for red admirals. I live in OKC.

Hey gurl, the Bad-Ranger knows you and saw you guys on the News tonight sitting again in the line of fire with the latest onslaught of unwelcome disasters falling from the sky. So do you think we've had enough rain yet? I have a future date with my bucket and trimmers, gonna thin and trim like its WWII on over-grown plants coming up soon, if it ever dries out that is. Looks like I need to also make a trip to the gravel pit to fix some mess out there thats washed out because I gotta get this landscape back to a level of sanity. I'm telling you--you are so lucky to live on sand in this torrential rain mess. Bringing tons of sand here was one of the best things I ever did. Maybe come Labor Day we will finally see some clear weather.

By the way, I love ditches. In the city we have Hell Strips but you lucky guys in the sticks get to have ditches. Some of the best plants I see grow in ditches and I'd be in hog heaven with 5 acres and a ditch on a sandy outcropping. I'm jealous of everything except the ^%$#@!!Hackberry Trees.

You have good taste, everyone who likes native grasses has good taste. Its an undisputed fact of life.

Hey Barron. Did you luck out and git some wet stuff in Arkansas? I just stayed inside today and fixed some areas inside the house that have been ignored too long because I'm usually out in the garden, smells like paint and plaster in here. Every little (and huge) cloud does have a silver lining.

Oh yes...it rained here..but not enough to stop me from finishing mowing the backyard at least.

Ah, yes, the hackberry trees! I put that in my post to see if you'd say something about them. :) Funny. Anyway, I also have a ravine full of very broken old black willows, but they must stay because they block our view of the neighbor's house. So, it's not perfect by any means.

You inspired me to come home Thursday evening and work in the garden until dark. I weeded, thinned perillas and planted some new potted plants. Yay!

C'mon guys...give the poor hackberries their due! They are the larval host for Hackberry Emperor and Tawny Emperor, occasionally Question Mark butterflies. I hang a suet feeder with spoiled bananas or other fruit for these butterflies which don't nectar on flowers.

Susan

Oh, I really love my hackberries. I was just teasing. As we've worked at clearing brush and broken/dead trees, I've saved every hackberry I can. There is a magnificent specimen that must be very old, with maybe a 2' diameter trunk, and at least 75' tall.

I love their gray bark with the quirky knobs and their small leaves.

Molly

Welcome back, Molly. I thought I was the only fool who plants flowers in the bar ditches for the butterflies. It drives my husband crazy that he can't keep our bar ditch mowed down all nice and neat like his buddies do. (I remind him that they don't have all the butterflies, birds, dragonflies and other creatures that we have here.)

Susan, You'll never make me like hackberries, but I tolerate them for the sake of the wildlife. They sprout everywhere and are hugely invasive. However, even though I pull up every one that sprouts in the yard or garden, I leave them in our 10+ acres of woodland, including a lot of them on the edge of the woods right by my garden. I try to leave as many native plants in place as possible, including leaving poison ivy alone, except for removing it from my garden fence line and from the pathways we've cut through the woods. It drives me crazy when people bulldoze the native woodland (even though it also may have invasive non-natives that they could selectively remove) and leave just a couple of trees, put in a lawn, and then complain because all the wildlife, including birds, bees and butterflies, has disappeared. I'd disappear, too, if all my food sources were removed and replaced with bermuda grass.

The hummingbird population is huge this year, much larger than usual, and in general the bird population seems really large. I so enjoy having them all here. Instead of our usual Phoebe in a nest on the back porch, we have four Phoebes nesting in 4 different places. For us, that's a lot of Phoebes at one time.

Dawn

There's weeds and then there's weeds. When a bunch of trees volunteer in a bad spot, such as hackberry's love to do by the 100's what you end up with is 30 ft tall weeds. Very expensive, destructive, unsightly and unwanted. It always slays me that its illegal to have weeds higher than a certain height but that people can allow trees and underbrush to grow with abandon along their property lines just as long as they get the lawnmower out once every two or three weeks and mow the middle. These weeds are not anywhere near the problem trees can quickly become. Who decides these things anyway?

Hackberry trees are considered weed trees anywhere north of Dallas. I've seen Hackberry trees that are pretty in the park and in other spots where a tree belongs but I also see them without exception in every slum area of the city along each property line and coming up next to structures. I've decided the first stage of creating a slum is to allow weed trees to proliferate and hackberry's are one of the worst, its right up there with Tree of Heaven.

I have noticed a large number of hummers and other birds this year also. We will need them to eat mosquitoes. Don't have any hackberries so I will leave that discussion to ya'll. the local birds are sitting under the porches trying to stay dry. I saw a geese family today, mom, dad and 5 babies. I thought they only had a couple of chicks guess not. They were just going from one large puddle to another. Hope the rain clears out for a few days, everybody needs a break.

I recently bought a farm with rich fertile soil. I also bought an orange tree that I would like to plant in my orchard. I know this is uncommon but want advice to help it to survive and flourish in Southwestern Oklahoma. Can anyone help with this?

Err, short of building it a greenhouse around it...isn't going to happen in the ground.

Carol, there are a lot of lovely trees you could plant there. However, all parts of Oklahoma get ice and below freezing temperature. This map might show you how many below freezing days you might expect in your neighborhood:

Mesonet: Number of days with less than 32 degrees

The mesonet is an amazing resource. I think we are all using it regularly at the moment for tracking rainfall, but it has a lot of other data as well.

Everyone...did the Mesonet just change names, or have I been clueless for a while? "Oklahoma Climatological Survey" Oh...nevermind...too much rain lately. My brain is watersoaked. The websites are linked.