Hey Larry, I never got around to planting any sweet potatoes. So your ahead of me in the potato game.

My garden is full of weeds and grass. We got around 2 1/2" of rain yesterday so it's too wet to do any garden clean up.

I did get to sort some cattle in a very muddy corral yesterday and this morning. But that is a long story on why that came about. Lets just say one of my cattle panel gates came un secured and let my cows and bull in with a young heifer that was in heat. Not what I wanted to see during yesterdays down pour.

Larry, You're ahead of me on sweet potatoes too because I never got any planted since we stayed flooded from May through early July. I do agree that planting sweet potato plants that are rootbound will give you terribly deformed tubers, but that doesn't mean they aren't edible (unless they're all twisty and get rot in all the nooks and crannies).

At least you've been keeping the deer well-fed, like it or not.

My garden is a lot like Robert's, full of weeds and grass. We've been back in drought practically ever since the flooded ended and I watered as much as I could until I just gave up in early September and stopped watering, so the garden still is producing a few things but it has as much weeds and grass as it does garden plants and it is just a mess. It has gotten snakey within the garden so I probably won't try to do garden clean-up until the nights are a lot colder. I'm not seeing snakes in the yard so much lately, but have heard them in the garden (one was eating a frog that was screaming its head off, which is a horrible sound), and found a snakeskin last week while doing garden cleanup, and it looked freshly-shed. That was all I needed to spur me to abandon the garden and go back indoors.

Robert, Ooops. I suppose the bull must have been having fun anyhow. Or, at least, he was seriously doing his job, (like it or not, from your point of view).

We ended up getting about 0.65" of rain yesterday, not nearly enough to put a dent in the flash drought, but enough to make a few puddles and to green everything up a bit (I hope). I also think we'll likely have a grassfire-free week thanks to the rain. Or, at least, I hope we do. We got about the same amount of rain about two weeks ago and got temporarily greener fields and a few more wildflowers blooming, even though small, but the rain didn't do anything to make the big old cracks in the clay close up significantly (if any).

We still have hummingbirds around, but I think this week's cooler nights likely will send them south, though the days still will be warm enough to keep them happy.

I'm ready for autumn and hope it is coming soon. I know it is about to arrive by the calendar, but it still feels too summery here. This morning's cooler weather was the first time it felt to me like autumn really is on the way and I hope that's a good sign.

Dawn