Congratulations on your new baby! I hope she delivers early and plenteous! I am glad you are still able to restrain yourself. They make it hard on us.

LOL. I laughed from the beginning, because I KNEW you were gonna get that plant. I thought you'd get both of them, but you showed discipline! ;)

Why break with Tradition, Dawn? LOL. I think you got a good deal, too, because the one DH bought like that a couple of years ago was closer to $20.

We pulled up to Lowes today and the garden center was bare. Not a plant to be seen. I looked at DH and said I don't understand, I'M ready for gardening season, what is wrong with these people. So I bought 2 packs of peas and a pack of Moss Rose seeds, drooled over the orchids and house plants and sat in a patio display until DH came back.

Came home and Speckles was outside the property fence and she couldn't figure out how to get back in. Sigh.

Kim, It was the hardest thing in the world not to buy them both. And, who am I kidding? Despite my effort to talk myself out of buying that plant, I knew from the moment I saw those tomato plants sitting there, all alone on that shelf, that at least one of them was coming home with me.

Mary, Of course you know. You all knew. I knew. But, I had fun dragging the story out for a while.

Amy, Speckles should be renamed Houdini or Ms. Houdini. I did think it was a good deal. I've seen them for about $16.99 to $19.99 before in that same size pot with the black cage. They usually hit the stores down here around the end of the planting season. I think they are aimed at people who haven't gotten around to planting yet and who will spend the extra money to get a bigger plant in order to make up for planting late.

The stores here still do not have nearly as much gardening stuff on the shelves as usual. They still seem especially clogged with Christmas clearance stuff on the shelves where gardening items ought to be appearing. TSC is especially behind. Atwoods has fresh, green bundles of onions inside the store in huge black tubs and they had Red Southern Belle, TX1015Y and some other one that I think the sign said was White Spanish. I'm not sure if it was correctly labeled because that one is a long day-length type. Walmart had some cool-season veggies (brussels sprouts, cauliflower, kale, lettuce, onions and maybe something else) and those two tomato plants. We didn't go to Home Depot in Gainesville or Sherman but we might need to go there tomorrow to get some wood for a craft project. If we do, we'll be across the road from Walmart and I might have to sneak a peak at their Garden Center to see if they have the same plants that the Sherman store had.

Amy, I'm sorry to hear that you couldn't find anything here. I haven't been to Ardmore lately because those stores, roughly 25 miles north of me, are usually much later to get gardening stuff in than the stores in Texas roughly 25 miles south (or, in Sherman's case, 60 miles east/slightly southeast of me). It drives me batty to look for something in Ardmore that I know is already in stores in Gainesville and Sherman, so most of my early season garden shopping happens in Texas.

I sowed some cool-season seeds in flats on either Wed. or Thurs. afternoon---little things like mustard, kale and lettuce. Those seeds are already sprouting. It is nice to see the tiny greenish-white sprouts poke their heads up out of the soil-less mix in the flats.

Dawn

I think everyone up here is slower to get their garden things out this spring. As Amy already said, Lowe's is bare. Even what little pine bark mulch they had, had mold in it. Still no Burpee seeds, no inoculant (and it doesn't appear they are going to get any this year). I noticed WalMart is getting stuff put in their outdoor garden section, but I didn't stop. Stillwater Milling is a little behind schedule. They don't have their seeds out, except for a few small commercial packs on one little rack. They aren't as eager as we are, obviously.

Lowe's is bare here too. Home Depot is slowly adding things. Their seed racks are fully loaded and ready, and they had Burpee pea inoculant.

I guess it is just as well I haven't stopped in to visit a Lowe's lately.

Amy, March might be right for you. It is mid-February for me and I'm a lot further south. Onion plants can freeze around 20 degrees, so I think the general rule of thumb is just to wait until it is likely that your area is through with nights lower than 24-25 degrees. I think onions get freeze damage around 20-22 degrees.

If you order from Dixondale and let them pick the shipping date, they choose the best date for you based on your zip code. For me, they usually ship the onions so they are timed to arrive around February 12th.

The OSU Garden Planning Guide shows Feb. 15th - Mar. 10th for planting onions with the Feb. 15 being for far SE OK and the Mar. 10th being for far NW OK, and the rest of us are supposed to pick dates in the middle of those two somewhere, relative to our location in the state.

Onions are hardy so, yes, they can be planted before the last frost, but there's still a limit to how much cold they can endure. Like many other cool-season plants, if well-insulated by snow, they may be able to survive temperatures a bit lower than the low 20s, but there's no guarantee.

I normally plant potatoes around mid-February and may or may not follow shortly thereafter with onions. It just depends on the weather and whatever feels right in any give year.

In the mid-2000s when we were plagued by horribly warm winters, both Trooper168 or Trooper186 (I can't remember his proper GW name now for sure) and I planted onions the first week in January once or twice and got away with it. We were pushing the limits but it was a hot winter so why not? As I recall, he lived in either Bryan or Marshall County, so he probably had roughly the same planting dates as I did.

Sometimes you can plant early and get away with it. Sometimes you can't. Here's one of my criteria for planting early: if I were going to plant onions early, I'd plant cheap, locally-purchased onions that cost $2 or $3 a bundle early and risk losing them. I wouldn't plant the more expensive Dixondale Farms onions that I order online too early and risk losing them.

Honestly, now that it is mid-January and I have floating row cover that gives 10 degrees of protection, I probably could plant onions any day now and get away with it. Even if we dropped to 12-13 degrees, which seems unlikely, a single layer of the row cover, combined with mulch, should keep the onions safe. A double layer would be even better. I normally don't do it though. As long as the soil is cool, they won't grow much, and there are plenty of little critters that will eat them. It is important with anything planted early to remember that the insects, birds and small animals are hungry for anything green at this time of the year so early plantings can be vulnerable to hungry creatures. Since just a week at low temperatures can cause the onions, (if they are as large as or larger than the diameter of a No. 2 pencil), to bolt later on, there's more risk involved in planting early than you think because even if they survive the cold, they might bolt a month or two down the road.

Whoa, onions in January? Actually my dear father in law from Collinsvile Tx always planted his onions around 1-20. And potatoes good Friday. He was very consistent on his planting dates. According to Dixondale mine are shipping week of 2-6.

Dawn I did love how you tried to drag that story out. If you hadnt bought it we ALL would have been trying to contact Tim to see if you were ok. I mean we depend on you to try new things for us, the benefit of all of us. And you probably saved that plant from sure death if they would have had another frost or freeze.

Dawn, now I'm worried about the tomato plant that was left behind. It's alone...and what if some newbie buys it and plants it this week thinking that because it's in a store, it's time to plant it.

Did you see the pretty spring stuff at Hobby Lobby? There's a couple of things I want to go back and buy. For one, that bright dish drying mat with herbs all of it. SO cute. I hope it's still there when I go back.

There's not much going on at the garden centers around here. They're emptying them out and preparing though.

Kim, Sometimes when we still lived in Fort Worth, and even the first few years after we moved up here, I'd see onions at places like Marshall Grain Company as early as the end of December or early January. You could plant in January down in Fort Worth most years, though with the way the climate is changing, I'm not sure when Fort Worthians plant them now. My dad always planted onions in January and potatoes on Washington's Birthday.

If I hadn't carried that tomato plant into the store and had instead just told Tim they had big tomato plants out in the garden center, he would have gone out there and gotten the plant himself. He really doesn't concern himself with the garden too much---his attitude (and it is such a sweet one) is that I should have whatever I want/need for the garden---but he does love those first early tomatoes and the BLTs we make with them. After a long winter without a fresh, home-grown tomato, we gorge ourselves on BLTs for the first month or two. I mean, there's a point where he's asking if I have bought bacon and have it in the fridge ready and waiting for the first tomato to ripen. As if I might forget to buy bacon and have it waiting for the first ripe tomato.

My only regret might be that I didn't buy both plants. Isn't that horrible? I was thinking I would be so kind and leave one for the next person so that is what I did, but now I'm sitting here thinking it would have been smart to buy two in case one gets snapped in half by the wind (I'll stake it to prevent that) or a deer eats it or whatever.

We are going to work on the kitchen tomorrow (if Tim doesn't get called in to work because he's on call this weekend) and we have to go to Home Depot to buy a few minor supplies. We won't finish the kitchen tomorrow, but we'll be a step closer. The Gainesville Wal-mart is right across the road from HD. I bet I can come up with something that we forgot to buy today so I have an excuse for us to pop in to Walmart for a second. Once I'm there, who could blame me if I ramble through the garden center just to see what they have? They might have something of interest.

This morning as we were driving through Gainesville on our way to Sherman, we stopped at TSC to get chicken scratch and, as we were waiting to pull out of the TSC parking lot, we saw the Bonnie Plants' truck pull out of the Wal-Mart parking lot and then turn into the TSC parking lot. That tells me that both Wal-Mart and TSC must have received some sort of planting stock from BP today. We even discussed it, and figured both stores might finally be getting their onions and their BP cool-season veggies.

In general, neither of us is crazy about shopping. We make a list of what we need and try to pack all our weekend stops into one trip and get everything at once. This works especially well if we remember to grab the shopping list we've made and take it with us instead of leaving it on the table or the kitchen counter. However, during that special period when new plants and garden supplies are arriving in stores, all bets are off as I can easily find reasons to stop in at one store or another on any other day to get this or that. I don't know why all the stores here are so slow this year but it is driving me crazy. It isn't that I need to buy much or want to buy much. It is just that I love seeing what they have. Atwood's had fruit trees in their greenhouse today and I didn't have to look at them. It was enough just knowing they had them, if that makes any sense.

We're expecting a lot of wind tomorrow and fire danger will be almost critically high in some places. We're in trouble if we have wildfires because the ground remains so wet that it is likely the brush trucks and tankers would get stuck in the mud. I hope it is a quiet day like today was (we only had one call) so that we can work on the kitchen. It seems like every time we plan to spend a day or even a couple of hours on the kitchen, we have fires all day long. It will be too windy to put the new tomato plant outside, so I'll probably open only one greenhouse door and put it in there. I don't want to open both doors and create a wind tunnel effect.

Dawn I realize how small this world is when you talk about shopping the same stores I shopped for 8 plus years. The old Walmart which is now where HD sits was where I used to do most of my shopping and before they had the superwalmarts everywhere. The lady in the front would see us coming and pull out a hot dog, no bun, for my son and cut in half length wise and have it cooled off by time we got over there. Loved shopping in that little Walmart. Gainesville has changed so much in 23 years. And Sherman, we spent alot of time there as well. On 82 just south a little in Whitesboro is where my son went to daycare. I spent alot of time and money running those roads back before I knew better.

Where's the "love" button, lol? I was rooting for you to tuck one under each arm! Daryl is taking me to Shawnee tomorrow and I fully expect to check out Atwoods and Wal-Mart's garden centers.

**giggles**

Hazel, I did look at all the pretty Spring stuff in Hobby Lobby, though I did it pretty quickly. It gave me a worse case of Spring Fever than I already had.

Kim, I remember that old Wal-Mart. When we moved here from Ft. Worth, we gave up shopping at a huge, gigantic really new Wal-Mart Super Center in Lake Worth to shop at a dinky little old Wal-Mart in Gainesville that was the smallest, most crowded and most poorly organized Wal-Mart I'd ever stepped foot in. I hated that store because I never could find anything in it. It probably would have been fine had I never gotten used to shopping in the bigger supercenters.

Even when they built the new Wal-Mart and HD moved into the old W-M building, it still seemed poorly laid out and poorly organized. It still is. Much of it seems backward compared to other HDs. It has the most bizarre and pathetic check-out lines I've ever seen and I guess they're never going to fix them. I hate shopping there, but since it is the one closest to us, we shop there pretty regularly. However, if we're going to Denton or Sherman for something else, I try to stop at HD while we are there because both those stores are so much better and have a huge selection compared to the one in Gainesville.

Really, for the first 5 or 6 years we lived here, we went back to Fort Worth, or at least to Denton, almost every weekend and did our shopping while down there. It was really had to give up the convenience of shopping at all the old familiar places where you know where everything is and you know the people who work in the stores and they know you. Of course, the I-35 corridor from Fort Worth to Gainesville has grown tremendously since then and you can shop anywhere you wish without having to go all the way to Fort Worth any more.

I remember when Sherman got their Lowe's store and then, eventually, a Home Depot. Then, that whole new shopping area sprang up in between the two along both sides of Hwy 75 and now you can find almost anything you need in Sherman. I love going there. Of course, the new shopping area has just about killed the mall, but that's happening all over American and not just in Sherman. Ardmore has a Lowe's now, and I'd rather go to it than to the Home Depot in Gainesville, but since it is further north, it tends to get plants and garden supplies a month later than Gainesville. Thus, I probably won't step foot in the Ardmore Lowe's until March.

Highway 82 continues to scare me to this day, especially between Gainesville and Sherman. Everyone speeds so much and there are so many fatality accidents---not every single day, but some times it seems like it is an every day thing any more. Chris drove to Sherman on an icy day to visit his girlfriend and a little while after he left our house, there was a fatality accident on Hwy 82 at an intersection with a flashing yellow light. I texted him to tell him about it and he already had come through that area, but he said the ice was bad and when he tried to brake at the intersection, his brakes locked up and he slid about 300'. So, he wasn't surprised at all to hear about the accident.

My family goes back a long, long ways in Gainesville. My mom lived there on California Rd. during part of her childhood in, I guess, the 1940s or even possibly in the late 1930s, though they had moved to Slidell by the time she was in high school. My grandmother and grandfather both had relatives from their generation still living in Gainesville through part of the 1990s, although the last one, who was my grandfather's sister-in-law, died around 1994 or 1995. I remember driving my mom and dad up to Gainesville for the funeral. At that time, I never dreamed we'd end up moving up here, but Tim and I both did love small country towns and rural living so maybe it was a dream we just hadn't vocally expressed yet. I have very, very faint memories of attending family reunions at a big white farmhouse in Whitesboro in the 1960s. I only remember bits and pieces, including (this is such a cliche') tables made with planks placed across sawhorses and hand-made quilts used as tablecloths. Some of the tables were covered in red and white checked oilcloth. There were tons of people and lots of pickup trucks. Being a child, it felt like we drove for 20 hours to get from Fort Worth to Whitesboro! I laugh about that now.

Carol, Believe me, I wanted to bring home both plants. It was a huge internal struggle between my bad self wanting to be selfish and bring them both home and my good self wanting to leave one for the next unsuspecting tomato maniac to discover and to joyfully purchase and carry home. My good self won. Now, if I happen to stray across the road from Home Depot to the Gainesville Wal-Mart today after we buy the building supplies we need, and if I happen to come out of that Wal-Mart carrying a tomato plant (or anything else, lol), y'all won't be surprised, right? Tomato fever is running rampant now that I have one plant with blooms on it. Once Tomato Fever strikes, it does not easily abate and it might even be contagious.

Dawn

Well atwoods is right there. You might look there too.

You know my youngest went to school in Slidell and we lives in greenwood. That it where i actually first attempted growing from seed. No fan no lights, longest leggiest plants and no hardening off. It was sad.

The Shawnee Lowes and Walmart, both have huge Early Girl plants. They looked fantastic, but I figured they wouldn't stay looking that way for long! The wind was absolutely beating the snot out of them. Since I wasn't prepared to do a plant rescue, I chose to walk away, rather than witness the abuse!

I was at Atwoods yesterday. They only had fruit trees in the greenhouse, and onions, peppers, garlic and seeds inside the store. They also had sold all the checks they've had in stock since December. Who the heck buys baby chicks in Dec/Jan with the weather we have? I hope whoever bought those chicks kept them under heat lamps (or underneath a broody mama hen) on those bitterly cold nights.

Home Depot has everything----every single cool-season veggie and herb you can imagine planting between now and March, and plenty of tomatoes in all sizes. The really big ones like the ones I found yesterday didn't even have a price on them and I didn't ask. One big tomato plant to carry out into the sunshine right now probably is plenty. The smaller plants weren't nearly as big as the ones I have indoors on the light shelf that now are 7 weeks old, and they mostly only had Early Girl and Better Boy. I am sure the wind is beating the living daylights out of those plants in the garden center at HD. They had shadecloth on the sides of the garden center to block some of the wind, but it still was awfully windy this morning. I wouldn't have my own plants out in this wind today....and not on Tuesday either.

The Wal-Mart across the road from HD had some cool-season plants but in much smaller quantities---cauliflower, broccoli, brussels sprouts, several kinds of kale, several kinds of lettuce, and parsley. They had maybe 1/6th as many plants as HD. All that both of them had was Bonnie Plants. No tomato plants. Both stores had onions, but the onions at Atwoods were in much better shape because they were indoors. It was sunny when I was at HD and cloudy by the time I made it to WM and the WM garden center felt amazingly cold. Luckily, plants aren't susceptible to wind chill like we are.

The wind is bad today. For many parts of OK it will be a lot worse on Tuesday when the relative humidity also will be really low. If I were in central OK on Tuesday, I don't know what would worry me more--the fact that wildfire might burn up my garden and/or greenhouse and all my plants or that all the plants will suffer from windburn.

While we gardeners are itching to get started and ready to plant, the wind and cold combined can be brutal. All my plants are going to enjoy being babied indoors for a good long while yet while the nights get too cold and the weather stays too windy. March winds are bad enough to deal with. I don't want for the plants to have too much wind exposure in February and March as well.

About the chicks at Atwoods. I saw chicks at the Norman Atwoods on Thursday which really stressed me out, but also made me long for new chickies.

I asked an Atwoods employee about having chicks in the winter and he said Atwoods had decided to offer chicks year 'round.. BUT they have rethought that decision and will not have chickens year 'round any longer--after this group.

They were SO cute! Looked like Peggy when she was a baby.

Hazel, I am surprised how early tomato plants are hitting the stores there in OKC and Norman. People on FB saw them all over the place up there this weekend. I understand it in Dallas, and maybe even in far northern Texas in places like Gainesville and Sherman since those areas are zone 8 or some of the more northern ones are on the dividing line between 8a and 7b, but it is surprising to me to see the plants further north than Texas. I used to have to drive to the DFW metro to get early plants and was lucky if they had them by mid-February. Then they starting having the first ones in by earliest February. This year they have them all the way up here in mid-January, well a little past mid- but not much.

It certainly is far too cold for those plants to stay outdoors, so I hope the folks who are buying them know that and will be sure they are either in a heated greenhouse or are brought indoors at night. It is one thing for a knowledgeable, experienced gardener to buy something like a tomato plant early with a plan in place to protect the plant until the weather stabilizes. It is another thing for an excited rookie gardener to buy the same type of plant and take it home, not knowing that it will freeze if they leave it outdoors. Maybe these tomato plants should come with warning stickers alerting brand new gardeners to the fact that the plants will freeze if and when temperatures dip down to freezing. We all know that the freezing nights aren't done yet. Heck, our forecast here was for an overnight low of 35 degrees and our mesonet station shows it dropped down to 27 degrees, so it isn't even like we can trust the forecast either. My plant is safely warm in the spare room with the plant shelf. I'd be beyond irritated with myself if I were to leave it outdoors by mistake and let it freeze.

I'm glad Atwoods has rethought the year-round chick selling. I bet it didn't take long----just as soon as some newbies bought chicks at the wrong time of the year, took them home and lost them to freezing weather...and came back to the store to complain. I can imagine that happened a lot and the folks at the store quickly realized they were creating an issue. The one thing you quickly learn when ordering chicks from an online/catalog retailer is that you have to get them (except from MyPetChicken) in lots of no less than 25 to keep them warm enough so they don't die in transit. And those sellers make sure you understand the temperatures that new chicks need for a prolonged period of time. When anyone can walk into a store and buy chicks without having that info available to them and they can do so during brutally cold weather, I fear for the lives of the chicks.

Seeing new chicks always makes me have new chick fever too, but we have plenty of chickens and don't need more so I think I can resist buying any this year. I saw a dead coyote beside the road near us yesterday, obviously struck by a vehicle, and I wondered if that's the one that has been lurking in our woodland for months and occasionally getting a chicken when it wanders off from the flock. We haven't lost a chicken in a good long while now, so it may be that "our" coyote vanished months ago, but the thing about wildlife is that nature abhors a vacuum and new predators promptly move in to fill vacancies in the food chain.

New chicks are the cutest and so are baby turkeys, ducks and guineas, but just like tiny puppies and kittens, they grow up, and you only need so many of them.

Dawn

Those little baby chicks are SO CUTE. Can you house-train a chick? Just askin' for a friend;)

Sorry, Mary, you can't house train a chick. I hold my hens often and sometimes get pooped on. I always wear old, yucky clothes when I play with the animals.

I left pots of minty things on the shop porch because we weren't supposed to go below 33 last night. Dumb. Why did I trust that? Our shop is insulated so it protects them pretty well..it would have been easy enough just to scoot them in.

There was no one looking at plants last night (at Lowes) other than me, who practically ran through the parking lot to get to the plant stands. The first picture above, those plants are all outdoors. Could be goners this morning.

Thanks for mentioning My Pet Chicken! I do not want 25 baby chicks, but would like to try ordering them if Atwoods does not carry the types of chicks I want. My zip code is a minimum of 6 chicks to order....I just checked. (except in the cold months) Even the hatchery in Oklahoma won't let you purchase less than 20, I think, even if you drive to pick them up.

Mary, I've never heard of a house-trained chicken and doubt it is possible. I also wouldn't have one indoors as a pet because of certain diseases they might carry.

Hazel, Did your minty things survive?

I never trust our forecast. Just in the last week, our wind gusts have gone a good 10 or more mph higher than our forecast wind gusts and I wasn't happy. It didn't hurt anything, but if I had had tomato plants out hardening off and then I left for a fire and the young tender plants had to deal with wind gusts of 42 mph rather than the forecast 32 mph, I would have been mad (and the plants likely would have been beaten to death by the wind). I do try to put up the plants that are hardening off when we get paged out because very bad wildfire days probably are bad plant days too due to the wind, but sometimes it isn't possible for me to linger at home long enough to do that. I'm going to carry out all my home-grown tomato seedlings this afternoon for their first hour in the sun, and I'll probably stay out there with them to make sure the chickens don't bother the plants. You cannot trust the chickens around any green plants in January. At this time of the year (and at least through early May), I always assume our forecast low may drop as much as 10 degrees lower than forecast (once, in early May, it dropped 18 degrees lower and my garden mostly died). I look at the forecast temperatures as a more-or-less thing, so 35 degrees could mean 45 or it could mean 25. Usually, I can tell by how fast temperatures fall between sunset and bedtime if any outdoor plants may be in trouble.

I'm not sure what My Pet Chickens does to ensure the chicks survive when shipped in small quantities, but they seem to have many satisfied customers. When we order chickens of any kind, even in batches of 25, we don't order for a delivery date any earlier than March, just to be extra safe. Our weather is so wildly changeable that I am not sure when we ever can feel safe from cold temperatures, well at least not until we are burning up.

Dawn

Minty things got a little beat up, but they'll probably survive.

My Pet Chicken won't ship only 6 chicks (in my zip code) until March 27. Until then, the minimum is 15. We probably won't be ready for chicks until March 27 anyway.

It's nice out today. Someone is going to pluck up those tomato plants on a whim and ignorantly (not because they're dumb people, just unaware. I would have been the same way at one time) leave them outside. Maybe not, though. Maybe enough people around here have greenhouses.

You're probably right. The lack of awareness is stunning. I'll see people at Wal-Mart buying Bonnie Plants' sugar snap pea transplants, for example, at the end of May. By the end of May, mine are nearing their productive life if it hasn't ended already, and with the heat setting in by then, transplants put into the ground at the end of May are not likely to produce a thing. Or I'll see someone buying three corn seedlings, and I wonder if they understand it takes a lot of plants to produce corn. I'll wonder if they think corn produces a lot of ears per plant like an apple tree?

A friend of ours planted one corn plant once. Just one. I just stood and stared at it for a minute, rendered virtually speechless. Another friend planted 3 tomato plants, but then a whole row of zucchini and a whole row of summer squash. He was really lucky that year and the SVBs didn't find his first year garden, so his garden produced enough squash for the whole county. When you produce that much squash and zucchini, people turn and run when they see you coming because they fear you're about to dump still more squash upon them.

I just bite my tongue and don't stick my nose into other people's gardening business, especially when I see random folks buying plants out of season, but I wish folks would research the timing of different veggie plantings instead of randomly and impulsively buying whatever they see whenever they happen to see it. I'll give the employees at the big box stores credit. When I buy an early tomato plant, I get asked every time "you're not going to put that in the ground now, are you?" and I reassure them that I am not and that it will be waiting either in the house or the greenhouse until the cold nights are gone.

Those greenhouses had better be heated, though, or warm-season plants still won't survive these cold nights! I try really hard not to assume that the nights are going to be warm in January (or February) just because the daytime highs are above average. We often have beautiful sunny warm winter days followed by freezing nights.

Dawn, a couple of years ago my daughter and her husband decided to grow a small garden. He tilled it all nicely, and fertilized it, and they grew their own tomato seedlings, etc. I was out there admiring their little garden with my daughter, and I saw this one little plant, different from all the others, and it was all growing and looping around itself. I said, "what is that"? She said, "oh, that's beans". I nearly fell over laughing. Not only had she planted one bean plant, it was a pole bean with no pole.

Mary, That's funny. At least it was a pole bean plant and not a bush bean.

I have a hard time keeping my mouth shut when I see things like that and how much, or how little, I might say depends on how well I know the person and on how well I expect or know that they do or don't respond to information they don't want to hear.

One of the times I find it hardest to keep my big mouth shut is when someone proudly shows me something they identify as basil or borage or catnip or whatever, and we're standing there staring at pigweed or lambsquarters or whatever. My most gentle response usually is something like "Why do you think that is basil?" which alerts them to the fact that I don't think it is basil. (grin) Invariably the reason is because that is the type of seed they sowed in that area, which I do not doubt at all. However, the plant they've lovingly tended isn't what they think it is and I do break that news to them gently. Sometimes people have a hard time accepting that the plant they're growing is not at all what that thought it was. I'm just relieved when we can ID a plant like that and get it out of their garden before it makes 1,000,001 seeds.

Dawn

Ha! I shouldn't laugh too hard, because I have been known to do some pretty stupid things myself! :)

We all have done stuff like this, but we learn, don't we?

What I do hate is when someone who is brand new to gardening stands in my garden and starts to tell me the things I'm doing wrong. I brush it off pretty easily by telling them that there are many ways to garden, my methods have evolved over an entire lifetime spent gardening and my ways work for me.

I know that if they garden long enough, they'll learn why wide rows of veggies, well mulched, with more narrow mulched pathways between them are better/more effective/more productive than narrow single rows of veggies with 3 or 4' of bare, exposed soil sitting there in between each row, drying out and blowing away.

Another pet peeve that doesn't amuse me? New gardeners who stand in my garden and try to persuade me that every tomato grown must be a round, red hybrid and that they think my black, pink, orange, yellow and purple tomatoes are a waste of space. Clearly they've never tasted the remarkable flavors and textures of all the different kinds of tomatoes available. They've been brainwashed by the commercial agricultural industry into believing we all should be growing the same crappy tomatoes sold in grocery stores. Happily, once I convince a newbie to taste test the oddly-colored tomatoes I grow, they tend to change their minds. I love seeing someone take their first bite of a SunGold, Brandywine, Black Krim or Cherokee Purple tomato. Just from the expression on their face, you know you've made a convert!

I have lots of customers like that. I got quite a few people hooked on krim and Cherokee purple. This year I am going to samples which is an annoying process. But I believe it will open the door for more customers and sales

I bet you're right. Usually a couple of bites and they are hooked.

The first time I gave our friend, Jesse, a black tomato he sliced into it, ate it, and loved it. So, when his kids, grandkids and great-grandkids were visiting, he tried to get them to try the black tomatoes. They treated him like he was out of his mind and trying to feed them rotten, spoiled tomatoes, to which his reply was "OK then, that just leaves more for me." When he told me that, it just cracked me up. I also got a negative reaction from Fred when I shared black tomatoes with Jesse. He told me something like "No, don't give them to anyone else but me. Those black ones are our secret." I had to reassure him that I grew enough purple and black tomatoes to share with both him and Jesse.

If people can get past the fact that the skin and flesh are a different color, they tend to love heirloom tomatoes---but we do have to train people to accept tomatoes of different colors. It is sort of ironic---the first tomatoes in the USA were yellow and cherry-sized, so it is odd that the commercial agriculture industry somehow decreed must be red and followed that path in breeding the tomatoes. I'm grateful that other colors survived.

I still have similar issues with people who think all watermelons must have that pinkish-red flesh. No, they don't. (grin)

Okiedawn,

I was at Seminole Wal-Mart today and went looking at their Garden Department where they had several box's of onion plants that didn't look so good, brown. I also saw 22 tomato plants with 4 about the size you describe maybe about 12" tall and the others were about half that size, a couple of flats of Bell Peppers and other plants all had been frozen and were very bad shape. This reminded me about your tomato and I wandered what became of it's mate that you left in the store. This is all very sad to see.

Well, I hope that someone found it, bought it and took it home with them where it hopefully is someplace warm and frost-free/freeze-free. My big tomato plant is happily residing upstairs in the spare room right beside a south-facing window. I talk to it, thump its blossoms and check its soil moisture daily. A couple of lady bugs that were attempting to overwinter by hibernating in a corner of the spare room woke up in Tuesday's hot weather and now are climbing all over the plants in the room. They must think it is Spring.

I do hope the folks at Home Depot in Gainesville brought in all those plants from the garden center or covered them up with a very heavy-duty frost blanket row cover because they had hundreds and hundreds of plants in stock over the weekend. If they had moved the plants, shelving racks and all, someplace indoors it would have filled up an entire 2-car garage with little room to spare, so it was a substantial number of plants. . And, those are just the vegetables, fruits (strawberry plants) and herbs. I'm not as worried about the shrubs and perennials they had on display.

On Tuesday it hit 79 degrees at our Mesonet station and 77 degrees at our house, and it didn't just feel warm, it almost felt hot. That sort of weather could give a person planting fever. The bees and the wasps were swarming all day. This morning, though, reality returned and it was 26 degrees at our house and 23 degrees at our Mesonet station this morning around sunrise. Gainesville is at a higher elevation so they might have been slightly warmer, but probably not by much. Our weather is nuts. We've had more than the usual number of grass fires the last couple of days, which is par for the course as winter deepens and fine fuels like grasses become more cured following freezing weather.

I'm surprised how many plants have popped up in stores across the state this past week. Even some cool-season plants can freeze or suffer damage with temperatures in the lower 20s, especially if they just came out of a climate-controlled greenhouse before they were shipped to the stores. I just don't understand why so many stores so far north have so many plants. Of course, the stores are happy to sell the plants. And, for the folks who buy those plants and put them into the ground too early, the stores then will happily sell them replacement plants. It is a great business model for the stores---the more plants they sell early which then freeze, the more plants they sell later to replace the frozen ones.

Got a chuckle out the business model observation! Reminds me of some of the fishing lures I've seen. Great for catching the fisherman, not so great on fish!

I haven't been back to see how badly abused the plants are at our local Lowe's or Walmart. Not sure I want to see the carnage!

Our Atwoods had the frame up on their 'greenhouse', but hadn't installed the cover yet, as of a couple of days ago. Probably a good thing or they would be abusing plants, too!

It has to be a strategic model! Surely it must. It is bad enough that the stores in western North Texas have plants in mid-January, but at least they're on the cusp of 7b/8a and have an earlier average last freeze date. But for the stores in central OK to have them now? It has to be the business model I described. I am sure there is some knowledge on the part of the stores that a certain percentage of their customers, like me, want an early plant or two to baby along indoors or in a greenhouse. I'm equally sure there is a certain degree of calculation in the early arrival of plants---a certain amount of expecting a certain percentage of the people will freeze their plants and then the stores will sell them replacement plants.

Freezing weather after warm-season plants are on the shelves will tell you which store managers pay attention to details and which ones do not. The stores whose managers were paying attention will have brought the plants indoors, covered them up, etc. The other stores? The stores with bad managers will have bare shelves this coming weekend because their plants all froze or they'll have a fresh shipment of different plants for the same reason.

I ran through Gainesville so fast today I didnt even look at the garden center or at HD. Trying to get home before midnight. I wanted to go to nursery in Collinsville to see what they had but I restrained myself. I knew if I went and saw I would buy and I am not ready yet....

You must have been in a real hurry if you skipped both the Gainesville HD and your nursery in Collinsville!

It was very cold here again last night--25 at our house and 22 at our Mesonet station. We had a very heavy frost for the 2nd morning in a row. Gainesville probably was warmer, but maybe not by much. If all those tomato plants I saw last week were not either under heavy-duty row covers or carried inside the store, then I imagine they're all dead and headed for the dumpster now.