Oh how exciting! Thank you! I love that sweet little Malva sylvestnis. Just ordered some from Baker Seeds. The snapdragons--it will be interesting to see what happens with them. I notice, too, that a lot of hybrids won't self-seed at all, or minimally. Not sure about ALL hybrids, of course--have any of you noticed? The regular cleomes did, for example, but the little ones (Sparkler, I think), no way. Now you just reminded me of more flower seeds I can't live without. The hyacinth beans. Love those; had forgotten about them. Black-eyed susan vines. I used to buy them as annuals up north, and enjoyed them every summer. Zinnias, cosmos seeds are nearby. I'd never grown dahlias before, but am ordering some of those soon. Sounds like they should love Oklahoma. Are any of you dahlia nuts?

Oh, and speaking of re-seeding--I had tomatoes growing in three different flower beds last summer, most likely, I'd guess from compost that hadn't completely broken down--AND peppers. We got a real kick out of the tomatoes and peppers--the best tomato plant we got, last year, in fact, was in our large central flower bed in the back yard--have no idea what kind it was. It was a very sturdy determinate with medium-sized tomatoes that did really well; and I'm pretty sure it must have come from tomatoes I bought at a farmer's market. I can live with this!

Hybrids sometimes are sterile and then, even if they produce seed, the genes often resort into different combinations and the plants you get from the seed are nothing like the parent....or they look like it but lack the disease tolerance or whatever. I don't bother saving seeds from anything that's a hybrid because you never know what you'll get. I mostly only grow open-pollinated varieties of most things anyway. Common O-P cleome reseeds vigorously, Sparkler is a hybrid and I wouldn't expect it to reseed.

Dahlias are tricky here. I have had the best success with Bishop's Children. The larger dahlias, like the dinner plate dahlias, sometimes do well but more often than not they cannot hold up in our heat. They're happiest if you can get them some afternoon shade. Dahlias are a lost cause in my garden because the voles will eat the tubers....every last bit of every last one of them.

I get tomato and pepper seedlings sprouting in the garden, the yard, the compost pile, etc. all the time. They do reseed really well here.

Cat, Daffy, brought us a vole she'd captured yesterday. We were so tickled--until she dropped it and it scooted into the log recess at the bottom of the house, and I told her to get it, but then the dog butted in and Daffy kind of freaked and backed off, and then I told Titan to get it, but he couldn't navigate around the little table that was there, and by that time the vole spotted a crack in the deck and escaped under the deck. DRAT. But she does pretty good (having brought us numerous mice and a couple baby rabbits), and I hope she's on a vole-hunting mission now.

I hope Daffy is on a vole-hunting mission as well

Our best vole-hunting cat, Moose, died in 2003, but before he left us, he totally wiped out all the moles and gophers and a great many voles.

The only rodent mistake that Moose ever made was that once, probably in our first year here, I opened the door to walk out and he ran into the house with a live vole in his mouth. He just wanted to keep it and play with it, not kill it. I was the only one home so I had to deal with having a live vole hiding under the sofa.

I put Moose back outdoors since he was not being helpful, and I forced the vole out from beneath the sofa with a broom. Faced with an open floor space and not knowing where to run hide, the vole sat in the floor and stared at me. I took the lid of a Tidy Cat litter bucket and poured the litter into the box in another room, walked back into the living room and placed the bucket over the vole. So, there we were, the vole and I together and one of us trapped underneath a bucket. Did I mention I hate rodents?

Unsure what to do but absolutely sure I did not want to spend the day with a vole inside the house, I finally lifted the bucket ever so slightly and slid the lid underneath the bucket. Then I flipped over the bucket and pushed the lid on tightly, trapping the rodent inside the bucket. I opened the door again and Moose ran inside to hunt for his vole. I left him indoors while I walked about 200 yards from the house and released the vole. I told it to stay away from the house or Moose would kill it.

Moose searched the whole house for his vole for the rest of the day, but I guess he learned a valuable lesson about not bringing a rodent into the house because he never brought a vole indoors again.

Our best vole-killer now, is Pumpkin, who is our youngest cat. He has gotten bored with killing voles, though, as the woodland produces a million more to replace each one he kills. His current challenge is squirrels. He spends hours chasing squirrels, stalking them, etc. As far as I know, he hasn't gotten one yet, but he enjoys the challenge.

My cat, who is an indoor cat, got out this week. She was contrary about coming in. I gave up and went inside. I heard her meowing. Went to the door. She was on the patio and 5 chickens were approaching her. The chickens came closer and closer when suddenly she jumped at them. Of course the chickens scattered (noisily). Her posture was like "I'm bad, I'm bad". Then she came in. She went to the garage, caught a mouse and brought it in the living room to play with. She doesn't kill them, she just plays with them. The last time I saw that one it ran under the heavy base of the dining room table. Sigh.

Your vole story and Moose reminded me of funny vole/mouse stories. Three years ago I was living in a garden level darling mother's apartment with my son and family. One night I saw Daffy intently studying something--it was a vole crawling along the baseboards. Previously she'd been a good mouser, but she must have been out of practice for a few years. (Thank heaven, she has regained her hunting skills now.) So I was telling her to GET it and she just lollygagged around--so I called my son upstairs and told, perhaps somewhat hysterically, that I had a vole in the apartment. He said, "Well, what do you want ME to do about it?" I said, perhaps somewhat hysterically, "Come down and GET it--you're my LANDLORD, for crying out loud!!!" So he came down and got it with a plastic bag. He came back about a minute later and I asked him what he did with it. He turned it loose right outside the apartment. DUH--so it (or one of its cousins) was visiting my apartment the next week again. This time I got it--Daff still was not that interested. And I took it outside and murdered it.

Amy, Pumpkin likes to torment the chickens too, even the biggest roosters. He loves to run up behind them, slap their tail feathers as hard as he can with his paw, and then run right past them. Then he hides under a shrub and waits for another chicken to come along so he can do it all over again. He's all boy and it shows in his behavior/misbehavior.

Nancy, It is irritating when a cat decides a rodent is a toy, but perhaps even more irritating when a son releases a beast right outside your door.

I had that problem with my husband for the first 10 or 15 years we lived here. He'd remove a chicken snake or rat snake from a chicken coop and take it 100 yards and set it free, even if I had requested that he kill the predator. Half the time, the snake made it back to the chicken coop before he did and was in there swallowing eggs or chicks. No matter how many times I pointed out that he was achieving nothing with this technique, he kept doing it.

After a particularly aggressive black rat snake ate 4 half-grown guinea keats in one afternoon, I told Tim that he'd better kill that snake or I was going to kill him (Tim, not the snake). I also explained for the one millionth time that removing and releasing a snake did nothing except teach them they're allowed to come into our coops and eat our eggs and young poultry. I guess I finally got through to him because he finally began removing them and then killing them. I don't care where the rat snakes and chicken snakes live and roam on our property as long as they stay out of our coops and don't eat our eggs or chickens. There's plenty of other things for them to eat--field mice, lizards, frogs, voles, rats, etc. so I don't tolerate them preying on our poultry. I can't believe it took as long as it did to get my husband on board with permanently removing the predator animals.

Dawn

Pumpkin should get an embossed E for effort, in hunting squirrels! Daff caught a red squirrel several years ago, and dropped it for me as I was working at the computer. I heard a thump, turned around and there it was, deader than a doornail. I laughed pretty hard, as I'd told her dozens of times not to come back inside until she killed a squirrel. (They were the noisiest most obnoxious things, living right outside my quilting room window in the black walnut ten feet away.) This one had to have been wounded, sick, or just plumb stupid. Haha--re Tim AND my son Wade.

Sure sort of wish we had chickens, all of you lucky ones. We entertained the idea last year, but "chickened" out. Maybe we'll change our minds one of these days. Our main concern is all of the loose dogs in the vicinity; and cats, and possums, and raccoons and skunks. . . we sort of agreed we weren't up for the trouble at this point. If we got half a dozen, pretty sure it'd all be on me--the worry AND the lion's share of the work. GDW isn't nearly as interested in working as he is fishing. I don't really blame him--he's being an awfully good sport about the garden (he'd never gardened before, either) and is super excited about his potatoes, especially, and the fact that he'd never had a successful experience with gardening, previously. Who knows, maybe it'll be HIS idea in the months to come, since he knows what a valuable ingredient chicken poop is. However, our grandchildren, who live an hour away, have about four dozen chickens, and for now that's our answer--it IS easier. We'll see.

Pumpkin is a fierce warrior cat. He got off to a hard start in life. Our son found him, around 3 weeks old, in the bar ditch by our front gate, screaming his head off at 4 a.m. when Chris was leaving for work one August day. We never had any idea how he came to be there. He was so small and very sick, mostly from lack of food. We worked with the vet on a weekly basis for almost 2 months to save our sweet little Pumpkin kitty as his stomach just couldn't tolerate any food we gave him, and we tried everything the vet suggested, including certain kinds of medicine for cats with sensitive stomachs. Finally it seemed like he outgrew his stomach problems and started gaining weight, and by then he had been spoiled rotten. When he was tiny and couldn't hold food down, for comfort he liked to lay on a human's chest, right on top of their heart, and both Tim and I spent many hours being a warm-blooded cat bed so Pumpkin could sleep. Tim would sit in his recliner and Pumpkin would sleep on top of Tim's chest for hours. Looking back, I think it is amazing he survived because for so long he just threw up roughly 90% of everything he ate and couldn't gain an ounce. He's fine now, and is very loving and loyal. He thinks it is his duty to kill everything that moves. He and I go round and round around his killing of butterflies. I've finally just about broken him of it, but it has been a long, hard process.

We had a dog who just showed up and adopted us, so we kept her and named her Honey. Obviously she'd been dumped or abandoned and had fended for herself by killing and eating rabbits. Even after she'd been here 2 or 3 years and was used to a regular diet of dog food, she still loved to chase a rabbit, catch it, kill it and eat it. She always saved the rabbit heads and brought them to the front porch and laid them, carefully and lovingly, on the Welcome mat so that when I opened the door, the first thing I would see was that rabbit head. I'd scold her and tell her to stop killing rabbits and to especially stop bringing us the bunny heads, and eventually she gave up killing rabbits. We had her for about 10 or 11 years. She's been gone about 2 or 3 years now and I still really miss her. She was a great dog, very sweet and loving, and so appreciative of being adopted by someone who truly loved her, but the whole rabbit killing thing was very distasteful to me---especially the gift of rabbit heads left on the front porch.

Pumpkin is a great garden cat. He scouts that garden daily for field mice, voles, etc. and is happy when he finds one. He's happy because he is going to play with it before he kills it. I'm happy he is going to kill it, but not so happy if he is running around the garden playing with it while I'm working in there.

Dawn