I see we are NOT the only ones--saw a post from some time ago that mirrored our situation perfectly. We're surrounded by the very tall oaks; and underground, surrounded by rocks--but decent dirt. I was studying the geology of our area last week--fascinating! I found out we are on the "Ozark Uplift," meaning we have little more recent dirt on top of pre-Cambrian rocks. I'm not sure what I can do with that information, but it was fun reading about it all. Sometimes a little knowledge can be dangerous, I'm certain of that--especially in my case.

My major puzzle is in trying to figure out which great plants can go where. The cleome and bee balm I planted toward the back of our main yard have done pretty well for two years--with only about 3 1/2 hours of morning sun, and then heavily dappled shade for most of the afternoon. That made me think that with this hot sun, perhaps others that normally prefer more hours of sun could do well, too. I have a crape myrtle, four o'clocks and herbs in a spot back there that have done great for two years with about 6 hours of full to dappled sun. The morning glories climbing onto our deck, as well as moonbeam coreopsis, clematis have done great with 4 hours of morning sun.

In the large center bed it gets trickier. It gets full sun from about 4 pm on, but before that is fairly heavily shaded. I had put a climbing hydrangea out there, but I think I'm going to have to try and move it this year--that late afternoon sun seems to be baking it. (I put a nanking cherry in front of it last year, hoping it might provide some shade, but don't think it's going to work. I would really love to see it live, of course, and am thinking I may move it to a tree that gets only about 3 hours of morning sun. And if push comes to shove, easy come, easy go, eh. The daylilies there like it just fine, as did the lantana, zinnias, some herbs. The shasta daisies I put there the first year have grown like weeds, but because they get so much shade, got too tall and all flopped over. Volunteer tomatoes, on the other hand, grew great! Heucheras are even doing decently, despite the hot late afternoon sun.

But this puzzling center bed actually kind of amuses me. Not so amusing is the other half of the back yard, toward the south That section has six oaks, and so little full sun, but a lot of dappled shade, from heavy to light. And though it is at the bottom of the not too steeply sloped lawn (the property slopes down toward the east and down toward the south) the trees undoubtedly suck up all the moisture that hits there, I'm thinking. I tried putting up some morning glories against the deck in that half last year, just to see how little light they could grow with, and though I had to guide them over the little tiny drainage "creek" bordered with rocks, after I did, they climbed right up the deck and did pretty well. So this year, I will curve the little creek out to give me a good two feet there and let the morning glories have at it. I grew snapdragons in that same area (that gets full shade in the afternoons after about 2 pm because it's west of the house facing east), and they actually did pretty good. So I'm heartened--and perplexed. I suppose it's mainly trial and error, right? Just boggles my mind that flowers I had come to know as "requiring full sun" didn't really mean it in Oklahoma.

It is such fun reading about others' dilemmas, or situations, about the trickiness with the heat--or unexpected freezes; or clay; or sand. . . I read something amusing a couple days ago, wherein one lady said her husband made the comment that gardeners were a most competitive group of people (not against each other, but with Mother Nature.) I had to laugh. You think?

My Bermuda grass friends. . . yes, if it weren't for Bermuda grass, we'd have no grass, pretty much. Bermuda and crabgrass. There's some fescue and mixed shade grass at the back of this slope, but otherwise it's Bermuda and crabgrass.

Is that your home, Nancy? That is so beautiful. Mine looks nothing like that at all. haha! Mine was a blank slate when we moved in almost 3 years ago--just bermuda, wildflowers and weeds...and very few trees.

Wow beautiful. Mine looks nothing like that either. And yes I agree this corner of the gw is awesome. They even let wayward Texans in. I believe I found this place when I googled hot dry windy. I look at the neighbors wheat if I want to see green. Lol

Yes, hazelinok--It's like a person who isn't normally photogenic. If the sun is just right, if you don't get too close, if you kinda squint your eyes, and if you present your most favorable angle, you can look really pretty. LOL I'm working very hard to get it up to speed, as I don't figure I have that many years to get it perfect. So many flowers and shrubs and veggies to plant, so little time. I'm so thankful for the concept of lasagna gardening, which has made our work go a little faster and a lot easier!

Where are you, hazelinok and luvncannin? When I hear Dawn talk about where she lives, I think, we can't BOTH be zone 7. But we are. Two pretty different zone 7s, but still. I looked up her Mesonet link, and had to laugh at the zone 7 snaking up to encompass us. Thank you, Zone 7!

I think hardiness zones are pretty worthless. Mine changes depending on who publishes the map. And the Pacific northwest can have the same zone, but obviously NOT the same climate. They are useful when planting perennials, but otherwise only denote average minimum temps. Heat zone maps are much more useful, but not many venders use them. There is also the Sunset Maps, which I haven't realy explored. Even if you figure out your zone, you could be in a micro climate (as Dawn often mentions) and different areas of your property have their own micro climates. (Up against the stone wall on the south side of my house is warmer than anywhere else.)

I am guessing from what you've written you may be a higher elavation than Dawn and much of Oklahoma's zone 7. That will effect your climate, too. The most recent map I looked at said I was 7a, and I am north of Tulsa. I used to be 6b.

It looks like you have a pretty place and I'm glad you have good soil.

I think one reason this forum is so active (besides the excellent advice) is that our climate is so confusing for new or transplanted gardeners. It's kind of like the wind. A newbie to OK once asked when the wind quit blowing (it was March). I said "it doesn't, except in July when its 105". I think she was considering moving at that point.

I'm supposed to be 7a too. And I'm in Norman--a whole lot further south than Amy.

Nancy, are you in the eastern part of the state? Your place looks sorta like ours at least as far as big trees go. We are in Adair County and in z6b, most years anyway. Welcome to Oklahoma. Where did you move from? Somewhere where full sun means sun all day? Because that doesn't work in Oklahoma. A lot of stuff marked full sun can get by just fine on 6 hours of sun in Ok.

Although I am 7a/ 6b I think zones are mostly for perennials and micro climates can change a zone pretty quick. I am in a micro climate on my property and our city. We are in a valley. Our neighbor cities are over 1500 ft above us. I am in the panhandle of Texas, surrounded by cotton and cattle. I was raised Wis, Ill, Pa. So I love trees which we dont have here yet except my few fruit trees.

Dawn--yep; I discovered last summer that we have two growing seasons. I could not believe my eyes when my tomatoes and peppers and nasturtiums, potatoes, even, sprang to life and began growing like crazy. So then, experimenting, I threw down a bunch of marigold, zinnia and nasturtium seeds, bought a few flowering kale and plunked them in, and watched those seeds spring up and blossom by the time things came to a halt in late November. That's when I realized I needed to get stuff in really early in order for it to produce before the heat. And of course, all of that was confirmed by you guys when I found you here. And now to get second crops in in the summer to have RED tomatoes by freeze time. :) It's all very exciting to me.

Yes, Dorothy--we're in Wagoner County, near Ft Gibson Lake. I haven't been very many places in Oklahoma, but HAVE been to Sooner Nursery--beautiful country over where you live! Just beautiful! And yes, somewhere where full sun meant FULL sun--Minnesota, via Wyoming; just about as different from Oklahoma gardening as it could get! In fact, with some plants 8 hours of sun a day wasn't enough!

And like Dawn said about Pennsylvania, it can get plenty hot in Minnesota. A few years we may have hovered around 100 from July 10-August 15. And as she said, yep, that's a lot different than 100-115 for a solid month or more and 98 on either side of that month for another couple weeks. And to my amazement, most of the meadowlands here were still green.

Wyoming is very arid, probably like NW Oklahoma, maybe? (How much precipitation do you get in the panhandle, luvncannin?) Only a lot colder. Annual rainfall there is about 14" a year--across most of the state. Grew good sagebrush and cottonwoods, pines in the mountains. Gardeners there have it rough. Comparably, Minnesota had rich dirt, lots of trees and 40-44" of precipitation, but one had to have it together to get everything in the ground on May 15-25, no lollygagging around, because it comes to an end by September 15, usually, and for the most part, generally speaking.

I'm not sure about elevations here. Says we are at 600 feet for Wagoner, but 700 feet at my house. Can it get lower than that?! :) That's interesting to me. Especially considering we are on a large "hill," which would be an unlikely flood spot unless we had a Noah's ark event. Directly to our west by about 3 miles is all pasture land and lower by 100 feet or so than we are. The first summer here it flooded and the only dry land much of the way between Wagoner and Pryor was the highway.

Hail is something I'm always nervous about--have seen what it can do to stuff. That's something Oklahoma has in common with Wyoming and Minnesota. We had some of it last summer, but only a touch, along with high winds (a mini tornado?) that tore out many trees in the vicinity. The roofing people spent a couple months in the area replacing shingles. (We have a metal roof, so a few dents, which they couldn't replace--not that some of them didn't try, though. And most people here have tornado shelters. We don't, but some of the neighbors have invited us over in the event.

Speaking of plant cruelty, Dawn. We have a spot down the driveway next to the carport (bordering the shop) railing that gets oh, probably 12-14 hours of full sun. Since it rained the entire month of June the first year and then was sultry but tolerable, I had no idea. So I had the bright idea of building a long 3' x 25' cinder block bed there. Last year I realized by July that nothing much was going to grow there--well, zinnias did! And we got 8 butternut squash from it. This month, I'm looking for something to put in that bed--I'm thinking lots of zinnias, cosmos, we'll give the squash another try, maybe verbena? Black-eyed Susan vines??!

Welcome Nancy!
I live and garden near Tahlequah. And, as Dawn already mentioned, when we first came to Oklahoma I thought that we had a really nice long growing season.... Nope. We have two short seasons!

I've about given up on some things I used to grow. Regular summer squash bombs too often for me. So now I grow Old Timey Cornfield Pumpkin (am mightily tempted to plant Seminole, now, too, as I've enjoyed it so much). When I want summer squash I simply pick a young one of these and eat it. These, more primitive, moschata squash seem to handle our conditions so very well that I call them "feel good crops." They make me FEEL GOOD when everything else is burning up. Cowpeas are feel good crops. Okra is generally in that category too. Sweet potatoes rock! Last year we discovered the joys of eating sweet potato greens! Now we should never lack for greens during the blistering dog days of summer.

I think Oklahoma is the most challenging place I've ever gardened. Yet we love it here.

George

Nancy, If your raised bed has good soil and adequate moisture, you can grow whatever you want in it. Plants in good soil and with some irrigation can do surprisingly well here, even in the hottest months. It is plants in poor soil that can really struggle. Sometimes plants just flat out surprise you, and here's one example:

We all know that most tomatoes (excluding those that produce small, bite-sized tomatoes) won't set fruit well here once the daytime highs are exceeding 90-92 degrees and the nighttime lows are exceeding 70-72 degrees, and that's especially true when it is humid. We try to work around that by planting as early as it is realistically possible to do so in order to get fruit set before the heat arrives. But, as always with OK weather, there's an exception to that rule. In the summer of 2011 when we had drought that was beyond anything any of us have experienced in our lifetimes, I had a couple of varieties of tomatoes set fruit in July and August, when our high temperatures daily were in the 108-115 range. Yes, they set fruit. Among them were Fantastic, Mystery Black and Phoenix (the latter one is bred as a heat-setting tomato). I was sort of stunned by the fact they set fruit, but I understood why. When the relative humidity is very low, despite high temperatures, some tomatoes set fruit pretty well, and our relative humidity values often bottomed out in the single digits that summer. So, sometimes you just get a nice surprise like that in what is otherwise a miserable summer.

Another surprise that year was that I left Piricicaba broccoli plants in the shady west end of the garden and never removed the plants and threw them on the compost pile like I normally do. Honestly, from June onward we were fighting fires day and night and night and day and sleeping very little, so I more or less abandoned the garden because I was't home enough to step foot into it. It wasn't that I had some brilliant idea about seeing what the broccoli would do if I let it stay all summer. So, rain eventually returned in mid- to late-August and we cooled down a bit and one day I set foot in the garden, probably in September or October, and there sat a Piricicaba plant with little broccoli side shoots on it. I was amazed. That plant produced shoots until freezing weather got it around mid-December. So, for all we think we know about how plants will and do behave here, sometimes we still get surprised. Those surprises are part of the mystery of living and growing here. Who would have thought that a broccoli plant would survive that summer when the heat and drought killed even the native prickly pear cacti growing a few dozen yards away? Gardening in Oklahoma is full of surprises.

Like George, we have struggled with squash because of the pests. I finally started growing my yellow summer squash and zucchini under MicroMesh netting and just hand-pollinating each morning, and that works pretty well, However. for fuss-free, care-free and trouble-free summer squash, I now grow three different kinds of Korean summer squash that are C. moschata types. Since some of the C. moschata winter squash varieties are the ones most likely to do well here, it only made sense to search out and find C. moschata summer squash. I grow Teot Bat Put, Early Bulam and Meont Jaeng I Ae (Hope I spelled that last one right, it always gives me trouble). I sought them out years ago, figuring all I needed was some summer squash varieties from tropical regions that were resistant to squash vine borers, because surely people in tropical areas have SVBs and yet somehow grow squash. When I found these three varieties, I was so excited. I feel like they are tailor-made for OK's hot, hot summers and the voracious squash vine borers, which have multiple generations here. They grow so well that I really shouldn't even bother with regular summer squash, but I love them to so I grow them as long as I can---each time I life the netting to pollinate the ones grown beneath it, I know there's a chance an SVB moth will sneak in and lay eggs before I replace the netting, but last year we never even had SVBs here, or squash bugs either. We get a miracle year like that about 1 year our of 5. Oklahoma still remains full of surprises.

I also sometimes harvest Seminole pumpkins, which are a C. moschata winter squash, very young and use them as summer squash. Really, there's not actually specific winter squash vs. summer squash. Any squash can be harvested early, small and tender as summer squash or left to mature and develop the hard rinds as winter squash. We just group them generally in one category or the other depending on how a given variety is traditionally used. Growing squash was so easy in Texas, and so much harder here---but the trials and tribulations forced me to learn more and work harder to get squash, so it's all good in the end.

Like George, we love it here and I cannot imagine living anywhere else. We were around 40 years old when we moved here and we had chosen this as our forever home where we'd live for the rest of our lives. I might have questioned our sanity when the August weather hit 111 degrees our first year here, or when a old rancher neighbor glumly told me that by moving here from Ft. Worth we "lost both ways" because we would have to endure hotter weather here in summer than we had in Fort Worth and also colder weather in winter. I laughed when he told me that, but quickly learned he was right! Regardless, despite the crazy and sometimes tortuous weather, we love living here and aren't planning on going anywhere else.

Oklahoma's people are the best! Living in a community of so many wonderful people is just a joy and one we'll never give up. And, despite all the people who insist Oklahoma only has one season "hot, hot hot", we actually do have all 4 seasons. It is just that some years we have all 4 seasons in the same week. Ain't life grand?

Dawn

Thank you, George. I'm happy I found you all. Your gardening area may be similar to ours, although it didn't LOOK as rocky when we were through there--it just looked like Eden. Is it rocky? And will be expecting some of the difficulties you all have discussed. Forewarned is forearmed, eh! And now I'm beginning to understand why you all discuss specific species--which is something I never had to think much about before. Now have to key into those and make some notes.

Nancy, for that flowerbed, try tithonia (Mexican sunflower), gallardia (blanketflower), and black eyed susans with your zinnias. Maybe some dwarf sunflowers too.

Excellent, thank you! I have em in their little grow cart pots--all the ones you mentioned--except sunflowers. Although I'm not QUITE as worried about the deer as I was before Titan and my repellents and my fishing line fences, they nevertheless got every sunflower I planted two years in a row. Oh--and rudbeckia--I must have gotten the wrong kind the first year. It grew prolifically, but got all mildewed, and I finally pulled it out last year thinking I'd try Hirta (although am not sure that what I had the first time wasn't Hirta). . . Still, I have visions of lots of it in the far front sunny bed if I get it going this year. I am hoping maybe the black-eyed Susan vines might work? What I often do is plant some of everything everywhere, to see where it might enjoy being. I think YOU had mentioned doing that, too. AND with your notes about the greens growing in some shade, I have decided, this year, to intermix veggie stuff in my flower beds. I'm kind of excited to do that. Fun stuff.

Many of you enjoy remembering gardens as children, as do I. With a family of six, we had a huge vegetable garden. I loved helping plant it every year. Loved seeing the little babies sprout. But what I loved most were flowers--and my family never grew flowers when I was young. (My mother never DID, but Dad began growing various flowers later in life.) And I remember trying to scrape up enough dirt in a pile to grow flowers around the house and failing. . . until my teens, when I had a little more knowledge and then had some success with elementary flowers. And so all my adult life (most of it being single), I have adored growing the flowers, spending all my spare summer time when I got off work in the spring and summer hours out in my yard. It wasn't until I got down here that we got into the vegetables--and that, largely because my husband thought it would be fun to grow his own potatoes. He doubted we could grow anything else. . . ha! He is so tickled to see squash and cucumbers and tomatoes--I believe he has caught the gardening bug! Woo-hoo!

I found the forum by googling. Nine times out of 10 googling "growing ____ in Oklahoma" brings up posts from this group. I lurked for awhile, but I felt like I knew people after reading for awhile. I think we are one of the most active forums on Houzz, at least in the gardening section. This is the first thing I check when I go online.

I just googled for potatoes. There were some people posting whom I haven't seen in a while. I hope Jay and Larry are doing alright.

Yes Nancy, in spite of appearances, it is quite rocky where I garden. I have hauled countless buckets of rocks from my garden. They are from egg size to the size of bowling balls. At least we don't have a solid rock shelf near the surface. I know, that our pond has a solid rock bottom, below which, neither man, nor machine can dig deeper.

Ha, George! We have a (or some) rock shelf/shelves! Would be fun to see what those rocks looked like underneath the ground.

Nancy, for your shaded spots that needs filling, try Rex begonia. Looking at your picture, they would go beautifully with the surrounding landscaping. Personally, I'd use the green/silver rex. It also comes in a pink. I was so surprised to see how well it did in my shady spots in my garden. I totally fell in love with it. It withstood the heat and just kept going til frost.

PERFECT, Karen--thank YOU. I'd totally forgotten about begonias! (I always bought them for my daughter-in-law's shady deck in the past. Never occurred to me that down here they'd be lovely in the yard!!)

Karen, I was just checking out begonias. Oh my gosh! Begonias is like a whole separate gardening category, aren't they? WOW. Thank you again!

I am NOT going to look at begonias, I am not going to look at begonias, I am not going to look at begonias....

I used to grow them as house plants. I know the tuberous ones are spectacular.

I am not going to look at begonias...

Hahaha, Amy. I spent about 2 hours last night looking at them. They just go on and on. And on. How does one EVER decide! Oh my gosh. I'm going to have to give this some thought. . .

I have been lurking all over the internet tonight, and studying and reading up. I just somehow happened onto this post of mine. . . And I have to say, it has enlightened me all over again. Thank you all, so very much!

I was initially looking for what flower seeds I could get going in the beds; and when to plant my garlic. . . Do any of you grow Joe Pye weed down here? I adore it, but don't see any references to it here.

Joe Pye Weed grows well in some parts of OK, probably not in all. I'd say it is most likely to do well in locations east of OKC, and particularly in NE OK , SE OK and E OK in years with at least average rainfall.

I don't grow it here because it prefers damp/moist areas, and I don't have damp/moist areas, for the most part, in July, August and September unless I am watering heavily several times a week (which I don't do). In dry years, even daily watering might not be enough here in southcentral OK since summertime drought is the norm for us, but y'all generally stay really damp or outright wet up there compared to how dry we stay down here.

Yeah, since it hasn't rained here for 6-7 weeks, Joe Pye would not be happy! Dang. Well onward, eh? LOL