Mostly just asparagus, kale, green onions, chives, onion chives, parsley, rosemary, sage and tomatoes (Better Boys and SunGolds). I harvest the herbs as needed for cooking. I have chamomile flowers now for chamomile tea. I skipped sugar snap peas and replaced them with green beans, figuring we were too hot too early down here (don't know if that is true for all of you further north) for the peas to have much of a chance of producing much of a harvest, so beans seemed like a better use of the area where I was going to have peas. Sometimes you have to adjust your plans right in the middle of planting when the weather decides to get abnormally warm and basically say there.

I haven't looked closely at the broccoli plants as they are at the far northeast corner of the garden so don't get a lot of foot traffic walking past them, but from just glancing at them casually while walking by yesterday, they seem fine and on track to produce the first big heads by late April or early May. The kale and cabbage are huge, having grown rapidly the last 7-10 days once they got a chance to dry up from excessive rainfall.

My squash plants are forming the first buds that soon will be blossoms. Tomatoes and peppers are setting fruit. The potato plants are huge and I think we'll be able to rob a few new potatoes from the plants soon. The dewberries have green fruit, and I can't wait for them to ripen.

I am further south so likely a bit ahead of everyone else here. I planted my sweet potatoes yesterday to take advantage of the extra-warm soil in the raised beds this year. More volunteer sugar baby watermelon plants are popping up in the tomato bed this year (which grows succession crops of watermelons after the tomato canning season ends and I start yanking out excess plants), so if the soil is warm enough for them, it is warm enough for almost anything.

I harvested a southern green stink bug in the garden yesterday by snipping it in half with my scissors. It is awfully early to see them here, but not unexpected with the early warmth.

Weeds, I harvested weeds today. The chickens got them. I told myself I had to be brutal and thin the beets so they had room to grow. Same with the salad turnips, which should start to bulb up soon...is that the right term for turnips. So the chickens got those thinnings. I pulled all the pac choi that sprouted at the asparagus roots and they got that, too.

I didn't notice any bad bugs, though SOMETHING is eating on odd ball things. One bean plant with no leaves, all others look ok. A kale plant in a bucket sitting on a patio chair so it's too high for a rabbit. I'm trying to get seeds from this kale plant. Something ate the flowers on one branch. WTH. COULD have been caterpillars, but I didn't see any. Wonder if the grand dog tasted it? It might be kind of high for him. I'd guess grasshopper, but I haven't seen any.

I wish I had something big enough to harvest. The chicken massacre took care of brassica. Moved the asparagus, so not harvesting that this year. Lettuce, spinach, pac choi is tiny. Grow, grow, grow!

I had a couple of pea pods for breakfast. My first pea pods after trying for years.

Yay Bon! Like little man says just like candy.

I am eating spinach parsley fennel and onion tops if the hoe gets too close :/

Amy, Oh well, heck, I harvest weeds every day. The chickens follow me and the bucket or wheelbarrow to the compost pile so they can dig and scratch and hunt for their favorite things. Every now and then when I pull a weed and unearth a cutworm or grub, I just toss it into the bucket with the weeds, and the chickens get ridiculously happy when they find that juicy little morsel. Sometimes the poultry runs so fast to the compost pile that they beat be there and I am practically dumping the load of weeds on top of them. Chickens are silly that way.

I have seen big grasshoppers but not small ones. It is the most bizarre thing. This afternoon when I pulled out a clump of some kind of weedy grass that had come up in the northern fence line, a tiny grasshopper jumped, fell or flew onto my hand. It was the smallest one I've ever seen---maybe 1/32 of an inch, and was almost translucent. I just sat and stared at it and then brushed it off my hand. So, I guess the little ones are hatching but just not really big enough yet to be seen.

Something is eating on some of my plants, but I don't see the pests during the daytime. I'm thinking caterpillars of some sort based on the fact that I'm seeing a lot of cats outside the garden. A couple of days ago the first Pink Laura Bush petunia bloomed, and then yesterday the first Purple one bloomed. They're so pretty, even when small, and they get big quickly. I also think I have found a small amount of flea beetle damage on some of the leaves of the tomato and pepper plants, but it isn't enough to worry about, and I'm not seeing flea beetles now. I'm betting they were out in the garden on all those cool, rainy days a while back when I wasn't out there.

Kim, Anytime you're hungry for some onion greens you can just accidentally on purpose chop off a leaf or two with the hoe. Works for me!

Dawn

Do those onion leaves grow back. I've been clipping green onions for recipes, but leave the onion in place--because normally I'm in a hurry. I noticed that the leaves are growing back. Or is that my imagination?

Hazel I think once you cut the leaf off its done but new ones coming from the center grow so fast it may seem like its regrowing

Just harvesting spinach and salad greens so far, but things are growing. Cascadia peas are climbing, the squash seed is up, and the tomatoes I planted over the weekend are getting settled in. They have some leaf roll, but I think that will correct itself. While we do need rain, they are happy for the sun this week.

Where should I get straw for mulch? I don't want to use my grass clippings, as there's bermuda in them. I have to be able to bring it home in the trunk of my car, too.

Atwoods sells straw bales. They also sell compressed alfalfa that is smaller than a regular bale. Not sure of price comparison. Presumably Tractor Supply would sell it since they are Atwoods competitor. Worley's also sells straw so I assume a good sized nursery like that would sell them.

Yes, what Kim said about the onion leaves. To get really large onions, your onions need to have between 11-15 leaves at the point where they begin to bulb up, so be careful not to steal too many leaves from one onion or it will give you a smaller bulb. Each onion leaf creates one 'ring' of onion flesh at bulbing time, so the more leaves you have, and the larger and more vigorouslY they are growing, the bigger your onions will be. That's why onions are heavy nitrogen users---to make big, vigorous leaves. My earliest short-day onion varieties usually begin to bulb up here in early May, and I need to count their leaves and see how they are doing. They need to have 8-10 leaves by this point if I am going to get any sort of a decently large bulb from them.

Rebecca, We do need rain and I don't see rain falling here in any quantity worth having, based on the latest QPF, so one day this week I need to top dress the tomato beds with Tomato-Tone and then water it in. The onions need water too, although the soil they're in this year at the eastern edge of the garden doesn't drain as well as the tomato beds (where the best-draining soil is 'cause the tomatoes always get the best everything) so likely is holding moisture a bit more.

I just went and looked at the 7-day QPF and it looks a lot better for us today than it did yesterday when it was showing my area only in the 0.25-0.50" category over the next week. However, it changes every day (updating multiple times per day) and often over-promises rainfall and under-delivers, so take it with a grain of salt. For last week at one point it had us near 2". Guess how much we got? Two one-hundredths of an inch. Oh well, the 2 was correct even if the decimal point was misplaced.

7-day QPF

Bon, Congrats on the peas. Aren't they the best? To me, sugar snap peas from the store just aren't as good. I kinda hate that I decided against devoting space to them this spring, but I am a realist and know our early heat down here is too much for them. We hit 86 degrees at our house a couple of days ago, and that alone would be a problem for them, so I'm not that sorry that I didn't plant them this year. We've just had too many early days in the 80s and even the 90s already. Those of you who are further north probably still have a decent chance of getting a good crop from them, but I know hot springs down here do not lead to good harvests.

And, for what it is worth, I have been closely watching our weather specifically here in our county this Spring, and I've been comparing it to previous springs, hence the following bad news. January, February and March of 2017 have been considerably hotter than January, February and March of 2011, if you compare each month's average temperature from the OK Mesonet. This is worrisome. For those of you who didn't live here in Oklahoma then or weren't gardening then or whatever, 2011 was insanely hot insanely early, and to make it worse, the rain didn't fall much at all. Here in our county, we were hitting the 90s during Easter Week, and most people didn't even have tomato plants in the ground yet---while we already were having the sort of temperatures that shut down tomato fruit set. (We did get a slight reprieve in early May but only for a brief period, and most people I know down here didn't get a single tomato. We got a good early crop thanks to my early planting, but I did a staggered planting over many weeks time and the only tomato plants that produced well were the earliest ones that went into the ground in late March or earliest April.)

What is even more worrisome to me is that at our house, we've consistently gone 3 to 5 degrees warmer than our OK Mesonet station on many days, making us even hotter earlier than what the Mesonet is showing. The only good thing is that we have had a lot more rain in 2017 so far than we had by the same date in 2011, not that 2017 is particularly rainy so far---just that it is better than 2011. I do not want another 2011 in terms of heat, even if we get more rainfall. Really, more rainfall should bring down the temperatures some, so perhaps if rain keeps falling, we won't get as hot this summer as 2011 did. What I remember best about 2011 was that here in our county we had highs over 100 (and often 107-115 or so) for 70 of Summertime's roughly 90-odd days. Often, even when the OK Mesonet recorded highs of 97 or 98 or 99, we were over 100 here at our house, but for historical purposes, I'm using Mesonet data. I don't think the garden, the chickens or I can take that sort of heat again, so I'm hoping that April's somewhat cloudier, somewhat cooler weather is a sign of a pattern change. We do not need for the trend of hotter and hotter months to continue into the summer months.

Dawn

No! Not another year like 2011! I wasn't even gardening at that time, but I remember feeling miserable and cranky. The AC couldn't keep up in that big 'ol house. Ugh.

The onions I'm clipping from are in a separate area with the herbs. They were the extra large ones that Dixondale sent. It seems like they sent the two extremes this year--very large and very small. My onions range in the number of leaves...anywhere from 2 to 7. Maybe I should get some nitrogen on them.

I know you're in a whole different world down south and when I see the hoppers here, I wonder what kind of summer you're going to face since it has been unusually warm for you. I know you're on top of the timing and succession and probably ready to jump out and harvest ahead of an impending shorter spring season and a grow into a longer summer season. I'm imagining that's what you'll get, but you'll probably cool off somehow to get a break.

Thinking in terms of probabilities, I'm hyper focused on 2011 which was an abysmal failure of weather to be any sort of humane to us humans. It followed a very long severe drought, too. Everything was already suffering (including humans) and then it was a relentless year in 2011. Almost all our trees have died since then and we're still cleaning those up. The chance of 2011-like events recurring is low. Not impossible, but low.

We're right on the edge of the zone and the longer I pay attention, the more I feel it. This year we're leaning more toward zone 6b rather than 7a (or whatever zones we straddle).

I was afraid you were going to write something like that, Dawn. But the truth is, we're way different than you are. But that probably means that when our cloud cover dissipates, it'll be blazing hot and we'll be catching up. Even our ground is still moist (and some of the tomato plants still have purple stems), but it'll end soon.

bon

So far the only thing we are harvesting are radishes and a few lettuce leafs(leaves?). The peas are only about 6" tall, so at this point I'm not going to bet on us getting any sort of a harvest before the real heat sets in. Our broccoli is kind of a joke, but at least the little guys look fairly healthy.

We have harvested most of the radishes. Spinach and lettuce still going strong and I have one golf ball sized green tomato. Very happy that we decided to get the peppers and tomatoes in early. They are doing very well despite two fairly cool nights. Apparently we have a rabbit that has been harvesting as well. Big fellow.

Hazel, I don't want it either. Once in a lifetime was bad enough. It really bothers me that our first three months of this year were hotter than our first three months of that year, but we are getting more rain, so it isn't like the years are identical.

Nitrogen might not hurt. My onions have from 7 to 10 leaves, based on the last time I counted, which might have been 4 or 5 days ago. I really need to look at them today and see if anything has changed. I've been at the other end of the garden from the onions, weeding the dewberries before the dewberry plants disappear beneath the weeds, so haven't checked in on the onions today. What seems to have helped them more than anything is just that the wind stopped blowing in the upper 30s through mid-40s. I hope we're pretty much done with that sort of wind.

Bon, It is a whole different world down south, particularly for any areas south of the Arbuckle Mountains. We have a climate that is more like Dallas's than OKC's or Tulsa's. Sometimes in late winter that works to our advantage, but often in summer it does not. Sometimes we get too hot too early and that is that.

After constant flooding in 2015 and in the first half of 2016, I don't expect to be that wet again this year. Around June of last year, we went from flooding to dry almost overnight...which at least felt normal if not desirable. I just hope we have decent rainfall through at least the end of June so that the garden has a chance to do well without us having to water like mad.

Brian, Hang in there. Sometimes the plants can have a big growth spurt in April if decent rainfall occurs.

wotanhl, I'm a huge advocate of early planting, and then if necessary covering up the early plants on an occasional cold night. If I can get my tomato plants in the ground in March instead of April, I generally get a harvest that is 200%-300% larger than when I plant in April. Down here in south-central OK, we just get so hot so early some years that fruit set on most tomato plants can stop occuring in May or very early June instead of in late June or mid-July. It makes a huge difference harvest-wise. I've tried it every which way---planting early, staggering the planting out by planting so many plants per week over a 6-8 week period, or planting late, and early planting produces the best harvests every single time.

Dawn