I finally got 2 Diva cucumbers to sprout. Let’s hope they keep growing. First green beans are up too. I’ll dump the remaining potato bags this week, and plan on fertilizing tomorrow. Snow and snap peas are almost done, between the heat, bugs, and powdery mildew. The snow peas still have some life left. Tomatoes look really good. First year I’ve planted them with mychorrizae, and I can see the difference.

It was not warm here today. It was crazy this morning. Around 8:30am (I was at work) it turned as dark as night and then the storm came. It never got hot...it was warm for awhile, but was chilly this evening. Personally, I like Junes like this.

I'm a little concerned about leaving the garden and animals this week. Tom will do okay, but not my level of care. Of most concern is the potted plants and the broody hens.

My tomatoes that were burned by Neem seem to be outgrowing the damage. I pruned the damaged foliage and am hopeful.

That is all.

Got so many failures. . .some successes. No storms today. In fact, a picture perfect day! And guess what, though I did a couple walk-arounds, Not one little bit of gardening. I did the Sabbath. I worked on Wesley sermons, Bible reading/study, and a new book--How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth. Some of you will relate, some will not. All good.

I have the red bee balms, and as usual, they have mildew. Grew a bunch more this year. . . razzle dazzle??? They were supposed to be mildew resistant They ARE! Not a hint of mildew They're purple-pink I am liking them!! Shasta daisies are blooming. . . . and they're actually lookin good at this point. Perky and cute. More zinnias waking up. And my first ammi is in full bloom--I'm tellin' ya, friends, get ammis!

Rebecca, I've been thinking about the Diva thing. Diva is a gynoecious and parthenocarpic hybrid, which makes me think maybe there might be more "dud" seeds. But Johnny's sells it, so next time I'm buying from them. I looked it up and my seeds didn't come from the same place as yours. I should plant some cucumbers.

Babysat Saturday. Put sunscreen on the short people, but the red headed baby turned so read in the face I had to bring him in. Then with gardening plans for Sunday, woke up to dark skies and eventually rain. Sorry for those in OKC who got so much! Our yard is like walking on a sponge and the wooden cane I tale to the garden just sinks in.

We have decided to dig up desirable plants from the flower beds and put in pots and redo the beds. Weeds come through the fence and I can't reach the back of the bed so they are really bad. Since the dog is climbing the chain link, we may get a privacy fence, if so the beds would be disturbed anyway.

When I first started gardening, all I wanted was food crops. The longer I go, the more I want flowers...ALL.THE.FLOWERS. ha. My pansies are still blooming like crazy. But either the rain or a critter pulled up a coleus.

I'm rambling. Y'all have a good week.

Amy, I checked my seeds (finally found the packet) and they’re from Swallowtail. Are they good at standing behind their products? I may buy from Johnnys next season. They have several things I want to try. Many on the veggie board rave about Bolseno tomatoes.

Going to the chiropractor to get my back checked out and make sure I didn’t crack a rib. Enterprise gave me a brand new Toyota RAV-4 to drive. It’s luxurious and I won’t want to give it up.

Pulled the 2 beets that I got for mom this morning.

Y'all, it is beautiful outside! I'm about to go out again. Came in to fix dinner and do a few other things.

I was able to get one of the asparagus beds weeded and the other partially weeded. The front flowerbed is tidied up. The monkey grass needed to be restrained a bit. I'm proud of that bed. It's not going to win any "Yard of the Month" award, but when we moved here in 2014, it was only yard. It's finally looking like a real flower bed.

Tom is going to walk the garden with me in a bit and receive instructions. haha!

You know, I wish my cucumber would get with the program. They are growing but are being so pokey.

I hate to say this because I don't want to jinx it, but it looks like we might actually get a decent bean harvest this year. That was one of my goals for this year.

There's cute little fig fruit on the fig tree. It's such a tiny tree, though.

Rebecca, I hope your back feels better and there's no cracked ribs.

Oh! I caught and killed a SVB moth today! And two more squash bugs. Why am I trying to save this volunteer plant?! In other bug news, I found a green stink bug on the asparagus of all things. An occasional asparagus beetle still makes an appearance. Those little cutworms seem to be everywhere but not in huge numbers. (I think they're cutworms). White flies are still around. And some weird red beetles on the volunteer sunflowers that are growing in the burn pile.

I let Finn out this morning and he ran from one end of the property to the other, climbing up trees, acting like a total maniac and amusing my neighbor who had stopped to talk. He was tired of being cooped up apparently.

Okay--time to go enjoy the outdoors.

Rebecca, The flowers look great!

Jennifer, We had the heat pretty early Sunday. I think we made it up to 85 or 86, which was cooler than originally forecast, but that was fairly early (by noon, I think) and we already knew how y'all had been slammed by the bad weather up there, so were watching for it to arrive here. It was clear it was coming a lot earlier than forecast so we knew it would hit before we could reach our forecast high of 89, and it did, so the rest of the day felt pretty nice and mild. We had hail, wind (gusting up to 63 mph at our Meso station), and brief heavy rain (0.60" at our house) and then some parts of our county had trees down, a few power lines down, etc., but not the extensive damage that the Dallas area had, and the nearest the hail got to us was about 1 to 1.25 miles north of us. It is shocking how often the hail makes it to that area and doesn't come further south and hit us---it happens an awful lot. Our friends will warn us that the hail is at their house, and then somewhere between their place and ours, the hail disappears. I'm not complaining.

The cool weather last night and today were heavenly!

Amy, You and I are on the same page....flowers! I have veggie gardened literally my whole life, albeit always with herbs and flowers mixed in. There's always been tons of veggies raised and tons of time spent on food preservation and I think I'm burning out on doing both. That's why my succession planting now is all about flowers replacing veggies for the rest of this growing season. I'm going to go further next year and fallow the garden, at least in terms of raising veggies. There won't be any vegetables in the front garden next year, and I'll just grow some peppers and tomatoes in the side yard in large containers by the house....only enough for fresh eating, not for preserving. The whole front garden will be nothing but flowers and a few herbs, and I'll probably do that for 2 or 3 years in order to give the soil a break from the heavy demands made upon it by annual vegetables. I'll just plant a huge variety of flowering plants for myself, the butterflies, bees, hummingbirds and other pollinators, and have fun with it. It is so hard to rotate crops in a veggie garden where so many of the plants are nightshades (tomatoes, peppers. tomatillos, potatoes, daturas, etc.) because literally every bed will have some sort of nightshade every year, so I've never rotated crops terribly well in the front garden, and I am seeing more and more foliar diseases each year because of that. I think if I go 2 or 3 years without veggies in the front garden, maybe it will make me enthusiastic about growing veggies again, and maybe I'll go back to growing too many of them. Or, maybe not. Time will tell. Maybe I'll be crazy without my veggies, and will go nuts filling up the back garden (voles and all) with them. We'll see.

Today was supposed to be a garden day, but Chris called really early and asked if I could keep the girls here this morning because they had a sick tropical bird and needed to rush her to the tropical bird vet in Dallas. Of course I said yes. We had a lot of fun together, but didn't venture out into the garden with its mud and mosquitoes, so tomorrow I'll make up for it by working extra hard. Our morning low is supposed to be 59 degrees, so I want to be up and outdoors early to enjoy the rare treat of having such cool morning air in June. Hopefully some of the mud will be less squishy tomorrow morning than it was today, and I'm hoping for enough wind to keep the mosquitoes away.

Rebecca, I've never had any trouble with Swallow Tail Garden Seeds, and I buy a lot of seeds from them. They have a reputation for standing behind what they sell and replacing unsatisfactory seeds, so if I were you, I would not hesitate to contact them about your seeds' germination rate.

Jennifer, Ha! My instructions to Tim when I am away is that he is not supposed to touch anything in the garden. He is a plant slayer (though not intentionally). I hope Tom does well with the garden and chickens while you're away.

Cutworms usually hide just beneath the soil surface during the day and then feed, cutting down plants at night. So, if you are seeing caterpillars during the daylight hours, unless you are pulling them up out of the ground as you weed, they probably aren't cutworms. However, that's not 100% true---in the south we do have one species of cutworm that climbs the plants and cuts them off well above ground. I almost never see those here. Maybe you're seeing those...or armyworms. I am seeing tons of army worms. I kill each one I find. On any given day, I bet I see 10-15 kinds of caterpillars, both pest types like army worms or canker worms and beneficial ones like swallowtail cats or variegated fritillary cats. I found a first instar army worm yesterday afternoon on a small plant in a flat sitting on a table. I pulled the army worm off the plant and killed it, but don't even know how it found its way up there to the flats sitting on the table to begin with. The only years I really have trouble with caterpillars damaging plants in large numbers are the really wet years, like this one.

Cucumbers need consistent sunshine and heat, so perhaps June's weather will give them what they need as May's weather clearly did not.

It sounds like Finn was just loving the cool, lovely, dry weather! I love watching cats running around enjoying themselves like little maniacs. There is such joy in their play when they are having fun like that.

The long-term outlooks continue to show June weather is likely to be cooler than usual and wetter than usual. These are typical El Nino conditions, and it is hard to complain about mild weather, though I certainly wish all the flooding would stop.

Dallas got slammed by the severe storms not too long after they passed through here, and the storms seemed to intensify as they hit the hot, humid air in parts of Denton and Dallas Counties, where their wind was even worse than ours, and there was massive tree damage and power lines down, as well as a construction crane falling onto an adjacent apartment building where one fatality (so far) occurred. There's still almost 200,000 people in the DFW metro area without power, but large contingents of utility trucks from other areas (from as far away as Alabama and Mississippi) have been rolling into Dallas today, and that will help Oncor get the power back on a lot more quickly. I feel like we kind of lucked out here---since rain had been missing us for a couple of weeks, our soil wasn't heavy saturated so we didn't get the flash flooding like y'all had in the OKC metro area, and we weren't quite as hot and humid as Dallas, so our wind was a little less extreme (max of 63 mph here versus 71 mph there).

Tonight on the evening news, they mentioned the prospect of heavy rainfall this coming weekend. Really? Again so soon? At least maybe we get a couple of nice days between now and then.

Dawn

I need to catch up on posts but wanted to drop in with a few comments.

Dawn - I'm creeping in on your hail record. Whichever morning we had the bad storms roll through over the weekend, we got more hail which puts me at a count of 7 times this season. It wasn't large and there wasn't a lot but there were a few lima bean sized stones - which was loud enough to get me out of bed and over to the protected window across the house to see what was happening. I was in bed with bronchitis and noticed it was darker at 8:30 a.m. than when DH left for work around 6 but was exhausted and completely ignoring the tweet alerts on my phone since there hadn't been an emergency alert for a Thunderstorm Warning. About the time Ben called to warn me bad weather was coming, the hail started and when I picked up my phone to answer I saw a tweet from NWS saying golf ball size was possible. I panicked since it had just started and I was already seeing bean sized, but it didn't get larger or heavier and stopped right away. Thank goodness! About 10 minutes after it passed I got an actual Thunderstorm Warning notification on my phone. This has been a pattern lately - I get notifications from twitter faster than the pushed emergency alerts. Same thing happened when the tornado was nearby a week or two ago. I rushed to the garden after work to move my hanging baskets under cover and while I was out there, saw a tweet for a tornado warning near Piedmont. I ran inside, put the kid in the bathroom and the dogs in the laundry room then turned on the TV to get the details. If it had been moving more easterly instead of northeasterly, it would have already been on top of me before the sirens went off or the emergency alert sounded on my phone.

I got the first cherry tomatoes of the season yesterday - sungolds and orange sunshines. None were completely ripe, but the sungold was double the typical size and almost mealy. I was a little surprised, but with this weather, I shouldn't be. My lettuce is long since spent. It did not disappoint though. I had the equivalent of a 10' row and got roughly 3 bushels using the cut and come again method. My coworkers were gracious enough to help me with the overflow. Next year though, I'll donate to a food pantry or compost it. Believe it or not, bringing lettuce to work has put me in the middle of a ridiculous battle between HR which wants to start an internal CSA of sorts using overflow produce donated by employees and an anti-CSA camp. It's absolutely absurd and I haven't appreciated being the poster child for it because it morphed tremendously from the idea HR pitched me (a one-time "tasting") and turned into a battle that's gone all the way to our legal team. Anywho, with the lettuce gone, I need to get more of my dwarf basils going underneath my tomatoes. Green beans are starting to produce well and I have a few bell peppers that will be ready probably around the same time as the first beefsteak tomatoes in a few weeks. My Aristotle basil is super adorable but because I had it in a hanging basket, it has already bolted. The plants are only about fist-sized, so I need to grow it somewhere the roots will stay cooler so it can get a little larger, but I don't think it's the right candidate for under the tomatoes. We'll see. Sweet potatoes are setting slips. I'll probably plant my first tub of those this weekend.

Question about ajuga - Is it as aggressive as creeping jenny or will direct sun keep it nipped back?

In addition to the rain garden I've mentioned needing to work on, there has been a creekbed project that was going to be more my husband's baby than my project since it involved mostly hardscaping. I did a little bit of work in that area to address some drainage problems I caused when I stored a pile of topsoil under a tree - at the top end of this would-be creekbed. Now, I'm thinking of turning it into a more naturalized/landscaped creekbed. I haven't forced myself to sit down and draw a plan, so right now I'm struggling to resist buying all the plants that I think I might want over there. I've also intentionally neglected to mention this plan to the hubs. I won't be able to describe my vision accurately and he'll end up picturing an overgrown ditch. Nancy, I've finally found a place for your rocks though. I'll use them as a small outcropping like they're poking in through the fenceline.

It's been so long since I posted here that there are a million other things to include, but I'm tired. It's amazing how quickly not being able to breathe will wear you out. Beware of this respiratory bug going around - it's a viral bronchitis and it's knocked me on my butt.

Dawn, is Chris' bird okay?

I think they might be cutworms (the ones I mentioned yesterday). I found them while weeding. The soil is wet so it comes up with the weeds and has to be shook off. The cutworms shake off with the soil.

I like your painting, Nancy. I'm not sure "like" is the proper word, but it's moving.

Megan, I hope you feel better soon. You've had more than your fair share of illness this year. I'm confused by the CSA battle. Sorry you're having to deal with that too.

I picked up the rental car today. So, it's getting real. I get so anxious about leaving my home even if it's for a fun vacation. And, this trip will really stretch me because I'm "in charge" of getting us there. Stretching is good for us, though.

I haven't packed yet. But will do that soon. I want to walk the dogs.

I'm pretty sure I have work lined out. I do so many little things out of habit, that it's hard to remember everything I need to remind the interns to do. My "old" intern will be out of town too...and a regular volunteer who knows my job almost as well as I do.

I did walk the garden and the first Sungolds are almost ripe. My mouth actually started watering when I saw them. It was hard not to pull one and pop it in my mouth. I'll let Tom have them as they should be ripe tomorrow or Thursday.

Other than that...not much to report. Things are growing and coming along nicely...but probably not worth talking about now.

Oh, Nancy. I picked up a couple of seedlings from you that were marked LB petunia. They are not. I kept them in their little pots waiting for them to bloom so I could see what they actually are, but unfortunately Tom moved them into the shop to clean the shop porch...and I forgot about them. They died. (out of sight out of mind, I guess) Did you have any other plants marked LBP that turned out to be something else?

Also, y'all LBP people...can they "volunteer" 20 feet away from where they were planted the previous year? I have something coming up along the back of our house. The leaves look like LBP...some of them are about to bloom. I'm going to ask Tom to not weedeat there. I'm curious.

I have something I brought home marked LBP that’s growing into a vine.

Ouch! I am so sorry! Everything I had marked LBP and planted were LBP! What???? Growing into a vine. . . . hmm. You'll have to let us know what it is, Rebecca!

Yeah, mine were vine-y too, Nancy and Rebecca. I'm so curious. Let us know, Rebecca.

Nancy, I love the painting that tells your life story and find it interesting your foretold your own happy golden years with Garry. I think deep in your soul you somehow knew that the golden years/decades would be blessed ones. Everyone I know who has retired finds themselves so much busier than they ever were when they worked---and it is the good, happy kind of busy because they're doing things they love to do.

Megan, I thought of you when I heard hail was falling up there, and told Tim "I think Megan is going to beat our hail record". I was hoping I was wrong about that, and just hate that y'all got hailed upon yet again. I am glad the hail wasn't any bigger than it was. Is it NWS tweets that are slow to arrive? I've noticed their computerized systems are having a lot of trouble these last few months---I'm guessing they have massive issues. Back in May when we were having all those storms, the NWS webpage was so slow to update that often we weren't seeing warnings pop up on the webpage map until they were about to expire. I was seeing them more quickly on FB and Twitter though. Our local Emergency Mgmt officials still were getting them directly from the NWS quickly and posting them in our GroupMe pages (one for first responders and another for SkyWarn Spotter network personnel) so I would see them twice on my phone long before they ever showed up on the official NWS webpage, tweets and FB posts. I think I might have been incredibly frustrated on those severe weather days if it wasn't for my GroupMe groups though. Oh, and during that time, our NWS radio transmitter that serves southcentral OK was out of service on a couple of crucial days, so warnings couldn't come that way either. They got it fixed as quickly as they could though.

I'm sorry you're ill and wish you a speedy recovery. Chris came down with something a couple of weeks ago and ran a persistent fever for a couple of days. The fever just wouldn't break and finally he went to the doctor, was tested (we all were guessing it would be bronchitis) and had Type A flu. He was so frustrated to be sick with the flu in late May/early June, but he is a firefighter and runs a lot of medical calls all day long when he works his 24-hr shift, so it would not be surprising that he caught the flu (despite having the flu shot).

The CSA battle sounds crazy and I hate that you got dragged into it. Why do people have to make everything into such a battle nowadays? Why can't people just be nice and get along?

Jennifer, His little bird, Sunny, which is one of the parrotlets, is fine. She had some sort of ear infection. They had a hard time getting to the vet....made it to north Texas and discovered all the power still was out, more than half the traffic lights weren't working, etc. The vet's office had no power and had sent out a FB notice saying so, but Chris and Jana never checked FB that morning on their way down, and hadn't called the office because they left here well before office hours began. Personnel were in the office, awaiting the return of power, and checked her and diagnosed her by flashlight. The vet is wonderful and has told them that when they have a sick bird, because of the long commute involved, they should just hop in the car and head down and they'll work them in any time, but usually Chris does call them and let them know they are coming---it was just that it was so early in the day he knew no one would be in the office yet. There are not many vets that specialize in tropical birds so this vet office seems to stay busy all the time, and I cannot imagine what bird owners would do if this vet retired without finding someone to replace her in her bird practice. Luckily, she's nowhere near retirement age.

Sorry, I must have missed you said they were cutworms. If you have SlugGo or SlugGo Plus, just a sprinkle of it on the ground will take care of the cutworms. I never have used it specifically for them, but just learned that when I used it for pill bugs and sow bugs (which are having a massive population explosion at the present time) that I often saw no cutworm damage either.

I have had LBPs pop up in unexpected spots. For several years I grew them in a bed beside the old garden shed, which is up by the house and greenhouse, not down here near the garden, and I'd find random bunches of LBPS in odd spots....in containers nowhere near their bed, in a separate garlic bed about 15' away from where I had planted them, in the driveway, etc. I am thinking maybe birds plant the seeds because some of my LBPs that volunteered were in places where I don't think the wind or rain runoff could have placed them.

Have a safe trip and enjoy your vacation. It always is good to get away, though I do not like leaving during the growing season either.

I worked hard in the garden yesterday, multitasking in each bed as I worked my way through the garden. So, I was simultaneously weeding, deadheading, harvesting and planting Magellan Ivory, White Profusion and Polar Bear zinnias in each bed as I worked my way through the garden beds. I got 2 and 1/2 flats of plants tucked into just 4 raised beds. I harvested more beds than that (beans, tomatoes, peppers, onions) but only got the weeding, deadheading and planting done in 4 beds. I also weeded each path as I worked on the adjacent beds. This rain is keeping new weeds popping up daily. It would drive me crazy if I thought about it for too long. I'm hoping to get another 4 beds done today, but awakened to rain that is expected to last through at least 10 a.m., so I won't be getting an early start. Today's flats include more zinnias (Benary's Giant white zinnia, Oklahoma white zinnia and one of the tall white cosmos, though I don't remember its name). I have three kinds of cosmos growing from seed in flats, and think the tall one is Double Click Snow Puff. When I decided in May to use flowers as succession plantings instead of succession planting veggies, I wanted easy stuff that would blend in with existing flowers and herbs already planted, so I ordered and sowed seeds of several kinds of white zinnias and white cosmos since white goes with everything. It also was sort of a strategic move based on the prospect of a cooler summer. Often, white zinnia flowers don't last as long in the heat of an OK summer as other colors of zinnias do, so I figured a cooler, wetter summer would be the ideal time to plant a lot of the white ones with a reasonable expectation that they'll be happier in our summer weather than they normally are. Time will tell. They'd better be happy because we're certainly going to have a lot of them.

Our tomato plants are at peak production right now, and in sort of a stunning way. None of the plants really look good, except the ones in containers where I'm better able to control both moisture levels and soil splash, but they're all producing well anyway. I picked a 5-gallon bucket of tomatoes yesterday and I only harvested half of the plants. Today I will do the rest after the rain stops. I really am not ready to have to deal with processing tomatoes every night after working in the garden every day, but here we are.....it is that time. Once I get enough ziplock bags of frozen processed tomatoes for salsa, I am going to start yanking out plants right and left. I already have enough tomatoes in the freezer for at least 6 batches of salsa and 3 batches of either tomato sauce or soup, and enough tomatoes sitting in rows on the table to at least double that, so the tomato plant yanking will commence very, very soon. I told myself that I would not be a slave to canning and dehydrating this summer, and I meant it, so once my salsa and sauce goals are met, the plants can come out and go onto the compost pile. Even if I keep nothing except the 12 plants in pots (six in the garden, six up by the house), we'll still have more tomatoes than we ever could eat fresh, so I can use the excess ones at that point for making tomato sauce, etc. I love tomatoes but when you plant far too many of them on purpose as I do, the excess harvest gets old quickly. The upside is that when I have too many plants, I can get all the preservation done in a really compact time frame---certainly well before the end of June. By the time the heat arrives later in the summer, I won't be a slave to a hot, steamy kitchen because the tomato preserving will be done. Since our rain largely stopped here a couple of weeks ago and we've only had a couple of small rains since then (half an inch one day, 6/10s another, and only very light rain so far this morning), the flavor of the tomatoes is getting better. The early season tomatoes suffered too much from rain watering down the flavor, although even with watered-down flavor, home-grown tomatoes still are better than those from the grocery store.

The heaviest producers in the garden so far are Early Girl, Bush Early Girl, Early Doll, Cherokee Purple, Cherokee Carbon, Compari OP, Heidi, Mule Team, Chef's Choice Orange, Sun Sugar, Barry's Crazy Cherry, Black Krim, Jetsetter, Juliet, Aldi Orange, and Stump of the World. You know how some people will utter that phrase "I regret nothing"? Well, that's not me this year. I regret planting such a huge number of tomatoes. I'll add that I always get this same almost-panicky feeling when the first huge harvest rolls in...like....what what I thinking and what am I going to do with all these tomatoes? Usually I get over it. This year, though, I am going to get over more quickly---not by killing myself trying to process them all for weeks and weeks on end but by yanking out the plants one by one after I've harvested as many tomatoes as I want from each variety. I'm very close to yanking out plants now. Actually, I pulled out one Bush Early Girl yesterday after I harvested its last two fruit. It was the first plant to produce a harvest and it produced a lot of tomatoes over the last 6 or 7 weeks, but it is done now and happily (I assume) decomposing on the compost pile. I could have left it and it would have bloomed (it already had begun another bloom cycle) and set more fruit, but I'm at the stage where I don't want more tomatoes. We have been eating them daily since the start of May and are starting to tire of eating them constantly. I love tomatoes but am starting to feel like I'm overdosing on them. More plants are likely to follow the Bush Early Girl to the compost pile today, assuming the rain moves on out of here and I can get out into the garden to work.

Have a great day everyone.

Dawn

Help! Something is eating holes in my cabbages! What do I do? No visible sign of worms or bugs. Just holey leaves.

Check the backs of the leaves for very small green cabbage worms or cabbage loopers. If you find them, treat the plants with an organic caterpillar killer that contains Bacillus thuringiensis 'kurstaki'. It will be listed on the label as the active ingredient and is a bacteria that affects only lepidoptera, basically destroying their gut from the inside out. Avoid spraying it on non-targeted plants because you don't want to hurt desirable butterflies/moths. If you aren't seeing any signs of caterpillars, you might have snails or slugs feeding on them at night. Going out into the garden with a flashlight after dark might help you determine if you have them. If you have snails and slugs, you can handpick them off your plants and drop them into soapy water to drown, or you can treat with an organic snail and slug bait that contains Iron Phosphate as the active ingredient. The one I use is called Slug-Go. If you aren't seeing either of the above, watch for small grasshopper nymphs. I'm seeing them right now between 1/8" and 1/2" in length. They are hard to kill organically. I've been snipping the in half with my garden scissors when I see them, but they still outnumber me about 1,000 to 1. Birds will eat them though. Hope this helps.

Today I worked in the garden until almost dark, after a delayed start due to rain this morning---not enough rain to make much difference, less than 1/10th of an inch. I weeded, deadheaded, harvested and planted 4 more raised beds and their pathways, tucking in the rest of the Oklahoma White Zinnias, Benary's Giant White Zinnias and Cosmos Double Click Snow Puff into new homes in those 4 beds. I killed another bee assassin bug (lurking on a cleome where there are no flowers in bloom yet, so I'm thinking it is a dumb bee assassin bug since a smart one would be on a flowering plant) and several grasshoppers and stink bugs. The stink bugs we have in the garden are bigger than the juvenile wheel bugs so I'm trying to keep their population down until we have more mature wheel bugs. I also killed several army worms. The grasshoppers outnumber me about 1,000 to 1, and I'm not liking how many I'm seeing hatching out.

I'm about 60% of the way through the front garden this week, and hope to get more beds weeded and tidied up over the next few days. It looks like heat for the weekend and then rain, so I need to be really productive on Thursday and Friday. The next raised bed to tackle is the asparagus bed, and I haven't weeded that one for 2 or 3 weeks now, so it is a mess. It won't be a mess when I get through with it.

Dawn

I just got in to denton. Tomorrow barn comes and thr electric and plumbing and ceiling go in Saturday. My sister gave me new toilet, lights and bathroom flooring.

I have plants with me to plant. When I come back in 2 weeks it will be permanent. Does not seem

Kim, Yay! It sounds like you are making some real progress towards getting settled in your new space.

I know it is going to be hard to be further away from your little man, but I'm glad you'll be closer to your mom and other family members. I can see why it doesn't feel real.

We were in Denton very briefly yesterday---just driving through it on our way down to Ft Worth to visit my mom in the hospital (on the 15th anniversary of my dad's death). She has been hospitalized for over a week with three infections, including MRSA, and after they got those mostly under control, then she had surgery 2 days ago to replace her dialysis port for the umpteenth time. She's doing really well, I think, for a 90 year old woman who is as ill as she is. She still has her sense of humor despite it all.

So, there was no gardening for me yesterday as the whole day was spent on the road going down there and back, or with her there. We did stop at the CostCo in north Fort Worth on our way home so we wouldn't have to make a weekend trip down there---it only made sense as we'd be driving right by it. That's one weekend chore out of the way before the weekend even gets here.

Then we drove home via the country route, taking backroads from North Ft Worth through Haslet, Ponder, Justin, etc., through Decatur to Muenster, in order to avoid the multiple large traffic backups on I-35 between Denton and the Red River (mostly between Gainesville and the Red River). It was a lovely country drive and we marveled, as always, at the rampant growth in that area and the conversion of farmland to endless housing developments and shopping centers, validating our belief in 1997 when we started searching for land that we needed to go north of the Red River to get far enough away from the metroplex that the rampant growth wouldn't catch up with us too quickly.

Obviously there was no time in the garden for me yesterday, but today I can stay out there forever or until the heat/humidity/wind drive me indoors. I already have roast beef cooking in the crockpot this morning, because the point of going to Muenster was to stop at Fischer's Meat Market and stock up on good meat. Now I have a freezer full of yummy stuff, and we ate dinner in St. Jo before making the scenic drive across the Taovayas Indian Bridge to return to far western Love County and, eventually, home again. The nice thing about the long country drive was I got to look at all the wildflowers and hayfields. The wildflowers in bloom in Texas were pretty much the same ones we see here, though I also saw a magnificent stand of standing cypress high on a ridge in Wise County, compared to the one lonely standing cypress plant we have here near our gate. We don't really have the soil for it, but I sowed some of the seeds anyway and get an occasional plant here and there some summers. The hay fields have benefited from all this rain, and the second cutting that everyone is getting looks almost as good as the first cutting, for those here who already did an early cutting (some did, some didn't). I was a little surprised by how much drier than us Texas already looks in some spots. They've had a lot of rain like us, but it looks like recent rainfall is missing some of them about as much as it has been missing our place.

Heat and humidity return today and we'll be near 90 degrees today and this weekend, unless rain-cooled air from those of you further north makes it far enough south to cool us down. This morning our TV met showed the Euro and GFS models with their predicted rainfall for the next few days and, while some places near us could get 2-5" of rain, the latest run of the models show our specific area mostly getting missed by the rain. At best, we may get a bit over an inch.

I still have a couple of flats of plants to continue succession planting as the veggies finish up and come out. I have no regrets about this decision. I know the garden will look awesome filled with flowers and I won't be killing myself trying to keep up with the harvest from a large vegetable garden all summer long. As it is, tomatoes are piled up all over my house and I already am tired of dealing with them. I'll be happy to get the canning all done as soon as possible. I believe I am getting to the point where I could retire from canning and really not miss it, though I suspect I'll always can at least some salsa every year, though not the large quantities I've done for the last 10-15 years. I harvested all usable sized tomatoes from 24 plants on Wed and took out those plants. I don't miss them. They had produced a lot of fruit already and have Septoria Leaf Spot and looked terrible. I had sprayed them with a fungicide once and just didn't want to get on an endless treadmill of doing that all summer long. There's plenty of tomato plants left, but most of those are short-timers too. Once the canning is done, I just need a small handful of plants to keep us in fresh tomatoes for the rest of the summer. It really is getting too hot to keep putting small seedlings in the ground, so I need for the existing vegetables to hurry up and get out of the way of my flowers. lol. The grasshoppers will, I am sure, be just as happy devouring ornamental plants all summer long instead of devouring edible plants, as will the many caterpillars that are everywhere this year.

I'm heading outdoors now. Hope everyone has a great day.

Dawn

Yes, I'm glad you are about to get settled, too, Kim! Best to you!

I cannot even believe you are about done with tomatoes, Dawn, and I haven't even begun yet! Well, not true. We had four Sungolds for our salad last night--and they were so yummy. And we had our first pepper diced up in the salad, too.

It is 65 degrees here and raining off and on. I feel like we live in a whole different state than you do, Dawn! LOL I'm closer to Jacob's weather than yours.

Reading about what is going on with your mother just blew me away. Cannot believe at 90 that she is withstanding so many problems. Amazing.

I'm kicking myself over handing off not LB petunias, but viney somethings. For the life of me, I cannot remember which viney thing I was growing that I couldn't find. I planted several "viney" things to take to the school, and when it came time to collect them all, I only had ONE container of a couple of them--cannot remember which one. Maybe cardinal vine. Well, for the three of you who have viney things instead of LB petunias, would you let me know what it is when it grows out? I am sorry about that! (I have a billion LB petunias HERE! LOL)

I've been spending a lot of time weeding and have been trying to concentrate on getting hay or wood chips down on the places I've weeded. The job never gets done, does it! The wood chips I got last year are breaking down splendidly, so I'm enjoying getting them moved to the beds. And the alfalfa hay I got last year is nice and kind of broken down, too. Good stuff.

Stump of the World? You have got to be kidding--now I better go look it up.

After reading to use Sevin dust for (aphids, I think) the tomatoes because it's safe, I fell over the cliff so had to go sign up for OK Organic Gardening on FB. LOL Oh my oh my. I hate it when folks so cavalierly give out misinformation.

I intended to keep succession planting flowers, but I think I was just so burned out with the grow cart seedlings, couldn't muster energy to grow more this past month. I need more zinnias out there, so glad you mentioned them, Dawn. I will get some sowed.

I was visiting with one of the old-timers in Wagoner the other day, and she told me that when she was a child here, her family always dug up potatoes on July 4. That sounds about right, looking at my potatoes this year. And onions and garlic aren't looking like they want to be pulled any time soon, either.

I laughed so hard at the FB post yesterday, with all of you telling the poster to beat/smack/whip the tomatoes. Very funny. And if it quits raining, perhaps I will go do that, though getting more and more all the time.

Okay. . . . . . I may go vacuum. Have a good day, all.

PS: The Indian Stripe I got from you, Dawn, has FAR more tomatoes on it than anything else does yet. There are lots of blossoms on all, however, and they get nice wind where they are, so between the wind and a handy flyswatter, they get plenty of movement. The peppers are slowly showing up now.

I'm still building energy back up and last night was the first time I've done much in the garden in almost 2 weeks because of the combo of rain and not feeling well. I ended up moving my shishito peppers because a tree has gotten overgrown and is casting more shade than it did last year. I'm sure they have grown, but not much since they were planted so they were easy to move and looked nice and perky this morning. Hopefully, today's heat and humidity don't do a number on them. I'm struggling to get okra going and will have to replant it this weekend. It's on a very long to-do list I have going. One of the weekend chores includes going to the garden center to get some replacement plants for a few flowers that have gotten spindly in their pots, so I'm sure I'll walk away with some other things I wasn't planning. Otherwise, I'm still working on sweet potato slips. They're taking their sweet time. I tried Vardaman for the first time last year and didn't get great performance out of them. Somehow the soilless container mix I had them in was very low on nitrogen so I chalked the problems up to that. Now however, after sending off one slip, I haven't seen any additional growth from the Vardaman so I doubt I'll be growing those next year. They're really going to have to turn things around and quickly to change my mind, but I will give that one little slip a chance and see what happens.

Kim, I'm so glad to hear you're getting settled in. It's a good thing you're not in OKC. I'm still trying to get my mom out of my house and keep asking anyone I can think of if they'd like a roommate - I had one "almost" but no dice so far. If you were here, I'd be offering her up to you! LOL

Thats all from here. Hope everyone is having a great week.

I do hope you're feeling better, Megan. How're Ben and you holding up with Mom! I sympathize. . . what do you think is going to happen? Does Mom just feel comfortable living with you all? Crazy. Blessings to you all.

One of our favorite families came to celebrate Father's Day with us today--daughter and hubby with the four rowdy outlaws. I LOVE that family. Oldest boy is a freshman this coming year, and the other 3 are 1-3 years younger. 14, nearly 13, and two that are 11. Three boys, one girl. And the funniest thing is how laid back the parents are. Good good people! LOVE the kids. And as of this weekend, 3 of the four kids are actually TALLER than I am and the girl is maybe 1/2" shorter! She's 11 years old, for crying out loud!

Actually, this is only my third year of REAL gardening here. My 5th year here. First year, invested in some perennial shrubs. . . hydrangeas, several herbs that are still going, cannas that need to be re-homed, daylilies and Rose of Sharon and yuccas that were gifted to us. . .

First year--we got married in Nov of 2014, but I couldn't retire from my job in Mpls until Feb of 2015. So I'd been down here and told GDW that instead of burning leaves, he needed to just transport them to the former dog pen. . . . and so he did. We had 5 feet high oak leaves.

I will NEVER forget the day I arrived at my new home, here. We'd spent 6 weeks downsizing MY stuff up there, me making hard choices. Me having hard time separating from my kids there. We moved on February 13, 2015. . . Garry had already made one trip up and back, transporting a lot of my quilting fabrics, sewing machines, books. And on our final trip, we had my little car packed, his truck packed, and a U-Haul trailer behind. And when we left Mpls, it was 15 degrees at 4 pm with snow, and all the way down, until Missouri, it was snow. Then it evened out. . . we arrived here at 4:30 a.m. on Valentine's Day and broke open a bottle of wine. I drank most of it. And we sat out on the deck and drank it! Surreal!! 15 degrees and snow and then sitting out on the deck having a glass of wine! It was blissfully warm and friendly.

Well it was a major digression, but a great memory! LOL

My second year, more perennials, building some beds. . .

Third year, I found you guys! Very good year. Thanks much. XOXO

Nancy, I am just SO over tomatoes in excess. I believe the term would be burned out. I'm not tired of eating them so much, but just tired of there being so many....sitting there, waiting, waiting, waiting for me to do something with them. By the end of this week, after I process the mounds and mounds of tomatoes piled all over the kitchen counters and dining room table in various stages of ripeness, I'll have enough frozen for salsa and can take out all the plants I want and just keep a few for fresh eating. Keep in mind that if I took out another 2 dozen plants this week, I'd still have about 30 plants left, so it isn't like all the plants are going away overnight. I love having a great selection of fresh tomatoes in all shapes, sizes, colors and with many flavor variations, but realistically speaking, we can only eat so many before they go bad, so most get preserved in some shape, form or fashion.

If tomatoes were all we had, maybe it wouldn't feel like too much is piling up, but the green beans (7 varieties) are producing heavily as well and that many beans take quite a while to harvest, process and cook for fresh eating, or process for freezing. A part of me is happy when I walk into the garden each day and see all those beans that need to be picked, and another part of me moans and groans and thinks about the afternoon hours I'll spend working through the pile of freshly harvested beans. On the other hand, by the end of June, if not earlier, we'll have a year's supply of green snap beans in the freezer and I can consider my work with them done as well, hopefully before the heat gets too bad.

I enjoy edible gardening but am ready to largely take a break from it and mostly grow flowers for a few years. I'll probably plant a succession crop of pink eye purple hull peas this week even though I said I wouldn't, because I cannot imagine summer without fresh southern peas, but once the main bean and tomato harvest that's keeping me so busy right now is over, life will calm down. I think one sign I'm really burning out on edible gardening is that as each crop has finished being harvested and the excess, above what we can eat fresh, is processed and frozen, canned or stored away, I just feel relieved it is done. Like a job. Maybe that is it. It increasingly feels like so much work instead of so much fun.

Maybe whatever viney plant you gave away as LB petunias will be a fun plant to have and to grow anyway.

Stump of the World is a yummy big pink beefsteak tomato, saved for us all by the legendary Ben Quisenberry, who also is the one who saved Brandywine, Mortgage Lifter and dozens if not hundreds of other heirloom tomato varieties, and he was doing it decades ago when heirloom tomatoes were not widely grown. He lived to be almost 100 years old and was responsible for saving and sharing so many of the heirloom varieties we have today.

I'm glad Indian Stripe is doing so well for you. It always performs well for me, and is so much more productive than its near-twin, Cherokee Purple.

Megan, I hope you are feeling better and have been able to spend some happy time out garden shopping and working in the garden. This weekend's rain probably is setting back everyone again.

Good luck finding the right situation for your mom.

Nancy, Isn't it amazing how quickly those kids grow and get so tall? Time marches on so quickly nowadays.

That's a great memory of your move down here. It probably is a good thing you weren't moving here in July or August....might have been too hot to sit out on the deck and drink wine!

I need to go start this week's thread. I'm behind, behind, behind, reminding me of the words from one of those Day-Glo posters of the 1960s and 1970s "the hurrier I go, the behinder I get".

Dawn