Dawn I am so jealous! My green beans are producing just enough for a small mess at a time and little fuzzy green worms have hit them this week. Squash are producing well and zucchini was great till the biggest plant just cratered overnight due to squash bugs. The only tomatoes we have had are a few cherry toms. I haven’t had enough to even eat the last few years let alone can or make salsa. The peppers are setting on but they and the okra need some dry warmer days. We got another 1.8” last night and it’s raining hard again now. Our farm is so saturated that even flat ground is squishy. We had enough wind last night to down 2 Big trees but lucky they didn’t fall on fences. The purple hull peas are looking good - of course that usually means aphids will show up soon. I’m sure if it i didn’t have raised beds I’d have no garden at all. Cucumbers are about 2” long so should have those in a couple of days.

Happy Father’s Day to all - my Daddy passed in 2016 and Mom last year - it’s a tough adjustment to make. I still catch myself thinking I need to tell them this or take this from the garden to share.

Enjoy your parents and your children. Time passes before you realize it.

Yes, my raspberries are on their fourth year, and this year, I'm almost sick of eating fresh raspberries (which due to all the rain have a very muted taste).

I need to remove some trees that somehow are growing in the middle of plantings (sigh). I would like to thin some of the shrubbery that I didn't plant that is getting bigger and bigger too (and shading more).

Strangely, all my passionflower vines died that were on the trellis for the last four years during the winter. However, the lawn is absolutely full of them, so I just mowed around them the last two weeks and will dig some this week and transplant back where I want them. I hate migrating vines.

farmgardener, Well, you know, your weather has been a lot tougher up there than my weather down here, and I think that has made a crucial difference. We simply haven't had the heavy rain the last 3 or 4 weeks that most of you have had, and we've had a lot more sunshine and a lot of warmth. The plants really perked up and got a lot happier and better looking after the soil had dried out a lot too. The heavy rain came back today so now we're far too wet, and we'll see how long it takes for more Septoria Leaf Spot or bean rust to pop up now. I bet it won't take long at all.

We had gotten so dry that I had to water the in-ground plants twice last week, and of course, I've been watering the containers a lot over the last 3 or 4 weeks because the rain had mostly dried up. After getting 2.1" overnight and today, I imagine I won't have to water again very soon. We're headed for temperatures in the 92-94 degree range just a couple of days from now, so the soil may dry out more quickly than I think, especially if we have sunshine.

I am sorry about the loss of both your parents. We still have our mom, who turned 90 this year, but Daddy died on Father's Day in 2004. He's been gone for 15 years, and I still think about him every single day. Life is so different with one parent gone, and I cannot imagine what it must be like to have both of them gone. I agree with you about how quickly time passes.

dbarron, Well I guess you and I both know from experience that too much of a good thing is still too much, right? I used to think it was impossible to have too many tomatoes, but have slowly changed my mind about that over the last decade. Too much really is too much. Oh, and for everybody's amusement, today I counted six tomato plants growing in my big compost pile, and three of them have decent sized fruit on them.....because the last thing I need is more tomato plants or more tomatoes. Maybe the deer will eat the tomato plants as they think anything and everything on the compost pile is for them.

I wonder if it was the excess moisture in the winter months that killed your passionflower vines? That's terrific news about having them sprouting in the yard though. I hate migrating vines too, but in this case, it is going to work out okay for you.

Jennifer, Welcome home.

You shouldn't get over growing veggies for some time now as it all is pretty new to you, right? I never expected to get over it. I still like growing them. I think I'm just burned out because I've grown such huge amounts for the last couple of decades, and always have preserved whatever excess produce we can't eat fresh because that's what my dad taught me to do---you simply don't waste perfectly wonderful home-grown produce. I've grown serious amounts of veggies in my own garden since the 1980s and that is a very long time. Maybe I'll miss having all those fresh veggies. Maybe I'll resent having to buy them instead of raising them. Maybe I won't. Time will tell. I don't think I'll miss growing the vegetables at all because I think I'll still be happy as long as I'm growing flowers and herbs. Maybe I'll be happier because I won't be spending tons of time in the kitchen preserving food. Maybe it is the canning, freezing and dehydrating that I'm really burnt out on doing more so than the growing. We'll see.

I hope to work in the garden on Monday because the temperatures still will be kinda cool, though the garden also will be very wet. If not, I have piles and piles of tomatoes to process, and more waiting to be harvested from the plants I never got to last week---about 30 of them have fruit waiting to be harvested, and it is far beyond the breaker stage too, so I cannot put off picking the rest of those tomatoes either.

Dawn

Looking good, Rebecca!

Mine, hmmm. Out of control. Nicotiana's falling down; I whacked off the hollihock zebrinas for Round 2 I have made a horrible mistake with tomatoes this year, so whatever shows up before they all fall down, I'll be grateful for. I have them staked up to just one stake per plant, for the most part. I'm sure you all know how disastrous that's gonna be. I AM going to invest in good cages for next year! SWEAR. I might have this year, if I'd been able to make up my mind soon enough. That's going to be my MUST do thing for next year.

Isn't it funny you all, how different we all are in our approaches to our gardens? I love it in painting, in quilting and now see it here with gardening. I'm learning toward wood cages at the moment. I can't quite figure out how hog or cattle panels would work in these 4' or 5' wide beds (that I actually jump up into.)

I'm terribly pleased with the potatoes and can hardly wait to dig them all up. I wanted to today, but GDW reminded me they weren't QUITE ready. Wow has HE learned a lot. LOL. Also, I dug up a third of the garlic. Most are average to a little below average, a few were huge, and several were little. But the THIRD was app. 30-35 plants, so I feel safe in saying we will have enough garlic for the year ahead, and in fact will happily share plenty. They're really not complete ready, either, nor are the onions, and I am ecstatic about the onions. Yay, we are gonna have ONIONS!!!

I'm lookin' at it this way, Dawn. Potatoes, onions, garlic. No canning. No freezing, even. WOW, my kinda crops! (Sweet potatoes would be, too, George, except I'm the only one who would eat them.

Having said that, Dawn, I LOVED the salsa I canned from last year. And so will can far more salsa this year. We ran out by January.

We still haven't REALLY had to water. I've watered a little for newly transferred plants. Had it not been for them, wouldn't be watering yet. And yet, we've had no flooding or too-much water problem. In short, up to today, we have had very friendly weather. SO strange. One mile to our east, our poor friends at the Ft Gibson Lake Marina have been closed for nearly a month. They opened briefly last Fri and Sat, then a bad storm blew threw and they suffered major wind damage. One mile away, we had a couple tiny branches on the ground. Our friends at the Lincoln School in Wagoner. . . Oh, they had so much water that wouldn't sink in, that our tomatoes there are very very nearly dead--but are still producing tomatoes! as are most of the other things I put in there. Squash all have BER Plus it is very windy there. Here. Not hardly ever windy. Oh--Dawn--or someone who knows more than I do. Should we take off those tomatoes and add nitrogen. . . or just fertilize and pray?

I didn't realize how easy I had it until I tried a garden in town! LOL. . . I'm sure if I could be there 24/7, it's be easier. It's hard, being 10 miles away. I envy their sun; but overall, here is easier.

Farmgardener, Yes, I can relate to the strangeness and difficulty with your mother and father both passing away so recently. My own Dad died in 2002. He was my idol. He was the kindest, sweetest, most loving man. And yet so strong and strongly convicted to kindness and love, not necessarily in a religious way, but in his moral compass way. That was tough, and like Dawn, I think of him nearly every day. So we four siblings and Mom were left. (The oldest of MY two sons, Russ, had died in 1986. That, of course, was the worst time in my life.) In the past 3 years, both brothers and Mom died. Now there is just my sister and I. I was particularly close with my brother 4 yrs older. We talked via phone at least once a week. I miss Mom and the other brother, of course. But my close bro. . . it is overwhelming at times. And like you, I keep feeling I need to tell them something, or worse, think. . . oh my gosh, I need to call. . . . love to you.

Okay, I will admit to you all that I am a complete novice with canning. Was forced to help Mom, growing up, but hated it. She got so cranky. LOL. So of course I wanted no part of that. But being part of this forum, knew I wanted to try it. So did the past 3 years. NOW here's my deal. I want to grow salsa ingredients and can salsa. Have no desire to can ANYTHING else, cept tomato sauce. Definitely no pickles, no jam . . .. . we are only 2 people living here. Further, we only eat once a day. Further, we can only eat so much! LOL SO MY real interest is in medicinal herbs. Those I will harvest in large doses. However, we love fresh cukes, so want them. . . lots of onions and garlic and potatoes. . . We love cabbage and broccoli. . . but given the trouble, we may or may not grow 'em. Garry LOVES lettuce and we we were very happy with our lettuce this year. So we are finding our way, little by little, in what we need to be growing.

Looks good, Rebecca! Thanks for sharing your pictures. I might come back with a couple of pictures too.

Nancy, don't you get hungry only eating once a day? I can do that, but get headachy and weak. Back when I was 17, I went 6 weeks on only tea, water, and diet soda. BUT, I never want to do that again. I was so weak I could barely climb the stairs at my school.

My thought on gardening. Only grow what you'll eat or what you find pretty or interesting...and what isn't too stressful.

Dawn, I am fairly new to growing veggies--started with a tiny raised bed in 2014. I did have a couple of pots of tomatoes at our old house. AND had a veggie garden in 1994 when we were very young. You have grown so much for not only your own family but for gifts and such. I can understand why you're over it. Maybe I'll get tired of it someday. Maybe I won't. I'll probably only grow enough to put up for us, though. If I had 52 servings of green beans for the year, that's all I need. Same with all the other veggies. I get an odd sense of pride and pleasure when my meals come mostly from my garden. In the summer, I can happily eat sliced tomatoes, boiled eggs and southern peas (cooked with peppers/onion/garlic) for dinner. Even better if I have melon (and apples when the columnar trees were producing).

I just dislike the food system in our country...and world really. Thing is, if "it" got bad, you all know how to grow your own food if need be.

Some of you saw my FB post today.

The flowers are still happy. Tomatoes are slow to ripen. But, they are making fruit. Disease is lingering, though. My beans are growing, but they are diseased too. I hope they can outgrow it. I don't feel like running down each plant. But mostly it's good and bad without giving boring details that I've probably already said once or twice or more.

It's SO wet. And squishy. I would be okay with no rain for a week or two.

(I miss the weather in CO)

Okay....who brought the shishito pepper to SF? Either it was mislabeled (by me or you) OR I got one of the rare hot ones. I chopped it up for my veggie stir-fry tonight. WOW! It was hot. So very good, though.

I choose 5 eggs for one hen to hatch. I'll (hopefully) choose 5 more tomorrow for another hen. I know I want green eggs and would love to get one of Stella's. Of course, her egg would only be half Minorca because Jean Luc Picard is a barnyard mutt (a handsome one, though). This process is interesting but is a little stressful for me.

Just saw on FB that one of our neighbors shot 2 coyote pups. I don't know how to feel about that. We saw Momma coyote this evening on our walk. She was in his parents' backyard, near the garden (he lives next door to his parents). Supposedly he saw at least 6 puppies. He has two little girls so I can understand his concern. Also, I'm pretty sure Momma coyote took Peggy to her puppies. (although a hawk was circling around the chicken yard even with me standing outside!) I wonder if she has "feelings" about her pups being shot. Anyway...

I'm rambling like I do.

Rebecca, Everything looks great! Have you seen squirrels this year? I don't think we are seeing as many of them running around the yard, though they seemed plentiful earlier in the spring.

Nancy, Yep, your tomato plants likely will make you wish you'd used cages. Oh well, plenty of people let their plants sprawl on the ground with no staking or caging at all, which (oddly) can cause the plants to produce more fruit, perhaps because the branches lying on the ground tend to root into the ground. The downside is that sprawling tomatoes often lose more fruit to rot diseases, so I think that probably cancels out the fact that more fruit form. At least yours aren't sprawling on the ground and have their one stake to help hold them upright.

Root crops are great and easy to store, though the challenge with them, particularly with potatoes, is to use them up before they start sprouting if you grow a lot of them. I have half the potatoes dug and hope to get the other half dug this week. The half I haven't dug have later DTMs than the ones I already dug, but those late plants died back last week so now it is just a matter of getting the digging done. When I get the potatoes dug, I'm going to succession sow carrots there....not for us, because summer carrots usually aren't all that sweet.....but because there are so many swallowtail caterpillars all over my dill and fennel that I need something else growing and coming along for whenever all the dill and fennel get eaten back to the ground, which will be relatively soon. Carrots probably are my best bet to get new plants going for them in June because dill and fennel aren't happy about being started in the hot, hot weather that is setting in now with the arrival of summer.

I might sow more dill and fennel seeds along the edges of the garden, but I don't know how they'll do this late. We've never had as many swallowtail cats as we have this year, and I saw two more swallowtail cats laying eggs on dill yesterday. There's already at least three distinct groups of the cats in different sizes on the current dill plants, which have been trying hard to regrow and bounce back from being devoured by previous rounds of the caterpillars. They ate all the dill on the north side of the garden right down to the ground, but the ones on the south side of the garden have managed a little regrowth and should last another week or ten days. After that, there's still the parsley that is mixed into the flower border.....so, clearly, this year they prefer dill and fennel to parsley, for whatever reason. I also had a newly emerged swallowtail sitting on a watering can yesterday, hanging out there for a couple of hours, just soaking up the sun and, maybe drying its wings. There's plenty of flowers in bloom for the butterflies in terms of nectar, but despite my efforts to grow lots of host plants for them, they are eating it all at an incredible rate.

If the tomato plants are not growing well at the school because the roots are waterlogged, feeding with nitrogen will not help them at the present time because the waterlogged roots cannot take up the nitrogen right now. I'd wait until the ground dries a bit before feeding them if the waterlogging is still present. If the ground is not overly wet, you could go ahead and feed them and they undoubtedly will benefit from it. I wouldn't remove the tomatoes unless they are ripening. My tomato plants have been really skimpy foliage-wise, which I am sure is related to the constant waterlogging of the roots, but have produced huge loads of tomatoes. Even Tim, the non-gardener, has commented several times on how odd it is that the plants have produced so much fruit despite skimpy leaf production. He is as baffled as I am by the fact that the fruit has been so plentiful on plants that look so sad. During our drier weather the plants have made more foliage, but the recent heavy rain is causing all kinds of radial and concentric cracking of the fruit, so sometimes you cannot win for losing.

It must be so hard to lose your siblings. That is one thing I haven't experienced yet, though my younger brother has been fighting throat cancer for quite a few years now and we've all worried so much about him. He is not one of those positive-thinking cancer warriors who is determined to beat it. Instead, the first thing he did when he found out he had cancer was to plan his funeral because he was sure he was going to die soon and that attitude doesn't seem to have changed much. He ignores his doctor's orders and isn't a cooperative patient at all, and yet, he is still here despite all that.

I have a love-hate relationship with canning, but always will make salsa. I have been through periods of heavy canning and enjoyed it at the time, but have slowed down in recent years in terms of how much I can, and I don't miss canning every day, which gets old after a while, especially after many years of doing it. I wish I'd grown cucumbers and made pickles, but the area intended for cucumbers was waterlogged at planting time and is waterlogged now, so it probably was a good decision to skip planting them. I don't make much jam or jelly any more either, preferring to eat the fruit fresh without all the added sugar.

I wouldn't survive eating just once a day. I can feel my body slow down and become less productive if I even try to skip lunch while working outside. That slowing down and working less effectively is often the signal that reminds me it is time for lunch because I don't really watch the clock when I am outdoors. Breakfast usually is just a protein shake, or sometimes eggs, but I have to eat lunch and dinner, though dinner can be light if I got really hot while working outdoors and don't have much of an appetite for dinner because of that.

For so many years (decades) I tried to grow/preserve everything we like to eat from the garden, and it just gets exhausting, so gradually I tapered off on the canning. It really was all the post-harvest jobs you do to preserve the harvest that was more tiring than the actual growing of the food itself. I used to even make and can catsup, bar-b-q sauce, chili base, pasta sauce, pizza sauce, etc., and nowadays I tend to just buy those. In some really great tomato years I dehydrated tons and tons of tomatoes---the humid climate's version of sun-dried tomatoes (most commercial sun-dried tomatoes aren't sun-dried either and are merely machine-dehydrated, which makes you wonder about truth-in-advertising) and I don't do that any more either. Sometimes I'll make fresh pasta sauce when tomatoes are in season, but more and more, I just can salsa and leave it at that. There's a tiny part of me that misses spending a part of each and every day in the summer in the kitchen canning, but there's a much larger part of me that is relieved that I don't do that any more. I know that I definitely do not have the same energy level at 60 that I had at 40 or 50 or even 55, and I think it is okay to change one's gardening and preserving practices as one ages. As we redo the landscape over the next year, I am going to employ the use of a lot more ground covers and shrubbery on sloping areas to make them easier to maintain as we get older---mowing sloping hillsides can be dangerous at any age, but more so as you enter your happy golden years.

The conversion of this year's garden from veggies to flowers is just as fun as succession planting more veggies, but with the caveat that in the hot summer month, I'll just be cutting armloads of flowers to carry indoors and arrange in vases instead of endlessly harvesting and canning/freezing the excess produce. The bed where I removed the tomato plants a week or two back and succession planted flower seedlings looks really great already. It looked bare and empty that first few days, but the seedlings I transplanted took off quickly and are growing very well, and I am very pleased with that. Yesterday I weeded the asparagus bed, and then wherever there had been weeds, I tucked in little transplants of violet cleome and purple datura to go with the other allowed weeds (Verbena bonariensis and Malva sylvestris) that fill the areas between the asparagus plants. Oh, and comfrey. There is comfrey in the west end of that bed, though I didn't plant it there and don't especially want it there since it is such an invasive monster. The bees do love it though, and so do the hummingbirds.

Jennifer, For most of my life, I've grown most of our food. It used to be routine for me to can up to 600 jars of food per year and to fill up three deep freezes with all the produce. I was really good about labeling everything, rotating it so that the oldest stuff was eaten first, etc. and we always had plenty of jams, jellies, pickles of all kinds including relish, and salsa to share with friends and family members. There is no substitute for fresh, home-grown produce or for home-canned produce without all the commercial additives, and I know that. But, after decades of doing it, I am tired of it and bored with it and starting to do different things. I don't think the world will end if we are eating Heinz catsup instead of home-made stuff, for example, but at times I miss having that much food put up and stored away and just the whole sense of accomplishment that comes with that process. I do not miss spending every morning in the garden harvesting and every summer afternoon in the kitchen canning. For so long, I'd be on my feet during the peak of the season (often for 6-8 weeks straight, day after day) until 11 pm or midnight, finishing up the canning and getting all the canning gear washed, dried and ready for the next day. I think that last year may have been the first July 4th since we moved to OK that I was not in the kitchen canning tomatoes all day long. I do not miss that part of it at all. I also don't miss the crazy days of harvesting 100-200 ears of corn over 1-2 days and having to husk, blanch and freeze all of it that we couldn't eat fresh. I'm older and I need my sleep! lol.

I do wonder if doing so much less canning and freezing will make me miss all that food preserving and inspire me to start it up again. I don't think it will, but you never know. I still love having fresh meals that include home-grown produce, but think I'm over growing an excessive amount just to preserve it all. The amount of work in doing all that is immense. I know that I am a modern day wimp---my grandmothers not only raised and preserved virtually all their family's fruits and veggies, but made bread pretty much daily and did a lot of meat preservation too, raised their own eggs and meat chickens (and pigs and cattle), milked the cows and churned the butter, etc. They grew flour corn and had to dry and preserve their own corn meal. I cannot even imagine doing all that nowadays. Even in my heaviest food preservation years, I was a slacker compared to them.

Wet years are much more challenging for gardeners than dry years. In a dry year, if you can irrigate enough, and if you planted tomatoes and beans early enough to beat the heat, you still can get great harvests without too much effort. In a wet year, every disease on earth can pop up, and there's always ten times as many pest insects in the wet years. If I had to choose, I'd choose a dry year over a wet year, as long as the dry year is not another 1980 or 2003 or 2011.

I cut back all the Malva sylvestris 'Zebrina' and 'Mystic Merlin' really hard as they had hollyhock rust and I'm just hoping the new growth comes out clean. I've also removed some lower leaves on the zinnias because they had fungal spots, but newer growth looks fine. Tomato plants have Septoria Leaf Spot, but I'm just ignoring it now because I'm taking out the plants as I strip them of their ripe fruit. There's a little rust on some of the bean plants' lower leaves, but I am just ignoring it since the heat makes them fairly short-term plantings anyway. We just don't need that many tomato plants all summer long for fresh eating, and I'll be through processing tomatoes for freezing or canning in another week or two.

The two things I'm finding hard to ignore are the stink bugs and grasshoppers. Never, ever, in a long lifetime of gardening have I seen stink bugs in the numbers I am seeing them this year. There's hundreds, if not thousands, of them on our property. Apparently really wet years must be perfect for them. I kill several dozen stink bugs in my garden daily and I am not even making a dent in their population. It is the craziest thing I've ever seen---and they aren't easy to kill when they are adults because they can fly away. I've been mostly cutting them in half with my scissors when I see them, or smashing them with my garden trowel. I remember over the years that many tomato gardeners on GW in south TX have said repeatedly that after the huge hordes of stinkbugs arrived (I think the timing for them was early May) there, they'd just hurry up and harvest their ripe fruit and yank out their plants because there was no way to deal with the huge stink bug population, not organically and not synthetically either because stink bugs apparently have developed immunity to most synthetic pesticides. They'd already tried everything, including trying to protect individual tomatoes with organza or tulle bags that would exclude the stink bugs, and just couldn't win the war. I couldn't even imagine what level of stink bug infestation it would take to drive a gardener to distraction....but I think I am seeing that this year so now I have a much better understanding of it. Yesterday when I harvested tomatoes, I'd find 5-`10 stinkbugs on every single fruit. The number of cloudy spots (from stink bug stings) is unreal. Even if I already didn't have the attitude that I was going to yank out plants after the big canning harvest was done, I'd have developed that attitude real quickly this week. I've been fighting the stink bugs all along, but now can see I am losing the battle. They also are all over the beans, but the bean harvest isn't a long-term thing here anyway, as summer heat causes blossom drop, so I expect we'll get beans a few more weeks and that will be it for them. I am more worried about how badly the stink bugs will affect the peppers once most of the tomato plants are gone. I have Surround WP and probably will drag it out of the old garden shed and use it later this week on the pepper, okra and remaining tomato plants.

I wouldn't feel bad about shooting coyote pups, though we choose not to do it. They are predators and if you allow them to heavily populate an area, they will go after pets with a vengeance because they are hungry and they see pets as food. This morning, when Tim let the dogs out into their yard at 5 pm, I could hear the coyotes taunting them and was feeling fairly anxious about the dogs' safety until he let them back inside. (They weren't even out for 5 minutes.) Coyotes will come right into a fenced yard after dogs, cats, chickens, or whatever. I know they do attack humans (Frisco TX has had a huge problem over the last 12-15 months with coyotes attacking adult joggers and dogs.) though it normally is fairly rare for them to do so. I feel like we have a lot more coyotes up close to the house now because the river has been running so high for so long.

There's nothing wrong with rambling!

We had to euthanize our 19-year-old cat, Shady, the sole survivor of our original first litter of kittens that were born here on our place. He had outlived his last surviving sibling by about 5 years, and his health had been increasingly poor for several years. He'd gone downhill significantly in the last week, but still meowed to go outside and lay in the sun, even though he was getting so frail he could barely walk. I will miss him. We don't have any old cats left now, only middle-aged ones and young ones. Tiny Baby is our oldest, and obviously is not tiny or a baby any more. He was born early in 2010 so is slightly less than half as old as Shady was.

I need to get off this computer and get outdoors. I've already washed, dried and folded one load of laundry and made fresh hummingbird nectar to refill the 7 feeders, and I always feel like I am so much more productive early in the day because I'm a morning person for sure. I hope to get a lot of garden work done before the heat and humidity drive me back indoors. Both are expected to be significantly worse than yesterday. I was able to work outdoors until almost 5 pm yesterday, though that was only possible because several times I took cooling breaks and came indoors and sat down and drank a glass of tea while cooling off enough to make it go back outdoors and work some more. I don't know how people managed to work outside all day every day before air conditioning was invented. If I couldn't cool off periodically and revive myself, I couldn't handle a full day outdoors now. My dad would say that they did it because they had to, and he used to remind us kids (often) that they didn't miss air conditioning growing up because they never had it and didn't know what they were missing.

I only have a half-flat of flowers left to tuck into empty spots left by the removal of spent veggie plants. That's not much left from the 17 flats of herbs and flowers I seeded in May after I made the decision that I wouldn't succession plant veggies this year. Most of the remaining flat is candletree plants, though there's still a few salvias and one or two purple daturas. I wish I'd sown about three more flats because the lower end of the garden along the northern fence line still needs something planted there after I get it weeded (hopefully by the end of the week---right now it is a squishy, muddy pit of mud again). I probably will sow southern peas and zinnias there, or maybe sow some seeds of the vining Korean summer squash along the fence line. Oh, and 17 flats is not necessarily as many plants as you might be thinking because they mostly were not 72-cell flats, they mostly were 12 and 20 oz styrofoam and plastic cups.

I only got 2 beds weeded, deadheaded, harvested and replanted with succession flower crops yesterday, and didn't even finish 100% of the weeding of the adjacent pathways because the paths are so muddy now beneath the mulch. That leaves only 2 raised beds to do today. I did spend a significant portion of yesterday harvesting tomatoes and beans, and expect to do the same today.

Have a great day everyone. I hope the thunderstorms expected later are not too bad.

Dawn

I'm sorry about Shady, Dawn. He did live to a great age. Wow. I've never had a cat live to 19. Pretty sure Asher was 14 when we euthanized him. He might have made it to 19 but we unknowingly introduced feline leukemia into our house and pets. And didn't even realize it at his death...but I'm pretty sure that is why he got sick. Anyway...I'm sorry for your loss of Shady.

It really is a flower year, isn't it. Maybe it's because they seem to like the wet weather and the veggies do not. Really every year should be a flower year--they are so cheerful.

Okay...where was I? Speaking of predators, I just heard Jean Luc Picard start making a noise and noticed the hens were in the pen mostly except Rosslyn Kaye. She was in our neighbors' field and the hawk sitting on their back fence and then on their horse feeder. She came running and squeezed under the fence so is safe. But that was close. They are locked in their pen now.

Anyway...I had a thought. I'm sure Tom is going to love this (He won't). We are pulling up some pavers that was the floor of a dog kennel (had to have pavers so the dogs wouldn't dig out). The pavers are in the "backyard" just a few feet away from the Chaste tree. Why allow this to go fully back to grass/weeds? Why not use this opportunity to make a nice flower garden? (I was talking about flowers before the hawk interruption.) My dream is to make the "backyard" between the house and shop into no lawn. Just pathways and beds of flowers/shrubs/ornamental grasses. That's a huge and expensive dream...but this bed could be a start. Tom would prefer an easier mowing area--straight rows. But what if we eventually didn't have to mow at all in the backyard? Because it's all flower beds. I think it's a winning idea.

Hazel, I agree with Dawn on the coyote pups. I have had opportunity to shoot pups and didn’t because they were “little and cute and just babies” , then a few months later when lost a newborn calf or several guineas I regretted my tolerance. Often coyotes have wild game like rabbits and birds but choose to take the easier prey - like new calves, chickens, and smaller pets. They will also gang up on larger pets or a vulnerable cow, and even if they don’t kill them they can hurt them terribly. I tolerate them until they start invading our stock and pets. Then I don’t feel guilty for shooting one.

Now that I have a vehicle w cargo space, I’m looking for more cattle feed tubs. Anyone? I’ll come get them or meet you somewhere.

Yay! Remember that back bed I ignored until last summer because the Bermuda grass had totally taken it over. I named it the Bermuda bed. I kept after it finally and got it all cleared. Then loaded it up with cardboard, tons of leaves, wood chips. This year, I haven't really put anything special in it, other than the enormous lantana I moved and split into two bushes, but had only weeded a third of it. The crab grass and some Bermuda had filled up the other two thirds. So got after it this afternoon--so delighted it was so easy to weed because of the mulch. I ended up taking one of the lantana out several days ago and moved it to the shop bed. Just not enough sun in the Bermuda bed. So I have 3-4 cleome and 3-4 bee balm left over from before in there, a clump of 4 o'clocks, some dwarf coreopsis, I'm having a hard time thinking of what I can put back there that will do well with the part sun. Actually, maybe I'll just put more bee balm and cleome--they actually did pretty well. And I need something tall in that bed so that we can SEE it from the deck. I already have a TON of bee balm in the big center bed, and the mildew-resistant violet and pink ones are performing really well! Oh. I know! Roselle! And more cypress vine! I actually don't have any bee balm or cleome seeds. Maybe I'll quick order some. I do have plenty of zinnia seeds, but no place to grow them! Bummer.

Another fun thing this year are the anise hyssops. Both for the smell and the fuzzy little blooms. Ammis are growing and beginning to bloom. The ammi visnaga re-seeded like crazy. . . some are even popping up in the driveway! They're very small still, though.

I was not in the mood to mow today, but it was either mow or go clean house. Haha! No contest. Garry had gone to Muskogee to get weed eater part. I declined going with him because I told him I had so many things to do here. So I HAD to mow while he was gone. It's getting to be hot enough (and so humid) that I'm doing shortcuts now. If I have trouble seeing where my mowing path was, I don't mow--which makes the mowing not take quite as long.

WE are having our first BLTs tonight! With Cherokee Purple! Can hardly wait.

Dawn, I am hoping for all these lovely tomatoes to break color and hurry up and produce before I have to take them out because of the failure to properly cage! I am antsy to get fall stuff planted. I'm not even sure what I'll plant, other than a couple cucumbers.

I am so sorry your sweet Shady passedj, Dawn. After 19 years, you must have been very attached.

HJ, I think that is a splendid idea for the back yard! When I used to go on garden tours in Minneapolis, my favorites were always the ones who turned their yards into all plants.

Rebecca, good move, getting a vehicle with more room! You definitely needed it, right?

That eating once a day thing isn't a and fast rule. Once or twice a week, I'll fix bacon and eggs for GDW and will have a bite, too. Occasionally during a day, we might pass by the cashews and have a few. Or maybe a piece of toast with PB. And often, not. I tend not to eat anything if I'm working or outside. Don't even think about it. Same for Garry. Sometimes Garry goes to town for breakfast without me. And if we meet friends for lunches, we will sometimes have a PB and J sandwich in the evening. I know it sounds backward, but I usually have the most energy on an empty stomach--a lot more than after eating--especially breakfasts.

But now I'll be off for our BLTS!

Thanks, y'all, for the kind words about the passing of Shady. You know, I was thinking yesterday that I barely could remember life here in OK without him. He was a huge, strong, muscular cat as a young adult and had a very skinny brother who looked identical to him from birth except for the difference in their size, hence their names, taken from a song that was popular when they were born....Slim Shady. I used to call them to come in before sunset by hollering Slim Shady, and even after Slim passed away a few years ago, Shady responded better to me hollering Slim Shady than just Shady. He had become a tiny, little, shrunken old-man cat these last few years, which was sort of astonishing to watch as he aged, and he had a great zest for life even up to the end. The sunroom looked empty yesterday without him sitting in his favorite spot, sunning himself while staying cool in the air conditioned comfort of his favorite room.

Jennifer, It is so hard to keep the chickens safe at this time of the year with so many predators around. I'm glad Rosslyn Kaye made it back to safety. I hate those close calls like that.

I'd love to have a backyard that is no-mow too, but Tim might have mowing withdrawal. I know that I do not understand his love for riding that lawn mower around in endless loops....I call it 'the zen of mowing'....as it almost seems to mesmerize him, but we have lots of other open land to mow, and my project for redoing the landscape includes gradually taking out all the grass in the back yard and replacing it with beds. Tim might not be crazy about the idea right now, but I bet if we look 10 years down the road, he might be happier with a bit less to mow when he is in his 70s. The problem for us is that deer and rabbits eat everything, and Tim is stubbornly resistant to fencing the front and back yardsto keep them out, so I'll either have to plant only deer-resistant plants, which excludes a lot of what I want to plant, or I'll have to twist his arm to get him to finally put up more fencing. It doesn't even have to be a pretty fence....I could make it pretty by covering it with vines.

farmgardener, It is a fine line we walk out in the rural areas, isn't it? I love the idea of peacefully coexisting with all the wildlife, but I also know that is not our reality. There are times we have to shoot varmints, largely because of their predatory nature. I've tried to explain it to city-dwelling friends and family memers who have no clue by telling them "everything eats something, and everything gets eaten by something" but they still really don't understand that it usually is our animals being eaten by the wild things, and not vice versa. I think that if someone has always lived in the city and never had much contact with folks who live in rural areas they just have no understanding of how much wildlife we have. I have a friend who is in her 80s now and has lived here her whole life. A few years ago she felt sorry during a drought year for a coyote raising pups near their stock pond and fed them. She'd feed them stuff she was going to throw out, like stale bread or crackers or whatever. I was horrified---they have cattle, including calves. Who feeds coyotes that are on your land and can get your calves? Her kindness was overriding her common sense at that point.

Rebecca, If nobody you know has spare cattle feed tubs, you might find them on Craig's List or FB Marketplace for $5 or $10 each. I've given Chris 7 of them this year to temporarily hold lilies he is raising to go into his new landscaping beds (which aren't even built yet because he gets rain about every third day) and he is in love with those large tubs. I 'loaned' them to him, but I bet I never get them back. lol. That's okay. They look awesome filled with plants, even while they are, right now, just the temporary home for those plants, and would look just as good filled with permanent plantings. A lot of the ranchers around here have no appreciation for how many gardeners would love to get their hands on the feed tubs and often burn them, along with feed sacks, to get rid of them. That's how I got my last batch of feed tubs---Fred told Tim to come and get them for me or he was going to burn them, and Tim ran right over there with the pickup truck to get them. That was 10 or 15 years ago and we're still using them, though a couple of them have cracked after all these years of exposure to OK sunshine and weather.

Nancy, It's too bad you don't have more room for more zinnias. The butterflies love them so much, and mine are finally coming into full bloom now at the east end of the garden. They have been sort of pokey this year---a bloom here, a bloom there, but have been waiting for real heat before taking off and going crazy with blooming. Well, real heat is one thing we have now, so it is their time.

There's never any contest between mowing and housework is there? I'd rather be outdoors.....but someone, eventually, needs to clean my house and I suppose it will be me, maybe tomorrow because it is going to be too hot to do much of anything outside tomorrow. I think today is my last good day out in the garden for a while because tomorrow we start hitting the mid-90s with heat indices in the 100s. We've had that a couple of times this year, but just on a scattered day here or there. Unless we get a cooling rain shower, the hot days are about to set in to stay a while. I'm not even sure today will be that great after about 10 a.m., but I'll just do as much as I can while I can.

Congrats on the first BLTs of the season. I am sure y'all enjoyed every yummy bite. I have continued removing tomato plants after I strip them of all the full-sized fruit that has broken color. I hope to take out 12 to 15 more tomato plants today, and then this afternoon and tomorrow I need to process all those tomatoes for salsa-making. I feel no guilt about removing tomato plants when it suits me because I plant too many and I don't want endless huge harvests. I am starting to feel the same way about all the bush bean plants---they are living on borrowed time because once we start getting tired of eating fresh beans all the time (we aren't there yet, lol) and I have plenty in the freezer, then they are out of here and on the compost pile. Usually it is the weather that decides it for me anyway---we start hitting the mid-90s, they stop producing and then at that point they are nothing but spider mite hotels, and who needs that?

The garden is so full of pest insects this year, and they do seem to go after the veggies a lot more than the flowers, so I think it will be interesting to see if growing only flowers for 2 or 3 years causes any sort of change in the pest population. There are more and more predator insects showing up now, so at least there is that. Their population never builds up to higher levels until there's plenty of pest insects for them to eat, so I never see too many of them until at least June.

Losing a very old cat to whom you are so attached is very hard---in recent weeks I could see his health really declining and knew the day was coming, but still took it really hard when it was time to tell him good-bye. I can tell the other cats are grieving for him too---they were very subdued yesterday.

We were supposed to get rain last night and had watches and warnings and such. All we got was tons of thunder and lightning and no rain. It isn't that we needed the rain, but I hate it when the weather radio wakes us up in the middle of the night to warn of us approaching severe weather and then all we get is the noise and light show and not the rain. I'd rather just get sleep without the interruption if we aren't going to have actual rain fall.

Now, I'm headed out to the garden to weed and harvest and such. I did string/snap a lot of beans yesterday, set aside enough to cook for dinner, and then blanched and froze the rest. That should mean I don't have to harvest beans again until about Friday unless the ones I left on the plants have a sudden growth spurt. I've been trying to spread the harvest out over various days so I'm not having to process every thing every day. I'd rather do beans one day, tomatoes the next, etc. The fun thing about succession planting flowers instead of edible crops is that the constant harvesting/processing of produce is tapering off already, and I mean that in a good way. I plant a lot and get big harvests all at once so I am able to can or freeze the excess, and then I'm done with it. I'm applying that attitude to tomatoes more this year than ever before and, to be honest, it feels good to know I won't be canning tomatoes all summer long. I'm looking forward to just having it all done. Unlike a lot of folks in wetter, cloudier parts of the state, nothing has been that late here and our harvest has rolled on as usual. We may have planted some things late, but still are getting the harvests at about the same time as always. I think that is interesting. And, of course, I never plant tomatoes late....I plant them early or not at all. lol.

Have a wonderful day everyone. We're expecting rain this afternoon and evening. I don't care what it does as long as it doesn't knock the TV off the air. We lose DirecTV reception every time it rains hard. Tonight my favorite summer TV show, Yellowstone, returns for its second season and I'll be very unhappy with the weather if it interferes in me seeing that one hour of TV.

Dawn

I’m going to keep loo for the feed tubs. The squirrels are starting to eat/shred the grow bags.

Kitty and Daffy faded away just about like Shady did (Kitty at almost 23, and Daff at 15). I love the Slim Shady story. You come up with some unique names!

We ended up with rain and wind during the night. But most of the plants held up fairly well. Only a half inch here.

Dawn--you watch Yellowstone on cable? Garry loved the show. But when the second season began (on Netflix, I think), it was pay on demand! He was so ticked off! So he didn't get to watch second season. Poor guy. I was glad I hadn't watched it since that's what happened. lol

The only things that seem slow to me are tomatoes, peppers. And some of the flowers. Well, all the heat lovers were quite behind, understandably.

I got totally sidetracked from gardening this morning, and ended up spending the entire day trying to find out what's wrong with the washing machine THIS time. I decided it was the control board, finally. . . so tonight I get to research washers in preparation for a trip to Tulsa tomorrow. So any of you hate--or love--any specific brands? I'm aiming for a low end one without fancy features. If we have a utility room, I'd look for a wringer! LOL

Rebecca, on our way to Colorado, we took the "panhandle" route and I kept noticing (on this very rural highway) blue "buckets" in their fields. Finally, I said, "those are mineral tubs!". I almost stopped to grab them, but didn't have permission, etc.

Admit it. Who went and listened to The Real Slim Shady?

I'm tired. Worked all day. Dealt with two interns. And a service project tonight, so not going to comment on anything. BUT, Fowler beans are my new favorite. Steamed some last night--YUM.

Rebecca, I hope you find some feed tubs. I love them. I wish I had twice as many as I have, but then, if I did, I'd just fill them up and grow more of "too much stuff". I'm really trying to stop doing that.

Those darn squirrels! They just will not leave you alone. That would drive me crazy. I find it supremely interesting that the squirrels here do not climb our 8' fence to get into the garden because I had assumed that they would. It has big wooden fence posts, so even the cats (mostly Pumpkin) will climb a fence pole and go into the garden if they want to get in there when I'm not out there and the gate is closed. Our squirrel population doesn't seem as large this year as usual, or if it is as large, they are staying in the woods more and in the yard less.

Nancy, We have DirecTV and have had it ever since we moved here. Because we are in a low-lying creek hollow in the already low-lying Red River Valley, there was no other way to pick up any TV channels here at all when we moved here unless you put up one of those huge TV antennas that look similar (in height) to the big ham radio antennas. Friends on much higher ground even had to have that sort of antenna to get TV reception, so we knew there wasn't much hope for us. lol. There also was no internet service and no cell phone service here in our neighborhood in 1999, or at least not in our low-lying part of the neighborhood. Things have improved tremendously since then, though it took about 10 years before cell phone service reached our house. For several years, though, we had cell phone service if we walked 300' down the driveway and stood there at the road. There still are places in a few remote parts of our county where there is no reliable cell service or internet service, though some people way out west can get cell service via a cell phone tower across the river in St. Jo, TX.

I confess I'd never heard of the Paramount channel before Yellowstone came along. I think Yellowstone is the most interesting TV drama today, though the violence and language both could be toned down and I wouldn't miss it. Season One last summer was only 10 episodes, and I was hoping that this season would be longer, but apparently it will be only 10 episodes too. They announced yesterday that they've been renewed for a third season in 2020. Kevin Costner is superb, but so is the entire cast and even though I think their methods are extreme, the Dutton family's focus on family is heart-warming. The issues they explore around the Dutton family's ranch, and everyone else scheming to find ways to get their hands on the Dutton's land to use for their own purposes reminds me a lot of what has happened in western states the last couple of decades, especially with the BLM.

Slim and Shady were easy to name because at that age, Chris liked Emimem and had that song playing all the time, and there we had two black kittens, one of whom was extremely thin by nature, so Slim fit him and then it was a no-brainer that Shady had to be named Shady. I haven't heard that song in ages, but I still remember it well.

We were under a tornado watch last night but the storms developed a couple of counties to our southeast in Texas and absolutely nothing happened here so by 7 or 8 pm they had dropped us from the Tornado Watch. Yesterday was hot and miserable and today and tomorrow are supposed to be more hot and more miserable so I'm taking a day off from the garden to work only on food processing today and am not sure I'll step foot in the garden tomorrow either, unless I get out there really early to beat the heat. I hope to get all caught up on preserving all the produce on these days it is too hot to be out in the garden, though I'd rather be in the garden than in the kitchen any day of the week. Cooler weather returns early next week, so that's probably the next chance to really get things done in the garden. After I harvested tomatoes yesterday, I took out the last three plants in Bed #1 and all but 5 plants from Bed #2, so those 5 plants are the sole survivors of the first 50 or 52 plants I planted in March. Nobody should feel sorry for me though as we still have around 30 tomato plants left. Those are the ones whose tomatoes I'll be canning next week. Removing tomato plants that still look pretty decent and still are flowering and setting fruit is hard, and very time-consuming, but I had to do it or trying to keep up with the harvest and canning would kill me. I keep reminding myself that the plants in the garden are supposed to serve me, not vice versa, and it is okay to take them out once the food production goals are met.

None of today's washers and dryers are high quality like they were back a couple of decades ago. Our first washer and dryer lasted us about 27 years. Our second set now is 9 years old and I have doubts it will make it to 10 or 11 years, and Tim has had to replace lots of parts on both the washer and dryer already. Both our sets have been Kenmores, but the newer Kenmore set is nowhere near the quality of the older Kenmore set. I dread the thought of having to shop for a new washer, dryer or both. There is a Laundry forum here at GW. You might go there and see what the folks there recommend. I find it frustrating to research them online---you can find good and bad reviews on all of them. I don't know what we'll get when ours die, but my one requirement for the washer is that it has to have a built-in heater so that the hot water will be hot. Nowadays, they have dumbed down all the washing machines to get better energy ratings, so that what is called the Hot cycle on all the ones without built-in heaters really is only warm and not hot. To get real hot water you have to buy one with a built-in heater and a Sanitize or Allergenic cycle (different manufacturers call the hottest cycle by different names). When I want to wash something in hot water, I want for the water to actually be hot. Our washer is a front loader, which I didn't think I'd like when we bought it, but I found that I do like it and it certainly uses a lot less water than a top loader does. We know people who have and who like virtually every brand available, and also know people who have had and have hated virtually every brand available. Several of the people Tim works with have had to replace washers and dryers that were only a year or two old, which has been extremely frustrating. These fancy models nowadays are so expensive to fix that when something semi-major goes out, the repair is more than the cost of a new machine, or so close to it that you might as well buy a new machine. We haven't had that issue, but ours are just old enough that they still were making quality machines, sort of, when we bought them. I think that making them harder to repair nowdays is a deliberate thing on the part of the manufacturers so most folks (especially those who won't attempt their own repairs) will just buy a new one rather than pay for very expensive repairs. So, it is hard to guess which ones are really good quality or, perhaps it is more accurate to say that there are lemons in virtually every appliance line. You know, we went through that with a very expensive Kenmore refrigerator that never worked well from day one and was very expensive to repair. When it was 3 years old, we replaced it with a Whirlpool refrigerator that cost less than 1/3 the price of the Kenmore, and it hasn't given us one bit of trouble and we've had it about 3 years. It works much better than the Kenmore ever did, so I think when it is time to buy a washer and dryer, I'll give the Whirlpool's real consideration just because we're so pleased with the quality of the refrigerator.

When I took out those 15 tomato plants yesterday, I replaced them with the rest of the nicotianas, daturas and salvias I had grown from seed as succession plants. I'm now down to just the half-flat of candletree plants and one six-pack of violet cleomes, and am likely to put those in the ground on the next cool day---probably Sunday, Monday or Tuesday---whichever day the weather seems most cooperative. I ran out of time to plant those yesterday, though some of them will go in the exact spots where the tomato plants were removed. It just got too hot too early in the day, and it doesn't seem smart to put plants in the ground on a day when the highs will be in the mid-90s. I'll wait for a day when the forecast high is only in the 80s. Our summer weather pattern has set in here already, which isn't surprising since it is the latter half of June now, and the cool morning temperatures only last a short while. Yesterday I was thinking "if it is this hot here, then how hot must it be in Dallas?" so I checked to see, and it was just as hot here as it was there at that point in time. Uuggghh. We don't need Dallas' heat.

Jennifer, I always have that urge with feed tubs too. Some ranchers reuse them. Some sell them. Some burn them. Some just seem to leave them sitting endlessly in the fields even after they are empty. I suspect that no matter how many I have, I'll always want more, but filling up a lot of them (especially all at once) does cost a lot. I'm reaching the point where I could be happy with my whole garden in containers, but the thought of filling up enough containers with soil-less mix to make that happen...well, that would be a budget buster for sure. I do find containers get a lot less weeds, but aren't totally weed free either. Weed seeds blow in or get planted by birds or whatever.

I've liked Fowler beans since I first planted them, which was either 2010 or 2011. I do remember they were one of the few things to produce well in the dreadful heat of 2011 when we first started hitting highs in the 90s the week after Easter, and most plants didn't produce because of the heat. Fowler beans did produce well, and so did Worchester Indian Red lima beans and one of the multicolored bush Lima beans whose name I cannot remember at the moment.

Y'all have a good day. I'm going to be up to my elbows in tomatoes in the kitchen.

Dawn

Ahhh. . . it's cooling down now that the entire deck is in shade. We only had heat index of 97, so not nearly like those of you south. Glad you left the dogs in, also, HJ! We left ours in, too.

Well obviously showing not only my age but also the age of my son--I'd never heard of Slim Shady. And BARELY knew who Eminem is. (But on the other hand, I was so into classical music, I wasn't aware of ANY contemporary musicians.) haha

Dawn--after I mentioned growing more cleome and bee balm last night, I recall that I hadn't seen any at Lowe's, so quick jumped online and express ordered seeds: Queen violet cleome, and red mildew-resistant bee balm. But won't have them til next year. Maybe I'll go round up some of the volunteer cleome and some of the many bee balm and move them over to that bed.

We zipped down to Muskogee earlier today. We thought if Muskogee's Lowe's had a good selection of washers, maybe we could do better than Home Depot in Tulsa. We scored! They had several low-end washers, as well as on up. We got a lower-end Whirlpool top loader--with DIALS! (Yes, H E and Energy Star)--because the old one caused us SO many front loader problems! Further, since we're not getting any younger we wanted not to have stackables in that small pantry where they are housed. A nightmare to get stackables in and out of there. No fee for delivery and installation! Yay! $20 to haul the bad one away. Because I'd researched them first, we sort of knew what we were aiming for and it took us all of maybe 15 minutes.

Laptop is NOT cooperating. I best go in to finish this--if it's not finished.

Rebecca, while walking the dogs tonight we stopped at a neighbor's house and I noticed *the* blue buckets. I asked him if they are mineral feed tubs and he said, "yes". Honestly I wasn't sure what mineral tubs were or what y'all were talking about....but figured it out when I saw those blue buckets sitting in the fields along the rural highway. ANYWAY, he's going to try to locate the source. Someone gave them to him. (He's going to give them to me. He has three). I'll let you know if he finds out the source.

Nancy, Eminem is crude. Funny, but crude. Your son was probably a little old for him and your grandchildren a little young. That's probably why you aren't familiar. I just happened to listen to popular music until Mason got her own car at age 17, so knew all of it. (We also listened to my weird stuff about half the time). BUT, Ethan doesn't listen to popular music, so I'm out of it now.

Didn't do much in the garden tonight. Picked more bush beans and asparagus. Ate both for dinner. The asparagus is winding down and I'm letting it fern now. I have cabbage that needs to be harvested. I'll probably do some of that tomorrow night and make coleslaw. We are having a Solstice party on Saturday-- a day late. I like to cook things from the garden for Summer Solstice. I don't have as much this year. The tomatoes are being so pokey as well as the peppers...and cucumbers.

I have one flower on my hydrangea that is purple. It is on the backside of the plant near the brick wall of the house.

I'm on Day 3 of broody hens sitting on eggs. They get confused though, so I hope it all works out. Obviously they can't be watched all day because I work. What happens is they get up for a few minutes to act nutty-- run around like maniacs, all fluffed up, dirt bathing, preening, getting a few drinks and few bites. During that time, another hen uses the "broody nests" to lay an egg, so the broody comes in and sits on another egg recently laid, in another nest. Then when the non-broody who is using the broody nest gets up, the eggs are left without a hen. I'm not sure how long they can be left. I actually gave Blossom some eggs too--so we will see. IF they could each hatch at least one chick so we can get on with the rest of our lives.

I've been MIA, trying to get ready for jr high camp. I leave Sun so I'm trying to pack, weed enough that it isn't a jungle when I get back, pack, scrape a layer of mud and gunk off the house, and prep so my husband doesn't starve while I'm away.

Nothing much to report garden wise. I pulled the last of the peas, so now I'll have some empty space to fill when I get back. The pepper plant Nancy gave me is tiny but full of fruit, so I'm thinking by next week they'll be ready. I have 2 mystery plants that turned out to be sunflowers, lots of cosmos, and a few others in bloom. Oddly, no zinnia this year.

Overall, slow growing in my neck of the woods.

Same here, Jen, slow going here. Have a great time at Jr High Camp!!!

Nancy, We have had other cats named after musicians....just because we get tired of the usual cat names like Fluffy, Boots, etc. Slim Shady had a sister named Willie (named after Willie Nelson). Every cat we've ever owned also has had 2 or 3 nicknames, and answered to them as well. Cats are so smart.

Congrats on finding your washer. I hate appliance shopping and always do a ton of research first, so I feel confident about knowing what is available and what features different appliances have and can, therefore, walk into the store, point at one and say 'let's get that one'. I could plant shop all day, but when it is anything else, I just want to get into the store, get what we need, and get out. Once upon a time, long, long ago, I loved shopping but I also got over that ages ago.

Jennifer, I am totally clueless about popular music nowadays, although Lillie is trying to teach me something about the artists whose music she likes. I used to love to listen to music while working in the garden, but one day when I was listening to music while working, I didn't hear a rattlesnake rattling at me and almost stepped on it. I learned my lesson, and don't bring any extra noise into the garden with me nowadays.

Harvesting is about all I think I'll get done tomorrow, and possibly over the weekend. It is just too hot. I ventured out to the garden this afternoon when the heat index was 109 (crazy, I know, but I went out to check on the chickens, so then I had to check on the garden at the same time) and only saw a couple of newly transplanted seedlings starting to wilt slightly. I turned on the hose and gave all the new transplants a quick little drink of water. Then I walked down to the mailbox to get the mail, and by the time I made it back to the house, I was pretty sure I was dying. lol. My plan for tomorrow is to try to be out to the garden around 6:30 a.m. so I can harvest everything that needs to be harvested, and then I'll process the harvest either for fresh eating or preserving. After that, I'm going to clean house. One advantage of the heat wave is that it is keeping me indoors instead of out in the garden, so I'm catching up on lots of chores inside the house that I tend to let slide a bit on the days when I'd rather be out in the garden.

Hens are so goofy when they go broody. Ours often will sit together on a nest---at least two of them at a time---and sometimes they will trade off. One hen will leave and go wander around the yard, eating and drinking for a while. Then she goes back to the nest to set on the eggs and then the second hen gets up and goes walkabout.

Jen, I hope you have a great week at camp and that y'all have better weather than we're having today and tomorrow.

I have had zinnias pop up as late as July or August, so with those things you just never know. I have some red-flowered grain amaranth just now sprouting in the asparagus bed, where I grew some of it last year. Laura Bush petunias also pop up randomly all summer long.

Our garden is on fast forward at a high rate of speed lately, but we've been missed by much of the recent rainfall and have been pretty warm, so it is about what I'd expect for this time of the year. It was much slower in April and for at least half of May, but is more on track now. I'm hoping the heat doesn't have an adverse affect on the veggies that are producing so well right now.

I processed tomatoes for salsa and froze them today until I couldn't stand to look at one more tomato. There's more to do tomorrow after I harvest.

Our heat index here today maxed out higher (110) than Tim's down in Dallas at work (108). That doesn't happen very often. We should be slightly cooler tomorrow, but they may be warmer.

You know it is the hot weather season when the fall gardening catalogs are arriving in your mailbox.

Dawn

I'm up early and ready to go out and tackle the harvesting task in the early morning hours. When I woke up at 4:45 a.m., our air temperature still was 81 and our heat index was 89. That sort of weather does not make you want to rush outdoors at first light, does it? On the other hand, this is about as cool as it is going to get today. There's still a couple of cool season plants like poppies and larkspur in bloom in our garden, but I think this heat is going to end their season very quickly now.

A Heat Advisory is in effect today for portions of Oklahoma from 1-7 pm. It covers a larger area than yesterday and has shifted more northward and eastward as well.

One good thing about the heat is that it is rapidly drying up the puddles and mud from the heavy rain we received on the 16th, which now seems like it was ages and ages ago instead of earlier this week. There's a little storm to our west, half in OK and half in TX, one county west and southwest of us, and I am envious of whatever rain-cooled air they may have temporarily. On the other hand, they'll likely just have a higher dewpoint and more relative humidity from the extra moisture so that's the downside.

I'm already starting to think of indoor projects to work on since it is getting too hot to spend a lot of times outdoors. I usually don't hit this point until late July or early August. I received the Park Seeds fall gardening catalog yesterday and they had some beautiful plants, but I did not have an immediate urge to rush to buy seeds to start indoors in this heat because, eventually, those poor plants would have to leave their cool, cushy indoor life to go outside and roast in this heat. I am grateful that plants respond to temperatures and do not feel heat indices like we do.

Park Seeds did have a new osteospermum variety in autumn colors that probably would work for people in cooler climates, but it would be difficult to get it started down here since our hot temperatures tend to hang on throughout September and sometimes into October. I think osteospermums are beautiful, but they are cool-season plants and my area is cool-season challenged, even in autumn.

Osteospermum Akila Sunset Shades

The garden still looks slightly off-color, as if it needs to be fed, but I feel like it doesn't really need fertilizer as the nutrients are there in the soil---it needs for the heavy rain and high moisture levels in the soil to stop interfering with plant roots taking up nutrients from the soil. A chance of rain starts popping up in our forecasts daily again after today, though it looks like our best chances at our house probably are Sunday and Sunday evening, when severe thunderstorms are possible again. I imagine we would tolerate the rain happily if it would bring us cooler air temperatures.

The heat must have been bothering the hummingbirds yesterday. They've been largely ignoring the hummingbird feeders and focusing on garden flowers, but yesterday they were coming back to the feeders, which all are in the shade. I don't blame them one bit.

The mosquitoes and flies are horrible this year, but it doesn't seem like there's as many yellow jackets and wasps, which seems odd. I'm not exactly complaining, but many kinds of wasps feed on caterpillars, and the pest caterpillars are horrible this year, so I would think there would be lots of wasps around.

Even the little cottontail bunnies who often are out in the yard during the cool morning hours disappeared shortly after sunrise yesterday, as if they knew the weather was going to be awful and they needed to go find the coolest spots they could as early in the day as possible.

Have a great first day of Summer everyone. Now, let's start counting down the days until autumn arrives!

Dawn

Our dewpoint this morning is 77. This does not bode well for the day.

I have 2 Big Beef tomatoes ripening on the counter.

When I took the dogs out at 10:30 last night it felt like mid day. Not pleasant at all. This morning wasn't much better.

Rebecca, excited for your Big Beef tomatoes! I don't have any larger varieties "blushing" or "breaking color" or whatever the term is.

Just a couple of quick questions because I'm at work.

Fall tomatoes. Should I start seed now and plant in August? In the past, my tomatoes just kept going and producing until the first frost, but these tomatoes are struggling a little, so maybe fresh plants would be a good thing. How about beans?

I'm counting on a fall garden and watch our first frost be in September instead of the usual late October/November.

Honestly, HJ, I’d plant them now. When I plant fall tomatoes any later than July 1, I get very few, if any tomatoes. I don’t know why. Last year I planted 6 Early Girl July 10, and got nothing from any of them. I was still getting fruit from my spring planted tomatoes.

Rebecca, Congrats on the Big Beefs! Any day that the dewpoint starts that high usually is not a good day. We 'almost' had a good day yesterday. Our dewpoint started high like yours but slowly fell all day long. Unfortunately I guess it didn't fall far enough fast enough. Our forecast said our max heat index would be 102 (compared to the previous day's 110) but they were wrong---it still hit 106. Still, 106 was better than 110. To me, when the overnight low is 80 or above, that's also a bad sign, and we've already had that this week too, though it is more common for nights in late July or early August to stay that hot.

Jennifer, I agree. These hot nights aren't giving us much of a break.

With fall tomatoes, I prefer to get them planted in late June or no later than the first week of July. Mid-June is even better. You want the plants to be large and in bloom when the daytime highs fall back into the right range for fruit set. Exactly when that happens will vary from year to year, but often it happens for much of the state around mid-August when the early August heat rampage breaks. My experience is that most people in OK plant them too late and don't get a lot of ripe fruit from them for that reason.

Beans do not produce well in heat, and often do not produce at all in the heat. That is why we plant them so early here (April, and at my end of the state, in late March in a warm Spring)---we have to beat that heat. They drop blossoms without setting beans once the temperatures get up into the 90s and stay there consistently. The time to plant pole beans for fall production would be mid-July and the time to plant bush beans for fall production would be around August 10. Spider mites also are a big issue on bean plants in hot weather, which is another reason that beans don't do well as a hot weather crop here. If you like to grow Lima beans, I have found that they produce much better in the heat than snap beans do.

We have had frosts as early as the end of September some years, but I don't think that has happened in a long time. It did happen our first year here.....and is another reason I have invested all that money in floating row covers. You can cover up your fall crops on the night of the first 1 or 2 freezes and often that's all you have to do---just get them through that first oddly cold night or two and then we'll have another 4-6 weeks of warm weather during which time your plants will be producing like gangbusters in autumn's milder weather.

I didn't do much in the garden yesterday, just harvested enough bush beans to put up three pints in the freezer, and harvested more tomatoes (an everyday thing at this point). I've been staying busy on these hot afternoons processing the produce for fresh eating or freezing or canning so that nothing piles up too much and becomes an insurmountable mountain of produce that I dread processing.

I don't think I'll do anything garden-related today. I need a day off, and I need to go to the store and run errands and all that stuff. Plus, there's rain in the forecast although our chances for today are really low. I think our big rain here won't come until Sunday night, possibly in the overnight hours. Our local TV met showed us the predictor model he uses and it showed the rain getting here really late, and he said he didn't believe it and thought it was 'off' and that we'd likely see rain 6 or 7 hours earlier than the predictor said. That would be Sunday evening and not Monday morning like the predictor model was showing. Maybe tomorrow morning I'll harvest whatever tomatoes are at the breaker stage or beyond, and any other produce that is ready. That way I'll at least get everything up into the house before the rain comes again to try to ruin the tomato flavor and make them all crack. Summer rain is the enemy of our tomato fruit, unfortunately.

Have a great Saturday, everyone, and stay cool.

Dawn

Not staying cool. WHEW! It is STEAMY, even though it's only 88 (in the shade). But I stuck it out most of the day on the deck. Garry had to come in. . . he just can't take the heat very well any more. First, he had to run to town for stuff.

I took several tomato cuttings and got them started, and also planted a few, along with the roselle, more cypress vine, lots of zinnias (I remembered that even thought I will have a hard time getting more than just a very few planted here, the school can hold as many as I bring), Don Pedro 4 o'clocks, marigolds of all sizes, and gomphrena. I'll wait a couple weeks or so for cucumbers, squash, pumpkin and cowpeas.

Oh my gosh. I just spent 15 minutes looking for the Kitazawa squash seeds! AAGGH. I thought they were in one certain container. Couldn't find the container! Finally realized it was inside another container and that I'd moved all the seeds therein to the fridge. DUH.

I spent a fair amount of time off and on deadheading, weeding, and picking off Japanese beetles.

The washing machine was delivered this afternoon and it is undergoing its first big test. Our jeans. It got through its first two loads easily. I think we'll be very pleased with it, even though it has made our already tiny pantry even tinier. However, Garry is putting shelves up over the dryer, and we'll end up, actually, with slightly MORE storage room in there than before.

I think it is hard to stay cool with dewpoints like we're having lately. I found staying indoors helps, but you cannot stay indoors all the time.

I cannot take the heat either, and that's been an issue since I got heat exhaustion in 2011, so I've just learned I need to come in and cool down more often. I always heard that if you got heat exhaustion or heat stroke, it could forever destroy your ability to tolerate heat in the future, but I never believed that, not really. Now I know it is true. This largely has put an end to all-day-long work marathons in the garden once the heat arrives but there's nothing I can do about that. It is more important to not become overheated or dehydrated.

I'm glad you found your Kitazawa seeds.

I hope the new washing machine works out well.

As planned, there was no gardening involved in my day, really, and I'm okay with that. I really had worn myself out with all the gardening and food preservation all week, so I coasted through today. We did a little shopping, ate lunch out and then I took a very long afternoon nap while Tim mowed the lawn. Now he's sleeping and I am wide awake because of that nap. I hope I'm not wide awake all night long. He said about 3 raindrops fell on him while he was mowing but that it didn't really rain enough to even wet the ground.

The rain in today's forecast apparently missed us, but we still had quite a bit of heat and humidity. Honestly, though, after that heat index of 110 the other day, today felt almost cool---with a heat index of only 100. Of course, maybe it felt pretty cool because I was indoors all the time.

I don't know what allergens are in the air now, but my eyes have itched and watered all week. Willows and cottonwoods have been shedding their cottony seeds, so maybe it is them.

We stopped at the Lowe's in Sherman on our way to Sam's Club, so while Tim was inside getting the things he needed, I wandered around the garden center, wanting to buy and plant everything in sight if only it weren't so hot. I finally ended up with a 12-pack of moss rose to plant in the little Red Flyer Wagon in the garden. I'll plant them on a cooler day, maybe Sunday or Monday, though heat really doesn't bother them. It is hard to have any of them in the ground because the voles eat their roots, so planting them in the red wagon has kinda become the thing I do just so I can have a few of them every year without losing them to the voles.

I have to process tomatoes tomorrow. They're piling up again. I'll be glad when this phase is over.

Dawn