I’m planting clover, wildflowers, and Austrian peas. We had 1/2” of rain yesterday and couple more rainy days predicted so should be perfect timing.

Have new green beans, cucumbers, and squash blooming now. My tomatoes are blooming but not setting. Hopefully the cherry varieties will continue to make for awhile. Peppers are loaded and delicious, bells, cubanelle, and jalapeños. Youngest grandson was here and we picked several jalapeños. Guess I will find a recipe for jalapeño poppers as that’s what he wants us to fix now. Hummingbirds are down to a trickle but the doves are increasing. i think they know we don’t allow any hunting here. Going to feed the cosmos and blue wild sage so perhaps they will be pretty for awhile - the goldenrod is gorgeous now. Okra has slowed but still enough for soup or stir fry.

Dawn, your experience with neighbor‘s dogs are much happier than ours. We’ve had loose dogs kill chickens, guineas,run cattle till they either run through a fence or get pneumonia. Then most people can’t understand why we are angry after we call them for the second or third time. After all, they just want their beloved pets to be free and enjoy the country. Don’t blame the pets, but sure blame owners.

Hi Everyone.

Very much enjoyed my gardening day. It is the only day I've truly had "off". It feels good to be home all day.

I planted a few violas that were leftover from a children's activity last night. Also cleaned up the other flower pots. They were getting sorta tired looking. They look much better now.

I carefully picked all the Armenian cucumbers. I was a little nervous because the news talked about how it's copperhead hatching season. I heard something of some size move once...but that was all. It could have been anything. The A cukes are all overgrown except a couple. The overgrown ones will go to the chickens and the others to me.

There's not a lot to report. For those of you who are my FB friends, you saw that my columnar apple trees are blooming. They are also putting on new height.

Aphids LOVE my okra this year. I've been spraying them off with water every day, but they're always back the next day. It's not affecting the production, although the plants are starting to look a little tired.

The peas that were planted in the back garden are gone. Not sure what is going on back there, other than poor soil. It will be a focus of attention next year for sure. Probably even this year because I'm going to move the compost there next month.. The jalapenos are the only things doing okay in that garden area. Everything else looks like crap...or disappear. Now that I think about it, it's possible a chicken has gotten back there from time to time. I have two that escape often. Maybe they ate the peas.

Getting full size tomatoes again is such a treat. One bed has three tomatoes planted in it and those tomatoes are doing great. Full of fruit and blooms.

It is fun planning next years garden. I learn so much each year--what to do. What not to do. Each year brings its challenges, but I feel like I start each garden year with new knowledge.

I know what greens I like the best. Which ones I barely touched. I know what areas in the garden get the most shade...and the areas that are mostly in full sun all day. I know that the okra and southern peas should be planted in those areas. And that the Armenian cucumbers can also take that full sun all day better than other plants.

I like keeping my list of my favorites that I will always grow, but still allow room for a few new things.

Chickens. We have to rework the coop again. It appears that I have mostly pullets. (although everyone could start crowing and that would change things real quick.) I will keep them all especially if they are pullets. I thought I would be okay with letting my friend harvest them. But I'm not okay with it. Maybe next year I will be okay with it.

It's funny that they are mostly pullets--appear to be anyway. I'm still uncertain about Kirk/Eve. The people at Backyard Chicken say that the Dark Cornish bantam is male. I was sure I would get half boys. My neighbor to the east will take a boy or two, but not to harvest..so if Kirk is Kirk, he will go there to live. I'll try to keep the bantam roo. They are 11 weeks old now.

AND that dang Stormy is broody again. Blossom is considering it as well. I'm not doing the baby chick thing again until next summer so I have to help Stormy get over the broodiness.

My plan for next summer is to NOT hatch out Jean Luc's babies. Instead, I will order pullets from MyPetChicken to get the breeds that I want and sneak them under the broody hens. I'll only get one chick for each broody. All of that hatching business is fun, but I don't want to do it again next year. And I don't want a bunch of chicks that could possibly be male. And I want to add specific breeds to my flock.

Okay. I'm off to the garden.

Rebecca, In your salad boxes, I assume you're already growing some sort of lettuce. Do you grow other greens to mix with them? Mini cabbages would have worked if planted from transplants in August. It might be too late to start those now unless you find some nice-sized transplants. Do you like other greens mixed with your salads? There's kale, arugula (SESE has Even Star Winter arugula that is cold hardy down to around 6 degrees), Swiss chard, beets (for beets themselves or for beet greens), turnips (same as with beets), radishes (can be sown weekly through at least mid-October and possibly later depending on the weather), spinach, parsley (a few leaves can be added to salads and mine usually survives the winter), mustard greens, mesclun mix (SESE has one I've grown that is a Fall/Winter mesclun mix with very cold-tolerant varieties in it), Cress--upland (Belle Island if very cold hardy, Creasy Greens (aka Winter Cress), mache' (aka corn salad), and, until a hard freeze gets them, some of the more cold-tolerant herbs like dill (leaves are tasty in a mixed salad), fennel, cilantro and parsley. Then there's cold-tolerant edible flowers like violas and pansies. You even can sugar them and use them on tops of cookies or pastries. Oh, and nasturtiums if you can cover them up and protect them from freezing temperatures. The leaves have a sort of peppery flavor that perks up salads.

Farmgardener, It sounds like you're still getting an awesome harvest. That's terrific.

Believe me, we have had our share of trouble with roaming dogs killing our chickens, and with cattle and goats coming after our plantings. It is very frustrating, though it has gotten somewhat better in recent years. Then, there's the neighbors around who are gone to work all day, so if their dogs or cats get lonely at their home, they know I am at home and come looking for me. I don't mind stopping what I am doing to love on a visiting dog or cat for a few minutes, but sometimes those visitors start to get territorial and fight with our pets, and that cannot be tolerated, of course. We have neighbors who had a sweet old dog who always came to visit when she heard the lawn mower. I think that each time, she'd hear the mower, think it was her own "dad" mowing and come walking over to find him, only to find us instead. Then there is the constant procession of lost hunting dogs (or non-hunting dogs dragged from the city to the country during hunting season to keep their owners' company) in the fall during hunting season, and the nearly endless procession of owners looking for lost dogs that never seem to be wearing collars. I don't understand people who take animals out in the wild with no ID on them. Luckily, our recent visiting dogs have been friendly, though I have one black hen who would disagree with me after that white lab grabbed her last week and the poor hen lost a ton of her feathers, though she seemed otherwise unharmed.

The hummers are heavy and thick some days, and light and sparse others, so I feel like our locals mostly have left and we mostly have migrants passing through. Today, I was standing in the mudroom watching one through the glass window in the door, and it came and hovered in front of my nose and watched me watch it. Then it went to all the mudroom windows and hovered in front of the cats that were in there....watching them watch it. I was laughing. It was almost like that hummingbird wasn't used to seeing a human or cats up close and was enjoying seeing us through the windows.

The butterflies were all over the garden this afternoon, after lying low during the persistently rainy morning.

Doves and deer both are increasing here. We never have hunted on our land or allowed anyone else to hunt, so in fall and winter, we have a huge deer herd in our woodland and tons of doves around. Neighbors notice how many there are here and comment on them, but those neighbors hunt or allow others to hunt on their land so they obvious don't have as many hanging around on their property as we have on ours.

Today in the garden there were tons of new cosmos in bloom, including a pretty pink and white bicolor that I do not necessarily remember planting, though from the careful spacing of the plants I know I did plant them and that they aren't volunteers. There's also still lots of zinnias. The first blooms of the candletrees opened today and I'm looking forward to enjoying those over the next few weeks. The roselles, which I planted pretty late for roselles, are budding and we will have flowers soon. I expect we'll get a good harvest of them since there doesn't seem to be any sort of big massive cold front coming with a surprise early freeze. I only need about another month and we'll have more roselles to harvest than we'll know what to do with. Well, I know what I'll do with them....I'll make roselle jam and roselle jelly and dry the rest of the calyces for tea. You also can eat them as a sort of fruity dish, so I'll see how we like those. The okra and peppers continue to produce, and now there's an volunteer okra plant in the compost pile producing okra pods too. The tomatoes are setting new fruit, though it is anyone's guess whether these young fruit will have time to mature and ripen.

I was so looking forward to this week's cooler weather. I want for it to feel like fall. Well, it felt like fall early this morning when the morning rain showers kept the temperature down, and then we warmed up a lot in the afternoon. Our temperature was decently in the upper 80s, but our heat index still hit 98 and you could tell...so, bah humbug, autumn may be here but our weather didn't get the memo and it still feels like summer.

The fall wildflowers are looking better every day. All the recent rainfall has been great for them, and we are seeing more and more blooms in the fields. Today I found a bunch of liatris blooming down around the front gate in the worst-ever icky, dense clay and rocks. The butterflies and dragonflies are happy with all the blooms, puddles in the driveway for puddling, etc. The dragon flies are all over the yard, garden and driveway daily.

We need to mow, but with big standing puddles everywhere, I think that's not going to happen for a few days. There's a chance of rain almost every day, but I think these are more of the daily late afternoon pop-up thunderstorms so it will be hit and miss. One popped up a bit SE of us, traveled northward just east of I-35, hit Marietta and kept going north, so we had an hour or so of its thunder, but the rain missed us. That didn't help Jersey---she demanded I open up the bathroom door and a closet door so she could hide from the thunder.

The spiders are going nuts weaving webs all around the house every night. You walk out a door and walk into a web. I know they're after the insects that come to the porch lights at night. I knock down the webs (obviously) that block a doorway or are too close to the hummingbird feeders, but leave the rest. I wonder where these spiders are when those darned multicolored Asian lady beetles show up each autumn to try to come inside to overwinter? Why aren't the spider webs catching all those things and keeping them out of the house?

I am spending too much time looking at seed catalogs and dreaming about next year when I should be doing something more productive.

Dawn

.I,ve been trying to tie in up a fall of planting of fall cole plants . It's been a pain with the higher temps an and all.. Been trying to plant all fall seedings of greens like mustard , spinach , kale , collards .,ect.

I've got a monster load of okra right now. More than I can handle at the moment.

I 've also got a large load of Crowder peas. I just canned around 40 pints.

Yeah I'm a canner . My ma caught me well before she died.

Okmulgee boy

We are getting more okra and peppers than we can use. We dont try to can anything, but we do freeze a little, but Madge says she does not want anything else for the freezer.

I have brush hogged everything down in the wildlife garden, even nearly all of the zinnias. I have also been rounding up stuff for a compost pile. I have two nice size piles of compost material and a nice size pile of mulch here at the house, and one pile of compost and two piles of mulch in the wildlife garden. I want to over seed some of the lawn and some of the wildlife garden with annual rye grass. The clover is doing well in the wildlife garden, so is the tall fescue, which I wish that I had not planted because it is too aggressive. I have a small patch of some type of cole crop that has come back two times from a wildlife deer plot mix I planted a year or two ago. I have another 50# of food plot mix, 50# of Elbon rye, 50# of Austrian winter peas, the rest of the 50# of annual rye, and 2 # of turnips, and 2# of wild flower mix that I want to overseed over there. I will have to get my tractor running before I can do any of that, but I have just not felt like working on it.

I planted 12 brussel sprouts in the north garden, and I plan on planting a few turnips next to the brussel sprouts. I expect to plant the rest of the north and south garden with a cover crop of austrian winter peas. I want to dig my sweet potatoes soon, but the vines are all over the okra and peppers, and I am not ready to tear the other plants up, which would happen when I try to drag the sweet potato vines away.

I have a good crop of spiders also. I try not to bother them but Madge is not as "spider friendly " as I am.

I have had no problem keeping the lawn mowed because we have been getting less rain than some of you. We did get what I thought was a nice rain in the past few days, but when I planted the brussel sprouts the soil was only damp about 2" down, so I watered them in well. We still have chances of rain for the next few days.

We got rain last night and I wasn't expecting over an inch....but that is what we got.

We need to mow too. Again. Maybe it will dry out by Thursday.

I felt so bad about the "baby" chicks coop/pen this morning. The pen was standing water. I put their food upstairs in the coop. The water had been absorbed by the time I got home this afternoon.

The grass clippings are keeping the main coop's pen from being muddy. That was a great idea.

It all needs a good scrubbing.

Sounds like a lot of us have too much okra. I'm getting about a quart size bag everyday. I have friends who are willing to take it off my hands. We fry it about once a week and grill it once a week too. I have about a dozen bags in the freezer which will be a nice treat this winter.

The Armenian cucumbers look sick. I just noticed that today. I am a little tired of them, so am considering tearing them out. They are so intertwined with everything so it might be difficult. Maybe I'll try to leave one. See if it perks up again. I don't know when I'll have time to do that, though. I worked today at my regular school job instead of tomorrow, so that I can sub for another school tomorrow. I'm not looking forward to it. I don't enjoy subbing at all. I like to have a plan...and subbing isn't that. And I have to do my main job at odd times because of the subbing. Oh well. I need to work and will do what I need to do.

I am tired though. I was sure I had the flu for about 30 minutes this afternoon. Got real tired and felt feverish and was achy. BUT, it passed. Thank goodness.

So...we have a few hot days and then at the end of next week, it looks like fall will show up for real. Just in time for October.

You know...how nice would it be to take a relaxing vacation for about a week somewhere calm and quiet and quaint? (If you knew someone would take care of your plants/animals properly.) AND then come home and have a full week to work on projects, deep clean, etc. That sounds amazing to me

We only had two egg today. And maybe 4 the past two days. I guess it's that time of year. And two hens trying to be broody.

Okay...I'm just saying whatever pops in my head--rambling.

Fall is coming, y'all. Yay.

Yesterday: We got 1.5" between 5 am and a little while ago. That worked out well, as many of us had a funeral to attend, and the gray weather reflected many people's feelings. However, the funeral was a wonderful celebration of her life.

There is nothing going on with the vegetables to speak of, except the long beans are doing well. I'm going to pull the summer squash, galia melon, and cucumbers as soon as it's dry enough. Then we can get more soil into those beds. And I'll take out the Mexican sunflowers next week, as well. They are so ragged.

I've been able to get most of the beds weeded now that it's a bit cooler. I'm fairly disenchanted with the flower beds. Many of them are tired. I tried to pep them up with fertilizer 2-3 weeks ago, but the only plants that have responded happily are the container plants, verbena bon., and some of the zinnias.

Okmulgee Boy. . . since there are just two of us to feed, there isn't much point in canning now. I just don't like the flavor of canned goods nearly as much as frozen. The exception is salsa and tomatoes. Love pickles, but we rarely eat pickles! I have a bunch of pickles and spicy pickled vegetables from 2 years ago, and we've hardly touched them. I think I'll give them away and then I won't have to look at them and feel guilty. Same with jam and jelly. We don't eat sweets. What we WOULD eat a lot of are eggs. (And do.) Wish we could have chickens, but we just can't here. Way too many dogs and other critters going through the neighborhoods. It would be so awesome to have an 8' fence around our property--but it would look ridiculous. It would look like some secretive and forbidding enclave. And I can't imagine how much such a thing would cost around this 1.5-plus property. Not to mention, it would be nigh to impossible to put in posts on this rock.

(HJ--speaking of saying whatever pops in one's head--LOL)

Okmulgeeboy, This persistently warm autumn is making me crazy! As I sit in the comfort of the air-conditioned house and type this, it is 91 degrees and our heat index has hit 102 so far. For late September, both the temperatures and dewpoints are higher than average so I blame them for this unpleasantly warm weather......

Y'all please note, I am only referring to it as unpleasantly warm and not unpleasantly hot, so it has improved some since August.

State climatologist Gary McManus has written quite a bit lately, both on the OKMesonet Ticker and on his FB posts, about our higher-than-usual dewpoints and how they're contributing so much to how unpleasantly warm/hot it feels outside. While the recent rainfall has been wonderful (we've had a ton of rain here over the last 5 or 6 weeks which really nipped back the developing drought, which now is nowhere in sight for us), the dewpoints are a killer.

I bet your fall garden plants would be a whole lot happier if it were 80s degrees.....or even 75. I know I'd be a whole lot happier if we could have temperatures like that. The late-season stars of our garden are the candletrees (Senna alata, formerly cassia alata) and the roselle (Hibiscus sabdariffa) plants, and they love, love, love heat and humidity so they are thriving in this ridiculously prolonged autumn heat. The zinnias and cosmos are not quite as happy, but still look good. The yellow bells (Tecoma stans) are looking awfully good too so they seem to thrive in the hot, muggy weather as well. Instead of enjoying all these heat lovers, I'd rather be out in the garden planting ornamental cabbage, ornamental kale, pansies, violas, snapdragons and stock, but those plants probably will have to wait for cooler conditions in October.

Speaking of cooler conditions in October, several of us recently have noticed that our 10-day forecast shows a big cool front coming around next Thursday or Friday, depending on one's location within the state. I hope the 10-day forecast is right! I'd like to have a couple of days with highs in the 70s even if they aren't going to last and we're going to go back into the 80s. I'm thinking that by the first week in October, we shouldn't be seeing many more days in the 90s, but I could be wrong about that. All the long-term outlooks from NOAA show warmer than average weather for this autumn and winter. This brings up the question that I think about a lot---how much longer can we keep having warmer-than-average winters until we finally just accept that these warmer than normal winters are the new normal?

I've always been a canner, to the point that I'm tired of it and trying to get away from canning hundreds of jars of stuff every year. I freeze a lot more now than I used to, and I like most things frozen. Of course, some food doesn't freeze well. I'll be making tons and tons of roselle jam when the plants bloom and I can harvest the flower calyces for that purpose.

Larry, It sounds like you have a ton of cover crops to plant when you feel like it and when you get around to doing it. I always leave my zinnias until at least after the monarch migration has ended, which won't be until later in October here, and often leave them until frost. I don't cover crop as much as I should because garden cover crops will keep my early season bloomers like larkspur and poppies from sprouting in autumn like they should. Maybe my poppies and larkspurs are, in a way, my cover crops. I'd like to overseed the front lawn with winter rye grass, just to keep the mud down because the grass is thinning out underneath all the shade trees. Maybe we can do that this coming weekend. We do have a good stand of clover out back near the big pond, in an area frequented by deer and wild turkeys year-round.

I think we have had about 10" of rain over the last 5 or 6 weeks, so we finally are getting some moisture deeper down than the first couple of inches of soil, but it also seems to dry up really quickly at any depth beneath the surface so it really doesn't last long. Having this much rain in Aug-Sept is odd for us, and this is our second year in a row to get it, but we needed it desperately after a really dry July and early first half of August, so I am not complaining. Our driest months lie ahead (Dec, Jan and Feb), so we need all the moisture in the soil that we can get for the sake of all the trees, shrubs and perennial plants.

Jennifer, We've always dumped grass clippings in the chicken runs as needed to keep the mud down, and do the same thing with chopped/shredded autumn leaves in the fall. Our chicken run is in heavy shade, so the grass thins out pretty quickly when the chicken are confined to their chicken run. We also always have a few pieces of 2 x 4 or 4 x 4 lumber lying on the ground that they can stand and perch on to stay off the wet ground after excessive rainfall. Sometimes when the chickens are free-ranging all summer long, I scatter handfuls of hen scratch in the unused chicken run, where it sprouts and turns into a nice green jungle for them. Then, when I put them in the run for a few days (like I did last week when the new neighbor's dogs were roaming), they dig and scratch and eat their way through their little green jungle, destroying it in no time at all....but at least they have fun.

A vacation away sounds heavenly IF a person could find someone to care for their animals and plants like they would, but that's a mighty big IF. I'm happy just to get a day or two away occasionally.

I hope the October cool front comes. I've spent all of September waiting for and hoping for cooler weather, mostly without any success.

Nancy, The rainfall sounds nice and so does the celebration of life.

We're so muddy here that even if I could pull out any of the tall, tired plants, they'd come up with big wet rootballs, so I cannot clean out much of anything until we dry out more. That's just as well---it still is snake season and the raised beds are a favorite of theirs when the ground is as wet as it is now. My Mexican sunflowers look a little tired and ragged, but I'll leave them for as long as the butterflies are around because they love them so.

I'd be happy to have an 8' tall fence just around the acre closest to the house....and then I could grow whatever I wanted without the deer, rabbits and other wild things destroying my plantings, but it probably isn't going to happen. Well, it could happen. Tim is opposed to an 8' tall "prison fence" like we have around the garden, but I'm contemplating putting one up anyway and then covering it entirely with plants like American cross vine and coral honeysuckle. Yep, it would look like some big compound up around the house particularly in the first couple of years before the plants could totally cover and hide the woven wire fencing, but nobody can see the house from the road because it sits so far back from the road, and anyone who knows us well enough to travel up the driveway to the house wouldn't be totally shocked to see we had decided to settle the deer-eating-plants issue once and for all by putting up a tall fence. Still, just the thought of fencing an acre, or a half-acre, is quite daunting. I haven't forgot all the $$$, time and effort involved in fencing the entire 14.4 acres with a barbed wire fence in the first place, especially since we had to laboriously cut through 50 years of overgrown, tangled forest to cut a fence line area, and Tim hates everything about fences, particularly the labor involved in digging post holes and putting the fencing up in the first place. Still, I think it could happen one of these days, starting with the back yard area between the house and detached garage this autumn and winter.

I also have considered putting up two 4' tall fences 3' or 4' apart, like a waterless moat around the house and yard, and that worked pretty well for the garden for a long time because deer can jump high or far but cannot jump high and far at the same time. However, a smart deer figured out how to jump sideways into the garden moat and then to take a second jump sideways into the garden, which put an end to that waterless two-fence moat working to protect the garden, to it would be a risk to try to protect a yard full of new plantings with a similar system. It would be great and much preferable to a taller fence, but much riskier because all it takes is one smart deer to figure out how to circumvent it.

Okay, it is too dang hot. I need a popsicle or ice cream or something. Or a glass of tea. Going outside for even 5 minutes in this suffocating humidity is just miserable. I spent all of August hoping the weather would break in September, and now I'm spending all of September looking ahead to October. Our weather is broken.

Dawn

Maybe next Thursday will be it. The start of cooler weather. Right now, my phone app shows a high of 67 for next Thursday.

The weather makes me cranky too. I am hoping the rain misses us tonight. I would like it to dry out a bit so I can mow the front and back yards. I don't care so much about the field.

And...hopefully the violas and brassicas will make it through this week of hot weather.

I'm at my "real" job now and won't get home until 5:30 or so. I'll only have a couple of hours to do outside work and walk the dogs. I am tired, though. Really, really tired, so maybe that is a good thing. Come in and go to bed.

Maybe I'll plant the hibiscus plants tonight. Maybe.

Dawn, I’m not a fan of bitter greens, so I think that’s eliminated much of what you mentioned. I do love my lettuce, though, and plan on experimenting a lot with it. Thinking about trying some snap peas or bok choy, maybe. I think celery would be too tall.

I have had it with the heat and humidity. I’d settle for low 80s and low humidity, though.

Yesterday morning when we had The Big Rain, I ended up with just under 3” in my rain gauge, but I had to hack my way through the tomato forest to find the gauge. So I may have gotten more.

I still need Brussels sprouts.

Rebecca, That's a lot of rain! It is unfortunate that this year, at least, high dewpoints and high heat index values seem to be the price we pay for the lovely rainfall.

I'm not the biggest fan of bitter greens either, but I am trying to vary my diet more and include them more often....still, not real, real often either.

Brussels sprouts plants aren't even in the stores there yet? I would have thought they'd be easy to find by now. I haven't been looking for any, but I will check tomorrow and see if the stores here have them, just so I'll know one way or another. Any excuse to stop at the stores and look at plants is a valid excuse, right? Most of the stores here get their plant deliveries on Thursday or Friday so they have fresh stock in place for the weekends. Maybe this coming weekend will be your time to find brussels sprouts plants.

Jennifer, I hope your phone app is right. I went and looked at the Climate Prediction Center's 6-10 and 8-14 day outlooks and neither one of them looked particularly helpful for us this far south, and they certainly didn't show high odds of us cooling down late next week. But they also are less specific than our 10-day forecasts as they show % chances and odds and not specific forecasts. Our local TV met at noon seemed very iffy on next week's cool down too. He spoke of it as a possibility, and as one he wasn't willing to commit to yet, so I think his feeling is that some people in OK will get a cooldown but it might just might not come this far south. Based on today's weather, I understand why he is not jumping into the cooling trend yet....we hit 94 with a heat index of 104, and we weren't even the hottest place in the state either. I'm keeping my fingers crossed and hoping the cooling trend comes and reaches this far and gives us a couple of days of nice, dreamy, cooler weather just to remind us that the cooler weather will be here to stay a while sooner or later....or later.....or later. It can't stay in the 90s forever, right?

I hope you can get the rest that you need!

I have small tidbits of news, and one big one, albeit a sad one.

I noticed today that the pineapple sage plants finally are blooming. Finally! It has taken them forever. Some years they are blooming by mid-summer, other times by late summer, but I don't think I've ever had to wait until late September for them to bloom. They were planted on time, and endured every sort of weather from very rainy and wet to very hot and dry and it just took them forever to finally bloom. I don't know why.

The milkweeds stripped by the Monarch caterpillars last week already have new leaves coming out, though I doubt we'll have any new monarch cats this late in the season. Interestingly, all the oleander aphids are gone now, even from the plants that weren't stripped of their foliage.

The feral kittens I've been trying to tame so we hopefully can trap them at some point and find them homes (most likely our home, lol, because most people don't want to take a chance on feral cats even if they've become domesticated) have moved into our garage, apparently to stay, more or less. They stay in there all day, and also all night if they haven't gone outdoors before I close the door just before dark. I feed them every morning and every evening, and in just 3 or 4 days they have learned to use a litter box---self-taught. We just put the box in the garage with them and they started using it right away. They do not always run and hide from me any more. Now, they sometimes sit and stare and watch me put out the food, while I speak softly to them and pet their mother, so maybe they are beginning to at least associate human beings with being fed, which is an important association. It was the last big rain that drove them indoors. I fed their mom for probably six weeks before she let me pet her, so I do continue to make progress with her, albeit slowly. She now will tolerate me picking her up and holding her briefly before she begins to squirm and wants down.

There's something new blooming along the fenceline. I think it is some sort of wildflower that is a gerardia. There's quite a few of them. I'll try to get photos of one tomorrow so I can ID them.

The persimmon trees are getting a slight yellowish-orange to their foliage, following the elms, so the trees seem right on time, or maybe a week late.

In rather sad though not unexpected news, our dear friend and neighbor, Fred, passed away today, at the rather grand age of 97. I believe he just turned 97 last week. He had been in failing health in recent weeks. I think I had begun to think that maybe he'd live forever, until this recent round of failing health arrived. He was my first and most steadfast local gardening friend here, and he and I shared so many gardening adventures over the years. He farmed and ranched very late into his life, never being one who could voluntarily sit still. He always told me that he thought the guys who retired to "sit on the porch" never lasted that long after they retired and he was determined to keep moving and not become one of those retired guys sitting on the porch, at least until his health began failing recently and he had no choice. He did, by the way, outlive all the other "old farmers and old ranchers" who befriended me and offered me endless advice after we moved here, and he outlived most of them by many years. I cannot picture a world in which I don't have Fred pushing me each Spring to hurry up and plant my beans and corn because he thinks I'm behind. His place is a warmer microclimate than ours, so he always planted those crops earlier than I did, and he knew our place always stayed too cold for me to plant as early as he did but he just couldn't resist harassing me, in a friendly and teasing manner, to hurry up and plant the beans and corn so mine could catch up with his. I will miss him so much. He leaves behind a huge family with not just a bunch of kids, but grandkids, great grandkids, great great grandkids, etc. I hope that somehow they work it out where someone in the family keeps the ranch and also the old home place (a separate location) in the family.

I'm hoping for a better year in 2020 (oh, a new decade comes with the new year too....) because our neighborhood has lost too many long-time and dearly beloved residents this year.

Dawn

Dawn, I'm very sorry to hear about Fred. I know he was a dear friend of yours.

Took a walk in the garden today. Kale plants have been stripped. They were beautiful a few days ago. The cucumber plants look bad. I don't know if it's disease or bugs. Need to take a closer look. Found that not all my okra is the same variety. Becks big buck freaked Ron out.

I threw turnip and beet seeds out in the beds a couple of days ago. I need to plant some spinach.

When I was taking out tomato plants, I left the Early Girl and tied it to the trellis arch. That sucker has grown a foot since then. Of course the Large red cherry is still going. The Heidi's look strong, but not any fruit. I broke my Arkansas Traveler when I planted it this year, so that stand by is not there, and I missed it. Ron brought in one of the volunteer musk melons today. The first one rotted. Don't know if this was ready or not. I have a Ginkaku hybrid Korean melon, I need to figure out if it's ripe. I missed harvesting sorghum seeds, I hope I have volunteers next year. We still have a lot of pimento peppers.

Have a good weekend.

Oh my goodness, Dawn! I am so sorry to hear about Fred, too. I do hope they can keep the place in the family, also. Yes, will hope for a better year for you in 2020.

How many kittens did you say? I love kittens. From your description of the kittens' behavior, I'm going to guess that Tom and Jerry were kittens from a barn cat. They so obviously weren't at all socialized. And Tom still isn't, except with Garry and and his herd and me.

Oh rats. I can't tear the tithonia out, either! Have to leave it for the butterflies. Right now there were at least 8 Gulf fritillaries on the scraggly remaining tithonia. They're as orange as the flowers are. Fun.

Having church women tomorrow, so Garry helped me clean house. I didn't care so much about the house as I did the yard! LOL Right?? Got to keep our priorities straight. Still. The house hasn't been this clean in a long long time! And I am exhausted.

Thanks, Amy and Nancy. What a year it has been, though in all the wrong ways.

I'm looking forward more than ever to 2020, or even to October, which at least is coming soon.

Amy, Do you know what stripped the kale? Have you seen any cabbage loopers or anything? Maybe fall armyworms? Sadly, at our house, when the kale is being stripped, it usually is our own chickens feasting on our kale.

I love Beck's Big Buck, but its size does stun a person when they are new to it. I like to slice them and oven roast them. You can sprinkle the sliced with a little olive oil and seasoning and create okra chips that are (to me) much tastier and obviously healthier than potato chips.

With the cucumber plants and as moist as it has been, I'd suspect disease more so than pests.

I hope y'all have a good weekend too.

Nancy, There's three kittens and they all look just like their mother except they are going to be bigger than her. They are growing fast now that they are eating regularly. I think they are about five to six weeks old and beginning to get a little bit more used to my presence every day, but it is going to be hard to tame them. Still, I am making progress. One of them no longer runs and hides immediately when it sees me---it sits and waits to see if I am bringing food. lol. With cats, you can develop a friendship over food, so I'm off to a good start there. I need to spend a lot of time trying to tame them over the next several weeks and it likely will involve putting a large cage in the garage and moving their cat food dishes into it. Once they are used to eating in the cage, hopefully I can catch them in the cage and bring them indoors to start working to tame them. It needs to happen while they are pretty young, or they'll be impossible to tame. As soon as we get them caged, their mom will go to the vet to be spayed so that she won't have another litter of kittens. If I can't tame them, they can become barn cats/garage cats, but I'd rather tame them so they can enjoy being around humans. If we let them remain feral, it will be hard to catch them in order to take them to a vet for shots and medical attention as we'd have to trap them and then they'd be upset, hysterical wrecks. I'd like to avoid trapping if at all possible. I guess I can spend the non-gardening season taming feral kittens. I'm amazed they've survived living outdoors this long because we have raccoons in the yard every night and coons will kill and eat kittens (or even adult cats). This kittens basically have survived by climbing up into the engine of our Dodge pickup truck to sleep at night. You have to lift the hood, check for them and make sure they aren't in there before you can start up the engine....every single time. They also like to hide on top of the tornado shelter, which is covered by a large trumpet creeper vine that gives them lots of cover, so if we can peer into that mess and see them, at least we know they aren't under or in the truck.

Have fun with the church group tomorrow. I'm sure the house and yard look simply splendid. I love our house when it is perfectly clean and tidy, which generally doesn't happen nearly as often as I'd like! You know, there's a level of everyday clean or family clean but then there is holiday/visitor clean. I love it when I take the time to get it all holiday/visitor clean BUT I don't love it enough to keep it that spic and span every day of the year either. I hope you get a good night's sleep so you do not feel exhausted tomorrow!

Today there were new monarchs in the garden. I don't know if they hatched here, but they were enjoying nectaring at various plants. It is too soon for us to be seeing migrants here, so these are local more or less, one way or another, though they could be regional or local butterflies beginning to mass prior to migrating. All the butterflies and bees are why I don't rip out any plants too early....any more, it is all about them in the garden, not us.

I looked at the plants at Home Depot today (inside the garden center, I forgot to look at the ones outside on the sidewalk) and they are starting to compress them down into a smaller area, probably in order to make way for holiday merchandise. They still had some shrubs and perennials, and some fall annual warm-season color, but nothing new for cool weather yet, and I forgot to check to see what Wal-Mart had. They had a lot of tropical plants that would look lovely indoors if only we didn't have cats and dogs that would destroy them. We were buying paint at HD to paint the house, a job which has been on our To Do list ever since we got the new roof put on the house, which I think was in July. We totally changed the shingles from light colored to dark colored and wanted a new paint color that would look better with the new color of the roof. We've just been waiting endlessly for cooler weather to arrive because who wants to paint when the heat index is 108 or 110 or 112? We cannot wait too long now that it is almost October or the nights will start to get too cool for the paint to dry properly, so we are going to start painting Saturday. I would have started tomorrow but Fred's funeral is tomorrow afternoon, and I don't want to go to the funeral with paint in my hair or anything.

I'm seeing a definite pattern change in the behavior of the hummingbirds over the last week or two. Several weeks ago, hummingbirds were flocking to the feeders all day---flying back and forth from blooming plants to feeders in a dizzying whirl of activity that went all all day long. I knew they were our locals eating extra food to put on the fat they need to help sustain them on their journey south to Mexico. It was amazing to watch and then it ended, and I knew at that point that the males were headed south, though we still had females and juveniles feeding all day long but not in such a crazy frenzy---they seem a bit calmer. Over the weekend and at the start of this week, it appears the females and juveniles too had headed south, and we had a day or two with practically no hummingbirds. Now we have migrants. One way you can tell is that they appear suddenly at the feeders early in the day, feed like mad, and then pretty much disappear. I assume these are migrants eating as they travel south. Then, in the evening you'll see more of them. I don't think it is the same ones that I saw in the morning. They seem tired, and content to sit on the feeder perches and feed a long time before drifting away before dark. Then, in the morning, they probably feed again and leave on the next leg of their journey, and then new travelers come in, sometimes in the morning hours, and sometimes in the early evening hours and repeat the process all over again. They're definitely spending more time at the feeders, and somewhat less time at the plants in the garden or around the house. There's nothing feeding in between the morning crowd and the evening crowd. It is fascinating to watch it all happen. Oh, and also at Home Depot today, there was one lone hummingbird who was visiting all the flowers and was so thrilled. It was just happy and chirpy and the whole nine yards and not at all bothered by being in very close proximity to people. I forgot to ask if it is a regular visitor there or just passing through.

The garden is full of sulphur butterflies, and some of the candletree leaves are being devoured, so we may have sulphur cats. I just haven't had time to check. The partridge pea plants in the pastures still are in bloom but there's much fewer flowers on them now, so I think they are about done. I'm glad we have the candletrees to fill that niche of time in October after the partridge peas finish up because their blooms won't last much longer. Helenium, goldenrod and and a few other fall bloomers fill all the fencerows and any pastures that aren't regularly hayed or grazed down low, so butterflies and bees have all the flowering plants they possibly could want right now, and that's such a good thing.

Our weather was slightly cooler today, but still hot, though our heat index did not break 100 today---yay! The HX was 99 but that is am improvement and we'll take any improvement we can get.

Have a great weekend, y'all. Maybe cooler weather is coming next week.

Dawn

Dawn, I've enjoyed your stories about Fred. You will miss him so much. We only lived here 3 years when our neighbor, Ron, died. In that short time, I grew to care about him very much. He helped with our pets...and had a tender spot for animals in general, except bully animals. I only knew him for 3 years and you had Fred in your life for many, many more.

I hope 2020 is kinder to you.

I love kittens/cats too. If I had a big sunroom (and could afford it), I would have several more cats. I just can't have anymore in our small house. Dawn, you should name one of the kittens, Fred.

Amy, Tom was weirded out by Beck's Big Buck too.

Rebecca, our Walmart, Lowes, HM, TSC, all have brussels sprouts. So strange that the stores near you and Amy do not.

Nothing new to report about the garden. Harvested some okra and green beans tonight. Sliced up Armenian cukes for the chickens.

I did plant one of the hardy hibiscus plants tonight. I put it where I plan to make a flowerbed on the east side of our house. The grass came up easily, so I should get on that project soon. Maybe I'll work on it tomorrow. I was surprised it came up so easily.

Dawn, I noticed that 67 that I talked about yesterday has been raised to a high of 74. David Payne just gave a teaser about a cold front coming in a few days...so I'll watch that in a minute and see what he says. It wasn't too bad here today...not great.

He just said "strong cold front on the 9 day". We will see...

One of the guys up here ( who I do not watch but follow on Facebook because he and his wife are gardeners) says that the various models really don’t have any idea what to do with the data coming in. So some show the front stronger and cooler and longer lasting than others, or any combination of the above. Travis Meyer has one day in the forecast in the mid 79s, and the rest in the upper 80s, and is confident about that. The guys on channel 2 are a bit more optimistic. I guess they will find out what happens when we find out.

This mornings rain was just under 2”, so I’ve basically gotten a hair less than 5” of rain the past 72 hours. Pulled a couple BER tomatoes this morning. Can’t recall that happening in the fall.

Im sure there are Brussels sprouts out somewhere, I just haven’t had the time or budget to go find them. I have one day off work in this 2 week span, and that day has to be partially spent making pesto before the yuck kills the plants. They are not happy about the rain.

Corporate visit, inventory, and coworkers on vacation are coinciding to make it an unpleasant week. I wanted to go to the fair, but...

As much as I want another cat, and knowing Audrey needs a sibling, I can’t take on another right now. I miss having two, though.

Im struggling with the idea of planting lettuce and spinach when it’s still this warm.

The yellow squash plants look great...except for the lack of squash. Nothing but male flowers for the past couple months.

Oh...this looks suspiciously like something I need a license to grow. A bird or squirrel planted it for me.

Dawn, I'm sorry to hear about Fred. You've posted about him so often over the years and I know he was a good friend to you.

One of my pepper plants had a dozen or so peppers on it, & broke in the last storm. When I checked, all the peppers were squishy and no good. Darn it! That was my best pepper harvest! But I have tons of jalapenos, so I may try making up a bunch of cowboy candy. If anything, it'll be good for thanksgiving and Christmas parties, since I can't eat a lot of spicy foods anymore.

Jennifer, I am sorry y'all lost Ron so early in your lives---three years of friendship surely was a blessing but then it was cut so short.

Naming a kitten after Fred is a good idea. I have to say---he never bothered naming his pets. He was kind and would take in any and every dog and cat that someone dumped "out in the country" but he didn't name them. Every dog was named Dog, lol and our precious Yellow Cat was Fred's first before the dogs scared him off, and Fred called him That Ol' Yeller Cat, so we kept Yellow Cat's name since he knew it already...we just dropped That and Ol' and called him Yellow Cat.

Our weather forecast has been bouncing around quite a bit. I'm at the point that I don't care what the temperature is next Thursday, Friday or Saturday as long as it is cooler than the weather has been this week. Our local TV met said yesterday that September 2019 is the warmest September ever for our region since they began keeping records, and I know that all of us are tired of the above-average heat. We'd settle just for having temperatures drop back down to average for October.

The local TV mets here are slowly coming on board with next week's cool front---we'll see if they change their minds early next week. I never trust the temperature forecast more than a couple of days in advance any way.

Rebecca, For as often as models conflict, I don't know how the meteorologists ever gain a lot of confidence in them, but I know from watching the models over the years that sometimes, though not always, it is really amazing to watch them day to day and see them moving more and more into agreement. Of course, sometimes the models never do agree....and that makes forecasting so hard.

BER in the fall often is linked to excess rainfall interfering in the transport of calcium within the plants' vascular system. I'm had some too, thanks to the roughly 11" of rain we've had since late August. It is frustrating because we always can irrigate if there's not enough moisture, but there's nothing we can do to suck the moisture out of the soil when excess rain is falling.

Your odd-looking plant may be some form of hibiscus...some of them have leaves that can look very suspicious.

I'm sorry this week has been rough at work.

Jen Thanks. He was an awesome friend, not just to us, but to all who knew him. In fact, I cannot think of anyone who didn't adore him, and that is pretty special, isn't it?

I just hate that your pepper plant snapped---they are so brittle that I cage all mine using those 3-ring tomato cages which are too small for tomatoes, but even caged, limbs can snap sometimes. I wish pepper plants weren't as brittle as they are.

There was no gardening here today, but I watched the hummingbirds for a while this evening. They just about emptied out the feeders this evening, so I'll make fresh nectar and refill them first thing in the morning. I don't think there were as many this evening as there were early this morning. They're definitely heading south.

There are so many butterflies right now, including lots of sulphurs and monarchs. I really think we're seeing monarchs beginning to mass in small groups prior to migrating. Time will tell. It is so unseasonably warm and there's so any flowers in bloom that all the butterflies seem supremely pleased. The sulphurs still are puddling too.

I sat outdoors and watched the kittens eat and play this evening. The cool thing is that 2 of them are a little less skittish every day and let me watch them from a closer distance every day. In fact, when I brought out their dinner this evening and called 'kitty, kitty', those two answered me with tiny, squeaky meows but stayed hidden under the trumpet creeper vine that itself hides the tornado shelter. So, I find it interesting they will 'talk' to me even when they still are skittish overall. I watched them watching their mama walk up to me to be petted, so hopefully seeing that will teach them to be less fearful. The third is a lot more nervous and hides, but it also came out of hiding finally and ate late in the evening while I watched, and it didn't run off and hide when it knew I was watching. As it ate, it watched me watching it. This actually is important---feral animals don't like to make eye contact because predators make eye contact as they are preparing to pounce. So, the fact that this cat was making eye contact is another tiny sign that maybe someday I'll be able to tame them.

We had three grass fires this morning. I find this incomprehensible because we are so green. Yes, green grass will burn, but just looking around, I don't see much of anything that looks dry enough to burn. We still have some huge puddles the size of ponds. I'm guessing these three grass fires, all along the highway, were started by some vehicle losing a tire piece by piece that was shredding and sending burning rubber pieces through the air into the grass.

Today I saw more autumn color on persimmons, not just on our property but on our neighbors' property as well, so we are starting to see the tiniest glimmer of golden fall foliage here now. I think it will be a couple more weeks before it becomes really obvious.

I bought more flower bulbs at Sam's Club to add to the tulips currently chilling in the garage fridge. I bought Dutch hyacinths and parrot tulips. Next time I'll get some daffodils. By the time that bulb-planting season rolls around, I'll have a lot to plant.

Our local stores are getting cool-season vegetable transplants in the stores now and they are really tiny. Still, tiny transplants are better than no transplants. I saw a lot of veggie transplants at the Home Depot in Sherman this morning when we ran in there to pick up a couple of things while on our way to Sam's Club. I didn't even go near the garden center though I wanted to because we were on a tight schedule in order to make it back in time for Fred's funeral, but I definitely observed the veggie transplants on a rack just outside the garden center on the sidewalk as we were driving by when leaving HD. It looked like they had lots of various brassicas and kale.

Dawn

Dawn, I am sorry to hear about Fred. We are getting to the age that we lose friend and lover ones more often. I lost a friend and class mate the this week. We will have a class reunion in Oct., so many have already gone on. It is nice to live in an area where you may be able to see class mates any day of the week. Some of them I have known so long that I can not remember not knowing them. Nearly all of our class turns 76 this year.

Not much garden wise is going on here. Madge and I are both are getting to the point that we just cant keep up with the things that need to be done. We cut back every year now but still seem to be behind, and we spend more time visiting and helping those that seem to be falling behind faster than we are.

I need to mow the lawn today, we finally got a nice rain, but it wont last long. My peppers and okra were losing leaves, now some of the peppers look like they have had too much water.

We have the youngest grandson today and are taking him to Bartlesville, so this will be short.

There was frass on one of the kale, but I saw no carerpillars. I always have white butterflies, so it's a possibility. The tops were lacy, some of the bottom leaves uneaten. No chickens here this year. The broccoli looked ok, but they reallt went after the kale. I sprayed BT yesterday in the hopes of stopping the damage and maybe they will make a come back before Persephany days. (And hopefully it doesn't get too cold). These were Bonnie plants planted in spring. The were kind of dormant in summer, but were putting on new growth which Ron had been cutting for salad. The romaine I bought looks like it is trying to bolt. Sigh, just can't win.

It looks like my Tansy died! I can see the Hot Lips Salvia's red blooms next to the fence. The tansy is brown. I really think there is something bad under those beds. Things live about 3 years and then they're gone. Too bad it doesn't kill lambs quarters and Johnson grass. Grrrr.

Was outside with the boy a while ago and it was pleasant. Why is it always nice out when I can't be out there? Hope you all enjoy!