Not all of NW Arkansas is like that...just stay off the hills.

We had a teeny tiny amount of rain around 5 am. It's been chilly here all day...not cold, just chilly. Sweater weather. (that is one of my fav candle scents from Bath and Body Works btw)

I am working tomorrow, so will not get to enjoy my low key Monday. Bummer.

This weekend has been a whirlwind...we didn't get to do anything special for our anniversary. That's not a big deal to me, though. We will do something later.

I bought a flat of pansies along with some pumpkins and a bale of straw...just for decorations.

I did not look at the garden today at all. I worked most of the day.

Still have not heard crowing from the little coop. The chicks are all big now and it's about time to start mingling the two flocks. A facebook memory came up yesterday of Jean Luc Picard. He was 12 week and had just crowed for the first time. My oldest chicks turned 13 weeks today and their combs/wattles aren't quite as big as his were at 12 weeks, and they don't have the saddle feathers starting yet, like he did at 12 weeks.

Dawn, I hope you get your cool down tomorrow. It's funny to think that y'all were hot today and we, just a couple of hours north of you, were chilly.

dbarron. I am sure you are correct, the hilly country here is the same way. Around here there are many rock quarries. Most of the quarries dig out building stone. The one closest to us (about a mile) crushes rock and dump trucks are up and down the hwy just in front of our house all day long. We are not nearly as thickly populated as northwest Arkansas. I have lived within 25 miles of where I love now all my life. I use to drive a truck traveling all the lower 48 states and part of Canada. I have told Madge many times that we should have a law that we develop the hillsides first and leave the valleys for growing food. I really hated seeing orange groves and corn fields ripped out and housing developments put in that spot. Someday we may want something to eat other than the rocks that grow no the hillsides.

I have not been out this morning to check on anything, but I did hear a few short, hard rains come through last night. The rain may mess up my sweet potatoes, if there are any.

I hope it washed away my insects, this had been a very bad insect/disease year for me.

Just saw this on FB, most are beverages, but that's a lot of recipes in one place for roselle.

Stuck the ginger, turmeric and citrus in the garage last night. Have to hose them off before coming in the house. No idea where they are going to go in the house.

We got about 1/3 inch of rain.

Purple oxalis plant, can I save it over winter?

We keep talking about green houses, but if it doesn't happen soon, it won't.

I wore a long sleeved shirt today. Had to go to la la land to the doctor. I am getting absolutely like a phobia when on hwy 169.

It was cold in the house this morning (Still set to AC). Have some windows open now.

Everyone have a good week.

Yes, Oxalis is easy (almost all them).

I have not grown purple oxalis in almost 25 years, but it was one of my favorites. The best I can remember it had small bulbs on the bottom. If the plant died back, it would even come back from the small bulbs the next year. I had Coladiums , Ajuga and Oxalis mixed in with the foundation planting on the north side of the house. The coladinms, and oxalis I would save the bulbs in the house because I was afraid they would rot in the wet soil during the winter months. The ajuga I was always having to thin them out.

I just bought 30 mineral tubs to use in container gardening. I never liked containers or raised beds, I but I use to be able to get up and down with ease. I hope to build a rack for the tubs at the edge of the deck. I will start out with just a few and see how it works.

We got less rain last night than I thought we would from listening to the rains come through. There were no puddles when I went out, but it was still a nice rain.

We got ten inches of rain Sunday. Which explains why cars were floating off the roads.

Sorie, That is a lot of rain! It sounds like you were able to get a lot of work done outdoors. I love being able to do that in the more pleasant autumn temperatures.

Nancy, I do have some well-loved and well-worn flannel shirts. I probably could use a couple more, but we're on the warm-cool-warm-cool roller coaster this week, so I probably won't even need or want to wear a flannel shirt until maybe Saturday morning, when our forecast low is 40 with expected wind chills in at least the 30s if not cooler. Between now and then our highs are supposed to hit the 80s---topping out in the mid-80s, so I probably shouldn't get in too much of a hurry to wear autumn clothing, though I did wear a long-sleeved shirt today. I'm not whining though---I would love mild, prolonged weather and hope we don't switch over to cold weather too quickly. I'd like to have more than one week of autumn weather.

I did pick up three pots of mums. They're all in bud and not yet blooming but I think they'll be in bloom in just a few days. I didn't see anything else, in terms of cool-season flowers, that I wanted. The only pansies I found had been in the Lowe's garden center too long while it still was hot and looked heat-stressed and tired. I'm hoping I'll find some better-looking ones soon.

That is terrific news about GDW's surgery. I'm so excited for him that it went so well!

Larry, I'm sorry to hear that about Madge's daughter. What rotten luck! I am not a fan of rocky ground either. There are rocky ridges very close to us, but we bought land down in the creek hollow (or 'holler' if you prefer, as many locals do) so we have mostly clay but some sandy areas and almost no rocks. Friends of ours who lived on a rocky ridge about a mile from us as the crow flies had a very hard time planting trees around their house because of all the rock. They had the same trouble digging trenches to run water lines through the rocks when the house was under construction. Seeing what they went through made me really appreciate all the rocks we do not have here at our house.

Jennifer, We often don't do anything big for our anniversary, generally preferring to just stay home and cook something we like on the grill.

We awakened to a nice 50 degrees this morning. That was a really pleasant change, and I think we'll still have temps in the 50s tomorrow morning too.

Since you worked on Garden Monday, are you going to have another day off later in the week to make up for it?

Larry, I hope the rain washed away a lot of your insects too. It was a pretty bad insect year here too, but we made it through all that, and now there's nothing annoying left except grasshoppers and mosquitoes, and this week's cool nights ought to just about put an end to the grasshoppers. In recent years we have had mosquitoes all winter long, so I'm not expecting much of a break from them unless we get really, really cold.

Amy, Roselle is really versatile. I planted a lot of them this year, and have many plans for the calyces. There's so many, I could spend all day long tomorrow just harvesting them. I'm not sure I have the flexibility in tomorrow's schedule to do that all day because my To Do list for this week is a mile long, but I hope to harvest enough to do a few batches of jelly. Then I can harvest more another day. I just don't want to get too busy and not get them harvested before the cold arrives.

Is your purple oxalis the one that is Oxalis triangularis? I believe that one can be cold tolerant all the way to zone 6, although many species of Oxalis are only reliably cold hardy to zone 8. I haven't grown it here, but it did overwinter outdoors reliably in Fort Worth, which of course, is zone 8.

dbarron, Ten inches of rain in one day is just crazy. I hate it when that much falls at once, even though most of the time, it obviously is better to get too much rain (within limits) than to get too little. We haven't had rain in a while now, but we had plentiful rainfall in August and September, so I feel like we are in pretty good shape overall, even though the ground surface is dry and cracking. I'd like a week without rain so I can work on a lot of outdoor projects. We'll see if I get my wish.

There were no hummingbirds today, so the straggler than Lillie and I saw Saturday evening might have been the last one. The monarchs that have been hanging around for the last few weeks are departing now, but we still haven't seen any big waves of migrating ones flying through. Maybe tomorrow.

The garden still is full of blooms and also full of butterflies and bees, which pleases me as it makes it seem like the garden is fulfilling its purpose by nurturing all the little wild things. Oh, and there's still plentiful tree frogs and dragonflies around too.

Every morning there's a new round of blooms on the roselles---they bloom upwards on the stem, from bottom to top, and most of the blossoms and buds that are left on the plants now are at the top of the branches and will bloom tomorrow or the next day, so they probably will be done soon. The blooms last for less than a day, making the calyx of each flower available to harvest very quickly. That's a good thing since they are photoperiodic and bloom so late in our season that they're always at risk of being hit by an early frost. Our local TV met says we'll be very chilly Friday night/Saturday morning but he does not foresee anyone in our area getting hit by a frost or freeze this weekend. I haven't looked any further out at the forecast. If we are about to get hit by cold weather, I just do not want to know. I want to be able to enjoy the flowers for as long as they last, and I'm hoping most of the flowers in our garden make it to at least November.

I bought two potted Amaryllis bulbs today--one is Minerva, which is a bicolor red and white with a kiwi-green center. The other one is Apple Blossom, which is a pink and white bicolor. I wet their growing medium until it fluffed up and expanded and then planted the bulbs and placed them in a south-facing window. Hopefully in a couple of months we'll have blooms.

I finally ordered wildflower seeds from Wildseed Farms today. I didn't get all that I wanted, but I'm off to a good start on overseeding the front pasture, which is about an acre, this fall for blooms next spring. There's still some more I want to order, but I'll worry about that another day.

Today's weather was glorious---everything you want an October day to be---mild temperatures, clear, blue sunny skies, and a low dewpoint compared to the really high dewpoints we've endured since July. We did, of course, get hotter than forecast, but it was only 2 or 3 degrees and I expected that so it wasn't a big surprise. This is that odd time of the year when a lot of the summer songbirds depart, and then new ones show up to overwinter here a few weeks later. We still have some birds around, but just not as many as we normally have.

The new puppy requires supervision 24/7 when he is indoors with us or he'll chew on something. We're having to get used to that....but he is a good dog and will be pretty easy to train. He's smart and eager to please. The vet said he's older than we thought---probably 10 months old, and as I suspected, is a mixed breed but obviously has some German Shepherd in him. He must have lived around cats before because he came face to face with Lucky this evening and quickly backed away as if he already knew she would slash his nose with her claws if he got too close to her. For better or worse, he's ours now...microchipped, vaccinated, dosed with a flea, tick & heartworm preventive medicine...and scheduled to be neutered next month. He is a good puppy, just long and lanky and all legs and feet, and teeth and tongue. He tries really hard in the garden to stay in the pathways and out of the beds, making him a better garden dog than our other three dogs. Possibly he is assisted in this endeavor by the fact that all the raised beds are filled with tall, wall-to-wall flowers at the present time, planted densely together, and he finds it easier to walk around the dense plantings than to run right through them. I probably will not let him roam freely in the garden area when it is filled with tiny young plants in the spring.

When it is too cold and yucky to work in the garden this winter, I bet I'll be walking the dog a lot in order to get both of us out of the house for a little exercise on those cold, gloomy winter days.

Are any of y'all expecting temperatures in the 30s this coming weekend? I figure if my forecast is for 40 (NWS) or for 39 (local TV met), then some of you surely are expecting cooler weather than that.

Dawn

Autumn weather finally is here, at least for another day or two. We might get hot for a day or two after that. This morning it is a wonderful 47 degrees with a dewpoint of 45 at our house. We'll take that weather and enjoy it! Perhaps a few days of cooler weather will make the miserable summer weather of 2019 with its ridiculous heat index values (our max here was 116) recede into our memory really quickly.

When I harvest roselles this morning, I intend to cut an armload of flowers to bring up to the house to arrange in vases. Luckily the garden is so full of blooms now that nobody (bees, butterflies, etc.) will miss the flowers I cut.

I had been planning an intensively-planted, highly structured cutting garden for the fenced veggie garden for next year, but now I'm leaning towards having a less organized/structured cutting garden more in line with what we have right now, and am thinking I'll just see what reseeds and then add some of the cutting flowers I want to it. It would be a lot less work to let the cutting garden be more informal, and I can take the energy I would have expended there and focus it on the re-do of the landscape planned for 2020. I do have larkspur and poppy seeds ordered to use to overseed some of the raised beds in a month or two so we'll have plenty of those flowers next spring.

Have a great day everyone!

Dawn

I vote for the less structured cutting garden, Dawn, so you can get the landscape plans complete...or at least put a dent in them.

Y'all, I am tired. I skipped Pilates (I don't like to do that because it's a limited class and we are her livelihood) to get some things done. Working away from home most of the time this last week, has left a lot of work at home. Today, I came home and dug up grass by the back garden. Put down wood chips and then moved the compost bin to that location.

The grass is digging up surprisingly easy. It makes me want to dig up the entire backyard.

I didn't do much in the garden other than that. Watered a few things. Chopped up the overgrown Armenian cukes and fed them to the chickens.

I hope it does not freeze on Friday night. I want a fall. I love the weather we had today. LOVE. It!

I think I've failed at my first fall garden. The seedlings I've started have died or are stunted. The purchased brassica plants are living. There are insect holes in them, though.

Good things going on, though. I'm too tired to write about them.

How's everyone's fall gardens?

Jennifer,

I've already decided on the less structured, less intensively-planted cutting garden too so I can devote most of my time to the landscape redo, which will involve removing tons and tons of turf. In the long run, even though I'm sure I'll miss having tons of fresh produce and the fancier, more-structured cutting garden, I think it really is the best decision.

It was a really hard year to get a fall garden started because of the drought and endless heat, then followed by flooding rains. Maybe next year will be better. Obviously I didn't start anything for fall, and I'm sort of glad....I just didn't need the stress after all we went through this summer. I do miss having fresh lettuce, kale and other greens though. I just don't miss it enough to uproot flowers to make room for those plants this late.

I am afraid the frost/freeze danger is very real. They just lowered our forecast temperature for Sat morning from 40 to 38, and since we are in a low-lying microclimate, a forecast of 38 usually gives us 34-36 degrees in the garden and patchy frost. It really wouldn't surprise me if they lower the temperatures another degree or two. I have row covers and, in theory, it would be possible to cover up the roselle plants, but I have 2 and 1/2 rows of them, and each row is about 20-30' long, depending on what other plants are in those rows, with plants that are 4-6' wide and 5-6' tall...like a big long hedge. Covering them up would involve two long pieces of row cover that is 6' or 8' wide that I'd have to somehow join together in the middle to get the height to cover everything from one side of the bed to the other and it is supposed to be windy and rainy so I do not foresee myself doing that. It would literally take many hours to do it, and I'd probably have to build some sort of hoop structure to support it. The hoops I have and use in early Spring aren't tall enough. I would do it for tomato plants at the start of the season when everything is shorter, but in that case I have tomato cages for support and can zip-tie the covers to the cages when it is very windy. The roselles just don't have that kind of support---even their stakes are shorter than the plants now. So, I'll harvest all the calyces I can on Friday, even the ones that aren't full-sized yet, and then will hope that what is left doesn't freeze. If everything freezes, it freezes. If things don't freeze, the next couple of weeks are expected to be warmer than average. Here's the 6-10 day outlook:

Six to Ten Day Outlook

And here's the 8-14 day outlook:

8-14 Day Outlook

So, it looks like our plants will have at least a couple more good weeks of nice temperatures if they make it through this week's cold mornings.

I hope we don't get any frosts or freezing weather (the panhandle counties surely will) this week so we all can enjoy our gardens for a few more weeks.

I didn't do as much garden-related work as I'd hoped to do yesterday because a house fire just down the road from us took up much of the afternoon and evening. I was told they were burning trash near their house, went indoors for just a minute" and came back outside to find everything on fire. It was a raging fire that consuming the structure, some grass, a pickup parked at the house, etc. (It is shocking how often this happens here---no one should burn stuff near their house!)

Earlier in the day, before I left to go to the fire, I had harvested roselles and jalapenos, deadheaded cosmos, salvias and zinnias for a while, weeded a little bit as I worked my way down the rows deadheading, and hand-watered the container plants and part of the garden. I had just turned on the sprinkler to water the very dry flowers (where is all that rain going? our garden soil is as dry as a bone again) when the fire pagers went off. I didn't even take a radio out to the garden with me---guess I've become spoiled by how quiet it has been---and only learned about the fire when I came indoors and found news of it on y phone.

Our tomato plants have small tomatoes on them, but we stayed so hot for so long this fall that there's not many since the days stayed too hot for fruit set well into September, and I don't think they'll have a chance to mature before the cold weather arrives.

I did see some monarchs yesterday, but not in large numbers, just in 2s and 3s here and there. All were nectaring as they worked their way S/SW and only stayed in the garden for a little while before continuing on their journey. I'm thinking we may see more today and tomorrow, but the wind is out of the south/southeast and pretty strong today and will be the same tomorrow so those little butterflies are going to have to fight those winds.

The weather is so much better this week and reminds me of why I love autumn so much, so I guess all we can do is hope the cold front passes quickly and we get to enjoy this weather for a bit longer.

Dawn

I sure hope it doesn't freeze. It can just get right up to freezing, but please, please don't freeze. My tomato plants are loaded as well as the peppers and pumpkins. After this weekend, it looks to be warm (for fall), so they would have a great chance of ripening.

I have enough frost cloth to cover the tomatoes..but really don't want to mess with it.

Need advice. What happens to the fruit of Seminole pumpkins when it freezes? Should I harvest them all (if I decide to worry about the frost) or are they okay going through a frost. There's at least 3 dozen in the garden right now of varying sizes and colors.

Actually a little chilly here today so doors aren't open--67 and I think that's as warm as it will get today. Gray and drizzly. The Gulf frits have moved out as did the Monarchs. I saw one foolish little hummingbird in the big center bed. . . sigh.

I expect we may get nipped by frost Friday. . . forecast right now says 34. Yuck.

My fall garden tomatoes didn't make it. We had about as many cucumbers as we wanted, too many peppers; the summer and winter squash, lovely; and the long beans.

I can now pull out the remaining tithonia and get more soil into that bed so I can sow some seeds! And that made me remember the wildflower seeds--so I jumped up and ran out and sowed a bunch of those in the back 40!

I've been researching gardening stuff the past week. But now that the butterflies are done (whether they want to be or not), I can get busy with refilling that one raised flower bed--and the veggie raised beds.

I'm also going to see if we can get a church garden going. Do any you have a church garden?

I think all the flies outdoors came in this afternoon.

I'm not having much to say at the moment. Best to you all.

This has been such a beautiful day. I have been able to stay out almost all day and do some of MY work. Madge is gone to see her daughter and help out at her house, which works great for me, The bed is unmade, the floor is unswept. I have had 2 pieces of bread and some cheese, along with some grapes to eat. I have 2 brush piles burning, a lot of the wildlife garden is torn up, almost ready for planting. The brush piles will burn for at least another day. After the brush piles burn I will get that area ready for planting. I love my wife dearly, but I can get so much more done when she is gone.

My Egyptian walking onions are doing very well. The rest of the fall planting looks good also. The free plants for the farmers co-op look like they may survive. I was able to pick out 19 that look like they may live, I still have 18 of them. Of course everything is so late that it may never produce anyway. All the seed I planted in the garden for a fall crop are just now getting their first true leaves, and we are looking at maybe getting a frost this weekend.

I had better go check my fires.

Hahaha, Larry! How long will she be gone? I am so impressed with how much you've gotten done today! WOW. Bread, cheese, and grapes sounds YUMMY.

So, our temps are predicted to be in the mid to upper 30s Friday and Saturday morning. Wind chill below 30. Do I bring in all the green tomatoes Thursday night? I don’t have enough anything to cover them.

What about the developing butternut squash? There are 3 or 4 on each plant. Those I could cover.

Rebecca, I'm dealing with the same decisions. My tomatoes and pumpkin and peppers are loaded--do I bring them in...or not? Ugh!

Larry, I LOVE Tom, but don't mind it when he leaves for a night or two...so I can focus on my stuff only. I miss him after a couple of days and am always happy when he comes home.

I planted a few "fall" things tonight and we measured the coop. The plan is to remake the roost bars. Tom took off work on Friday (as did I) so we can work on this. Of COURSE, we took off on the worst day when it's supposed to be cold. We have to get this done, though, the "baby" chicks aren't really babies any longer and need to go to the main coop very soon. The little coop/pen is getting a little tight for 8 chickens. It was originally made for my first 4 hens: Marjorie Peggy, Stella, and Ida. (Only two are still living.)

I think I have a dang cold. At first, I thought "allergies", but I've never had allergies. It's annoying. I know that. Maybe that's why I've been so tired the last few days. I hate resting...especially when the weather is nice.

Nancy, we've had a church garden for several years. However, it's never that great and often neglected. Before we moved out here (probably 6 years ago or so), my Mom and me "took" a bed and planted a variety of things. It was somewhat successful, but I was a real newbie at gardening. It was fun, though. Other people took beds too. Some did well and some didn't. We were "allowed" to pick from all the garden beds. The following year, the man in charge asked that we each take a specific plant for our beds--each something different. However that was 2013 (gosh, that makes the above garden 7 years ago!) when the tornado hit south OKC and Moore. Our church became a relief center and all gardening was put aside. It struggled along with a few people doing things here and there for the next few years until 2018. THEN, we had a large group of people who wanted to garden the spot...the weather in the spring of 2018 was jacked up, if you remember. We had very late freezes. Almost every time we planned to get together, it was raining or especially cold. We did plant some things and it was mildly successful. This year, I haven't even looked at it. :(

I have a plan for getting my life together in 2020. (although, I suspect a wedding will come in and change up some of that)

Jennifer, I don't necessarily expect a freeze, although it wouldn't surprise me to see a Freeze Warning go up for some parts of the state---likely the panhandle and far NW OK, but....frost can ruin tomatoes and tomato plants too without us actually having a freeze. And, oddly, frost can form at temperatures as high as 40 degrees if there is enough moisture in the air and the wind speed is low.

I have had so much trouble with frost here in our garden at temperatures well above 32 degrees--as high as 37 commonly, and a little more rarely at 38 degrees. I don't know if I've ever seen it happen at 39 or 40 degrees, but it took me years to learn I should fear frost perhaps more than freezing weather. This is why I spent all those $$$ on frost blankets---because year after year I kept having frost damage at temperatures that I thought were too warm for frost. I finally learned though.

Just throw sheets or blankets over plants you want to protect, and hold the textiles down tightly to the ground with bricks or boards or whatever---in some desperate situations in our early years here when I wasn't prepared for or expecting a frost, I quickly scrounged up sheets and canned foods (or bottled water) and used them to quickly cover up plants after watching the evening news and realizing that the conditions were going to be just right for frost to form even though we were expected to stay above freezing. Did my garden look ridiculous with cans of soup and vegetables holding down bedsheets tossed over the plants? Of course it did, but I didn't care---the plants survived.

Our forecast low for Fri nite/Sat morning has been lowered to 36 now, so I'm expecting frost for sure, and probably temperatures close to freezing. I am so disgusted with this forecast. I'm just not ready to let go of the garden for this year and most of the plants in it still look so good. All the monarchs haven't even departed yet, though there were a lot more of them headed S/SW today. We might see the migration peak here in the next couple of days as they hurry to get ahead of the coming cold weather.

Seminole? I have had them survive a killing freeze just fine---it killed the vines but the fruits themselves, with those hard shells, were completely undamaged. Frost wouldn't be any harder on Seminole fruit than a hard freeze was. I even harvested all the green ones after the vines died, and all the partially green ones, and lined them up along the west wall of the garage (figuring afternoon heat hitting the west wall would keep them warm enough to color up and cure) and they sat there and slowly turned from green to their usual buff color---it may have taken some of them a month or two. They stored just fine and lasted forever (more than a year) in dry storage. We really had more than we could eat that year, but I'll never complain about that. I've also missed watermelons that were hidden beneath the plant foliage when it froze, and found them 3 or 4 weeks later when I was cleaning up the dead vines, so probably in mid-December, and those watermelons were fine, undamaged, and tasted great. I did not know watermelons could tolerate that much cold, but I guess their thick rind protected them.

Nancy, Y'all were a bit chilly. It was 83 here today and is expected to only drop to 74 tonight, I think, and then hit the mid- to upper-80s tomorrow before the cold front rolls through tomorrow evening.

I expect most of us will have some sort of cold damage to our plants over the next couple of days---anything ranging from chill injury to frost damage to freeze damage.

Y'all remember that the forecast temperatures are for air temperatures five feet above the ground---which also is how the temperatures are measured at the Mesonet stations, and our plants may be colder....at least the plant parts that are lower than 5' in height. Warm air rises, leaving the cooler air down lower, a lesson I've learned here over and over again. Sometimes the lower parts of my garden freeze back completely to the ground, but the raised bed at the highest part of the garden would survive that same night completely unscathed just because it stayed a degree or two or three warmer at the slightly higher elevation.

Larry, It sounds like you have had a grand day indeed! When Tim goes out of town on a business trip, I enjoy being able to slack off around the house, and will happily eat a cold sandwich dinner just because that means I don't have to cook for however long he is gone. I get a lot done when he is gone too because I can do whatever pleases me and can set my own priorities.

Rebecca, You don't have a spare bedsheet or anything that could cover the plants? If not, then I'd play it safe and harvest anything that is far enough along to be used if you harvest it now. Butternut squash might be okay in the cold if their shell has gotten hard enough to protect them, but their shells are much thinner than some other squash like Seminole, so I'm not sure how well it protects them.

Jennifer, Call me a weirdo, but I love those days when Tim takes a day off from work so we can work together on a project---it feels almost decadent to be able to just stay at home and work on something together that matters to us while the rest of the world goes about its usual routine. I hope you and Tom can get everything done that you need done on Friday despite what probably will be less than ideal weather.

I hate to hear that you have a cold and hope you get well quickly. They say flu season is supposed to be really bad this year and to start really early. Well, I'm hoping we all avoid the flu.

If a wedding happens in 2020, I suspect you'll still have time to get your life together. (grin) Tim and I might finally feel like we've got life put all together at long last, but then we forget where we put it....(old joke).....

I'm not looking forward to this weather. I want to cover up plants and save them, but that seems like a pipe dream given how large all the plants are. I just don't think I can over those big roselle hedges, especially with all the rain and the wind in the forecast. There is nothing more miserable that struggling in wind and rain to cover up short tomato plants in spring time, and I cannot even imagine trying to do it with fall plants that are huge compared to those young tomato plants. Oh well, if everything gets freeze or frost damage, I'll move on to working on other projects.

It is hard to imagine that Friday morning and Saturday morning will be coat weather! Oklahoma's new thing seems to be to try to have the shortest period of autumn weather possible and I hate going from summer-like weather to winter-like weather after only a week or so of autumn-like weather. I have no idea what Tim will think about this, but I fully intend to turn on the heater on those cold mornings. I am not one of those people who tries to see how deeply into autumn or winter we can go without using the heat. Nope. Not gonna mess with that. I hate being cold.

Dawn

Dawn--how many square feet of gardens do you suppose you have? Surely far more than the church garden I will be proposing. Did you start it small and grow it each year? That's how we did ours here. How about the rest of you? I do think that is how I will propose it for the church.

We do have one rather large lot behind the church. I walked through it today. Right now it is not overcome by Bermuda, as it has enough prairie grasses running through it. But it has some, and so I don't think tilling it up is a good idea. I really am thinking we start smallish with raised beds and grow it from there. And to save money to gather leaves from everywhere and everyone, and to buy some alfalfa hay (I am totally sold on that), try to set a budget, and do as much as possible within that budget. Also we have some horse ranchers and cattle ranchers. I can touch base with them and find out what they feed their critters, to see if the manure would work for us.

I have changed so dramatically from 2015 to now in terms of how I view gardening. I quickly became an "organic only" convert the second year. Last year, year 4, I was worrying about pollinators and the plight of the Monarchs, and so planted for them. This year, my gardens have achieved a pretty good balance, and I have become an impassioned advocate for pollinators, and a way station for Monarchs (although several other butterflies are on the edge of extinction, too.) And of course, the logical conclusion after one decides to support the pollinators (including the butterflies) is that one must have the right plants. The right plants are natives, mostly. What a journey this gardening stuff has been. I absolutely love it, and believe we are charged to be good stewards of God's earth.

You guys, I don't mind leaving home knowing Garry's here holding down the fort (though I hate leaving my home), but I'd freak if he were gone for 3 days. Not because I'd be scared or frightened, but because he remembers all the things I forget and I remember all the things he forgets! So I'd be forgetting things on one hand, and on the other, I'd be worrying about what HE was forgetting. ROTFL. Hahahahaha. But true.

And so my proposal to the church will have that as the bottom line. I'll meet with the pastor in 2 weeks. I am 100% certain she will support me, though she does not yet know about gardening. But she is VERY smart and will learn quickly! I'm thankful that my friends at Lincoln are on board with this philosophy, too.

I owe so much of what little knowledge I have about gardening here to you all. XOXO

It's funny you are talking about spouses being gone, we had the same conversation at church Sunday. From the day Cliff moved in, I've spent 3 days and one night alone in our house. I've gone to camp or up to visit my dad, but he's always there. The only night he's been gone was the time he went to Louisiana with my brother to load up his dog after he & my sister in law split up. It's weird how quickly I got used to someone being there.

I bought a dehydrator at Aldi this weekend, so last night I loaded up a couple of trays with peppers. It's on the table next to the open window with a fan blowing, so thankfully the fumes didn't get bad with it running. I still have tons of peppers so I hope we don't get too cold this weekend. I'll check again this afternoon & decide if I need to rush home & pull everything, or if I want to roll the dice & hope things are protected enough to survive.

I went ahead and brought in any tomatoes that might be mature enough to force ripening. I left some small ones just in case. The projected wind chills made my decision. They’re wrapped up in brown paper in boxes, so we will see what happens.

Nancy, I no longer have any idea how big the garden is, lol, because its size actually has shrunk down a great deal over the last decade as shade has encroached from the west side and the north side. I think we've lost about 70% of our original garden space out front to shade, and we gave up the part of the garden that was across the driveway right next to the southern property line for several reasons....mainly because the Johnson grass from the neighbor's pasture next door was impossible to keep out of that part of the garden, and because timber rattlers constantly came out of their woodland, across the little bit of open pasture that is there, and into that garden area. It was scary how often they were there. When I grew corn there, which I did for quite a few years, it was impossible to tell Johnson grass plants from grass plants when they were young. With that area, we finally admitted defeat after 14 or 15 years, and even took down the fence, knowing we wouldn't attempt to garden in that area again. I miss it---the soil there across the driveway is more of a sandy-clayey loam that amended easily and grew things well, but then that also is one reason the Johnson grass infiltrated it so easily.

I'd love to cut down all those trees north of the garden and all but one of them west of the garden and reclaim what we've lost to exceedingly dense shade over the last decade, but a lot of those trees are 50' tall or taller, and it just isn't going to happen. They have made incredible growth since we had that 80" rainfall year in 2015, largely because of that year but also because each spring has had above average rainfall since then and the trees have grown like mad. Following the 4 years of deep, prolonged drought (2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014) with heavy rainfall and only small periods of drought has been wonderful, except for the whole thing with the trees becoming huge monsters. Because the woodland is so dense, the trees could only fall one way if we cut them---onto the garden---so we won't even go there because it isn't worth damaging the garden fence and the raised beds to regain square footage.

The front garden and a few smaller auxiliary growing areas scattered around the property at one point added up to about 10,000 square feet, most of that built between 1999 and 2008, I'm guessing. Now, the front garden probably is about 2500 to 3000 square feet and the back garden is about the same, so I'm growing in a lot smaller space than I once did.

The squash and pumpkin growing space behind the garage is about another 1000 square feet, but I'm planning to retire that space, move the girls' swimming pool there, and landscape it with banana trees, cannas, elephant ears and such next spring as part of the landscape renovation. We built the back garden around 2012, I think, to help make up for all the space we were losing out front to the shade, but it has sandy soil, a constant vole infestation and its own issues and I don't love it as much as I thought I would. There's nothing worse than having voles show up and eat the roots of everything you grow during drought. Because our woodland has pine voles, and there's 10 acres of woodland, there's no way we ever can rid our property of the voles---so, the sandy soil has proven to be very challenging.

I'm contemplating gradually turning the back garden into solely a container garden. It would be expensive, and it would take us years to do it, but I could line the bottoms of the containers with 1/4" hardware cloth and never have to worry about voles again. I could just start adding a couple of large containers (I'm thinking galvanized stock tanks) per year until I felt like we had enough. If money were no object, I'd convert it all in one year, but sadly we have a budget we must adhere to so that huge conversion to all containers in one year just isn't going to happen. Well, it could happen if we were to win the lottery, but we don't throw our money away on lottery tickets so that's never going to happen either.

I used to grow almost all our own produce and preserve it all, and it was a full-time job, literally from dawn (pun intended) to sunset every day from February through November. I remember day in 2012, which was a great garden spring, when I did nothing but harvest tomatoes from sunrise to sunset, not even stopping to eat lunch---I'd just munch on cherry tomatoes all day while harvesting. Then, I'd spend the next couple of days preserving all that we couldn't eat fresh, and then I'd spend the next day harvesting all day and trying to keep up on everything else that wasn't tomatoes too. Well, I'm getting older now, and don't tolerate the heat as well since getting heat exhaustion several times while fighting fires in the summer drought of 2011, so I cannot work out there all day every day any more, nor do I particularly want to. I've been cutting back, way back, on how much food I raise and preserve, and I'm not through cutting back yet. Having said that, we bought a ton of fresh produce at the grocery store last week and I wasn't happy with its quality, so I'm certainly not completely giving up growing our own.

And....that is the state of my garden now, compared to how it was in 2000, 2005, 2010 or even 2015.

We did start small---with two raised beds the first year, and added a couple of more the first couple of years after that, and then added 1 per year after that. We worked with our native soil, improving it to build each bed as we went along. The whole process could have been faster if we'd just bought/imported soil by the dump truck load, but we believe strongly in rebuilding and restoring the soil that exists here so that we leave this land in better shape than we found it. We probably stopped adding raised beds around 2012, when we began building the back garden as our supplemental or eventual replacement garden. At one point the front garden was set up like a formal potager with beds running in different directions and it was lovely, but impossible to water effectively with drip irrigation because of the beds running multiple directions. We changed the layout to make all the beds run the same way, widening the pathways when we did that, which also took away a significant amount of garden space because the pathways went from 12" wide to 2' or more feet wide, and that did help with irrigation, though it doesn't look as pleasing to my eyes as it did in the beginning. I loved the potager look, but those days are long gone.

Our garden got bigger every year until it got too big, but then in the long term, Mother Nature was working on shrinking it down with her encroaching shade, so I guess things have worked out the way they needed to because I wouldn't be able to keep up with everything now if the front garden still was as big as it once was.

My new dream garden, which may exist forever only in my mind, though I hope to have it by the time I'm 70, is a deck garden that would be just a big deck built with treated lumber so it would last forever, lined with self-watering planters, limiting the amount of time I'd have to spend weeding and watering. Believe me, I've been watching our friends and family members age out of gardening at such a hard-core pace as the got older and couldn't keep up with that they had, and I want to avoid the frustration they experienced when they had to downsize their gardening efforts sort of against their will as their bodies (and sometimes minds) failed them, along with their energy. I want the downsizing to be rightsizing done willingly at the appropriate time. That deck garden might sound lazy compared to how hard I work now, but I know I don't want to keep up this pace forever, especially all the time spend weeding endlessly in spring and early summer.

We're going to take out our last 2 fruit trees this winter as the big pecan tree is shading them out. I'm okay with this. We knew when we planted them that eventually they'd be shaded out by the taller trees, and fruit is so hard to grow organically. I don't think we'll replace them. We have Chickasaw plums if I want to make jelly, but since we have cut back so much on sugar, we don't eat much jelly any more anyway.

I suppose the shrinking down of the front garden and the fruit tree area sounds sort of like semi-retirement from a big garden to a smaller one, and maybe it is. Mostly though, I just want to garden smarter, not harder.

Now, you know a whole lot about my garden's history, whether you wanted to hear it in such detail or not. (grin)

Now...the weather. We are going to FREEZE here and my garden is going to be done. I've felt this way more and more every day all week long, and last night I saw a model that was forecasting a Saturday morning low of 31 degrees for us, so my gut feeling was right all along. The NWS may not be fully on board with that model that showed us going down to 31 degrees, but this morning they lowered our forecast low from 36 to 33, so I know they are moving more towards agreement with that 31 degrees. Since our entire property is basically a low-lying creek hollow that goes colder than forecast (our record is a low of 32 degrees and a killing freeze when the forecast low had been 50 degrees, which explains why I have frost blankets galore now...because I didn't have them then), if they are saying 33, then I am thinking 28, which would be a hard, killing freeze.

My new weather plan is: 1) harvest all the rest of the roselles that are a usable size today. I don't like this, as many would double or triple in size if they had another 5-10 days, but they don't have that, so I'll harvest them at any size as long as the flower blossoms have dropped. There is no way to cover up these huge monster plants. 2) Tomorrow I'll cut all the candletree flowers and bring them indoors and fill up all my vases and quart canning jars with them so I can enjoy their blooms another few days. They are tropical plants and are unhappy whenever we drop into the 40s, so the lower 30s or upper 20s will kill them. 3) if it isn't too windy to attempt this, I'll cover up the mixed perennial/annual border that sits right beside the southern garden fence with row cover in late afternoon. It is full of things in bloom--angelonia, zinnias, cosmos, yellow butterflyweed, various kinds of salvias including autumn sage and meadow sage, firebush, pineapple sage, dianthus, celosia cristata, yellow bells, etc. I cannot cover up the 7' tall Mexican sunflower at its eastern end or the three big hardy hibiscus plants which are about done blooming anyway, but I can cover up everything else. I am doing this for the sake of all the remaining butterflies because they need plants for nectaring. I'll also throw row covers over the containers that have my jasmine plants and shrimp plant, and I'll bring in the three tropical plants that have spent the summer on the front porch.

There, my gardening year is about to end in the worst possible way---an early freeze. There have been years I wouldn't have minded this so much because I had mostly abandoned the garden in the summer due to snakes and drought, but I hate it this year with those 2 and 1/2 beds full of huge roselle plants and one bed full of candletrees---all intended to give us endless beauty until at least mid-November or the first freeze/frost (which usually is mid-November).

It rained here early this morning---not a lot---about 1/10th of an inch, but there was a lot of thunder and lightning, which always upsets Jersey, so I had to get up and open the bedroom closet and put a blanket in there on the floor so she could hide from the storm.

There's more storms and rain expected today, and it is very windy, and expected to remain windy as the cold front comes through, and after it comes through.

I think most of y'all are forecast to be warmer than us Sat morning---because you're not in the low-lying Red River Valley. It is peculiar, then, to think we will freeze and many of you may not, but it is common here for this to happen when a big cold front rolls through. One of our local TV mets warned us about this on Tuesday, saying that "the usual cold spots, like Marietta" could get very cold at the end of the week, more so than some of the surrounding areas, so no one who lives down here should be surprised by this weather if they were paying attention at all to the weather forecasts.

Dawn

I came inside from harvesting roselles to cool down. The heat index out there has reached 95 today, but is slightly cooler now. It is raining one county away and as soon as I cool off a little bit I need to go back out and finish harvesting before the rain gets here. I am till waiting for that cold front to come through here and change our summer-like weather to autumn-like weather, which I think is supposed to happen by dinner time. "Still waiting" could be our garden motto for this year....waiting for the rain to stop, waiting for the weather to warm up, waiting for the rain to come, waiting for the weather to cool down....just waiting, waiting, waiting, and here I am, still waiting.

I've harvested about 75% of the viable roselles on the 2 long rows of plants. I hope to finish the rest of that area, and then go harvest the half-row. Then I'll harvest the rest of the jalapenos that are large enough to use although I do intend to cover up those plants so they can survive the cold and continue producing for a few more weeks. If I can get all that done in today's warm, humid, windy weather, then tomorrow will be a piece of cake---harvesting herbs, cutting armloads of flowers to fill up vases in the house ahead of the freeze, and harvesting any roselle calyces from today's blossoms, which will be faded and gone by tomorrow..

There's still tons of spiders, some praying mantids, bees and a handful of grasshoppers in the garden with me today, but very few butterflies this afternoon, and no monarchs (I'm sure they are hustling south/southwest as fast as they can fly today). There's not even that many songbirds around. Maybe they feel the cold front coming and are lying low.

Well, so much for relaxing and cooling down. I still feel too warm and too thirsty but just got a Significant Weather Advisory for NW Love County. I need to run back out to the garden and do what I can before the rain makes it down here to us. I probably don't have too long to do that now. I can cool off later.

Thanks so much for letting us hear your garden's history. I loved it. And it was helpful to me, as well.

Well--we have 3.25" of rain today so far. It's still raining off and on. It's nice and warm out, to boot. Certainly no gardening here! It wasn't raining the past two days, but was chilly both days. So weird now to have it be so nice and warm, and yet so rainy. I have been researching ALL day. . . that's a total lie (haha). GDW and I were binge-watching West Wing for about 3 hrs. LOL Neither of us ever really caught it when it was playing, at least not regularly. I'm going to go out on a limb and say the garden is mostly done for this year. The garlic I'll be planting this month doesn't count for this year. Yikes--best get it ordered. And yay, I have cilantro and spinach sprouting already! I have become a soak-in-hot-water (for 8-12 hours) convert with many many seeds.

My head's about to explode from reading gardening stuff today. I pulled out Rosalind Creasy's book--she's got some magnificent photos, doesn't she?

Rosalind Creasy rocks! I love what she has done with her own landscape and I love all the photos of the different landscapes she has designed across the country.

One of her favorite projects that she's ever done that I just adored was her Wizard of Oz garden. I don't think that it is in this book and I probably saw it in one of her rainbow books (a series of small books like The Rainbow Pepper Garden, The Edible Rainbow Garden, etc. from some time ago) , but I saw photos of it in a magazine probably at least 12 to 15 years ago, and that led me to the book from whatever year it was published. Many have copied her Wizard of Oz garden, including huge bontanical gardens with lots of staff and funds, but hers remains my favorite. She had bright flowers and painted the brick pathway yellow, and had Dorothy and the gang on display....it was just awesome.

Okay, I found and am going to link a portion of the book that has some of her Wizard of Oz garden info and photos. I hope the link works. Wouldn't this be a cute idea for a school garden?

Rosalind Creasy's Wizard of Oz Garden

I did all the work in the garden that I could. I harvested gazillions of roselles, which took forever, because I had to harvest all the little tiny ones that weren't fully mature and it takes a billion of those to fill up a 5-gallon bucket. If I were harvesting them all at full-size and maturity, it would be like harvesting Large Red Cherry tomato or something a similar size. Since I'm harvesting them small, it is like harvesting tiny currant tomatoes. If all the roselles I harvested today had been full-size, I think I would have filled up three or four 5-gallon buckets. Oh well, it is what it is and at least I salvaged all the harvest I could before the freeze early Saturday morning. It was so hot....at one point, I saw droplets of moisture falling on the roselle leaves near me, and thought it was starting to rain. It wasn't. It was sweat dripping off my head and face as I bent over the plant harvesting roselles. lol. Later on it began to actually rain and I came indoors. I did get the peppers harvested too, so all I have to do in tomorrow's cooler weather is cut flowers to bring indoor, harvest some herbs and cover up a handful of things I want to keep going a while longer.

The Norman Office of the NWS has issued a Freeze Watch for many counties, including mine, for early Saturday morning. Had I not been expecting it and if I had just walked into the house and heard it mentioned on the evening news, I'd be freaking out and running around like a chicken with my head cut off, trying to figure out how to harvest and save all I could very quickly. Luckily, I knew it was coming based on how our forecast low (now lowered again from 33 to 32 for Sat morning) was dropping consistently and was able to get all that final harvesting done. At least they issued it tonight for Sat morning, so people have from now until darkness falls tomorrow night to do the things they need to do to prepare.

Ha! The weather is messing with me this year and it is winning. I finally bought potted chrysanthemums on Monday and the three pots are sitting outside the mudroom door. I waited simply forever this year to get them because the weather just would not cool down. Now, with just a few of the buds about to bloom, I'm going to have to bring them indoors for one night so they won't freeze before we can enjoy them in bloom. You'd think the weather would attempt to cooperate with us just a little bit, but it does not. The stores still haven't had any cool-season flowers like pansies that look good because the ones they did have sat in the heat too long and look like crap. So, I have no cool-season annuals planted, and we are going to have a freeze. Maybe I'll find some to plant after the freeze.

It was raining pretty heavily and the DirecTV was working just fine. Then the rain stopped and the satellite dish lost reception. (sigh) That is the opposite of how it usually works. Who knows why these things happen---maybe it is the transmitter and not our dish.

As much as I hate the coming freeze, it allows me to move on. I can clear out the raised beds in the garden a little. I usually leave plants standing for the wildlife, but I want to take out the huge candletrees and roselles that fill 3 and 1/3 beds so I can improve the soil in those beds after the plants freeze and heap compost and shredded/chopped autumn leaves on top of them. In another part of the garden, I want to sow more poppy seeds and larkspur seeds because they sort of thinned out this year and need to be rejuvenated. So, an early freeze is not all bad. It frees me up to work on some things for next year. I'll be okay if we don't freeze, but if they are saying 32 degrees for us, then my garden will hit 28 or lower. It always does.

I need to go cook dinner. I'd rather just sit here and not do it, but then I want to eat, so I guess cooking is a necessary evil no matter how tired I am.

My wish for being able to wear sweats, and flannel shirts, and fur-lined boots (and, apparently a coat, hat and gloves as well) will come true Saturday morning. Even tomorrow will be in the 40s when we wake up. Tomorrow I'll make muffins so we can sit on the porch Saturday morning with cups of hot cocoa and coffee and eat muffins for breakfast and exult in finally not being roasting hot for once. Tim will think I'm nuts when I suggest eating on the porch, but he'll humor me and go along with it.

He grew up in cold weather in PA and doesn't adore it like I do. He's sick of it before it even starts. : (

It's so funny to think that you had a heat index of 95, Dawn! It is COLD here. It was warmish (I think, I was indoors) in the early afternoon. It was nice, yet windy when I went outside to start working on the coop. By 5 it was chilly. I kept working until about 6. We walked the dogs then and it was very chilly and windy then. However, everyone in my neighborhood decided to take a walk at the same time. So strange. Even people who don't normally walk.

If it doesn't reach 32, how much cold can tomatoes, Seminoles and peppers take before being ruined? I didn't harvest anything tonight. I can do it tomorrow if necessary.

Honestly, I feel like crap but Tom took off work tomorrow to rebuild the roosts and make droppings boards, so I've gotta pull it together. I cleaned a shelf above the coop window that I hang a curtain from. The shelf was supposed to be used for pots of herbs, but the chickens kept trying to fly up and roost on the shelf, so I just gave in to them. The shelf was nasty, but I got it, the wall behind it, and the window scrubbed and clean. The roost bars will be moved and lowered. It will make it more difficult for them to reach the shelf and window ledge. I will remove them if they make it to either...and place their little fluffy butts on the roosts.

It's gonna be cold tomorrow, but I'm going to scrub the rest of the walls and Tom will put the new roosts in. Has anyone used Sweet Pdz in their coops? That's my latest plan--put PDZ on the dropping boards and scoop it like a litterbox.

Finally, I am going to repaint their ceiling. May do that on Saturday when it's warmer. I think I actually have a free Saturday and am excited about that.

Nancy, that is a LOT of rain. We could use some rain here. And, it would be good for another reason--it would force me to stay indoors.

If our gardens could just get through the next 36 hours or so...I think they would enjoy next week's weather. IF. If only..

Okay. Off to take some Nyquil. (Normally don't take this type of medicine but am giving in tonight).

Has anybody ever tried to spray water over your plants during a frost/freeze event to save the plants. I tried that one time in a late spring artic freeze and it seemed to do more harm than good.

okmulgee boy

okmulgee boy, I have tried the water trick, for me, it was not worth the trouble. I can see spraying fruit for early year protection, but for late tired veggies I just let nature take its course. I think frost blankets are the safest protection from frost. When it is just around freezing, I have sprayed the plants pretty often with water just to keep frost from forming and keeping the plant warm till the sun and/or the temp came up. Often there is just a short period of time just before daylight that get cold enough to harm plants when the temp is around 34/28 degrees. I have never done a side by side comparison so I am not sure how much good it did.

The rain has pretty well shut me down as far as any kind of garden work. I still have 2 brush piles smoking. I have not been over to the wildlife garden, but I know that we have had enough rain to make it very wet. I expect water will be standing in some areas. when it drys some I will scoop up the unburned material and place it on one of the brush piles that I have not tried to burn yet.

Same here, Larry--no gardening for us. We ended up with 5 and about 3/8 inches for yesterday. I'm pretty happy about that, means I can study and read today. I also will be content to let nature take its course. I'm definitely NOT ready for a freeze! Grrr. Well, MAYBE I'll get out frost blankets for my elephant ears and ornamental ginger and sweet potato vine. Maybe.

HJ, that's just what I was thinking when Dawn was talking about it being 94 and hot. I thought, Dawn--it's like we live in different countries! It got chilly here, too. And today I have my little electric heater on (in my cave, which is a great room, cept it doesn't have heat). And I DO hope you aren't totally miserable working on the coop today, since it IS so chilly. Thinking of ya.

LOL. I've been reading reading reading on church gardens and community gardens. I write down every thing that comes to mind, as well. I've printed lots of articles and am also creating a word doc of my own. I was going to list resources as a part of it, and frankly, you all are one of the most important resources! And some of you on FB OK Gardening. I thought you all would get a kick out of that.

And now I MUST go order my garlic.

Jennifer, It was crazy hot, which just served as a reminder how bizarre this autumn has been, with the heat hanging on down here forever. I should be unhappy we're likely to freeze tonight, and a part of me is unhappy about that....but the rest of me keeps thinking that maybe it means that we won't feel like it is 95 degrees out there ( or 105 or 115) another single time this year, and I am happy about that. I wasn't hoping for cold weather like y'all had. I was hoping for moderate, mild weather, but here in OK we seldom get the weather we are wishing for.

In our neighborhood, the evening walks are how people connect, so I understand it. We live so far apart, and with houses so far back from the road, that your best chance of seeing another human who's not related to you is to put a leash on the dog and go for a walk. The other night, Tim took Jesse out for a quick walk while I was cleaning up the kitchen after dinner (which usually is the job of the person who didn't cook, but I thought that Jesse and Tim needed some time together) and, of all people, they ran into our deceased friend, Jesse's, widow, son and daughter in law, so Tim got to introduce our Jesse to them. He said it was a sweet moment when they realized we had named our dog Jesse after their Jesse.

We haven't used Sweet PDZ and don't know anyone who does use it, but it does get good reviews so maybe it will work for you.

That's a big 'if only' for our gardens, isn't it? I think I am beyond worrying about it. If plants in the garden make it, fine. If they don't, fine. I'm too tired to fight the changing of the seasons....sometimes it is easier to just go with the flow and work with what we've got. If the plants freeze out, I'll take that as a sign that I need to move on, clear out the big monster plants, and sow the wildflower seeds I ordered from Wildseed Farms on Sunday. Those seeds arrived in the mailbox today....is that a sign? I want to get the poppy seeds out in the garden and the larkspur seeds, and then maybe on Sunday, we can mow down the front pasture super-short and overseed it with the TX-OK Wildflower Mix and more poppies. This is absolutely the perfect time to sow wildflower seeds for spring blooms, so I need to get it done. Oh, and bluebonnet seeds too. I bought a pound of bluebonnet seeds for that front pasture because the bluebonnets in it tend to stay clustered mostly in one fairly small area and I'd like to have more of them over a much larger area. Of course, I cannot broadcast sow the wildflower seeds on a windy day, so now I need a day with low wind speed.

I hope taking the Nyquil helped and that you are feeling better---I've learned I cannot take any of those cold medications that have a decongestant or cough suppressant in them because it keeps me awake the entire night. I guess my body is super-sensitive to those ingredients.

I hope you and Tom can get a lot done since you both have a day off specifically in order to get those things done.

This morning I processed all the jalapeno peppers I've harvested this week, and there were a lot of them. Now I need to do the roselles, and there's ten times as many roselles as there were peppers, so it will be an all weekend job. The only really bad part is separating each individual calyx from the fruit/seed pod. It is just a tedious little task.

I still need to cut some flowers and bring them in just in case we freeze. If this wicked wind would blow all night long, frost couldn't settle on the plants, but you cannot count on that. (a) The wind is forecast to drop and we are forecast to have calm conditions after dark; and (b) any time I've hoped the wind would last and would prevent frost from settling....well....95% of the time, it hasn't happened

I am taking the approach that if the gardening season ends tonight, it is just God's way of telling me to move on and do all the other chores on the endless To Do list. I think it will be too chilly to paint tomorrow, but we should be able to paint on Sunday. I'd like to get the exterior of the house finished. I'm trying to keep tomorrow relatively unplanned and unscheduled so we can just stay home and watch the OU-UT game and take it easy, which is a rare change of pace for us for a Saturday. We'll see how that works out.

Okmulgeeboy, I have done it when I have awakened early (before sunrise) on a day when we had a surprise frost, and it seemed like turning on the sprinkler and watering the garden quickly before sunrise seemed to wash the frost off the plants and they showed no damage. What I don't know is whether they would have shown no damage if I hadn't washed the frost off of them. I also did it once when we were dipping down to around 30 degrees, also unexpectedly, and I was trying to keep the plants warm....it seemed to work. I went out and turned on the sprinkler around 4 a.m. when it was 33 degrees and left it on while we dropped fairly briefly below freezing and turned off the water once we were above freezing. Again, though, it is hard to know if watering helped, or if we were below freezing for such a short time that the plants would have been fine anyway.

I've heard that doing this does not work with home gardeners' fruit trees because we home gardeners lack the specific special nozzles used to mist the trees at a particular rate that will coat the fruits on the trees and protect them like commercial growers do. The commercial growers have it down to a very specific science and know just how many GPHs (gallons per hour) need to go through their irrigation systems to mist and protect the fruit. The problem with us home gardeners trying the same thing is we don't have fine mist nozzles and our sprinklers usually deliver too much water at too high of a rate. In the case of the fruit trees, the higher accumulation of water freezing on the trees can break limbs and even knock young fruits off trees. I do not know if that would happen with fruiting plants like peppers and tomatoes in a garden. I usually just cover them up instead.

It is good to water the ground if it is excessively dry because dry roots suffer freeze damage more readily than moist roots. We had rain last night and again this morning, so I feel like all my plant roots probably will be in better shape tonight that the plants' above-ground parts.

Larry, I agree with you on letting nature take its course this year. I'm trying to stay calm and cool and resist the urge to run outdoors and throw row covers over everything. Ha ha! As if I could even do that in today's strong winds.

We didn't even get that much rain, and we have water standing in all the usual places, but I bet it will be gone by tomorrow since the soil was shockingly dry before it rained. I say shockingly because August and September were incredibly wet, but the air must have sucked up all that moisture out of the ground. Even after I watered the garden earlier this week, the soil shocked me by being totally bone dry yesterday.

Nancy, That's an incredible amount of rain in such a short time.

To be honest, when it got so hot yesterday afternoon, I thought I was having an out-of-body experience and had been transported to some hot land somewhere. Then, I realized I was home, still in our garden, and Oklahoma's weather was just giving us evil heat index values. Why can't our weather ever behave????

I had to worry about snakes in the garden yesterday, but thankfully I did not see any. I am hoping we are cold enough that I won't see another snake this year. Realistically speaking, we still can see snakes after the first freeze since it often warms back up and stays there for a while. The latest I've ever seen a snake out here is on Thanksgiving weekend, and it was just a black rat snake out in the woods, looking for dinner. I still wasn't happy to see it. I think tomorrow morning while it is very cold would be a good time to take a long hike through our ten acres of woods to look everything over and see if we find anything interesting....we never step foot in it during snake season, but at least early tomorrow morning will be cold enough that snake season should have ended, at least for one day. I could take some surveyor's tape with me and mark beautyberry bushes to dig up and pot up for the Spring Fling once they've gone dormant later in autumn.

The NWS now has raised tonight's forecast low from 32 to 34, not that it really matters. Frost still is likely, and a freeze is not out of the question. Here in our cold microclimate, we went 4 degrees colder than forecast last night....41 instead of 45, so I'm not trusting that forecast of 34 degrees. We also, so far, are 1 degree warmer than forecast this afternoon and I think we have time to go up another couple of degrees. Maybe getting the ground a bit warmer this afternoon might help us stay warmer overnight. I don't know. Dewpoints were awfully low this morning. If they are low like that tomorrow morning, the odds are a lot higher that we'll see plant damage.

Dawn

Well, crap. The minute I hit submit on the above message, I went and looked at the OK Mesonet to see if our dewpoint was as low as it feels, and it is.....23. That's awfully low. It was in the low 30s around sunrise, so it has continued to drop all day. At least this explains why my skin on my hands and face feel like it is cracking---I've been slathering on the moisturizer all day long. Why does a low dewpoint matter? First and foremost, in terms of gardening, dry air cools rapidly so we should expect the temperatures will plunge quickly tonight, pretty much wiping out any hopes we might be harboring that we might stay warmer than forecast....unless the dewpoints rise as the temperature falls, and I doubt that will happen unless the wind starts coming back out of the south. The more I watch the weather and learn how it affects what happens in our gardens, the less I like it. Life was easier when I didn't know enough about the weather to understand stuff like this.

My grandmother used to spray her trees faithfully. I don't know if it did any good or not, but those trees were still standing last time I drove by her place.

I went out last night & harvested all the basil, but left the peppers and tomatoes. Much as I'd like to leave them to ripen, I'm thinking I should pull them too. Otherwise I'm going to lose the only decent sized crop I'll get this year. And that's about all the gardening plans I have for this weekend.

I brought in most of the peppers, tomatoes, melons, southern peas, cukes, and okra.

One tomato was covered. The plants are so tall now, that it is difficult to cover them. I covered the shortest one with the most fruit.

Basil. Thanks for the reminder, Jen, I'm going to grab my too. I'll make pesto tomorrow.

I guess I’m an Okie until tomorrow evening. We’ve been residing in a house a few miles east of Roosevelt, OK, at around 1676 ft. above sea level. We have to attend a partially outdoor wedding tomorrow morning in OK City (COLD), then home tomorrow night. At home (and I believe across all of OK state) we are under a freeze warning, potentially mid 20’s to low 30’s. At home we supposedly made it to the upper 40’s today. The weather guessers claim 49 but we usually run about 3 degrees cooler than that at the house in sunny conditions, as today was. My guess is 46. I’ll see tomorrow night. Meanwhile, here in OK it’s currently 32 degrees at the nearest station, outside of Meer, with a dew point of 29.

It seems that the temperatures (primarily daytime) are definitely cooler at home, but you guys have some WIND. I am not used to this much wind!! It gets windy at home, but this has been incessant, never-ending, cold and absolutely obnoxious wind!! I am not used to this...

Dbarron, it really did rain Sunday, didn’t it? I had just emptied a load of wood with the truck the previous day, and the wood shavings had clogged up the drainage holes in the bed. I had a foot of rain in the bed, my tool box and everything totally submerged! That was a mess.

Larry, we do have a lot of rocks in NW AR. It’s like that in southern Missouri as well, where my grandparents live. Piles of rocks line the fields of my grandpa’s farm.... I spent many hours digging rocks out of my 500 square foot front garden last fall, to a depth of 2 feet. My goal was no rocks. I am not happy to inform you that they have now mated and multiplied, rising as it has rained over the year. They do not leave! You have to keep thinning out the herds. That being said, I am finding that many plants simply do not mind the rocks as one would think. It is more of a nuisance for the gardener, at times a mindset in my own case...

Well, we had frost last night, It was 38 in Ft Smith, and I expect about 32 here. I am about 15 miles south of Ft. Smith, but often cooler. I went out and sprayed the plants and washed the frost off, also hoping to warm the plants a little. I am not sure if it helped any, because the water would freeze back on the leaves in just a few minutes. Some of the sweet potato leaves seemed to be frozen stiff, if they were, I will have to dig them today. This is the latest I have ever dug sweet potatoes. I dont expect to have many anyway.

I had taken the hot wire down a couple of weeks ago expecting the deer to come in and eat some of the vines, well, they did last night. I guess they needed a little more fuel to keep their bodies warm. The deer dont want to deal with the hot wire, even though it has not been turned on in over a month. I think they thought that they were getting back at me for brush hogging and discing most of their garden.

I had better go spray the plants again and hope I can save a few of them. I have a lot of peppers to pick, but I dont know how to give them to, and we dont want them.

The station down the road from our house (back in Arkansas) wound up reading 26 this morning. I imagine, being up the hill, it was more like 30ish at the house. I’ll see tonight.

Jacob, it's too bad the wedding isn't this afternoon. It's supposed to be pretty. I live in "no man's land" in a weird little area that isn't OKC, Norman, or Moore....so fairly close to where your wedding will take place.

I have not looked at the garden this morning. I can see that basil looks bad. It is planted around the chicken pen, so noticed it when I fed them this morning. I covered the milkweed and brought in all the caterpillars I could find. I'll return them as soon as it warms up. Hopefully the milkweed made it.

Other than that....we will paint the coop ceiling and I'll finish cleaning the walls once it warms up.

The chickens were freaked out about their new roosting bars. What a bunch of drama queens. Two of them refused to go to the coop...and Jean Luc wouldn't leave them outside alone and waited with them. I had to pick them up and put them on the roost.

My chick in question; Eve or Kirk, had her/his picture updated at Backyard Chickens and they are guessing pullet. What in the world?! How did my hens hatch all female???

Of course, at 14 weeks, there could be a late blooming roo...so I'm still not completely convinced.

I need to get some ingredients to pickle the hot peppers. I'll probably just chop the sweet peppers and put them in the freezer. All the green tomatoes are in a paper bag. The Juliets are going to the freezer for future salsa.

It only got down to 39 here. Looks like we're good for the next 10 days, at least. That's good, maybe some of the Seminoles will have a chance to get a little bigger. I can't believe there are still a few butterflies, some painted ladies and gulf fritillaries. As soon as it warm up, tomorrow and next week, I'm going to take everything out of the raised flower bed and the veggie beds, except for the Seminoles, I need to go get some alfalfa hay for the beds and for mulching the rosemary and lantanas.

I ordered the garlic and will get it in as soon as it comes--I hope this week. I've no idea why I even did that. We have enough garlic here to last for a LONG time.

Jennifer, that is amazing, about the chickens all being pullets! Keep us posted. I enjoyed the chicken pictures on FB.

Garry winterized the boat 2 days ago. The last time we had it out was in April. The lake never DID come down. They were/are working on getting the navigation channel going, so warned it might be November before lake level can be normalized. The extra 5-plus inches the other day didn't help, I'm thinking. So sad for all the businesses affected.

Welcome to OK, Jacob! :) I don't think we get the wind here, as we're protected by the trees. I guess. At any rate, I'm always surprised by how different it is at the school in town when I go in to work in the garden. Almost always windy to a greater or lesser degree. I put down a big tarp, folded to be about 4 feet wide--it's 20' long. I need to take another one into town and put it down, too. The grass underneath didn't take long to disappear. We'll be able to get some vines up--nothing fancy, I think just moonflower vines and Grandpa Ott's. And then just continue working on solarizing more and more of that fence line. I also need to get over there this next week so we can move all the plants out of the big center bed and stick them in the raised beds for now.

Plenty to do, that's for sure! But our chili cook-off is in a few hours, so I best get some work done here before we go.

I dug my sweet potatoes. On the left is the harvest of a 20 foot row of planting small potatoes only, on the right is the harvest of a 20 foot row of mostly planting slips. They are covington potatoes and I could not find slips locally. It seems t.o be true, that if you plant potatoes rzthrt than slips you will get more vines than potatoes. There were very few really good potatoes. I hope this is ok I can't see what I am typing.

I will go harvest peppers now.

Its about time to harvest sweet potatoes, this is the last 2 potatoes from last years harvest.

Jacob, Welcome to OK. Hope your brief stay is/was enjoyable. October weather is usually almost perfect---this year it stayed too hot in early Oct and then went straight to last night's freezing and near-freezing temperatures, so I guess we had our 3 or 4 days of autumn, then a winter-like day/night, and now hopefully we'll have a few more weeks of autumn before it gets cold and frosty again.

I'm not even a little bit jealous of all you guys who grow your own rocks and watch them multiply every year. We're in the creek hollow beneath the nearest rocky ridge, and it is much easier to garden down here in our low-lying area than to try to garden on higher ground with rocks everywhere.

Larry, I'm not surprised you had a frost. We dropped to 27 degrees and had a hard, heavy frost, so my plants experienced the sort of temperatures that lead to a killing freeze if they lost long enough, and also frost damage. It is unusual to get that cold this far south in zone 7b in October, but that's what happened. I am not too upset by it---the ground was really warm from the previous hot days and that may have helped save some of my plants. Most of the plants in the garden have severely freeze-damaged and freeze-killed foliage and flowers, but some plants, including lantana show only the most minor damage. The roselles and tomato plants have the most damage---the pepper plants and pineapple sage are barely damaged at all. Oddly, one of the most tropical plants I have in the ground, the candletrees (Senna alata, formerly Cassia alata) are among the least damaged. I'll wait and see how things look tomorrow though, because sometimes the plants don't seem too badly damaged for the first few hours after sunrise, but then as time goes on throughout the day, more and more damage becomes obvious.

At this point I'd say at least half the garden plants have major freeze and frost damage, but mostly I'm just surprised it isn't 100% of them. We were already down to 33 degrees at midnight, so the garden spent a great deal of time at and below freezing. I think we hit 32 around 2 a.m. here and stayed at or below freezing for slightly over 6.5 hours.

The amusing thing that made me laugh? The Johnson Grass in the bar ditch has worse freeze damage than my candletrees and roselles.

Jennifer, Most of my basil looks fine this morning, but only because it was planted beneath the roselle plants and they shielded it from the cold. I had lots of shorter plants planted underneath and between the roselle plants, and all of them look pretty good today since the monster roselle plants pretty much buried them underneath all the roselle foliage. In this case, it worked out well for the plants since it protected them.

If all your hatched chicks are pullets, that is simply amazing. Good for you---more eggs to feed and not so many rooster fights as young cockerels try to assert themselves and prove their superiority.

Nancy, How odd is it that y'all stayed a dozen degrees warmer than we did? I expected the upper 20s here though, as we're in a low-lying creek hollow in the already low-lying Red River Valley, which is the perfect setup for early freezes and early frosts. It is sad that the cold microclimate doesn't help us at all in summer, but that's because there is no cold air in the summer.

I need to get busy processing roselles. They are piled up in buckets and bowls everywhere just like tomatoes normally are in summer. By the time I get all the roselles processed and preserved in one way or another, I'm going to be sick of looking at them and handling them.

Dawn

Dawn, that's just what I was thinking, all the way through your post! How is that possible!? CRAZY.

It did not freeze here last night either. I had picked all the green tomatoes, and I'm kind of sorry I did. There weren't that many. Must have been hotter the last few weeks than I thought. We didn't get nearly the rain that Nancy got, either. I'm glad I'm not processing buckets of roselle! I put the tropical plants in the garage a couple of days ago, now I have to figure how to keep them inside since I have no room.

I hit the kale that had been skeletinized with BT and it is coming back. Those are several well established plants that should survive the winter. The seedlings I bought are still tiny. Maybe they'll survive and produce in spring.

The "Miss Huff" hardy Lantana is in a pot. Will it survive? You mulch yours?

There was something red in the weed bed...er...flower bed yesterday. Hiding behind the lambsquarter jungle was a mum I grew from seed. Kind of proud of that and impressed with the deep color. There were butterflies and dragon flies flying when I looked out a bit ago.

Jacob, years ago, in March we were talking to a woman who had just moved here. She commented on the wind and said it would probably get better in April. We laughed and said the only time the wind doesn't blow in Oklahoma is in July when it's 105 in the shade. She was not happy with that response. Good to see you, BTW.

It doesn’t look like we froze here in town. Likely the heat island saved us. I’m exhausted, so spending the day saving up energy for next week. Bean and ham soup in the crockpot.

Here’s my report.

tomatoes, peppers, Seminoles, southern peas, coleus, sweet potatoes vines, and cucumbers are all goners.

Even the tomatoes that had a frost blanket.

Im posting from my phone which I dislike so that is all for now.

It was weird here, I noticed things like mexican sunflower leaves that were dead in the center with green (wide) rings around them of live tissue.

Many things withstood several hours of freezing temperatures quite well (or so it appears at this point). I really can't find anything that's just totally dead.

My total harvest for today. I still have one pot of sweet potatoes on the deck to harvest.

Nancy, It was surreal to have weather that cold, and to have frost that heavy and then to see relatively little damage in the garden. God works in mysterious ways, I guess!

Amy, My hands are so tired and sore from processing all those roselles (it took me about 8 hours to do it, with only minor interruptions to let a dog in or out, or to feed a cat) and at this point I never want to look at another roselle for as long as I live. I'll get over that feeling though and fairly quickly at that, because now I need to turn all the processed roselles into jam, jelly and syrup. I'll start that process later today. I think I need to go buy a big bag of sugar because the ten pound bag I bought last week won't be enough. Any roselles remaining on the plants will be used for tea after they are harvested.

I had moved tropical houseplants indoors on Friday afternoon and moved them back out yesterday, where I think they'll be happy on the porch for a few more weeks. Starting today, the Christmas cactus will be moved to the spare bedroom to get the prolonged darkness it needs at night to bring it back into bloom.

My lantanas usually survive in the ground, mulched, as long as I don't cut them back in fall, so I expect the same will happen this year. Even some zone 8 and zone 9 lantanas that I planted as annuals survived last winter, but then it really wasn't a very cold winter. I never know what to expect from lantanas, so if they overwinter, that's great, and if they don't, it doesn't upset me since I only expect them to function as annuals here. They'd likely do even better if I had the really well-draining soil that they love, but at least our clay is well-amended and that helps somewhat. I think your Miss Huff would be fine in your container, or even if planted in the ground, but of course it depends on how cold y'all get this winter. I had Cape Honeysuckle survive here last winter and it is a zone 9 plant. Our weather is so erratic from one winter to the next that it is just a guessing game as far as what might make it through the winter.

Rebecca, When I was watching the Mesonet's temperature maps Friday night and Saturday morning, I was thinking that the heat island effect was doing your area a huge favor!

dbarron, Isn't it strange? I expected a lot more damage than I found, but I am not complaining. Maybe the warm ground really helped our plants withstand the cold.

Larry, Nice harvest!

Jennifer, How odd that the weather hit all your plants so hard, especially the tomatoes under the frost blanket. I have had that happen before as well, even though the frost blankets normally protect them just fine. Honestly, gardening here in our erratic weather always is a crap shoot. We can do everything under the sun to try to protect our plants, and Mother Nature always seems to find ways to get them if that's what she is in the mood to do.

In strange news from the farm store (because I thought of you when I saw them), our Atwood's in Gainesville had a lot of chicks in the store under heat lamps yesterday. I don't know anyone in their right mind who'd want to buy a bunch of chicks now and have to carefully keep them warm at night until they are fully feathered out, but I guess if someone had lost their flock and wanted eggs next spring, maybe they would buy chicks in October. The one good thing about that, from my perspective, would be that the chance of having rat snakes eat your chicks is a lot lower now than it is in Spring and Summer.

Dawn