I just got back in from checking my gardens, they look better than what I was afraid of, but not as good as I had hoped. The teens temp we had a week of two ago really kicked everything bad. The brussels sprouts, which I covered with mineral tubs, look pretty good. The greens that I harvested pretty close are coming back. The greens that I did not harvest look better than the ones I picked down close to the ground, I supposed that the leaves insulated the soil to offer a little protection. I dont think any of my sprouting collards survived the very hard freeze that we had.

I am really happy with the young man that has been coming to help me, he seems to be the type of young man that would make any parent proud. His dad leases this land so know me and is comfortable around me and Madge. I just told Madge that I thought that I would just kidnap him, I really enjoy being with him.

We have been working on my potting shed. It seems as though everything I do turns into a big deal. What was just going to be a quick, low cost project is costing more than I expected. Madge tells me that I try to build something to last a 100 years, when I wont be around but a few years to enjoy it. Even my helper is proud of the project, but we are building the shed like a tank, it is really solid. I plan on my helper to help make some row covers also.

My neighbor gave me a lot of black plastic pots that I will use in the potting shed when I pot up plants to a larger size pot. He also a roll of, what I think he was calling coir. I cant hear well, so I am not sure of what he said. My neighbor and I both have very poor hearing and it is really hard for us to communicate.

My daughter and grand daughters will be coming over today, so I had better get up and get a few things done and get ready to all my sweet ladies out to eat, then later this afternoon my helper will come over and we will work on a few more projects. It is really too wet to do a lot, but we still have more trees to trim.

I hope everyone of you have as pretty of a day that we are having in western Arkansas.

jennifer , most of my brassicas plants look about like that. No , their not dead yet but it does look questionable to me. Time will tell..

okmulgee boy

Everyone must be busy. Maybe enjoying the warm days. We get another one today! I am going to work for a few hours, but trying to get some laundry and clean up done first.

Okmulgee boy, I sure hope the brassicas actually make some food. Luckily, the brussels look good. But, seriously, how long before I get some food from them?! My first year of fall gardening has been a bust. AND, there's another E.coli recall on lettuce. sigh! IF I had been better prepared, I would be clipping lettuce from my salad bed.

Most of our outdoor lights are up, but we will need to finish one side of the house tonight. They don't look great this year. I used to be very OCD about it...the lights had to follow this pattern: red, blue, orange, green, white. Repeat. Now, it's just whatever. Tom only wants three strands per/outlet, which I know nothing about that. He has all these gadgets like timers and such. I'm like, I can just plug and unplug the extension cord. However, we are changing it up next year. I guess we'll go to the LED...I just need to find the less "sharp" ones. LED lights can hurt my eyes and give me a headache. AND I guess Tom won't worry about overloading the outlets with them like with our old ones.

Honestly, my goal is to simply decorations in general. I like to use things like vases year 'round, but just change out the "filling". I will save a box or two of the louder, busier, brighter things just in case we ever have grandchildren. Kids seem to love the brighter things. And some of these things are precious to me...sentimental. But, we don't needs boxes and boxes of them. And now we have Tom's sisters' stuff. We have taken some of her things to donation, though. Shhhh.

lol

I planted a few more pansies yesterday. They were still sitting in their little flats. And moved pots around and cleaned dead stuff out of pots. I had some plants still living in the front porch pots. I found the tag and found out they are perennials. I thought I was getting annuals for those pots. I threw them out, which I feel a little bad about but I want to plant all white flowers in the front yard next year. These that I threw out are supposedly deer resistant, Dawn. Tickseed Nana? It has cute yellow flowers. Maybe that is something you can look into for your new landscaping project.

The dryer just buzzed at me...and the little chickens have found their way out of their yard, so I'm going to put everyone back in the pen. THAT is another project on the list--fixing the chicken yard fence. It's a disaster right now. Why even have a fence?

Larry, The unseasonably cold weather in October and November have been so hard on so many plants. Maybe next year we'll have better autumn weather that stays mild for a long time and lets our plants have the nice conditions they need in the fall.

Your young man that you've hired to help sounds like a real gem. We had a friend who always overbuilt everything and, just as Madge said to you, he built it all to last 100 years. Sadly he died of a brain tumor only a few years after building his log cabin and the other awesome buildings on his ranch, but those buildings still will be there many decades from now. We hired his boys to build our detached garage/shop, which is 1200 square feet, and it is solid and well-built and not going anywhere. I like the idea that all of us are leaving behind sturdy buildings that will outlive us by decades. My friend, Fred, did the same thing with his home fruit orchard, continuing to plant new fruit trees almost every year when he was in his 80s because he knew the fruit trees he had producing then wouldn't live forever. He always told me that if he didn't live long enough to see the new trees fruit, then his kids or grandkids (or great-grandkids and, now, great-great-grandkids) would. Sure enough, he lived to be 97 years old and was able to enjoy the fruit off those trees in his 90s, which I thought was pretty cool.

We had a pretty day yesterday and got all the outdoor Christmas decorations up. It wasn't a bad day to be climbing the ladder and hanging lights because it wasn't very windy, and it was pretty warm and sunny for late November. We grilled steaks for dinner, and at the exact moment the steaks were coming off the grill, we were paged out to a grass fire. Life isn't fair, sometimes. lol. I hope you enjoyed taking all your ladies out to eat and that you got your work done later.

Today and tomorrow are supposed to be gorgeous days, weather-wise, in our area. Unfortunately, tomorrow some parts of OK will have wind gusting into the 50s and 60s so they will have high to critical fire danger. In my area, the strongest winds won't be nearly that strong and won't occur until after dark so we're hoping that any fires that occur won't be too bad. I'm hoping to get a lot of leaves mowed tomorrow and captured by the grass catcher and dumped on the compost pile, but it just depends. I also have to clean house and do some pre-Thanksgiving food preparation, so I may run out of time before I make it outdoors to mow.

There's supposed to be quite a bit of rain on the way, as if any of us need more rain, puddles and mud. Strong to severe storms are a possibility for some of us late in the week. Here's the 7-Day Qualitative Precipitation Forecast that shows the rainfall amounts expected over the next week:

7-Day QPF

This map updates multiple times daily. I'm not happy with the amount of rain it is showing for our area as we still have mud from the last rainfall. We'll get whatever we get though. It is so much easier to be thankful for 2 or 3" of rainfall in July or August than in November.

At least we have a couple of pretty days before the rain comes back, and I am grateful for that.

Dawn

Jennifer , I can't imagine any of the brassicas , including brussel sprouts , producing anything until around Feb when the daylight starts getting longer , if they don't freeze out in the meantime. I would keep covering them up when the Arctic fronts come down and drop the temps into the teens and single digits.

Here's a link from the Northwest (washington state , I think) that might be interesting.

https://lopezislandkitchengardens.com/tag/how-to-grow-overwintering-brassicas/

This is my first time trying to overwinter brassicas myself , I'm on a learning curve too.

I have more confidence in my spinach plantings overwintering into the early spring since I did it last year.

okmulgee boy

Brassicas are tricky to overwinter sometimes because our wildly erratic temperatures can push them into bolting----I have found that abnormally warm winter days (high temperatures in the 80s or 90s, and we have some of those in my county every winter) are much harder on overwintering brassicas than nights in the low 20s or teens. I don't think I've ever had them bolt any earlier than March though, so often about the time they are starting to bolt, it is about time to plant spring brassicas anyway. Brussels sprouts generally have been the slowest to bolt and broccoli the earliest. Cauliflower is a bit less likely than broccoli, and cabbage is the least likely. Collard greens are pretty much indestructible, and so is kale although the kale eventually bolts. Groninger Blue Collard-Kale lasted longest for me of all the overwintered kales in 2012-13.

Tomorrow's weather will be tricky, y'all, with strong winds likely to wreak havoc in parts of the state. Fire danger will be critical out west, and high to very high in central parts of the state. Many of us have wind alerts of different kinds, ranging from High Wind Warnings (accompanied by Red Flag Fire Warnings for some counties) in some areas to Wind Advisories in others. If you have overwintering crops, the wind might beat them up a bit.

We have been having a few grass fires and wild fires here lately along with the usual structure fires. This morning I complained to my husband that I felt like we have an arsonist at large in our county setting fires (not at all unusual, sadly) because there are certain obvious patterns occurring regarding timing and locations. He agreed with me that he thought we did indeed have this issue here in our area. As firefighters, you feel helpless in cases like this because you cannot prevent this activity---you simply respond to it when paged out. So, this afternoon we had fires along the interstate just a couple of miles north of our fire district (we were paged to go help Marietta with these fires), and an alleged arsonist was spotted starting fires, pursued by law enforcement officers, caught, arrested and charged with Felony Arson. It is my understanding that this alleged arsonist is a guest at our county jail at the present time. Can you believe it? I still think we are likely to have a bad fire day tomorrow with all the wind, and we won't even have wind gusts nearly as strong as folks further west are expecting. I don't know if I can leave to go if we're paged out because I'll be cooking and cleaning as we are having Thanksgiving at our house on Wednesday, and I'm not going to attempt to leave my house tomorrow if I have food cooking in the oven or on top of the stove. Tim went to the monthly Fire Chief's meeting tonight and came home telling me everyone is expecting the worst tomorrow. Well, I am not. I refuse to expect the worst. I'm going to hope for the best and maybe we'll luck out.

Wasps and lady bugs both were swarming and trying to fly into the house via exterior doors again today. Really? Why haven't the night-time lows in the teens put an end to them already? I did see a small butterfly or two out this afternoon in the sunny gravel driveway puddling a little here or there. I also saw two fairly new grasshoppers in my wildflower pasture---one was only about a quarter-inch long so has hatched fairly recently, and the other was almost a half-inch long so is slightly older. It is odd to have newish hatchlings out in November. We do still have a few native asters blooming though, so the odd weather with some very cool nights mixed with some very warm days continues giving us some oddities. We're supposed to be around 76 degrees tomorrow, so I'd say 77-80 degrees is not out of the question....and that will really stir up the wasps.

Three of the Christmas amaryllis are blooming now....one Red Lion and two Minervas. I suppose I'm happy to have amaryllis in bloom for Thanksgiving, and with 4 viable bulbs/plants left that are much further behind these early birds, we are likely to have them blooming at Christmas as well. My Christmas cacti is setting blooms but they are staying small and not enlarging much. Maybe I am just impatient, but I think it is too far behind to be in bloom by Christmas. It probably is my fault---try as I might, I find it hard to keep it on a regular schedule of 12 hours of darkness each day....between bottle feeding the kittens, running off to fires, and trying to get ready for the holidays, I tend to forget to put the Christmas cacti back into the dark closet at 8 pm as I should. If I was consistently adhering to the schedule, it probably would be doing better.

With everything various shades of wheat, tan, brown, etc. outdoors, it is good to have some happy green plants indoors, so I'm not complaining by any means. If I had a way to protect indoor plants from cats and dogs, I'd have more indoor plants to make the winter grayness/brownness more bearable.

It is deer-hunting season so our brown dogs are spending as much time indoors as possible for their own safety. No one is allowed to hunt on our land, but I know people sometimes sneak onto it and hunt anyway (because we have caught them doing so before) and Jersey, in particular, is the exact color of a white-tailed deer. She is spooked more than our other dogs by the sound of gunfire, so it is not hard to keep her indoors at this time of the year for her own safety. In fact, it is hard to get her to go outside at all. She won't stay indoors to the point that she has accidents indoors, but she'll stall and refuse to go out for as long as possible. When she comes to you and asks to go out, you'd better let her go immediately or you'll be mopping up the floor because she cannot wait any longer. See how much easier spring and summer are? Everyone just goes in and out, whenever, whatever, however, because the weather is not a meaningful impediment.

I checked the front pasture today to see if the cool-season wildflowers are sprouting, and they are. I can recognize the cotyledons and young sprouts of some varieties. Others are just a mystery to me at this point. Regardless, the plants sprouting now will overwinter low to the ground and will bloom next year from roughly March through June before warm season/hot season wildflowers take over.

Dawn

What a day! I just now sat down and turned on the TV. Bad fire in Mooreland. I'm sure y'all have seen it.

This isn't the day I had planned, but I'm trying to get things set so Tom can go to Ethan's concert tonight because Mason and Mack are going. If they weren't going, he would just stay home this time and I would go alone.

I wanted to do my OCD thing--making the lights a perfect pattern. And grab all the chick feeders/waterers that are lying about. Get those cleaned up and stored away for next year. Although, I don't know where I'll put any additional chickens. Maybe I can hatch some babies for friends who want them, if they want to give me their eggs. My hens seem to be good mothers. I'm sure I'll have broodies again.

And bake a few more pumpkins.

Instead, I went to buy heavy duty aluminum foil and apple wood for Tom. He is smoking 32 turkey breasts tonight. Also, picked up chicken food and delivered 2 pans of pulled pork that Tom finished at 3am. Ethan went with me, so that was nice.

I did get the lights in a perfect pattern (my legs got a great workout. lol), but didn't get to the waters/feeders.

And I scrubbed all of Tom's giant pots and trays so he won't have to mess with it when he gets home. I did it outside with cold water, I hope that got them clean enough...

BECAUSE....

of COURSE, our kitchen sink has a slow drain right now. Right before Thanksgiving and heavy cooking/kitchen use.

Maybe Tom can fix it tomorrow OR possibly Friday. I don't know. We probably should have called a plumber, but we hate to do that when it could be something he can fix.

Maybe his work will let him leave at noon tomorrow. I'm going to leave at noon.

Nothing garden related really.

The outdoor plants that I brought indoors are looking better. I left them out on a freeze night and they had some damage. But they are looking better and making new foliage. I watered all the house plants. ExCiTiNg.

I won't ramble on anymore about my day/life.

Hope everyone is doing well.

Jennifer

I work until 6 tomorrow, then I’ll put the green beans in the crockpot to cook overnight, and start the 2 kinds of bread I’m making. Thursday morning I finish the bread and roast the potatoes. We‘ll haul that plus my mom’s pies, mac and cheese, and salads to my cousin‘s house in Stillwater.

I thought I was set on my next years smaller variety of tomato selections, until the new Totally Tomatoes catalogue showed up. Enough choices with early blight tolerance that I’m having to reconsider a few things. And the microtoms...

Don't mean to annoy but today is the beginning of the Persephone Period at least for my location.

okmulgee boy

Okmulgee boy, thanks for the info. AND you've never been annoying. Ever.

Rebecca, YUM!

Why are there ants in my house??? WTH! It's Nov. We've had a freeze!

The dogs are outside staring at the power pole. I know they've seen a squirrel because they barked and threw a fit. Now they're just staring...up. LOL.

The wind came through last night tossing things around on the patio. Last thing I saw was 56 mph in Tulsa, 63 in Bartlesville and 75 in KS.

There's not much left in the garden. the kale is still green, but less than appetizing. I might have 2 brussels sprouts left, but they don't look happy. I have a planter with 2 ornamental cabbages and what I think is red Russian kale (tag just said kale) that I stuck a brassica seedling in, but I have forgotten which it was. Collard? Brussels sprouts? It looks good. That pot was meant to go by the front door, but it's thriving on the patio. May leave it there. We're discussing growing lettuce indoors under lights. I mean with e. coli scares again, yuck. The lettuce I planted in the fall got too hot and bolted.

The wildfires were horrible!

Okmulgee boy, you're not annoying. Persephone days are, but that's not your fault. I hate the cold and dark.

H/J, I hope your drain can be cleared. Just remember, boiling water melts PVC pipes. You might remember we tried to clear ours with boiling water and had to have the pipes replaced because they melted.

I giggle at you all's elaborate decorations. I put a wreath on the door. Yep, that's it. Ron never wanted lights. As a kid their place burned at Christmas. I think he's afraid of them. I'm a humbug. My big deal was always a live tree. With Sasquatch around we've nixed that for a 3' tall artificial tree. I will hang stockings on the mantle. Mutter, mutter, mutter, is it March yet?

I want pansies. I should see if any one still has some.

I'm rambling now. Have a good Thanksgiving everyone.

I was only going to use the tomato seeds I currently have but now I’m rethinking that! Look at this gorgeous catalog!

I hope that everyone had a Happy Thanksgiving.

Jennifer, Plumbing problems seem so common at this time of the year. I hope y'all are able to get that slow drain running properly without calling a plumber.

Those fires were so bad. I hate seeing evacuation warnings when there's wildfires like that. I don't worry about the people at home---they usually have at least enough notice to hop in their cars or trucks and go. I worry about all the animals at home whose people might be at work and who cannot get home to make sure the animals are evacuated or otherwise sheltered (cattle or horses standing in a farm pond, for example, as the flames go around them). We were lucky here. Earlier in the day when our dewpoint and relative humidity were very low, we didn't have the strong wind, and then our dewpoint and Rh values went back up. THEN the cold front came through and then dewpoints and relative humidity values fell sharply but by the time fires started, the wind had moved on through already, so we never had all the components for really bad fires in place at the same exact time. Still, there was a series of fires---arson fires---set east of Marietta towards Lake Texoma in late evening. The somewhat surprising thing about this was that it occurred either 1 or 2 days after another arsonist had been arrested setting multiple fires along I-35 in broad daylight. You'd think one arson arrest like that would deter a copycat, but apparently not.

Rebecca, So far, every tomato variety I've tried with so-called EB resistance or tolerance has been a total dud and the plants got Early Blight anyway, and at the same time other surrounding plants got it. So, I have found limited value in any of those. They might show some form of resistance or tolerance if planted in an area that does not have a recurring problem with Early Blight, but in an area where EB is a persistent problem, I haven't found them to be any better than plants with no known tolerance of or resistance to EB. I used to love the Totally Tomatoes catalog, but haven't had much luck with any of their exclusive varieties the last 10-15 years, so I'm sort of over them too. This year I had much better luck with tomato plants in containers in an area of the yard where we hadn't had tomatoes in recent years. Those plants survived the whole summer and produced well and stayed 95% EB free (it is windborne, so I never expect plants to be 100% free of it). The plants out back in containers did much better than the tomatoes in the ground in the front garden where I've grown a plethora of all nightshades (potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, etc.) every year since we moved here. I'm going to leave the whole front garden free of night-shade veggies for the next few years to give the EB a chance to clear the soil there. This is one form of crop rotation since there's no bed in the front garden that hasn't had nightshades in it at some point over the last 3 years. I'm just rotating to a whole new area instead of rotating to new beds in the existing area.

okmulgeeboy, I hate the Persephone days but just stay busy with indoor plants, grandkids, the holidays, etc. and before I know it, we have made it through the Persephone days and things are looking up.

Amy, Y'all had more wind that we had. I think our max gusts were either in the upper 30s or lower 40s and were of short duration, for which we were grateful.

I love, love, love decorating for Christmas. Every inch of our house gets holiday decorations, and we like to joke that our living room is just two Christmas trees, three wreaths and a little pine garland short of being a Hallmark Christmas movie living room. If you've ever seen all the over-the-top Christmas décor in the Hallmark Christmas movies....well, we do not measure up to that by any means, but we do have a lot of Christmas décor. I haven't even finished decorating yet---only the downstairs is complete, but I'll do the staircase and the upstairs next week. The girls are coming over in a couple of hours and we'll have them all weekend, so I'm sure we'll be busy with other stuff that does not include breakable Christmas ornaments.

This year for Thanksgiving, we had three Amaryllis plants in full bloom---one Minerva and two Red Lions, and one of the Red Lions had two stalks up with 4 blossoms each on them. That one was especially spectacular. They all bloomed earlier than normal, but I am not going to complain. I have four more taking their pokey old sweet time that probably won't bloom until Christmas itself, so we'll have more then. These three amaryllis plants that are in bloom were grouped on one end table and looked so spectacular that Chris stopped and stared at them when he walked in the door and said something like "I know they are real, but they are so perfect this year that they look fake". lol. He was right!

I was worried about the safety of the Christmas tree with Jesse and the new kittens, but Jesse is too busy with his basket of dog toys to even give the Christmas tree a second glance. He just runs by it on his way to get a toy out of his basket and doesn't even stop and look at the tree. Having said that, we don't leave him unattended in the living room with the tree because we fear what might happen if one of us isn't right there in the living room with him. The kittens are too little to care---they still are perfectly happy playing with each other, their scratching post and their cat toys and don't seem to have noticed the tree either. They play near it, but not on it or directly underneath it. So far, so good. Of course, it isn't even December yet and they still have lots of time to discover it and destroy it.

Larry, I think the quail restoration project sounds awesome. I do know we hear and see a lot fewer quail here around us than we used to. There used to be a guy up the road who raised and released them, but he no longer is with us and I don't know of anyone else local who has taken on that task.

All we have had the last couple of days is rain, mist, drizzle, fog, clouds, cool weather, and mud, mud, mud. I've over it already and we have another half a day or so of this November gloom to go before sunshine returns. Perhaps somewhat ironically, we go straight from today's/tonight's rain to tomorrow's return to high fire danger in the afternoon. Since everything has frozen repeatedly, none of the dead or dormant plants will hold moisture any length of time at all after the rain stops falling, so we face having dry vegetation in bad fire conditions tomorrow (and possibly Sunday as well) while the ground is muddy enough to slow down and even stop firefighters trying to fight wildland fires. It is a bad combination. Some of our worst wild fires historically have occurred on the weekend after Thanksgiving, and we find ourselves at that same point in the calendar again. It has been about a decade, maybe 11 or 12 years, since we had horrific wildfires on the Sunday after Thanksgiving and had to fight hard to keep those fires from burning through the town of Thackerville from two directions (west and east) simultaneously. We don't need a day like that ever again!

We had our Thanksgiving at our house on Wednesday with Jana, Chris, the girls and us since Chris had to work on Thanksgiving. Then, on Thanksgiving Day we went down to Texas for Thanksgiving at my sister's house with siblings, their spouses, our adult nieces and nephews and their partners/spouses, kids and grandkids. Oh, and an assortment of friends. So, we had a mob of people and it was fun, and three of us siblings were together for the first time since Mom's funeral (with 4 of us kids, it seems like we always can get about 3 of us together at once, but hardly ever all 4 at once because there's always someone who's gone out of town to visit in-laws or kids/grandkids in another state, or whatever). It was a lot of fun, but I have to confess that I looked around the table and missed all our grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles and several cousins who no longer are with us. We had such huge, fun, family gatherings when we were children, and I am sure none of us ever looked down the road to the point in time decades ahead of us when all the ones who were the "older ones" back then would be gone and we kids would find ourselves in the strange role of being the older ones now, with children, grandchildren and one great-grandchild gathered around the kids' table where we once sat. Time marches on rather relentlessly. I enjoy sitting at the adults table, but also think it would be fun to be an innocent child one more time, sitting at the kids' table laughing and eating while wondering when we finally would be old enough to graduate to the adult table. Somehow that happened a few decades ago and, being busy with life, we really didn't even notice it. We still try to fix the same dishes we remember in the same way our grandmother, mother, and aunts made them, but at the same time, nothing tastes quite the same way as we remember it from our childhood.

Have a good weekend everyone. Just think---tomorrow is the last day of November!

Dawn

Holy cow! Where did the week go!! WHAT. Oh Jennifer, I saw your post about the stopped up drain. You are a rock star!! SO impressive. I still wanna know what kinds of pumpkin stuff you fixed.

I am so glad you had a good Thanksgiving, Dawn! We had nothing. Nada. LOL. So we decided we'd go help at the Community Center; GDW worked in the warehouse, I worked in the kitchen and served. You know what? We LOVED it and that'll be our new routine. We're having a get together with all the family in Oklahoma on Dec. 8.

I don't know if Lisa will be reading on here, but I was jealous of their community dinner what with her fresh cranberry relish and broccoli salad. We have a kind wonderful woman who has been doing all the cooking for these dinners for years, but. . . . So no cooking at my house for Thanksgiving--except for boiling eggs for egg salad sandwiches that evening.

Yes, Persephone--thumbs down, for sure, Amy! And I laughed really hard at your Christmas decorating. You basically described Garry and me. BUT last year I did put up lights outside on the front porch, and by gum I'm going to this year. Maybe tomorrow afternoon.

I have a Christmas table runner, a large beautiful snow globe, and a large Nativity scene above the entertainment center. :) We're quite a foursome, Amy!

How much rain did you all get? We had a couple pretty rainy dreary days, right? 2 1/2 inches here. Beautiful gorgeous day today, I enjoyed just being out.

I'm exhausted today after Black Friday sales. No, we didn't go anywhere, but I've been on the computer trying to keep track of them on Amazon. LOL I got one children's art book and reusable produce mesh bags to split with my DIL. Obviously I am not a champion Black Friday shopper. I didn't get TT catalog yet. Pinetree showed up.

Well I'm in the middle of re-organizing and paring my hand-made recipe book so will continue on with that. Best to all of you!