Dawn it has been a full fledged roller coaster here again this year. 80's last Sat, 13 Wed morn and then supposed to be 80 by Monday and lows in mid 20's Thursday. I have watched the garlic and other signs including the late budding of the trees and started my seeds a lot later than the last few years. I battled large plants and rootbound plants the last two years along with health issues I decided to start plants later and too buy my early plants if the weather showed promising signs of an early spring. I watched the 3 dollar plus plants walking out of the Guymon Wally World last Saturday while it was 80 and listened to the buyers saying they were heading home to set them out. After a 13 degree low Wed morning I'm sure they will be buying again. I may go buy a few next weekend it the weather shows any signs of breaking. I can hold them for a few days in the lean too or the hot frames if I need too. But with tumble weeds blowing in every week it is hard to get really motivated. Jay

I Have more plants than I need right now, but that may not be the case for long. The tomato plants I started on 3-25 are the best sized plants I have. I have had more plant problems this year than ever before.

I think the world wide weather is costing everyone much more than we realize, when we toss in crop failure, flooding, drought, and many other things. With 7 billion people on this earth it is going to get harder to produce the food needed.

Jay, If there is anyone who would have worse weather than me, I guess it would be you. : )

From the 80s to 13 is just insane and from the 80s to the 20s is crazy too.

It was so beautiful today and I am sure the next few days will be as well, but we'll be back around 36 late in the week. I can't remember if it is Wed or Thursday, but I guess I'm going to go ahead and plant whatever I can in between rain or whatever else happens and then cover up everything with floating row cover. I am starting to think it is becoming impossible here to grow anything without floating row cover.

I started tomatoes and peppers later this year, but now they are at the critical stage where they need to either go into the ground or be potted up into larger containers. With the tomatoes, I hope to get all of them in the ground in the next few days. With the peppers, I guess I'll pot them up to larger containers and continue playing the waiting game. This year it seems unbearably late to be planting, and really it isn't, but I just have all those memories of early planting last year stuck in my head.

I hope your health issues have been resolved and that you're feeling better.

Your mention of tumble weeds made me laugh. They are not, of course, as common here as they are up there in No Man's Land. (grin) A couple of weeks ago Tim and I were in Denton. It was a pretty windy day. We were at a Sam's Club and I left Tim in line there to walk next door to the adjacent Wal-Mart to get something I couldn't find at Sam's. As I was walking along a sidewalk, a tumbleweed came tumbling by. It made me laugh out loud to see it because it was not something I was expecting there.

I see people buying plants at WM too as a cold front is bearing down on us and I really want to stop them and say "Tell me you won't plant that until after Wednesday's freezing temperatures have come and gone...", but of course I don't do it.

Larry,

Earlier tonight I was reading Dr. Jeff Masters' blog at his weather website and someone linked in the comment section a list of all the Billion Dollar Plus weather disasters since 1980. All the costs had been put into today's dollars. It was shocking how many more there have been per year in recent years....like in the last 10 or 15 years or so. It also was shocking how many were related to agriculture or had effects on agriculture. It seems like there's more and more every year.

You see only a couple of billion dollar events per year in the 1980s and most of the 1990s, and then you see it really start escalating. It is scary how many there have been in the 2000s. I'll find and link NOAA's list. It sure makes me wonder what will become of us all if this trend continues, especially if it keeps escalating. We'd all better know how to raise and preserve our own food.

I think it is good for all of us to learn as much as we can about raising our own food....not that any of us necessarily would raise all our own food, but it is good to know we can raise at least a portion of it and, with good food preservation techniques, we can preserve it to eat in the off-season.

We have a really big garden, but it would have to be a lot bigger if we wanted to raise all our own produce, and I'd have to raise fewer tomatoes and lettuce and more of everything else. I'm the only person in the family who would happily eat tomatoes every day. Everyone else prefers a more diverse diet. I think that tomatoes are a diverse diet when you grow them in all the colors of the rainbow and in various shapes and sizes but apparently the men in this family think I should be growing something meaty like cows.....isn't a beefsteak tomato an adequate substitute for a nice juicy hamburger?

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: Billion Dollar Weather Disasters Since 1980