The weather is better here, but the insects seem to get worse every day. I bought more screen wire yesterday to build cages to start plants in. The insects eat my plants before they any size on them. Maybe I can throw some plastic over the cages this winter to use as a cold frame. The row cover helps, but you cant row cover the whole world.

My sweet potatoes look terrible, I have never had this much leaf damage.

Larry

I didn't plant any tomatoes, but I have about 20 volunteers that are about 6-8 inches tall. I don't think there is any hope for them, but I might let a couple grow just to see how big they will get before they freeze out.

I still have quite a few summer things growing and haven't done much for Fall. I do have a tub of lettuce that is a couple of inches tall and needs to be thinned. I saw my husband out there thinning it this morning, but not the way I had in mind. LOL I plan to transplant some of it to another area, but he was thinning and eating it right in the garden. LOL

We took down some cattle panels this morning to give me a space to plant a few winter things in an area where I could cover them when I need to. We had decided that we needed to place the panels a little closer together next year, so they needed to come down anyway. Even if I only have lettuce, spinach, and few radishes, it will be worth the effort.

Dawn, it's Oklahoma, so weather rants are accepted and expected about 12 months of the year. One year we can spend the holidays in shirt sleeves, and the next year we are trying to stand up on the ice. One year Spring starts in March and the next year we are covering plants in May. We have drought, then we have flooding. Some years we guess it right and succeed and the rest of the time ranting is authorized. Actually, with careful planning and adding a little protection, we can have some kind of crop growing 9-10 months of the year. I like growing in the winter when there are almost no bugs, and very little watering to do. Right now my biggest crop is mosquitoes, and although I smell like Deep Woods Off each time I work in the garden, it still bothers me that they are buzzing all around me. Normally I pay little attention to them because the bites don't bother me much, but the the gift of West Nile that they seem to be bestowing on so many this year, makes me a little nervous.

I still have some grasshoppers, but they haven't bothered the lettuce. I am seeing some damaged leaves on eggplant and squash, and I have seen hoppers on the cowpeas. I am surprised that they haven't bothered the young lettuce. I am seeing fewer bug on my squash after a few days of spraying them. I have some dead leaves, but the plants are so huge, I think they will survive the attack.

Somehow I had decided that Seminole Pumpkins were small, and mine are getting really big. How big do these things get? None have started to change color, so I assume they will continue to grow up until that point. They also grow very fast, and I can see a huge difference from one day to the next. It amazes me that I have had so much trouble with germination on these, since they are such a strong plant once they get going. Maybe I will just start them inside in the future instead of direct sowing, because germination seems to be their only weakness in my garden.

I always hate to see the garden the morning after the first frost hits, so just having a few green things that will survive the cold, boosts my morale a little.

Larry, I wish we could build screened cages around our entire gardens. We'd still have to fight the pests that were inside the garden and got trapped within it when we built the screened cage, but I think eventually we could wipe out the bad guys.

I think the little green lacewings sense my frustration with the weather. When I am out in the garden, they come and fly around me, hang around, land on my hair, my face, or my arm, etc. I really feel like they are trying somehow to connect with me. Or, maybe they are attracted to the lovely scent of Deep Woods OFF?

For whatever reason, the pests have simply loved your sweet potato foliage this year. Maybe because it has been so lush and so beautiful? I'm curious. Do they bother the foliage of your ornamental sweet potatoes too or just the foliage of the edible varieties you're growing?

Carol, Al thins lettuce the way I do. lol I also love to 'thin' cherry tomatoes and sugar snap peas by popping them right off the plant and into my mouth. It is a good thing Tim doesn't realize how many little tomatoes, peas and lettuce leaves I'd consume while working in the garden. He'd likely feel like he was missing out on young, tender veggies (and he is).

With volunteer tomatoes you never really know for sure. Every now and then we have a really late first freeze or frost in December. If that were to happen this year, you might get ripe tomatoes from your volunteers.

The mosquitoes are less of an issue here every day since we have not had meaningful rainfall in some time and there's no standing water for them to breed in. I have been going through Deep Woods OFF like there is no tomorrow. I hate using it, but I'd hate having WNV worse. I wear long sleeves and long pants when I go out to work in the garden and mostly spray the Deep Woods OFF on them, but do have to put it on my hands, ankles and neck. Our friend who was hospitalized in Texas with West Nile was released from the hospital on Saturday and now is home, but they say she still is quite ill and her recovery will be slow.

At our house the grasshoppers have been eating tomato, sugar snap pea and southern pea foliage lately, at least until they discovered broccoli. They love the broccoli, and of the three broccoli varieties I'm growing, they're only eating the Purple Sprouting Broccoli plants. At the rate they're going, we won't have any purple sprouting broccoli. They've eaten about 1/3 of those plants down to the ground, even managing to find their way under the floating row cover. The hoppers have been devouring my lemon tree leaves all summer. The tree had put out a lot of new foliage in the last few weeks, and now the hoppers are feasting on that.

We need a good, very wet winter and spring to knock the hopper population down significantly. It has been in an 'up' cycle for several years and ought to be cycling back down.

Seminole's size varies a lot depending on your rainfall and on how many fruit are on the plant. Considering how much rain you have had lately, yours likely will be bigger than any I've ever raised here. Mine usually run about the same size (though not the same shape) as a large muskmelon, so maybe 6 or 8 lbs. in a dry year. In the occasional year when we have adequate summer rain and good fall rainfall, they can hit 10 or 12 lbs. This year mine are pretty small because I haven't watered Seminole much at all, and rain sure isn't falling. One thing that amazes me is how quickly they go from flower to tennis ball sized winter squash. I'll see a bloom one day, and a day or two later there is a fruit there the size of a tennis ball. How does that happen so fast? Of course, the flowers start out pretty large too.

A little squall line of storms formed in southern OK and headed our way, but of course the rainfall missed us. Marietta averages 4.19" of rain in September, and so far the cooperative weather observer, who lives just a couple of miles from us, is reporting 0.19" of rain for Marietta in September. I guess that explains the lovely brown bermuda grass out in the yard. I'm hoping the clouds might keep us cooler even though the rain missed us. So far, it is "only" 91 degrees, which isn't too bad because our forecast is for 96.

I'd ready for fall. Not ready for a hard killing freeze or heavy frost (or any frost), but ready for consistently cooler and milder weather.

Dawn

Dawn, my ornamentals dont have as much insect damage as the edible sweet potatoes, but they are not in as good of soil, not as much water. Shown below is a picture of what my potato leaves look like, and some wheel bugs. There are all kinds of insects in the potatoes. I even saw a snake going into the potato vines a few days ago. Every time I get into the garden I come back with a bunch of bug bites.

I pulled the row cover back from my fall garden to find blister beetles and 2 hills of fire ants.

Larry

Ah, Larry, great photos of my bitter enemies, especially right now when I am getting lots and lots of eggs and cats from the Gulf Frits and Variegated Frits! I shudder when I see them and grab the scissors........

I hate this weather, too, Mam!
I hate it, hate it, Sam I am.....

I just hope we don't get the bad insects and predators next year like we did this year!

Not seeing as many migrating Monarchs in the central flyway this year, since most are taking the East coast to get to Mexico - not as much drought affect there. Bur I see a few. Released one yesterday. She was anxious to get out of the cage, sweet girl.

I have lots of Juliet's and Bush Goliath, and some SunGolds and SunSugars, but the other plants did not really bounce back with much vigor from the prunings. They looked like they were going to and then just practically stopped, for all intents and purposes. But I did get a lot of spring and early summer fruits, so I'm not going to complain and blame the plants for just being plain old worn out after this atrocious summer.

I don't really have a place to grow any fall veggies - wish I did. But, I interplant with lots of flowers, and the plants I do have, have grown in leaps and bounds, taking up any room I might have had. The Dallas Red lantana has sprawled across a 7' bed and is going nuts with blooms that the butterflies love. It has taken up the space I used for the lettuce bed. I guess I could use the bags assigned to the cukes originally, and beef up the soil in them to grow some sugar snaps or something else. Like, you, Dawn, I eat them as I go OTV. I really enjoyed doing that with the "sun" group of tomatos this year. Mmmmmmmmmm.

I only have 2 little Yellow Doll watermelons. I really need to do more amending of that bed for next year. What can I do over winter? Remove the wood mulch and add what? I heard it binds nitrogen.

I need a few more Okra plants. They produced well, just not enough to have a meal at one time. I ate them raw - boy, are they good!

I had no squash at all. I learned they are best planted directly and not sown in cups. I tend to leave things too long in cups and squash did not like this. Some plants will tolerate this fine, but not squash.

I may yet start some things for fall once the Monarchs have completed their migration and the Frits fly South as well.

I have heard someone say that Winter Density lettuce can grow all winter long here???

Susan

Larry,

There are all kinds of insects everywhere. At least I am seeing a lot of the good predator bugs and hopefully they are eating the bad bugs. Unfortunately there's not a good predator bug that controls grasshoppers, but there are a lot of songbirds in my garden every day and I sure hope they are eating grasshoppers. It seems like all the insects that plagued our plants all summer have been busy reproducing because there's more now than ever.

I love wheelbugs and have a few in my garden, which is always nice to see. I saw and killed a squash vine borer moth yesterday. I don't usually see them in September.

I hate that the blister beetles found their way under the floating row cover, but it happens. The only time I don't have some stray bugs under row cover is when I transplant seedlings into the garden and cover them the very same day. That doesn't mean there aren't soil-borne pests that will be under the row cover or others that might hatch out under that, but at least most of the others aren't there. I always find fire ants under the row covers. I think they like the slight sun protection it gives them.

Susan, Wheel bugs are so helpful in general that I am happy to see them, but I totally understand why you are not.

The weather usually determines how bad of an insect year it will be. We need cool, wet, cloudy autumn through spring weather. Well, we need a cool summer too, but we never have one of those. Many, though not necessarily all, pest insects speed up their reproductive rate in the heat. So, insects that might take 2 or 3 or 4 weeks to complete a reproductive cycle in average weather can go through that reproductive cycle in less than a week in very hot weather. That's one reason that the insect population just explodes in hot years. Spider mites, in particular, get into such a fast reproductive cycle that their babies can be born pregnant. It also hurts us and helps them when winter stays pretty warm or when spring warms up very early like it has the last two years--they get a head start on reproducing and on attacking our plants while the plants are younger, smaller and more vulnerable. I've never seen insects as an overall group as bad as they've been the last two drought summers, although I have had much worse grasshopper years in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

It is a shame we likely will not see the monarch migration. I did see a new, fresh monarch yesterday, so clearly some are in the area but I'm not seeing lots of them like I usually do. I am seeing plenty of other butterflies, including more and more sulphurs and swallowtails.

You might try feeding the tomato plants that haven't bounced back from the pruning. I'm inclined to think that a feeding may boost them and kick them back into producing. I fed mine right after I pruned them back. Some bounced back and some didn't. We still are not getting much fruitset on anything except cherry types because our daytime highs are just too high. Yesterday we topped out at 98 degrees, and our relative humidity hit 14%. The fire pagers in our county went off at almost exactly the same time as they did the day before. In both cases, it was about the time we were at our maximum high temp and minimum low relative humidity. Although our county did not have an excessive number of fires this summer, I think our fire season is about to start if we don't get some rain. When fires start popping up at the same time every day, that's a clue that our weather combined with dry vegetation has reached the danger zone. This fire was further north than Thursday's, so it didn't involve our VFD but involved the three to our immediate north and they were out there for quite a while. That's a bad sign too.

Wood mulch on the soil surface doesn't bind nitrogen. That only happens if the wood is worked into the soil itself. Normally in the fall, I add compost from my pile, grass clippings collected from mowing the lawn, and chopped/shredded autumn leaves to the beds. I just chop/shred the leaves by running over them with the lawn mower and catching them in the grasscatcher. You can add anything you want in terms of organic matter and soil amendments--manure, compost, alfalfa meal, mushroom compost, etc. Or, you can plant a winter cover crop like vetch or rye grass. Let them grow until it is almost planting time. Then, cut them and let them decompose in the soil, or rototill them into the soil, or pull them/dig them out and put them on the compost pile. The issue with rye grass is that its roots are so aggressive that you almost have to have a tiller to work the plants into the ground to get rid of them. I often use buckwheat, which goes from seed to blooming in maybe 5 or 6 weeks, as a short-term cover crop. As a bonus, it attracts beneficial insects. Unfortunately, frost kills it.

I plant a ridiculous number of okra plants because it is easy to 'sneak' them into ornamental plantings. This year I planted about 30 so we had tons of okra and I have put a lot of it in the freezer. I finally got tired of picking the okra, so stopped picking it and am letting the pods got to seed to collect for next year. I actually have some pods that are dry and ready to harvest, so maybe I'll do that today. I could cut the pods this morning and sit and remove the seeds from them while watching college football today.

One of my favorite ways to sneak okra into the ornamental beds is to plant tall varieties in the back of an ornamental bed that has 4 o'clocks and hollyhocks in it. So, the okra goes behind the hollyhocks and 4 o'clocks, and then in front of the four o'clocks I plant Swiss Chard in various colors and in front of the chard I plant some of the pepper varieties that stay shorter. It is pretty all the time, but after the hollyhocks have finished up blooming in mid-summer, the combination of okra, brightly-colored chard and pepper plants is a really pretty almost-tropical looking combination.

Winter Density can grow most of the winter here but I will not necessarily say it will last all winter. However, it does tolerate some frost. I do plant it every year and have about 20 heads of it growing now, though they still are small. Once the temperatures are in the 20s, lettuce can get iffy, but covering them with floating row cover can both prolong their lives and keep the quality higher. In some past years, I've had good winter crops from several other kinds of lettuce, including Arctic King, January King, Rouge d'Hiver and Continuity Red. Really, though, since I started using floating row covers, I do not necessarily choose winter varieties for winter.

There are lots of other greens that do well in fall and winter, especially with the use of a row cover to keep them a little warmer at night. Some winters I grow arugula, mizuna, tatsoi, mache, French sorrel and miner's lettuce. Spinach, kale and chard do great as winter greens too. I have planted a ridiculous amount of kale and Swiss Chard this fall, along with far too many collards, because the chickens love having fresh greens in winter.

Some years I can keep winter greens going almost all winter. Spinach is particularly good at bouncing back even if damaged by cold weather and heavy frost, but in those years when we dip down into the single-digit temperatures, even lettuce and greens under row cover can freeze. Sometimes, though, they resprout from the roots. Oddly, one of our coldest periods here in our county is the first week of December. That's often when we get some of our coldest weather of the season. It sticks in my mind because that's when Marietta's Christmas Parade is. No matter how nice the weather is on the days leading up to the parade, it is almost guaranteed that we'll be freezing and shivering on parade night. It is common for us to be in the 20s on the night of the parade. If I put a heavy blanket over the row cover that is covering the greens, I usually can get the lettuce plants past that first really cold blast of air in December.

This will be my first winter to grow lettuce in containers in the greenhouse. Of course, in the GH, the daytime heat due to the greenhouse effect is more of a worry than the nighttime lows. I checked the temperature in the greenhouse yesterday to see how much higher it was than the outdoor air temp. Even with 50% shade cloth and all the doors and vents open, it hit 111 degrees inside the greenhouse when it was 98 degrees outside. So, I'm still waiting and waiting and waiting for the temps to drop low enough that I can start using the greenhouse. That may not happen until sometime in October.

Dawn

Susan, I have a love/hate relationship with the wheel bug. I love the fact that I hear so many good things about them and that I have so many of them. I hate the fact that I have only seen them kill GOOD bugs.

Dawn, I will get better with the frost blanket and other gardening practices. Three years ago I had never heard of a frost blanket, now I am trying to learn to use them.

Larry

Larry, I find them really helpful. I use U-shaped earth staples or pins to hold them down when I am using them only for frost protection. I do pin them down tightly to the soil so the wind cannot lift them. When I am using them to exclude insects, I prefer to use long pieces of rebar, or old metal T-posts or something else with weight to it to hold down all the edges so the bugs cannot crawl under.

I read about Remay, Agribon and other types of floating row cover material as far back at least as the mid-1980s and would mutter to myself "I am not going to spend money on that kind of stuff". I am sure it was the 1990s before I bought some and tried it. I love the stuff! It will change your gardening life by allowing you to give your plants some protection from late spring or early fall frosts and also will enable you to exclude the majority of the pests that bother certain plants.

I don't know how I ever could grow broccoli without floating row cover, other than by spraying the plants with Bt every few days. I'd rather use the floating row covers.

Now, a note to all of you about today's horrendous weather. By late afternoon, the temperature at our house hit 100.something, so I'll round it up to 101 and our humidity hit 12%. The cool-season plants were watered heavily yesterday, so today's heat wasn't as hard on them as I feared, though some have yellowed leaves and are a bit wilted, particularly the turnips. I have apologized to the poor cool-season plants for the ridiculous heat and I keep promising them that if they hang in there a little bit longer, it will cool down. I'm not even sure if that is a true statement, but it is what I keep promising the plants.

In the meantime, the mature grasshoppers are having mating orgies, and there are baby hoppers everywhere. I feel like it is midsummer instead of early autumn.

Dawn

OK. I'm in on the hissyfit today. Too dry. Too many bugs and too hot for this time of year. Ugh.

Well, many of our indeterminate tomatoes are setting fruit again. I also have a July 27 planting of Roma VF, which is starting to set fruit. Our beans were all eaten by grasshoppers, even the fall crop which I attempted to grow.

Rabbits, apparently seeking moisture, cut down most of my cluster beans. Some of the downed plants are still connected to the roots, and I'm hoping for seed.

Our okra has kicked into high gear. We are so thankful for that!

Sweet potatoes are growing. But I won't know about production for a few weeks, when I start digging. Grand Asia, a purple skinned, white fleshed variety, which Gary sent me, has been largely neglected, in a location with some shade. I notice that its leaves are much larger than my other varieties, and am looking forward to trying the roots.

We have a record crop of wheel bugs (assassin bugs) this year. I keep moving them away from my bee hives, and into other areas of the gardens. They do seem to stake out a territory. But they also seem to migrate to where they can get the easiest meal. In the garden, I often find the remains of grasshoppers they have eaten. I don't like them targeting my bees. But the fact that they nearly eliminated Colorado Potato beetles, two years running, has put them on my "friends list."

Yesterday I put out transplants of Packman Broccoli and Brussels Sprouts. I also started some No Name Red Leaf Lettuce (variety I received from the Seed Savers Exchange in 1990). I have beets, carrots, chard and kale all coming up.

I replanted some sprouting Azul Toro potatoes, a couple of weeks ago. Presently they are up about 9". I'm hoping for a crop. I have more sprouting from an April 12 planting, which never got dug. This potato produced very well for us, and it has good flavor. It does have a short dormancy, which, I believe, could be worked to our advantage in Oklahoma. It makes a fall planting feasible, from spring grown sets.

I also have sprouts coming up from Huagalina derrived potato seedlings. I started them from seed, and before I could dig them, the roots started sprouting. The largest potato any of these has produced, was about the size of a hen's egg. I have replanted a fair number of them. If they will produce A LOT of little potatoes, I'll be happy. This one is noted for having a very short dormancy, perhaps too short for my purposes.

I have some more potatoes, started from seed (True seed, tps) on August 16. I'm not hoping for a harvest, but rather a crop of little tubers which I can then replant in the spring.

While writing this, I hear thunder. We had a light rain here, this morning, before daybreak. It's still before daybreak as I write. We need the rain. I noticed yesterday and the day before that the garden's soil has been getting pretty dry again.

George
Tahlequah, OK

Dawn, I am assuming your Okra is OP? I have Little Lucy, which is an F1, but have a couple plants of Lee, which may be an OP? I really liked it, too. Eating raw Okra is GOOD! It is not mucilagenous as it gets when cooked and has a great, fresh flavor.

I have been feeding my tomato plants, so don't know what happened to the Black Cherry, Better Boy, Big Beef, etc. Cherokee Purple died in early summer, but not before producing quite a number of fruits. I will extoll the virtues of Bush Goliath til the cows come home. It did rest a bit, but has lots of fruit on it right now. SunGold seemed to tolerate the heat much better than SunSugar, and I believe I like its flavor more than SunSugar, albeit they are very close in taste.

To be honest, I have focused more on the ornamentals and butterfly host plants and nectar plants since I have a lot right now. Mama Variegated Frit left so many, many eggs. I just hope I can get them raised before frost sets in. Monarchs are all released, and the migrators are no longer laying eggs. I have HUGE seed pods on my milkweed, Goose Plant. They are bigger than golf balls right now. Have you ever tried growing this Dawn? It's a great annual here for the Monarchs; they love it. The beautiful Purple Milkweed should bloom next year. I can't wait!

I am still catching Cucumber Beetles. Argh...... Now they are getting used to me and starting to fly away before I can get them. I guess we should call them "Smart Bugs", lol!

I think I will use Austrian Pea for a cover crop. I want to use a legume, and I have used AP before successfully.

Can't blame the Monarchs for choosing the East Coast to migrate. I'm sure the wildflowers are plentiful in that region since the drought did not affect them as bad. It will still be a very low population to reach Mexico. I encourage everyone to plant milkweed for next year. Most of our natives need a cold stratification period, so sowing seed in the fall is a great idea. Starting the tropicals, like Asclepias curassavica and A. physocarpa indoors to put out in spring when they migrate back North would also be helpful. I am concerned about the diminishing numbers. What would we do without these big, beautiful butterflies?

I have about 11 Black Swallowtails that I'm raising. Very low numbers for them, too, this year. These will overwinter as chrysalises until next spring.

Every year we pray for a better gardening year next year. This year could have been worse. We did have a nice, very long spring, which is something we don't often get in Oklahoma. So, I am grateful for that.

Susan

Bon, I feel like I have been having a weather-related hissy fit every day since June began. Welcome to my party. : )

George, I hate that the rabbits and squirrels are causing you so much trouble. We have had rabbits all summer, and it has been common to see 6 or 8 of them out in the yard in the early morning and early evening hours. A few days ago, they abruptly vanished, so I suspect some predator showed up here and took them out in a few days' time. I'd love to hear thunder, by the way, but then I would expect rain to accompany it, and we just aren't getting rain here. I feel like our winter fire season, which normally starts in the winter time or sometimes in very late fall, is likely to start in Sept. or Oct. this year. Some people here in our county think it started 3 or 4 days ago, and they could be right. We've just hit that point where things are impossibly dry.

Susan, All the okra varieties I grow are OP except for Little Lucy. I've saved seed from Little Lucy and it has grown just fine and produced plants that seem identical to the F-1 plants, so I probably will save some of it too.

I haven't grown the Goose Plant milkweed.

I don't blame the Monarchs for taking the East Coast path. They're smart and I hope it helps as many of them as possible survive.

You're right that this year could have been worse. With early planting I was able to get great harvests of almost everything, so I cannot complain. The heat was brutal though, and here at our house, the heat just won't let go of us and go away. It was a cool 59 degrees here around sunrise, but it probably will be in the upper 90s again this afternoon.

All my poor little cool-season veggies are begging for mercy and heat relief. Well, except for the Giant Red Mustard. It is standing tall and proud, thumbing its nose at the heat and saying "Bring it on".

I had two or three monarchs flitting around last night. Clearly they were nectaring, but it was interesting to see that they all were flying towards the southwest. Maybe the ones here are slowly beginning to make their way towards Mexico. Two were new and fresh, one was old and faded. I do have green milkweed in the pastures for them, and there are some fall-blooming wildflowers, so I think that any that are in OK and make it this far south ought to be able to find enough nutrition here in southcentral OK to help them as they migrate. Since it has been so dry lately, I've been making puddles in the gravel driveway daily for the butterflies. You wouldn't believe the butterfly and dragonfly "traffic" around those puddles daily, and many other flying things like wasps and green lacewings visit the puddles too.

Yesterday I saw and killed another SVB moth. I cannot believe they are here and laying eggs in September. I am checking my cole crops daily for eggs because we sure do have the moths all over the place.

Dawn