In Oklahoma today, we're in the midst of snow play. Bear is testing the snow now to see if it's the good sledding kind. I'm betting it is. I'll join her as soon as I write this post. Green chairs in the front lawn. In recent years, Oklahoma has had more snow than I remember from the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s let alone the 2000s. However, I thought the winter of 2014-2015 was never going to start. It felt like one of those warm non-winters Oklahoma gets every few years. No wonder the plants stay so confused. Days in the 50s were the norm in December and January, and everything had that brown and gray cast we always see on cloudy winter days. In February, roses broke bud and began leafing out. I was getting lots of emails about pruning and hard freezes. Gardeners were understandably worried. Go ahead and prune after this snowstorm melts...

In honor of the fifth anniversary of Gail Eichelberger's Wildflower Wednesday meme, I want to share some of the wildflowers I grow in Oklahoma. Over the past five years, my garden has leaned closer and closer to a wildflower pollinator haven. Whenever I must remove a rose because of Rose Rosette Virus, I tend to plant a grass or wildflower in its place. The garden seems happier that way. It doesn't mean I've given up on tough roses yet though. Featured above is yellow Baptisia sphaerocarpa. I have two or three different yellow baptisias, a white one, two blue ones, and even B. australis x B. alba 'Purple Smoke,' a seedling from the North Carolina Botanical Garden according to the Missouri Botanical Garden. They should know. In my mid-spring garden, baptisias really shine, but don't try to move them about. Being prairie natives, they have tap roots. Move them, and they will sulk at best,...

These are the seeds which made their way into my virtual shopping cart from all over the Internet so far this spring. I decided to share them with you so we'd both know what I'm planting this year. Some are for the vegetable garden. Others are flowers that may go in the back garden, or maybe in the vegetable garden. I have a thing for sunflowers and zinnias, especially in my veggie garden. They make me smile.  I'll also divide them into cold season crops and warm ones. All of these are in addition to seeds I already have from last year. Tomato seeds seem to live forever if you take care of them, so I keep them for years. Colorful tomato cages in my potager during the summer of 2010. Franchi: Cold Season Chard (Bieta) 'Blonda Di Lione' is a beautiful white stemmed chard with light green leaves; Pac Choy (Cavolo...

It's time to prune roses in Oklahoma if you have any not yet stricken by Rose Rosette Virus. If your rose has Rose Rosette, shovel prune that puppy and bag it. Do not put the diseased plant on your compost pile. As of 2015, you cannot save an infected rose no matter what you read from some garden gurus. Instead, look at the science from Oklahoma State University and the University of Arkansas. When I started seeing RRD in my garden in 2009, no one was really talking about this problem. However, Jennifer Olson, Assistant Extension Specialist and Plant Disease Diagnostician at the Cooperative Extension Service, has an excellent slideshow of symptoms of the disease. Scientists are working very hard to find a way to stop RRD, but for now, there isn't one. Here's a quote from a paper on Rose Rosette Disease written by Olson, and Eric Rebek, Associate Professor and State Extension Specialist Horticultural Entomology from...