George, I bet you're right, but I hate going out on a limb like that. Merton, I thought maybe I could find a comparison of the cucurbita seeds that would help you, so I checked my copy of Suzanne Ashworth's book SEED TO SEED: SEED SAVING AND GROWING TECHNIQUES FOR VEGETABLE GARDENERS and here is how she describes them: Cucurbita maxima: Thick seeds that are white or tan or brown with cream colored margins and thin cellophane coatings. (As George pointed out, your Lakota is a maxima so should fit this description.) C. moschata seeds are small, oblong and beige with a dark beige margin. (Your butternut is a moschata so one of your two solid tan types of seed ought to match this description.) C. pepo seeds are cream-colored and each has a white margin. Your acorn squash is a pepo so its seed should match this description. The problem is that your spaghetti squash is a pepo also, so its' seeds ought to match this description too. C. agyrosperma (formerly mixta) seeds would be the easiest to identify because they usually have small cracks in them. (They are described as white or tan with a pale margin and cracks in the skin coat on the flat sides of the skins which are covered with a thin cellophane covering.) None of the squash in your packet are agyrosperma types though. If you have specific variety names for your spaghetti, butternut, acorn and Lakota squashes, you probably could google and find descriptions of each squash, including the approximate size of the mature squash and that size might help you figure out which of your pepo seeds is which. Or, you might e-mail the seed company and see if they can tell you, by description only, which seed is which variety. Dawn

Hi Dawna, Thanks for the kind words. I just wanted to put together a little info sheet for everyone because the pests are so bad this year, and everyone has had a lot of questions. It sure has been raining a lot up your way. I hope all is well there. At least we aren't having to worry about wildfires or a hay shortage this year. Flooding, however, may be this summer's big issue. Dawn

With the magnolia pod do you mean that you want to figure out a use for them, like a craft or something? Or, are you wanting to try to grow magnolias from seed? With the shrubs, there are probably dozens that grow wild in Oklahoma and you'd find different ones in different parts of the state because of the diverse growing conditions found here. When we bought our land, I used Doyle McGee's book "Roadside Trees and Shrubs of Oklahoma" to help me figure out what native plants we had on our land. You also could look at the lists/photos of native plants on the website of the Oklahoma Biological Survey, which I've linked below. If you have no idea what kind of plants are growing on your inlaws' land, I'd go out there with a camera and take photos. Then, bring back the photos and try to ID them using the Biological Survey or the book I mentioned or something similar. Then, once you have photos and names matched up, do online research about the plants you are interested in and read about them to determine if they are suitable for your soil. Make sure they aren't invasive thugs and that they won't reach a mature height that is too large for the planting area you have in mind. Then, if you want to transplant those shrubs, wait until they are dormant and then carefully dig them up keeping the rootball as intact as possible. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: Oklahoma Biological Survey

Hi Moni! You have my sympathy. Whenever we visited DH's family in Pennsylvania, I never took the right clothing and was always freezing cold, even in July. More rain didn't fall, but it stayed cool, cloudy and misty. There's a tornado watch to our southwest, so I guess if that storm develops further and moves our way, we still might get a little more rain. We were in Dallas most of the day and drove home through a lot of rain but that rain stopped before we reached the Red River. Caroline, The maple is gorgeous. You have better color there than we have here this year. I hope the rain helped your pastures and ponds. Our pastures are still so dry and our ponds remain empty but eventually enough rain has to fall to start refilling them. A neighbor of ours who has a spring-fed pond says it is the lowest she has seen it in the 15 years or so that she's owned the place, and worries her spring may be on the verge of drying up. Lisa, I bet the rain was wonderful for the flowers you planted. Almost all my stuff froze on the night we went down to 25 degrees a couple of weeks ago, but the brugmansias in containers are still blooming. One of them, and I think it is Lemonade Twist, has 6 or 8 flowers open right now and another couple of dozen about to open. I am going to have to carry it inside before the weekend freeze, but it has handled a lot of cold weather already. We didn't get a lot more rain, but also didn't have any grassfires today....which is a change. I think there were grassfires every day last week. Of course, the dormant grasses will dry out quickly unless it rains again soon. Still, any rain is a good thing and this rain was a fairly slow soaking rain so the ground is not quite hard-as-a-rock now. Dawn