Like you, I wanted a longer season to make mulberry muffins and was impressed by all the happy customers growing IL Everbearing up north. The plant that I got from a well-known Houston area nursery was represented as an "IL Everbearing" and has grown well and faithfully made berries. But they are les than 1/2" long MAX. Perfect for bird beaks, but not for a big, hungry human tummy. Nurseries never mislabel plants, right? So, I got scions from a nursery up north from 3 recommended varieties to replace the tops on the supposed IL Everbearing. The grafts all took. The 3 kinds of fruit were very unimpressive and had very little flavor at all. So next March I will clip off those and regraft every branch with a proven, tasty, big-enough variety that works well producing fruit all April each year. Shangri La. Pick them early if you want more tart ness, and pick them a little later if you want less tartness and more sweetness. Pick them too late and they are insipidly sweet/flat tasting. Drop unwanted berries in a big pot of continually moist potting soil and you may have lots of Shangri La seedlings sprouting up that can later be potted separately to give away or plant elsewhere. The leaf patterns will vary a lot. The seedlings grow very fast in full Sun and in good, moist soil mix. Go Saints.

Hi, I have had two hollyhock plants grow to over 6 ft here. (Ponchatoula) For me, they grew some the first year then really grew and bloomed the second year. I think one of the problems with hollyhocks is the heat. The one that bloomed this year could not take the heat we are having now, but earlier in the year it was beautiful. Add too much water to the heat and they just melt away. I tried planting malva zebrinas in pots in the fall, transplating in the spring. They bloomed some and the flowers were very pretty. But they could not take the heat and all the rain. I grow the Texas Red Star hibiscus, which is about seven ft tall this year and it will bloom from the really hot days until frost usually. I also grow the native hibiscus, cream color with maroon throat and some dinnerplate hardy hibiscus in pink and also maroon. I don't grow the tropicals because I don't like having to protect plants in winter. Keep trying with the hollyhocks, if you get just one to make it, it will be worth it. Sherri

This is a quote from The Southern Living Gardening Book: "Plants take 2 to 3 years to come into full production but then furnish spears every spring for 10 to 15 years or more. They take up considerable space but do so in a grand manner. Use along a sunny fence or as a background for flowers or vegetables. (You don't have to plant every plant all together. You can scatter them around through ornamental beds and just walk around to harvest.) Set out seedlings or roots (not wilted, no smaller than an adult's hand) in fall or winter. Make trenches 1 ft. wide and 8-10 inches deep. Space them 4 to 6 ft. apart. Heap loose soil enriched with composted manure at bottom of trenches and soak well. Space plants 1 ft. apart, setting them so that tops are 6 to 8 inches below the top of the trench. Spread roots out evenly. Cover with 2 inches of soil and water again. As young plants grow, gradually fill in trench, taking care not to cover growing tips. Soak deeply whenever soil begins to dry out at root depth. Do not harvest spears the first year. The object is to build a big root mass. When plants turn brown in late fall or early winter, cut stems to the ground. The following spring you can cut your first spears; cut only for 4 to 6 weeks or until appearance of thin spears indicates that roots are nearing exhaustion. Then permit plants to grow. Cultivate, feed, and irrigate heavily. The third year you should be able to cut spears for 8 to 10 weeks. Spears are ready to cut when they are 5-8 inches long. Thrust knife down at 45 degree angle to soil; flat cutting may injure adjacent developing spears." "Jersey Knight is the best variety for Southern Growers. Male hybrids typically produce more and larger spears, because they don't put energy into seed production. Such selections still produce an occasional female plant." At my old house, I followed the above instructions and had asparagus there. (I live in East Central MS, about 200 miles inland from the Gulf Coast.) I made a three foot wide raised bed alongside my vegetable garden and planted nothing in it but asparagus. Ever. That is one disadvantage to asparagus and why they are so expensive. You cannot plant anything else in their bed. That soil only produces something edible for 2 to 3 montsh each year. In my youthful ignorance, I bought the typical order of plants, which is 20, and then split them with a friend to save money. Ten plants never produced enough spears at one time to feed my family of four. However, the plants did well, and required very little work except feeding, watering, and giving them a good mulch each year to keep down weeds. If I had space, I would definitely grow them again, but plant AT LEAST 20 roots this time. The Gardening Book says asparagus will grow as far south as the Lower South, which is all the way down except a narrow strip along the coast. Asparagus roots are not that expensive, though you may have to hunt for Jersey Knight. If you want to grow them, do a really good job of preparing the soil and digging the trenches and see what happens. It's not much to lose and you just might succeed!

Scott, The coral snakes are "supposed to" stay on the Texas side of the Red River, and we're surrounded by the river and by Texas to our west, south and east....and in 16 years of living here, and 18 years of owning this land, I've never seen a coral snake here in OK yet. I hope those coral snakes understand that they are supposed to stay over in Texas and not come here. Still, I remain conscious of the fact that the river (which often is pretty much dry in places for much of the summer) will not stop the snakes, so we still could encounter them here. I hope if I ever see one, it is from a great distance so I have time to recite to myself "Red on yellow, kill a fellow, Red on black, venom lack" and then I can study it and decide if it is venomous and if I should be worried. On our property, we have had, at various times, encounters with western diamondbacks, pygmy rattlers, timber rattlers, copperheads and water moccasins. The water moccasins weren't a problem very often since they stuck to bodies of water. However, after Extreme and Exceptional Drought continually dried up most of our ponds and our creeks, they moved to the ornamental lily pond in our back yard. After fighting them there for several years, we let the pond dry up last year and this year we filled it in. I miss my lily pond but it wasn't worth the risk. My closest encounter with a snake was with a pygmy rattler, which was about 2" from my hand. I rarely see those, though, unless I venture into the woods, and I rarely see a western diamondback other than sleeping on the rocks in a sunny spot alongside the creek. The copperheads often are found on the 'edges', like where the grassland meets the woodland and we most often encounter them while mowing. The timber rattlers, though, are a very persistent problem. They come out of our neighbor's woodland to our south, travel across his cow pasture with grass waist high or higher, and then come onto our property, where we most often encounter them in the driveway, in the veggie garden or near the chicken coop. They seem to travel the same little trails that the deer and rabbits use, so at least I know exactly where I am most likely to see one. Over the weekend, one of my neighbors asked me if I had a snake-free summer, because normally he is the person who will come and shoot a snake for me if I am home alone and encounter one when I don't have a gun with me. I told him that I had plenty of snake encounters, including the one with the timber rattler last week, but this year the snakes scheduled all their visits for days with my husband or son were home. When we first moved here, my experience with venomous snakes was fairly limited and I would run into the house and grab a gun and come back out to shoot it, and of course the snake wouldn't be there. I laugh at myself now when I think of that because I guess I thought the snake would just sit there and wait for me to come back and kill it. Obviously, they don't do that. It has taken me a long time to accept the fact that snakes always will be in my garden at times, but I just try to take it with a grain of salt when I see a non-venomous snake in the garden. I know they are good garden helpers and aren't going to hurt me. We often have rough green tree snakes in the garden where they like to sit wrapped around the canna leaves waiting for something delicious to come along for dinner. They also like to sit up in tomato cages and will travel across the shade cloth I put over tomato cages in the worst heat of the summer in a drought year. It is sort of disconcerting to be picking tomatoes and to look up and see a green snake at eye level, but I've gotten used to it. Dawn