We are on a private well, within sight of the river, but just out of the flood plain. Water is not a problem here. In fact, we have a spring in an old springhouse that we can (and they did) use as backup if the power went out. Once i put solar on it, we can get by for weeks with no outside inputs if we have to. But most of all, if you buy the forecasts, we are ok in the climate change game for the next century or so. And yes, RO filters are in very common use here.
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Wow.
Noted.
And we ran out of time for Staunton but we want to check it out still.
Getting fruit trees and vegetable patches irrigated during dry spells should not have to be the high-stakes game we find ourselves now in.
In the interest of getting back on topicā¦ here are some natives, blooming, and I am grateful for them showing up at my workplace:
Oxalis violacea
showing victorious and green above all the dead dry non-irrigated grass
Calyptocarpus vialis
(Straggler Daisy or Horseherb)
Southern Leopard Frog (Rana sphenocephala)
(removed from pool, relocated to a flowing creek)
White-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus)
(smirking, walking past the staked caged Monterrey Oak, Mexican Plum, with ashe junipers in the background; extreme foreground is a native Texas live oak Quercus fusiformis or Q. virginiana var. fusiformis)
Just out of frame is the big bowl of water I keep for deer and for mountain lions out here. We have both. Last month, we got visited 3 times by a juvenile mountain lion.
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We have karst too! If youāre into geology, northern Indiana is not a bad place to hike.
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So my outdoor toms at my allotment plot have been being nibbled by mice. (Some of my greenhouse toms at home were, too. Never happened before.)
Today, I went to the plot and was chopping up some stuff over my compost heap there, when something rustled and moved. I froze, and a couple of seconds later it did it again and I spotted the source.
He burrowed. Came back. Tried to jump out. Ran around a bit more. Burrowed again. Then finally came out, tried to jump out again and managed it. Did not seem very stressed about it, at all.
Not the first time Iāve found mice in compost bins, over the years. But this yearās evidence of them rampaging over my tomatoes and nibbling many of them is a first for me. Maybe the long, hot, dry summer made toms, previously ignored, a new source of food and moisture.
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I use live-catch traps and they work well. If they are native mice they get a short drive to the local forest preserve and are released. If theyāre non-native, well, they donāt.
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Iām afraid I have too many endless tasks at my plot to add yet another to the list. Where there is one mouse there are always many mice.
My allotment neighbour reckons thereās (also) a nest in his shed. They chewed through a plastic tub of slug pellets there!
Trying to remove them all would probably be a never-ending job. I have harvested more toms than I need this year, but I am harvesting under-ripe ones now, as the season ends, while they remain unnibbled.
Funnily enough I inadvertently trapped our neighbourās cat in my greenhouse when I got home. He is a real hunter (has taken pigeons, squirrels, mice, etc. and sometimes presents them to his owner) and since they moved in our house-mouse catch has dropped considerably. (They are actually field mice that come into the house, usually in the depths of winter.) Normally I chase him off (he only comes round to our side to shit and hunt) but if he wants to create a cat-like miasma in the greenhouse, Iām cool with that.
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Todayās pickings
Leeks, various tomatoes, green pole beans, cherry tomatoes, zucchini, cucumbers, various peppers. Doggo under the table.
I made my first garden-vegetable cock-a-leekie soup of the year last night. Yummy!
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Today, some 4-6 weeks too late, I dug up my potatoes. About 24 plants, but Iād dug up three a couple of weeks ago. Cara, Maris Piper, King Edward and Salad Blue.
Bizarrely one or two were still in flower. A few plants were brown and died back, and quite a lot were still very green and leafy (partly why Iād kept putting off digging them up).
It certainly was too late. (Iāve been too busy and distracted with other things lately). There were some monster-sized spuds, but too many were scabby and peppered with worm holes. So, I donāt expect they will store too well. And those I do manage to eat will probably have a high wastage level.
Hey-ho.
Below, the harvest and the patch they came from.
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Nice haul from a little area!
My spuds didnt grow well through a combination of wrong variant for my area, first time with grow bags, shade, lack of watering, heat, and eventually rodents. Basically I did everything wrong.
This Irishman must go hide his head in shame.
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First pawpaws are in! Yay! Wonāt get many this year, trees are just getting old enough to bear, but Iāve been looking forward to them for a while now.
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It never occurred to me that varieties might be very geographically sensitive. If one is in a place where spuds can be grown, then Iād have naively assumed any variety would do. Especially given just how many varieties there are - I reckon I could have bought any of a dozen or two varieties at our local garden centres (without even bothering the specialist seed merchants).
Funnily enough, the harvest from the potato plants I grew in bags was much more meagre this year than usual. But given we had such a hot and dry summer, and my watering simply did not keep up, thatās hardly surprising.
But no shame in less than stellar crops - itās all in aid of learning to do it better / learning to cope with whatever surprises nature throws at us. 
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oooh! loves me some paw paws! the lot behind us had a tree right on the fence and we could help ourselves. when the lot sold, new neighbor cut the tree down.
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Awww, man, i hate stories like that! There arenāt a lot of things i can grow here that just scream ātropical,ā but this banana-meets-mango is one.
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The biggest factors are climate zone and day length. You have early varieties and late varieties.
The early varieties do well in zones 5 and higher. They will make spuds while the days are getting longer so you need enough time between the soil being workable and midsummer in order to get a harvest. If your zone is too cold you just get some runty spuds.
Late varieties need long days and dont start making spuds until the days start shortening, but if you are in a hot, dry zone then your spuds may be too small come picking time.
Thereās more to it than that of course. An issue i have is that the store where I buy spuds never properly labels the varieties. I dont buy from a specialty seller
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Ah - yes, I know all about earlies, second earlies and maincrop varieties.
And I have a tendency to often ignore that as ātoo much to worry aboutā, and stick them in and harvest after theyāve flowered when they start to wilt. But sometimes they donāt wilt. 
It didnāt occur to me that theyād each tolerate/prefer different day lengths - but I guess that makes sense, really.
Iād stop buying from that store, if it were me. Even the most ālowest common denominatorā mass market garden centres here in UK stock from suppliers who label their products appropriately (type and variety).
Maybe find a good reliable seed merchant where you can order for delivery. During Jan and Feb, time spent browsing seed catalogues is a pleasant pastime. Over the years Iāve ordered from a few different merchants here, and so they all keep sending their annual catalogues to me around then.
(Of course, if I did pay more attention to early, second early and maincrop designations, Iād get some of them out of the ground before they were beyond it. I bet if I looked at the recent haul and checked which is which type and and their health, Iād find a correlation.)
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12 days on and the seedlings are doing well. 3 gallon grow bags this time instead of 5. I really donāt think a huge root system develops for autos, in their roughly 80 day cycle, and it gives me more room in the grow tent, at least early on. Weāll see if the yield suffers at harvest in early November.
One other thing I started doing on the last grow was to forego letting the bucket of water sit overnight before watering the plants with it. The bro-science says that doing this will allow the chlorine and other chemicals in my tap water to dissapate. Iāve read that it doesnāt, though I still treat the pH in the water, always taking it down to 6.0ish.
Unfortunately, no real scientific method here. If the yields are off because of the changes, Iāll never really know. 
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Was out getting more hazelnuts and found this little guy hanging out in the tree
I didnāt even know we had tree frogs here!
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Checking in from Novaā¦
We had to cut down an oak tree and had this guy complaining about the atrocity at our front door for a couple of years.
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Mint oil and / or eucalyptus oil repels rodents.
You may need to apply every few days.
If you donāt want your food in contact with the essential oils, put a few drops of the oil on rag-strips (old t-shirts, sheets, towels, socks) and tie them to the plants you are trying to get them to avoid. If itās a big plant, you may need a handful of those strips. This may work long enough to get the crop to the ripe stage.
Other option: find a rat snake and make sure she is made comfortable near your compost pile.
Cats sometimes do the job.
But sometimes they donāt.
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