As you all know, I 'm not an assiduous forum follower,but seeing as Campanula, like me, seems to be trying to do a very big project on a very small budget, I though I'll throw in my 2 cents. I think the sooner you manage to swallow the Reality Pill, the better it'll be for your wallet. I've wasted an awful lot of money (and worse yet, time and energy) in the 16 or so years that I've been working on transforming a part of my land into a garden. First, it took a while to realize that gardening in the wilds just is too different from gardening in "garden soil"! I'm beginning to think that , for example, direct sowing of seeds may well be impossible for me, at least for several more years,just because there's too much competition from weeds (not to mention brambles and broom and vitalba...)One of the reasons I got so into roses in the first place was that they can hold thier own in some pretty rough terrain. In fact, I'm still at the stage where my focus will remain on woody plants,shrubs and trees. I myself never used herbicide; I always figured that that it was as bad as it's brother "cides",insecti and fungi. I tamed areas of deep bramble jungle by chopping the plants down, and covering them with thick black plastic sheet for a year or so. This year, I'm FINALLY focusing on doing a real mulch job on as much of the cultivated area as I can,using cardboard covered with organic stuff. I'm hoping that over the summer this will tame the weeds enough so that next fall, I'll be able to plant out some perennials among the roses. Eventually I'd love to underplant with perennials as a living mulch... I hope this doesn't sound discouraging; I don't mean it to be so. I think you'll definitely be able to do this, Campanula. I don't follow your threads that much (so please forgive any impertinence), but I gather that your DH and son do help you,and probably in England I imagine that you don't have to worry as much about drought and watering young plants as I do here in Tuscany,so you have several advantages going for you! I guess if I were you, I'd just focus on one small area for my first years' garden,cultivating that, whilst surrounding areas that I was plannig to incorporate into the garden in future I'd begin taming with the chopping/black plastic technique (or whatever other thick screening material you canfind or buy cheaply). Tru, it's not pretty to look at,but you can avoid poisons that way. For the first year or so, you get your Gardening Jollies working on the small cultivated plot, and planning what you'll do with the part that's "cooking" under the plastic. Then, next year or the following, you pull up the covering and can go to it on a larger scale, recycling the covering to do a subsequent area, etc. Good luck,and try not to get too discouraged. "Rome wasn't built in a day" to coin a phrase, lol...bart

Oh thank you for posting the photo, Rob! I just noticed kitty peering out the sliding door. Cute! Yours looks pretty nice actually, better than I expected. The leaves are a little darker than mine, and yours is a little larger and well formed. The best of m two is on the east side that gets plenty of morning sun, but it insists on growing away from the house, and does not have long enough canes this year yet to train on a trellis paired with a Madame Correzon clematis which has grown way too tall for the trellis (ordered a taller one). Yours has the makings of a nice shrub rose at least. I don't know if there's any hope for mine or not, but I will try to protect it this winter, wish I had a place to move it so I could at least grow it as a shrub. It looks very healthy otherwise, as does yours. I got my pair of them from Brushwood Nurseries; it was the year of the late spring freeze, and the owner propagated them for me over the summer, I received them as healthy bands, and they did have some time to acclimate before freezing, but I think last year might have gone a little better if I'd been able to plant them earlier. But I was happy to get them. If you don't mind, I may ask you more about your roses at some point because my son has shown an interest, and I'm a little wiser as to what is more likely to do well in our zone, especially climbers. I just don't know enough of them to recommend. I hope you have time to post more photos when they burst into bloom. That Wasaxxxx?, where did you get that one? Maybe as yours start blooming, there will be others just as nice. I did look that one up but can't remember the exact name.

Kristi, beautiful blooms! That shot of Nymph is amazing. How many scapes was that? I'm looking forward to seeing pics of Lady Diana opened. Those Maguires blooms are the most intricate I think. My Harbour Lights will be ready next week to post a picture of. I think your red/white one looks like my Gilmar - but I have no idea if my Gilmar is really a Gilmar either (lol). Alana

Just leave them be, TTM. You wouldn't have to do anything unless frost or freezing threatens. Cool weather slows everything down, but if it's only a couple of days with the lowest temps in the 50s, it won't be by much at all. Good luck with your larger tomatoes! Enjoy them!