I tend to collect from all my flowering plants and they are a mishmosh collection, some bought before I started WSing, some grown myself from bought or trade seed. I've found that some seeds from hybrid plants (i.e.purple millet) grow just fine from collected seeds, while others are not true to the parent but sometimes nice anyway! I figure I'm not losing much (just some pro-mix, which I'll recycle for a pot or something anyway)by trying and I really enjoy collecting seed. My biggest frustration is that I will occastionally purchase a plant and get excited about the possibility of it flowering and setting seed (and growing more next year!) and it won't flower (some fancy plectranthus I bought this year) or it flowers but I can't find and harvest seed (Veronica "goodness grows"). The best thing about winter sowing is the very low "risk" - if even 20% of my jugs are duds, I haven't lost much. When I used indoor lights and had to baby everything inside it felt much more risky to try things I wasn't sure would work out. My advise...Get out there and collect some seed! I imagine that there is not a lot of time left in zone 6 as I am almost done in zone 7! Nancy

Thank you Michael! The blackberry are Arapaho thornless and I put 2 plants close to the fence, they always produce for me and I like them better than blueberries, purple sweet potatoes are planted at the bottom. If the weather is good I plant squash at the end of January or beginning February, this season was weird we had a warm winter and then it got cold. I use the pantera bowls or any other container that size and put the seeds there, it is easy to cover them if frost is predicted, the containers are put in the raised bed, when done I just take the container out and pull some of the roots that grow through the holes. I do that with summer and winter squash, the idea is that the soil is always new. This is not a new idea, long time ago as a child my father took me to the Amazon forest and the nomad tribes planted the crops always in new soil, when the soil was used one season they moved to some other place and build a new home with materials from the area. With my small garden I don't have to rotate or worry about the nematodes when using new soil in the containers. Sometimes I plant a small variety squash for the fall season somewhere end of July, any kabocha is good, acorn are very productive but don't last too long after harvest. May 2012 winter squash harvest, the big ones are an Italian variety Silvia

Whew! I'm back! Got in late Monday night, and had to drive home from MEM to where we live in MS, adding another 3 hrs to the trip home. Now its back to crazy at work. I leave before daylight and get home after dark, so I haven't seen my plants or flowerbeds in the daylight since Nov. 17. Have to go out by flashlight to ask the plants what happened while we were gone. LOL It was a great visit with family and friends in AZ, as usual. Its always fun out there. Went to one of my favorite places to visit in Tucson: the Arizona Sonoran Desert Museum. If any of you ever make it out to Tucson, it is not to be missed! I suspect that Dianne's package was waiting for me when we got home Monday, but did not make it to the mailbox until Tuesday. She sent so much great stuff! I think we are 2 peas in a pod when it comes to reading material :) She sent: Country Living magazine - American Autumn issue from Nov. 1998 a vanilla scented bath fizzer - ahhhhhhhhhhhh! A whole pile of coupons - I'm a major coupon lover! So many recipes she clipped. These are so great! Crystal Light Mojito drink mix - looking forward to trying this. It's a new flavor for us. A lovely friendship card with an aster on it And WOW, Look at the seeds: Jackson Wonder lima beans Taylor cranberry bean Spaghetti squash Am. Persimmon Nasturtium Scarlet Gleam Nasturtium Cherry Rose (dwarf) Nasturtium Dwarf Alaska Sunflower Mammoth Russian Brown & Yellow sunflower Scuppernog (white) grape seeds Asclepias syriaca Rudbeckia mix bronze/orange/yellow Dianne, thank you so much for such a wonderful and generous package! And Jeanne, thanks so much for hosting. BTW, how is the horse search going? Both my husband and I grew up with horses in our lives. Both of our parents still have horses, although they have both had losses this year. Last month his parents lost one of their favorites, a 29 yr old, much loved and prized champion Morgan stallion. My father still has the QH mare I used to barrel race on. She is almost 33! Katie

Amy, I agree. Give him his own bed and let him try to grow the things he wants. Nothing else will work nearly as well as letting him try to baby along those plants through our often uncooperative growing conditions. If he succeeds, great! If he doesn't, then at least he'll understand the challenges involved in growing them. I've never heard of anyone growing pickling cukes in a greenhouse here in winter. They need heat (though not excessive heat) to produce well here. Everything I've ever grown in the greenhouse in winter, at least in terms of warm-season crops, grow slowly (excrutiatingly slow) in winter's lower temperatures and less intense light. Tomatoes and peppers, for example, even if they set in autumn's relatively warm air, stay very small and mature very slowly as the temperatures cool and the sunlight weakens. On top of that, their flavor and texture aren't great. That's why I don't bother trying to grow warm-season veggies in the greenhouse in winter. I wouldn't bother trying pickling cukes for the same reason. I think it is an issue with the light more so than the temperatures because the greenhouse still can reach great daytime highs (even with cool nighttime lows) but the sunlight is very weak and for a significantly smaller portion of the 24-hour cycle and the plants grow slowly accordingly. Even with cool-season crops in the greenhouse, they produce best if they make most of the growth in early thru mid-autumn so that all you're mainly doing in the cold winter months is just keeping them alive, growing slowly, and then harvesting them. As for why your cukes aren't producing now, it is hard to guess, but normally with cucumbers, poor productivity/low productivity relates to temperatures (too high or too low), poor sunlight, lack of pollination, lack of adequate water (takes a lot of water to produce a lot of cukes) and/or lack of nutrition (it also takes very nutrient rich soil or fertilizer to produce a lot of cukes). Occasionally it might be because of a certain pest interfering with pollination---perhaps western flower thrips, for example, but that seems fairly rare here. Disease can cause poor productivity if it is severe enough. Hazel, There is nothing wrong with having a reverence for all life, but....it it is a dog eat dog world, or a bug eat plant world, so sometimes the bugs have to go. I was bothered by spiders in my younger days, but I guess I outgrew that somewhere along the way as I got older. Most spiders won't hurt a person, and they are very beneficial in the yard and garden. One thing to remember about a spider in the house is that it is there for a reason, so when I see a spider indoors, I know it is looking for insects to eat, which might be a clue for us humans that there's some sort of food source indoors attracting spiders. The only spiders I now kill are brown recluses and black widows. I sometimes see brown recluses indoors (I found several dead ones while cleaning out the pantry underneath the staircase in advance of the kitchen remodel, but didn't find any live ones) but I only see black widows in the garage or shed. My garden, yard and our acreage are full of spiders (it is estimated that an average acre of grassland can contains up to 1,000,000 spiders, though many areas have less, depending on habitat and available food source) and I love their many different kinds of webs. It brings me great joy to see spider webs where other insects (the kind that damage garden plants) have become ensnared in the web and are being stored away for future meals. Don't get me wrong. I still jump (pretty much jump out of my skin, and sometimes squeal) if a spider lands on me out of nowhere, but it's me and my perception of the spiders, (left over from my younger days of hating them/being afraid of them) that is the problem. It isn't the spiders. They're just trying to find something to eat, and trying to survive. Melissa, Army worms, like any other caterpillar, don't really have a place in the garden. (Well, I try to feed the good caterpillars that turn into monarchs, swallowtails, and other butterflies, but you know what I mean.) Bt 'kurstaki' is the solution. One common product on store shelves that contains it in a liquid form is Thuricide and a common powdered form is Dipel dust. The problem with Army worms is that they generally appear in large numbers and devour plants. You can hang and dry basil anywhere you please, preferably in a cool, dry location out of direct sunlight. I prefer to not dry herbs in a garage if cars are parked in it because of vehicle exhaust that would be in the air, but the world probably won't end if you dry them there. I often hang them right in the kitchen or in the pantry itself. It's not too late to sow more basil seed in the garden for fresh basil if you wish. There's still a lot of growing season left. Fall is a great time to plant. I already have some bulbs ready and waiting for cooler air so I can plant them, and of course, we always plant garlic in the fall. Autumn is just around the corner, if only the summer weather would just go away and leave us alone already. Dawn