Thank you everybody for responses! I will try to respond to everybody in one post. ltilton, I have no way to have two of them - I will have to destroy another tree for it) Otherwise I would plant 5, not one) Harvestman, I decided to go with harglow because appricot in my yard has to meet several requirements: it has to be dwarf due to the space issue, survive in zone 5b, be somewhat resistant to bacterial canker, and have stone-free fruit for canning. Only apricot I could find that meets all of it(at least in description) was canadian ones - harglow and another one I forgot, but I couldn't find it dwarf. I planted my apricot on the hill, to avoid "wet feet", and I mulched it pretty well with shredded leaves. But we had a week or two around 15F with out a single snowflake, so not sure how leaves could substitute the snow cover. I will research Alfred and see if it fits... john222-gg, I promise to call it the same as soon it shows first sign of life)

I'm in zone 9 a little south of you and have started some a few weeks ago and they are doing well and have plenty of roots. Some of them showed roots in 8 days. My trees are going through a fall flush (new growth) and I believe this helps with the rooting. "gene"

I'd be very interested. Part of my "mission" this summer is to collect perennials from as many sources as are willing to give them and overwinter them until May. Unfortunately, most of them are the shady variety since I don't much sun in my yard but there are some "sunny" ones in the space I do have with sun. I know I already have some things I know what they are and some I don't. I'll be bringing these to the swap but don't know right now exactly what that will be. Could I be more vague? Thanks for doing this, Lisa!

PushCoGrow, I hope it is like last fall too. Last fall was wonderful. Since we're hoping for a repeat, it probably won't happen. Our weather is so inconsistent. Ezzirah, I'd never call you crazy. Experimentation is fun and is a great way to learn. You never know whether something will work or not until you try it. I do lots of experimentation. I always wondered, for example, if I could get tomatoes and peppers in the winter from plants in containers if I dragged them into the garage on cold nights. So I tried it and I did harvest peppers and tomatoes even in December and January. Before I did it, I would have thought it was not possible because of the cold nighttime temperatures, but in that year the outdoor air temperatures dropped into the upper teens before the plants finallly suffered freeze damage in the well-insulated but unheated garage. Who would have thought they'd last that long in there? Even after the damage to the plants occurred, they resumed growing, blooming and setting fruit. Once it was that cold, though, and the number of hours of sunlight daily were so short, peppers and tomatoes grew very slowly and took forever to ripen. Now, whether anyone would think a cold-weather tomato or pepper has the flavor to make it worth the bother is a different issue. However, I learned it is possible to produce them. I've got all kinds of stuff in the ground for winter, and am getting ready to set up the greenhouse for cold-weather growing. I've got tons of seedlings in flats ready for the greenhouse experiments. I'm just waiting for cooler weather to arrive to stay. Often we're still having daytime highs in the 90s here in our county until Halloween, so I haven't been in a hurry to put anything in the greenhouse until that sort of heat truly has ended for this year. This week the greenhouse, even with 50% shadecloth has been in the upper 90s and the 100s. I'm going to grow lettuce in a variety of ways to see which gives the best cool-season performance: in the ground in the garden unprotected, in the ground in the garden under floating row covers, in containers outside under floating row cover, in containers outside unprotected, in containers on the sunporch, and in containers in the greenhouse. I suspect the cats will nibble the lettuce in containers on the sunporch, so it may be more for them than for us. In rainy and cold weather, the cats practically live on the sunporch, venturing outdoors for brief periods only and spending an inordinate amount of time sleeping on the sunporch. In the big garden, birds usually eat unprotected lettuce in the ground in spring---I want to see if they'll do it in fall and winter. I have tried to trick them by planting the fall lettuce in rows in between rows of taller southern peas and bush beans. So far it is working as the taller plants are hiding the lettuce from the birds. Or, maybe the birds are so happily consuming grasshoppers that they aren't in the mood to eat lettuce yet. About the only thing I've learned about purple sprouting broccoli so far is that the grasshoppers prefer it to anything else I have planted. They haven't touched the Packman or Romanesco Broccoli, but have completely destroyed 1/3 of the Purple Sprouting Broccoli, so now I have it under row covers. I do have tons of grasshoppers still. If there was only a hopper or two around, I don't know that they'd hurt it that much, but we still have hundreds of hoppers per acre. Susan, I am not ready for cold weather, so I hope it doesn't happen. If it happens, I suppose we'll deal with it. I'll be able to keep the cool-season stuff going for months yet with the protection of a little row cover fabric, but the tomatoes and peppers still are covered with fruit in various sizes and stages of development and I'd love to see them have a chance to ripen in warmer temperatures. Nothing surprises me here. Our first year here we had a hard freeze around September 29th, but I put up temporary plastic tunnels over the tomato bed and got those plants through the first two cold nights with minimal damage and they then produced for another few weeks. I prefer the years when the first cold temps don't arrive until December to the ones where the cold temps hit in late September or early October, but we'll take whatever we get. I loved last winter too, even though the lack of cold had me fearing a hot, dry summer....which is what we got. We barely had any cold weather down here and I put tomato plants in unmovable outdoor containers in February because I was confident enough to think I could cover them up if needed to protect them from freezing on the rare cold night, which is exactly what happened. Usually I put them in smaller, movable containers. I also put tomato plants in the ground the first week in March, which isn't possible most winters. Since we'd love a mild winter, we probably won't get one. Have you noticed how seldom we actually get the kind of weather we're hoping to have? Dawn