Doodys, that amber glass is beautiful!! Those flowers will look great on a wall or fence! Pretty plate, is it hand painted? Might want to keep it inside if it is! 10cents a plate !!Wow!! More like $1.98 & if marked down 99cents, we never have bargains like rest of country. I think antique store owners get to TS owners & get lot of it. Saves them lot of time & they might pay a little more or take a lot of stuff off their hands. Every time new TS opens there is great stuff & then by time it is there a year less & less. No more old dolls, depression glass, hand painted plates, oil paintings etc. Went to several yard sales last weekend, mostly clothes for kids & baby stuff or adult clothes, no glassware of interest. Did get 5 necklaces with beads at couple of sales so that was nice. Oh, got a book on Cacti & Succulents at the "cemetery sale" think I mentioned it- they are raising money $15,000 to do search with plane that can see bones. They have been told there is 600 people in that little space, don't think it is even 1/2 of a city block. Only 2oo+ have been marked. So they will have sales often. It's just getting time for good sales, well maybe not this weekend, supposed to be over 100 degrees out!! Was 69 today when I went out.Jan

As far advanced as are many of my container hosta, I have three in the ground which concerned me. This will be the first time for them to emerge from dormant state, since I've only had ANY hosta since May of last year, in Mobile anyway. Then yesterday I noticed the pal green shoots of Winter Snow rising above the leaf mulch. Where the other two ground dwelling hosta were located, near their stakes, I brushed aside the leaves and saw very small eyes for Blue Angel and Fragrant Bouquet. These are my test plants, to see what difference I can expect from ground gardening and container gardening, as I am doing with the balance of my hosta--quite a few. I can see the ones in the containers a lot easier. It is stressful to wonder about those in the ground. I'd written off those three already, now have to deal with them too.

That's just too cool, kiddo! I think that's a good idea about planting corn here and there as accent pieces. I might do that too, next year, maybe with some beans! I picked a yard long bean yesterday and it really WAS a yard long! So far it's the longest one I've picked, most have been only a little over a foot long, but still lots of bean for the space. It was hilarious, I was so excited about the bean that I took it to show my husband. He's just had knee surgery and the home health nurse was with him, changing his bandage. When I came in dangling the bean, the nurse jumped. She thought it was a snake! LOL we all had a good laugh, she was really glad to know it was only a bean. The people who walk the park along my back fence just love to stop and chat and ask questions about the garden. I have met so many people that way. Even the guys who run the mowers for the City will stop and take their breaks at our fence. I just love volunteers! It's like a little present from Mother Nature. LOL I always let them grow if I can. Last year, I had several cantaloupe from volunteer plants. I had never grown them before, the seeds were from a supermarket cantaloupe that I had put in the compost bin. This year, I had a couple of plants come up in the compost bin, they look like a cucumber or squash plant. I haven't bought a cantaloupe in awhile so not sure what they are. I transplanted them someplace where they will grow better and we'll see, eventually, what they are. I can't remember putting cukes or squash out there either, so it might even be something the birds planted. In that case, it could be most anything. If there was no such thing as stock panels, I wouldn't know what to do! DH made a grape arbor and a trellis out of pipe, and we put pieces of stock panels up the sides and on the tops of them to support the things that grow there. Besides my two stock panel arches, I also have put a hog panel along the side of one raised bed because the asparagus keeps flopping out into the walkway if I don't. Normally I would use tomato cages, but I used all I had on other things and can't seem to buy any more, everyone's sold out and not ordering any more for the season. Beans are hard to see, to get every one of them. Pretty often, there will be ones I miss and they will have gotten too big to eat. I just let them go ahead and "ripen" on the vine and I use those beans for seed. If you "stew" your plums, you can use lots of the under-ripe ones, especially if you're going to make jam out of them. If you're sure the plum has no worms in it, you can put it into the pot, pit and all, and take the pit out after it has stewed (use only enough water with the plums to keep from sticking, and stew on low heat). The presence of the under-ripe ones makes it jell better. Use 6 C. stewed plums, 5 C sugar, a pat of butter, cook to the jell point and you will have nice jam. --Ilene

Nice to see them doing well.... not as nice to see that snow and ice! Old House Gardens offers wax dipped bulbs which seem to be much more successful in surviving the digging and storage. Probably worth searching them out (if you don't have any friends willing to part with a few!) Three years ago during the winter of polar vorticii my winter aconite were in bloom when a -8F night came through. The flowers were mush, but the plants came through with only a little damage, so they are hardier than you might think. I visited a park which was the site of a former estate long gone. The first plantings probably date to the late 1800s, so in another 200 or so years....