Hi everyone, I found this forum a few weeks ago when I was in a similar situation. It started off with our family pet vomiting all the time, then she started losing weight. We thought it could be hair balls so we bought her hair ball remedies and the it eased up. She started getting very thin and couldn't jump as much or walk as far anymore. We took her to the vet and found out she was at least 15, more since I remember growing up with her as a kid (we took her in after a store owner abandoned her when we moved and literally kicked her out). So I'd say she was about 18-19, maybe a tabby breed but not 100% sure Anyway, the vet took a urine test-wasn't diabetic. Blood test-had a double white blood cell count. She weighed 4.6 lbs and for her age, should have been 8-10 but she was always on the smaller side. When you pet her all you could feel was fur and bones. The vet gave her an antibiotic shot which made her poop and sent my mom home with medicine, the diagnosis was either cancer or a kidney infection. My mom didn't get an X-ray because of the cost and surgery so took a chance on the kidney infection. The vet bill came out to be around 250, the cat started to get better, she would eat more, one day she ate 2 cans. The final days she was falling because she couldn't keep herself up and ate very little. My Mom saw her take her last breath yesterday. Sad but she was so pitiful and in so much pain. I made sure to post this in case someone was in a similar situation. The medicine might have prolonged her by a week but she didn't finish taking it. Had my mom given her the surgery she might have lived but she was old and might have not survived it. Vets are extremely expensive and just didn't help in this case. Good luck to anyone who has a cat like mine and just keep in mind when they pass that they were suffering and in pain.

I don't think it's particularly ugly, though maybe not what I'm looking for in a veronica. I think introductions like this may well be the results of an unexpected breeding disaster, where the hybridizer's initial reaction is "ugh, better throw that on the compost pile", followed by "hmm, maybe if the p.r. guys write copy about it being a "new and exciting variation" I can sell it for big bucks". I suspect that's what happened with the platycodon whose buds never open, and the Echinacea lacking petals but having a big black center.

Hi Bonnie, Long Ago is working on their site, so the page being down isn't surprising. I know she's like Burling in that she's a one person operation. You can imagine trying to take care of hundreds to thousands of plants; propagate them all; handle all the "chief cook and bottle washer" duties for the business and household, etc., AND mess around with a web site. It will get there. I don't know who will have stock ready first. Remember Long Ago is on the east coast and doesn't ship west of the Rockies. Burling is less than three hours from you. Actually, I prefer receiving young plants during weather as we're "suffering" right now. Replanted in a larger pot, in good soil, placed in filtered sun and kept well fed and watered, most will grow like mad with this heat. It sets the stage for the perfect opportunity to push them by keeping them disbudded. I'm impatient when it comes to pushing plants. It drives me crazier for them to just SIT there, appearing to do nothing. Kim

The remedies for them are as different as their diets (voles are generally smaller, by the way, and are rodents, essentially a type of mouse -- moles aren't even in the rodent family, or so I've read). Anyway, Moles will often create tunnels digging for worms and grubs (if you have a large Japanese beetle problem, they may be taking care of that for you, underground, but they also love earthworms, which we all know are the gardener's best friend). The FIRST THING they taught us in Master Gardener class was how to kill moles (the class "mentor" is apparently a real "mole-hater," and he did a slide-show in an intro session a month before the first class, wherein someone signed up of the PETA persuasion promptly protested, quit the program and asked for a refund, lol). If it's moles, they'll be active in the daytime, and you'll see them moving the ground as they tunnel. If you can actually see one tunnelling, one thing that works (I once saw my dad do this as a kid) is to walk up to where the head of the tunnel is, where the mole is actively digging, with a shovel, and whomp down HARD with the shovel, flat onto the ground, right where the leading edge of the tunnel is, thus basically rattling Mr. Mole's brains and causing instant death. If not, you determine where an "active run is" (they have instructions for doing this with the trap you'll need to buy), place a harpoon trap over that active run, and the next time Mr. Mole comes through there, he gets harpooned. If you can determine where voles are active, you can expose part of their run (they sometimes don't dig tunnels at all, just kind of create "runs" under mulch or loose earth), set a mousetrap in there with a bit of apple and peanut butter on the trigger, and most importantly, cover that back over TIGHTLY with a bucket, or something, so that NO LIGHT gets in, as most underground voles like total darkness and won't go anywhere they see light. That's another point... There are two common types of vole in the Carolinas: Pine voles and meadow voles. The pine voles are the underground kind; meadow voles are essentially like field mice. While pine voles will eat the roots of your precious plants and the bulbs of all your flowers, the meadow voles can do something even MORE insidious and attrocious -- they can and sometimes WILL chew off all the bark around the base of a small tree up as high as they can reach, thus girdling it and killing the tree. If you've spent $50 or $100 or so for a Japanese maple or Prunus mume, or similar, and gotten it "just so," and a little mouse comes along and kills it by eating a a little chunk of bark from around its base, well, I don't know about you, but I'd be wanting to kill every rodent I could find! Good luck with whatever it is you have, Crazy4Life! Jeff