I'd like a garden tour of your yard sometime please! How lovely all of your things are....the clematis is beautiful...I know what you mean, they smell heavenly. Your tipsy buckets are so pretty and your grasses, hens and chicks...well, you get the idea...love them all!

Even here in northern California the rhododendron planted beneath the palm tree is an all-too-common sight. It is so easy to grow so many things here (compared to western Massachusetts, where I gardened for 10 years) that it is difficult to avoid. My yard admittedly suffers somewhat from "plant ecologist syndrome", but at least I try to keep biomes consistent. Water conservation is also a concern. So, the front-front yard is "the Southwest (U.S.) meets South Africa", and the hill in the back is "multi-cultural chaparral", with elements of California soft-scrub and hard chaparral (Artemisia californica, toyon, coffeeberry, Rhus integrifolia, Ceanothus, Salvia mellifera, manzanita, larger Eriogonum sp., and more-- whatever will withstand Livermore's heat and clay-ridden soils!) cheek-by-jowl with the rosemaries, Grevilleas, and Eleagnus pungens which were already here. The CA natives replaced literally 1000+ sq. feet of blindingly fluorescent magenta mesembryanthemum and invasive gorse that were also on the hill and almost immediately ripped out. A large valley oak at one end and a really old CA pepper at the other anchor the more-or-less native part of the garden. Like Kim says, it's a real challenge to plant within the severe constraints out here (of course, in Massachusetts, I always thought there was too much rain and lived in what was practically a swamp, but the peonies were beautiful). The roses here mostly hang out in the irrigated flatlands of the yard with the fruit trees and berries. The fruit plants sort of provide infrastructure or divisions for the various "rooms" of roses and keep the color schemes from getting too crazy. Some "non-biome-correct" plants seem to look okay with roses, such as caespitose Yuccas from the southeastern U.S. (e.g., Yucca filamentosa, and where else am I going to put them, she asks?!). -- Debbie

The wildflower seeds I've gotten from Wildseed Farms in Texas have performed well here, and I usually don't buy wildflower seeds from further away unless it is for something they don't carry. I have ordered seeds from Native American Seed in the past, though it was quite some time ago, and they were fine but I only order seeds from them if Wildseed doesn't carry them because Native American Seed tends to be pricier. Most wildflowers reseed themselves just fine anyway in an average year, so all I have to do is plant them and let them do their thing. Since our climate can be difficult, some years the wildflowers fry in the heat and drought before they even set seeds and that usually is when I order seeds to overseed that area to make up for the seeds they didn't form. A lot of people burn their pastures and say it gives them better wildflowers the next year, which I do not doubt at all---fire is restorative to prairies after all, but because we're surrounded by woodland that also could burn, I tend to avoid burning our pastures. We spend enough time putting out other people's so called "controlled burns" (which so rarely seem to remain under control) and don't need to deal with that at our own place. If I did do a prescribed burn, I'd plow proper firebreaks and such first and only would burn on a low-wind, high humidity type day. After two days of rain we're still slightly under a half-inch in the rain gauge, so we haven't gotten nearly as much rain as they said we would, but I'm not complaining. It is gray, gloomy, wet and cold, which is not my favorite autumn weather. It is muddy outdoors so our floor is decorated with muddy paw prints. Tis the season for that! The dogs get bored indoors and want to go out, so I let them out, and then after 5 minutes of mud and cold they want to come in again. I just wait until the end of the day and mop up all the pawprints after they've been out for the last time right before bedtime. That way the floor gets to be clean and look good for a few hours (while we sleep) until the dogs, cats and people wake up and go outdoors again. Raised wood beds are essential for us because they stay in place. We do hammer in rebar to hold the boards where they are because, in our strongly sloping garden, everything moves downhill if not held firmly in place. For that reason, concrete blocks wouldn't work for us unless we used rebar to hold each and every block in place and I'm not willing to invest that sort of money in rebar. I love low tunnel hoops but am halfway over them. When I cover them with frost blankets, Micromesh netting or, in hail season, with deer netting/bird netting for protection from hail stones, the cats think we've built elaborate cat hammocks and sleep on them. This generally does not end well. Gardening with pets is such a challenge. We still have parsley and fennel that are green, and dianthus and snapdragons, though all of them suffered some freeze damage when we went down to the 15-17 degree range a couple of times. They're bouncing back though. Our asparagus still is 75% green---it just doesn't want to give up and turn brown this year. Just think, in an average year, we'd be having our first freeze around now at our house. This year it was so abnormal, but not unheard of, to have it in early to mid October. This week the kittens have been having a bottle every morning and every evening and canned kitten food thinned with water to a sort of gruel consistency the rest of the time. After a week of eating semi-solid food, they are doing great, so we've cut them down to only their bedtime bottle now, and that only will last a couple more days. They've developed sharp teeth and are biting holes in the bottle nipples but sure do hate giving up their little bottles. They put their little paws up and hang on to the bottles while eating now. It is the cutest thing. I'm also mixing less and less water with their food so that we can help them move from semi-solid food to solid food. I cannot believe how quickly they grow and change. Obviously it has been a long time since we've raised newborn kittens, and you forget how quickly they grow up. The cat corral that I put them in last week has kept them contained and in place for a whole week, but now when they get bored, they climb over it. I do put them back in it, hoping they'll decide it is futile to keep climbing out. I'd rather keep them contained a while longer so they don't get lost underneath furniture or get stepped on by people or dogs. I spent all day yesterday, as time, chores, and pets allowed, getting our Christmas tree put up and decorated. I'm not done with it yet, but am getting close. The cats and dogs make having a Christmas tree set up indoors pretty risky, so mostly we use unbreakable ornaments, largely because I'm afraid to put the breakable ornaments on the tree. Our house looks odd now with mostly autumn décor in the dining room and on the living room mantel, but the Christmas tree and other decorations also in place. Still, I'm glad I'm getting it done now. I bet the days between Thanksgiving and Christmas will fly by. As soon as Thanksgiving is over, it is just a couple of days until December. That seems crazy, yet here we are. Two of the amaryllis plants are opening the first flowers now. I'm happy to see them. A third is a dud with abundant foliage for some time now, but no flowering stalks. The others remain in various stages of growth. My goal for today is to finish the living room's Christmas tree and to decorate the mudroom's skinny tree. I feel pretty organized now and think I'll be able to get both of these done. I hope so. I'm already over having the storage tubs of Christmas decorations sitting all over the place as I empty them out and use up the stuff inside of them. Chris finished decorating the exterior of his house yesterday and sent me photos that he took last night. I think that Jana and I offended him by calling him "The Grinch" because he insists he doesn't like holiday decorations, so he set out to prove us wrong apparently. He sent me photos with a hash tag "NotTheGrinch". lol. Tim and I hope to get our exterior decorations up on Sunday, which looks to be the nicest day of the weekend. The 6-10 day Temperature Outlook is pretty favorable: 6-10 Day Temperature Outlook The 8-14 Day Temperature Outlook doesn't look quite as favorable to most of the state. 8-14 Day Temperature Outlook Dawn

I hope that everyone had a Happy Thanksgiving. Jennifer, Plumbing problems seem so common at this time of the year. I hope y'all are able to get that slow drain running properly without calling a plumber. Those fires were so bad. I hate seeing evacuation warnings when there's wildfires like that. I don't worry about the people at home---they usually have at least enough notice to hop in their cars or trucks and go. I worry about all the animals at home whose people might be at work and who cannot get home to make sure the animals are evacuated or otherwise sheltered (cattle or horses standing in a farm pond, for example, as the flames go around them). We were lucky here. Earlier in the day when our dewpoint and relative humidity were very low, we didn't have the strong wind, and then our dewpoint and Rh values went back up. THEN the cold front came through and then dewpoints and relative humidity values fell sharply but by the time fires started, the wind had moved on through already, so we never had all the components for really bad fires in place at the same exact time. Still, there was a series of fires---arson fires---set east of Marietta towards Lake Texoma in late evening. The somewhat surprising thing about this was that it occurred either 1 or 2 days after another arsonist had been arrested setting multiple fires along I-35 in broad daylight. You'd think one arson arrest like that would deter a copycat, but apparently not. Rebecca, So far, every tomato variety I've tried with so-called EB resistance or tolerance has been a total dud and the plants got Early Blight anyway, and at the same time other surrounding plants got it. So, I have found limited value in any of those. They might show some form of resistance or tolerance if planted in an area that does not have a recurring problem with Early Blight, but in an area where EB is a persistent problem, I haven't found them to be any better than plants with no known tolerance of or resistance to EB. I used to love the Totally Tomatoes catalog, but haven't had much luck with any of their exclusive varieties the last 10-15 years, so I'm sort of over them too. This year I had much better luck with tomato plants in containers in an area of the yard where we hadn't had tomatoes in recent years. Those plants survived the whole summer and produced well and stayed 95% EB free (it is windborne, so I never expect plants to be 100% free of it). The plants out back in containers did much better than the tomatoes in the ground in the front garden where I've grown a plethora of all nightshades (potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, etc.) every year since we moved here. I'm going to leave the whole front garden free of night-shade veggies for the next few years to give the EB a chance to clear the soil there. This is one form of crop rotation since there's no bed in the front garden that hasn't had nightshades in it at some point over the last 3 years. I'm just rotating to a whole new area instead of rotating to new beds in the existing area. okmulgeeboy, I hate the Persephone days but just stay busy with indoor plants, grandkids, the holidays, etc. and before I know it, we have made it through the Persephone days and things are looking up. Amy, Y'all had more wind that we had. I think our max gusts were either in the upper 30s or lower 40s and were of short duration, for which we were grateful. I love, love, love decorating for Christmas. Every inch of our house gets holiday decorations, and we like to joke that our living room is just two Christmas trees, three wreaths and a little pine garland short of being a Hallmark Christmas movie living room. If you've ever seen all the over-the-top Christmas décor in the Hallmark Christmas movies....well, we do not measure up to that by any means, but we do have a lot of Christmas décor. I haven't even finished decorating yet---only the downstairs is complete, but I'll do the staircase and the upstairs next week. The girls are coming over in a couple of hours and we'll have them all weekend, so I'm sure we'll be busy with other stuff that does not include breakable Christmas ornaments. This year for Thanksgiving, we had three Amaryllis plants in full bloom---one Minerva and two Red Lions, and one of the Red Lions had two stalks up with 4 blossoms each on them. That one was especially spectacular. They all bloomed earlier than normal, but I am not going to complain. I have four more taking their pokey old sweet time that probably won't bloom until Christmas itself, so we'll have more then. These three amaryllis plants that are in bloom were grouped on one end table and looked so spectacular that Chris stopped and stared at them when he walked in the door and said something like "I know they are real, but they are so perfect this year that they look fake". lol. He was right! I was worried about the safety of the Christmas tree with Jesse and the new kittens, but Jesse is too busy with his basket of dog toys to even give the Christmas tree a second glance. He just runs by it on his way to get a toy out of his basket and doesn't even stop and look at the tree. Having said that, we don't leave him unattended in the living room with the tree because we fear what might happen if one of us isn't right there in the living room with him. The kittens are too little to care---they still are perfectly happy playing with each other, their scratching post and their cat toys and don't seem to have noticed the tree either. They play near it, but not on it or directly underneath it. So far, so good. Of course, it isn't even December yet and they still have lots of time to discover it and destroy it. Larry, I think the quail restoration project sounds awesome. I do know we hear and see a lot fewer quail here around us than we used to. There used to be a guy up the road who raised and released them, but he no longer is with us and I don't know of anyone else local who has taken on that task. All we have had the last couple of days is rain, mist, drizzle, fog, clouds, cool weather, and mud, mud, mud. I've over it already and we have another half a day or so of this November gloom to go before sunshine returns. Perhaps somewhat ironically, we go straight from today's/tonight's rain to tomorrow's return to high fire danger in the afternoon. Since everything has frozen repeatedly, none of the dead or dormant plants will hold moisture any length of time at all after the rain stops falling, so we face having dry vegetation in bad fire conditions tomorrow (and possibly Sunday as well) while the ground is muddy enough to slow down and even stop firefighters trying to fight wildland fires. It is a bad combination. Some of our worst wild fires historically have occurred on the weekend after Thanksgiving, and we find ourselves at that same point in the calendar again. It has been about a decade, maybe 11 or 12 years, since we had horrific wildfires on the Sunday after Thanksgiving and had to fight hard to keep those fires from burning through the town of Thackerville from two directions (west and east) simultaneously. We don't need a day like that ever again! We had our Thanksgiving at our house on Wednesday with Jana, Chris, the girls and us since Chris had to work on Thanksgiving. Then, on Thanksgiving Day we went down to Texas for Thanksgiving at my sister's house with siblings, their spouses, our adult nieces and nephews and their partners/spouses, kids and grandkids. Oh, and an assortment of friends. So, we had a mob of people and it was fun, and three of us siblings were together for the first time since Mom's funeral (with 4 of us kids, it seems like we always can get about 3 of us together at once, but hardly ever all 4 at once because there's always someone who's gone out of town to visit in-laws or kids/grandkids in another state, or whatever). It was a lot of fun, but I have to confess that I looked around the table and missed all our grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles and several cousins who no longer are with us. We had such huge, fun, family gatherings when we were children, and I am sure none of us ever looked down the road to the point in time decades ahead of us when all the ones who were the "older ones" back then would be gone and we kids would find ourselves in the strange role of being the older ones now, with children, grandchildren and one great-grandchild gathered around the kids' table where we once sat. Time marches on rather relentlessly. I enjoy sitting at the adults table, but also think it would be fun to be an innocent child one more time, sitting at the kids' table laughing and eating while wondering when we finally would be old enough to graduate to the adult table. Somehow that happened a few decades ago and, being busy with life, we really didn't even notice it. We still try to fix the same dishes we remember in the same way our grandmother, mother, and aunts made them, but at the same time, nothing tastes quite the same way as we remember it from our childhood. Have a good weekend everyone. Just think---tomorrow is the last day of November! Dawn