Cat....I think I stick to tried and true entirely too much. I think I should be trying to find something a little different to grow like you and Bill. I've never heard of guinea hen flowers. I do like toad lilies but I tried one and it didn't make it through my winter. I hope you will post photos later. Bill...I never saw a slug in my yard until last year. We had a lot of rain that wouldn't let up and they started showing up. Where do they come from, out of nowhere? [g] You remind me of me... when I can't sleep in the summer, I will get up and go out in my pjs with the flashlight and a paper cup and look for earwigs, which I hate! They seem to love me for some reason. Just the same I enjoy being out there at that hour. You get to see all the night creatures and some of the fragrant plants make the trip worth it. And if there is a moon out, a warm breeze and it's very quiet, it's almost magical! And you can't see all your mistakes at night. [g]

Yes Mike. It is a very handy tool. The bent tip makes it really useful. You can grab the base of the plant and jiggle the base to loosen the roots and pull it out. Very useful when reaching in tight spaces especially for succulents. In bonsai the back of the tool that likes a little spade is useful to tamp down the soil, smooth it out and tamp down moss on the soil. I have two of them because my wife seems to like it too and it disappears from my tool box from time to time. Come to think of it I have two of most tools.

I was thinking of getting a weeping white spruce (picea glauca) to put in the place of the hemlock but after seeing what they cost, it was hard to convince DW to fork out another $300-500 to get one of any size and I'm not patient enough to start with a very small one. My next thought was picea abies would look nice there but for some reason, nobody seemed to carry the smaller potted trees anymore around my area. All types of spruces were high priced and seemed to be hard to find this year, for some reason. Finally, I found a tree grower who was gracious enough to sell me a potted P. Abies from his stock he'll be planting soon. I waited over an hour at his fields while he tended to customers, but it was worth the wait. I was expecting a seedling in a half gallon pot, but was happy to see it was a 30" tree in a 3 gal. pot. :-) He explained to me how to slit the sides of the root ball before planting, which I did but when I tried to find the root flare, the red flags went off. I took off over 1-1/2" of extra soil from the top layer in the pot before finding the root flare. In turn found a couple of good-sized roots growing up from the top of the root flare and were circling around the trunk area in that top layer of soil. (You can see the white spots of the snipped roots just right of trunk (next pic) and the soil line (dark part of trunk) where the original soil line was in the pot). I've read that P. Abies isn't as fussy as most trees are about getting planted too deep but didn't want to take chances and circling roots are never a good idea to leave without fixing. So anyways, got the P. Abies species tree planted, and it shouldn't be long for it to start looking nice. The buds were just breaking when I was planting today. 77df. When clearing the old mulch for planting, I found at least 3" deep of composted wood mulch under the top layer of mulch, I suppose from the last 7 years of applying mulch around the hemlock. Now you know 'The rest of the story'. ;-)

I have only one double which I always thought was Replete. But now that I see Flower Parade, I think that may be what I have. Had them for over a decade and other than the first year, they've always broken my heart. I get minimal buds - 3 or 4 from the original dozen - and they usually fall off before they open. But even if they don't fall off, I have not had any open for years. Once I figured out it was bud blast, I started cutting them and bringing them indoors to open. This year there were 4 buds so I cut two. The two left of the plant eventually dropped off but the two inside opened beautifully.