I don't think 8 roses are too many to start with. That's how many I started with two years ago now. Last year I added about 30 more. This year I'm adding another 30 (I think, not sure what it was on the last count). Peace does fine here in Wisconsin, it will die to the ground but it comes back and was three to four feet tall by fall. It does get blackspot but I use that Bayer Garden Disease Control stuff and it is very simple and works well. I'd recommend leaving some room in your rose garden so you can add to it. You'll want to do some research on this forum for good cut roses once you've had more experience with roses. A good cut rose is more than just a pretty bloom - other factors to consider are how long it lasts in a vase (some very pretty roses only last a few hours) or how well it perfumes a room (some of the cut roses have very little scent). Check out Palatine roses as they have a great selection of beautiful cut roses. For other nurseries, be sure to check Dave's Garden Watchdog for feedback from gardeners. Some of those pretty catalogs look good but don't deliver what they promise. When you get your roses in the spring be sure to plant them deep. Don't over-do the fertilizer as they won't need any right away. And if they don't turn out well then don't give up. One of the roses I thought would be great turned out not to do very well for me, it was a different color than I thought it would be and didn't bloom much. It died over the winter and I replaced it this year with a different rose that was much closer to the color I really wanted and that rose has done much better. I hope they all survive the winter, but if they don't it means an open spot that I can get another rose to fill.

Oooooh - verbascum!! There's another thing, for sure. And they aren't that easy to pull, unless you get them really little. They have a tap root that goes down to China. LOL And you know, i've taken their seed heads and shaken seeds down the side of our road - nothing. Same with poppies. We have a field just up from us that looks awesome when the daisies and buttercups are blooming but no poppies or verbascum have ever shown up. Go figure.

Great thread. I've made many mistakes over the years. When I needed drapes for 5 very tall and wide windows, I thought I would save money by making them myself. I ended up buying 30+ yards of a synthetic moire on sale at a chain fabric store, along with drapery lining, and after making up one panel, found that even with lining, the light coming through the fabric made the color brighter and kind of gaudy. The bolt is still in an upstairs closet, and I found 96" crushed voile panels online that I like very much for about $20 each. Lesson: keep it simple. A couple of years ago, I hired a local designer mainly to help me choose paint colors and advise on accessories/tweaking. In the master bedroom, I had some custom green silk drapes that I never liked that much, and she talked me into spending the money to have them interlined and a printed fabric border added, along with custom shams with the same fabric. I had already spent $2000 on the drapes, and now I spent another $1000, and I still didn't like them. I took them down, and they and the matching euro shams are in the closet in the guest room. I put up natural linen-look semi sheers from target, and I like them better. Lesson: keep it simple, and don't throw good money after bad. We weren't using our formal dining room much, and the same designer suggested moving the dining furniture into one end of our large living room, and making the old dining room into a den and the old den into a home office, which was really needed. Since I wanted to replace the old LR sofa anyway, I moved the den furniture into the living room and had a custom ($$$)sofa made for the new den. It was not a huge space, and we tried to keep the sofa scaled down. When it arrived, the fabric was gorgeous, the style just what I wanted, but the seat depth was so shallow that it was not very comfortable. I had also slipcovered the old den chairs to go with the new sofa ($$). I ended up moving the new sofa to the living room, where it was more appropriate for perching ladies than lounging TV viewers, and now none of the colors I had chosen (with help paid for by the hour) for the LR and new den would work. Plus, the newly slipcovered den chairs (on swivel rocker bases, I love them) don't work that well with the old sofa color. Fortunately, I hadn't painted yet. Lessons: Don't buy furniture without sitting on it. Choose paint colors after you are certain of your fabrics. Don't let your designer talk you into stuff you don't really need. Keep your major pieces fairly neutral. The worst was the master bath update. I had chosen tile for the walls and floor, and the tile vendor gave me a couple of names for the installation. The guy with the higher quote was very highly recommended but I went with the other guy because he said he could also do some other work I needed done. Even though I had a gut feeling I was making a mistake. He did a horrible job on the tile, broke my toilet, and disappeared. I had to buy more wall tile and pay another contractor to replace it, and I'm still stuck with a bad job on the floor. Between the cost of doing the job, redoing the job, and buying a new toilet, I could have had the better contractor do the job, and replaced the vanity and sink as well, and upgraded to a better tile. Lessons: A jack of all trades might be a master of none. Go with your gut. Ask contractors for their license numbers and CHECK IT online with your state to see if it's in effect. I've made more, but these are the recent highlights, LOL. I feel better having confessed them here.

I apologize for reviving this old thread and for the very poor MSPaint image I'm including, but I wanted to ask a few more questions about our rather perplexing sink situation now that we've opened up the sink and taken a good look at the specs. The company that is installing our DW "strongly suggests" we not install it to the granite, but to the cabinets to either side, one of which is the sink cabinet. We didn't think this would be a problem at the time, but now...well, it might be because our DW is right next to the sink. Because the sink is 36" and the cabinet is 36", a good portion of the cabinet is going to have to be taken out. One of the screws for the DW is going to need to go in a part of the cabinet we would have to cut out to fit the sink. So, my questions: 1. Did/does anyone else have this problem? 2. Is it really bad to screw a DW into the granite? 3. Should we just get a 33" sink? (We bought the 36" on overstock over 6 months ago, so there's no chance of returning it. We'd just try to sell it on ebay and hopefully not take too big a loss.) Thanks again!