I can't remember the cartoon lady's name, Chloe, but we have a Christmas ornament of her with lights wrapped around her body. The first one is my favorite. "Bite me size", lol. And the two peas in their respective pods made me giggle again. I'll work on keeping my hairy chinny, chin, chin a little higher. It was a tough weekend and the week ahead will be long, full, and all I'm really looking forward to is bedtime on Friday night. How pathetic is that? (maybe my much needed haircut on Friday afternoon will prove a boost, too). Michelle, your arrangement is just lovely. I have a particular fondness for cattails, and always want to pick them early on... but don't really know how to collect them to prevent the seasonal, fuzzy explosion... what's your secret? The annual take-downs are arriving in the shop for cleaning and mending. I'm fine with the mending part of it, but I so loathe the cleaning. It's hard on my hands/wrists and it's so terribly boring. I have a solid month of it ahead of me, I reckon. More rote, and while it's not what I need on an emotional plane, it's does rather pay the bills handily! More sucking up is order, I fear. :/ The book sounds fine... assign it and I'll go for it. I'm thinking a diversion of any sort might just be a very good thing for me about now! Now it's time for me to tend to the dishes in the kitchen. And clean up the broken wine stem that belonged to my grandmother. Now only two are left... out of 10. My irritation at "frat. house carelessness" will subside, but today I didn't need to see one more pretty, "fun" thing broken. Maybe I should simpy accept it and use DixieCups? What is it Taryn says, "calm, blue ocean... "? I need more tassels, methinks. ;)

I did a search online and found a bunch of biodegradable garden bags sold by different companies. These seemed either a little pricey, or impossible to actually determine where they are sold. biodegradable garden bags can be found at ANY big box or hardware store ask for lawn & leaf bags. I would like to know what is the best way to store fall leaves so that I can use them during winter and summer.(should they be shredded first?) Then perhaps bagged? As mentioned, your call. How much energy & time do YOU have? I like to cover the garden area with leaves. It is my way of gathering worms castings w/o having to handle them :-) The lawn & leaf bags will do just as they are designed to do and decompose wherever they touch something else or remain wet. I like to use whatever remains to suppress weeds before I lay the leaves down, just as you would do with newspapers. Any plastic bags will begin to breakdown from UV if left too long after spring. Of course shredding or mowing over will allow more into bags if that is your choice. It also helps reduce the amount that blow away in the wind, if not bagged. I get leaves each fall from people who drop them off in a variety of bags, each has a benefit or pitfall. You may want to try the wire ringy thingy (compost ring) to keep them from blowing away (neighbors hate that). They are not going to completely breakdown over winter if just leaves are piled. The top of the pile will be useful in the spring, as the bottom will be, just in different ways. Try it a couple different ways to find what suits you. Good Luck, Gumby_CT

You've got one brilliant Hazel there! Very nice indeed. Fall is one season I don't get much out of, garden-wise. I don't have room for any nice big shrubs or trees, and most of my perennials don't have much fall colour. Oh well, you can't have everything you want! BP

Paula, We always have them down here and they usually hit the stores here around the 3rd or 4th week of August when it is ridiculously hot, when we are in drought and when no one in their right mind wants to be buying and transplanting cool season crops while the weather is ridiculously unfavorable. By early to mid-September, people seem to be buying them. Whether or not the different cool-season crops will do well when planted that late just depends on the weather, and how much the person who bought them is watering them. There's also the issue of timing and luck. My experience is that the performance of anything in the brassica family from late-summer/early autumn purchased transplants is going to be hit or miss. The brassicas greatly resent being rootbound and often they sit in the stores in the six-packs too long and are rootbound when bought. This often results in them bolting a few weeks after being transplanted. This seems more of an issue with broccoli, cauliflower and brussels sprouts but not so much with cabbage. The cabbage plants I've planted in fall have all done amazingly well and often keep giving us heads of cabbage until January or February. (You cut off your original cabbage head when it is a nice, usable size. Leave a good bit of stem on the plant. Using a paring knift, cut an X in the top of the stem, and it usually will form 4 new small heads---one from each cut quarter of that main stem.) Lettuce can have the same issue of trying to bolt if it was allowed to stay too dry while in the store, but you often can help it recover by keeping it really moist and by cutting it back hard if it looks like it is trying to bolt. If the plants in your store are nice and fresh and don't look too big for the containers they're in and don't seem overly stressed or rootbound, they likely would do fine if bought and planted. It seems too late to me for tomato plants to be bought and put into the ground now, though it might be worth the risk if they already are in bloom (since I know that you have row cover for the coming cold nights). My fall tomato plants have been in the ground two months and are finally setting fruit now that the nights are cooler. I haven't planted anything else for fall. We remain in severe drought, our daytime highs are running 7-10 degrees above average for this time of the year and there's not much point in me trying to get cool season crops to grow in these conditions. I have to purposefully avoid walking through the garden centers at the big box stores right now because it is so hard to resist the urge to buy something and transplant it into the garden. If I thought the conditions would improve substantially over the next couple of weeks, I might buy something and plant it. But I don't expect that improvement in the weather, so I'm just trying to avoid looking at little containers of plants beckoning to me from the garden centers. Those of you looking for garlic---I have seen some in little cellophane packages in a couple of Wal-marts lately. They were with brand new displays that includes daffodils and other spring bulbs that need to be planted this fall, so you might watch your stores for those displays. In the store I was in this week, the new displays of bulbs for fall planting were inside the garden center, not outside with the live plants. Or, you can order from any of the great online retailers that sell garlic. They ship in the fall, and some of them likely already are sold out because they take orders all year for fall shipment. Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, Territorial Seed, Baker Creek Heirloom Seed, Seed Savers Exchange, Peaceful Valley Farm Supply and Victory Seeds all generally have garlic and perennial onions (assuming there were no crop failures) for sale right now for fall planting. They normally ship in at least September through November, and maybe later than that if their planting stock doesn't sell out. Or you can buy garlic in the produce section at the grocery store and plant it. I like to look in places like Central Market or Whole Foods for different varieties since they typically have a much wider variety of garlic than your average grocery store. Often, about the only kinds you'll find in the produce sections of big box stores are basic varieties like California White or elephant garlic. Dawn