Forgot to mention that where the top end of the slider on the ruler is, is where the soil level is. It seems like I had to dig down pretty far to get to the root. I STILL didn't get down to the finer roots.

Depends on the soil but generally banana roots don't go a long way down.

Robert, Well, it is a good thing you are behaving (if indeed you are) and not overdoing things while you're recovering from surgery, or you'd be putting in an orchard of 60 trees. I have accepted that most of us never will slow down until really bad health forces us to do so. I am sure that I won't, no matter how much I threaten to cut back every year. I KNOW that you won't because you'll never be happy as Unbusy One. You have got to stay busy and I don't think that ever will change. Your need and desire to stay too busy all the time remind me of my dear garden friend, Fred, who lives up the road a bit from me and still gardens and ranches full-time, all day long, even now, even though he is in his early 90s. He never slows down. He is my gardening hero and I hope to be just like him should I be so lucky as to live that long. The happiest, healthiest people I know in my neighborhood are the ones who don't slow down when they hit their 60s, 70s, 80s or 90s. Maybe there is a lesson in there for all of us that we shouldn't slow down any more than our bodies absolutely force us to. Mike, My little orchard grows every year here in recent years. It has to, though, as the first trees I planted after we moved here in the late 1990s are aging and some are dying. I want to get replacements in place and large enough to produce before we lose the old ones. Borers eventually get the stone fruit trees because I don't like spraying them with any chemicals, but if I can get a peach or plum tree to live and produce for 8-12 years with no spraying, I'm okay with that. I cannot even look at fruit trees in stores, magazines, garden catalogs or at the websites of Stark Brothers, Womack Nursery, Bob Wells Nursery or Simmons Plant Farm or I get the urge to buy and plant 20 more trees and a lot more berries. I also cannot look at kittens and puppies at PetSmart on adoption days either because I want to rescue/adopt all of them and take them home. (We don't need any more pets, but we always need more fruit trees. lol) I also find it hard to be in a feed store during chick season and not walk out of that store with another dozen chicks. They had containerized orange trees in CostCo last week fully loaded with fruit. Some had fairly small, young fruit, but some had full-sized almost completely ripe ones. It took every ounce of willpower that I could muster up just to walk away from those trees without buying one. If they'd had any citrus trees in bloom that day, I would have bought one just so I could enjoy the aroma of the blossoms for days and days. At least we have made it to February, so we can at least start doing a bit more outdoors, including some planting (especially in southcentral and southeastern OK where it warms up earlier) and lots of garden prep work. It seems like it takes forever for February to get here so we can plant fruit trees, rose bushes, berries, asparagus roots, horseradish, etc. and then by mid-month, some of us can start planting onions, followed soon thereafter by other cool-season plants. I'm so ready for that. A lot of the stores down here that had BP cool-season veggies, herbs and flowers in the outdoor garden centers didn't cover them the other night when we got really cold (16 degrees at our house) and those plants looked horribly cold-damaged the next day. If I am going to buy anything like that instead of raising them from seed myself, I try to buy them the first day they come off the delivery trucks because the stores generally let them get colder than they should on some very cold nights in February and March. It's going to be so warm and pretty this coming weekend and that will make it harder to ignore all the fruit trees in the stores now. I may have to completely avoid going to the store so that I won't be tempted to bring home more trees. Dawn

When my lawn was Kentucky Blue Grass I had a lot of Crane Fly larvae, now not so much. One time years ago I put down a poison to kill the larvae. They all came to the surface and the eight mallards my wife had been feeding, ate them and started acting funny. It took a week for them to jerk to a stop and die. I haven't used poison on any bug or animal since. Feeding the ducks cracked corn did the pond no good either. The ducks never left the pond and turned it into a mud hole. Live and learn. The deer and elk do mostly cosmetic damage, but can, and have, broken small trees in half. I have an old picture taken by my game cam of a elk cow in the driveway. It seems like whenever I see one I'm not carrying my camera. :-( She looks well fed.