Teresa, you were missed. Hope you're feeling better. We'll bring your plants to the Green Elephant. Please tell LaDonna that we have her pampas grass, but I thought it was yours, so I didn't pass it along to her. We'll bring that to the GE, too. Rachel, thanks for coming. I have a trade every September. I used to have one in April, too, but I think last spring's was the last one I'm having, because it's too much trouble to haul the plants. Barb and Don Engel have one in Kelso every spring, so we decided to divide the labor. They usually post on GardenWeb, so be on the lookout beginning in April. See you at the Green Elephant, and if I need help hauling plants, I'll give you a holler. Barb and Don, hope you're enjoying your family time. Most of your plants were given away, with the exception of the Kerria, but it'll be very popular at the March Green Elephant. Drive safely home, and see you in November. Tammy/bejoy2

I respect your opinion Gil, but you see, alot of us live in rural areas that don't have access to speciality nurseries like you folks living in the big cities. I will order live perennial plants, roses, daylilies, Irises from reputable growers that have a good reputation and customer service, I too have had too many bad experiences with shipping live plants from some of the popular mail order businesses on the Internet. I only order rare or unusual that I know I would not be able find locally around here and I will only order from those that have a guarantee policy. For McFaydens, Veseys, Botanus, companies like that, I've been only ordering bulbs, tubers and rhizome plants too. Sorry to highjack your thread Janet, hope your plants make it as well. Sharon

Its really a matter of your own personal preference, time & space issues, the condition of your planting area and many other factors that vary. People who are loyal devotees to the WS method swear by it and won't use any method except that one for all types of seed. They collect & store lots of jugs, buy lots of potting soil and use this method even for seeds which only require warm moist conditions and which germinate easily in a week or 14 days. Then they typically wait to sow in December (often on the solstice) but never before that. Thats perfectly fine but its sort of a made up law on that forum. Other people prefer to sow the 'needs warm/moist only' seeds directly in spring or sow indoors to get an early start on plants and use the WS method only for the ones needing cold. Personally, that makes sense to me while WS'ing those does not so that is what I do. I always sow hardy annuals in late summer to early fall. They come up, put in time for good root growth and then spend winter as green rosettes ready to take off much earlier in spring than if I'd waited or WS'd them. Tender annuals OTH are sown in spring. Shrubs and some other native seeds need a warm period followed by cold followed by warm so fall is the best time, especially if you are unsure about conditions necessary to break dormancy, some seeds have several 'locks' on dormancy to protect them from germinating at the wrong time so these conditions must be met. Many seeds naturally drop to the ground during fall. If you wait too long into fall, you won't find seeds to collect from some plants as next years seeds are already naturally sown. Some seeds need soaking and scarification. The point is, there is no single one size fits all answer as the only best way to sow seeds in general. WS'ing is a good method generally speaking, but not always. I've had some types of seeds rot doing that while others do fine. It also depends on which part of the country you live in, up north they stay frozen and have snow most of the winter, here in Oklahoma we do not. Echinacea is an easy one so choose whatever appeals to you. I personally do all the types of sowing mentioned above, it depends on the type of seed and which is the most efficient method.

Rebecca, Stink bug or leaf-footed bug damage on the tomato. I was wondering about C. diff too. My younger sister had it once a few years ago and had to be hospitalized for quite some time. Nancy, We've been hearing occasional fireworks for about a week already. I'm tired of them....and we aren't anywhere near the actual Fourth of July holiday yet. It makes the dogs crazy. Everyone is out mowing grass down short today. Between the heat, lack of rainfall and the fireworks craziness we always have out here in unincorporated parts of the county, people know the grass in the fields needs to be short in case fireworks set their fields on fire. Heavenly Blue is one of the latest MGs to bloom at our place, and they do better in full sun and poor soil than in part shade and good soil, so it helps if you choose them a 'bad' site to grow and don't baby them too much. Otherwise, they can just go on making new foliage forever and forever and forget to bloom for the longest time. Once they start blooming, though, they are so spectacular that you'll forget how aggravating it was to wait forever and forever for them to get their act together. Most of the basil I grow is for the beneficial insects. I ignore it and don't harvest it much, and just let it bloom for them. Our weather is awful again today. It was supposed to be around 97 degrees with a heat index of 103, which certainly sounded better than previous days. So, what have we had so far? An official high temp of 98 (so, very close to forecast so far) at our Mesonet station with a max heat index so far of 109 (oops, they were way off on the forecast for this). At our house is it 100 degrees right now. Our weather refuses to behave. Everything outdoors is just roasting. They had our Mesonet station (and Kenton's, I think it was) down for a while today, and when they brought them back online, both stations changed from a 16" soil moisture level of 0.14 to 0.40, so they either changed malfunctioning moisture sensors or they adjusted the data. Now I don't know what to think, but no matter what their data shows, the ground is miserably dry. The rain is bypassing us, moving from SW towards central OK, so some of you are likely to get rain. Hopefully, you won't get the hail. Jennifer, I hope the dinner is fun and that the animals do well without valium. Megan, There's so many neonics in use that I mostly just grow my own flower transplants from seed nowadays. I tried to buy some plants at HD this past spring, and they had Neonic tags in them (sort of hidden behind the standard plant tag, so if you weren't checking for them you might miss them) so I put them back on the plant racks. At least they are labeling theirs, which most places do not. I used to buy flats and flats of annual flowers in early to mid Spring for maximum impact, but don't buy many now. If I cannot grow them myself or find them at an organic nursery in the DFW metro, then I just live without them. It is hard for me to give flower seedlings the attention they need when I'm wrapped up in growing veggie transplants, especially during winter/spring wildfire season, but I'm getting better at giving them the appropriate amount of attention since buying them is less and less of an option because of the heavy reliance in the bedding plant industry on nionics. For me, growing transplants is easy if I'm not rushing off to fires every day, but almost impossible if we're having a bad fire season. We've been harvesting and eating tons of tomatoes for two months now, so you will not hear any whining coming from my lips. The fruit that set in March-April is mostly all harvested now. We had very little fruitset in May, but those are the ones that are still green now. With the heat cranking up, no rainfall in ages and tons of wind this week, the spider mites are flooding into the garden every time the wind blows and hitting the tomato plants hard. I'm now at the point where I look at the plants and think to myself that I'll be glad when each plant has ripened its last fruit and I can yank it out of the ground, thereby putting it out of its misery. I've been doing a pretty good job killing stink bugs and leaf footed bugs with citrus oil, but normally wouldn't spray it on the plants because it tends to burn the foliage. (Orange oil, at a high enough concentration will strip paint and varnish, so I have to be really careful to mix it up properly and to not spray it on any plant I don't want to risk losing.) It is just that with the plants declining so rapidly and drought officially in parts of our county now, I just do not care. I wouldn't spray it on the leftover tomato plants that I planted at the northern fenceline very late (to serve as host plants for tomato and tobacco hornworms found on the fruit-bearing plants in the main tomato rows) because they have not been hit by herbicide drift or spider mites yet, so they look ridiculously good and might survive until fall if the grasshoppers would leave them alone. I also wouldn't use it on the 8 new tomato plants for fall. They are in containers at the NW end of the garden, in as much shade as I can give them and still expect them to grow any at all. They can have more sun later after they grow and are established. I'm no longer dealing with tons of tiny grasshoppers in the garden. Now I have big huge ones flocking to the garden from the non-irrigated fields around us---thousands of non-irrigated acres. The differential grasshoppers are a huge issue as they really prefer forbs to grasses at this time of the year. I've started letting my Kong sunflowers wilt on purpose, which I'd rather not do, because the differential grasshoppers, which love sunflowers, will usually avoid wilting sunflowers. (Maybe the wilting impacts the leaves in some way the differential grasshoppers do not like?) So now, the dog's sunflowers that are self-sowing natives which border their dog yard are much more appealing to the differential grasshoppers than my garden sunflowers because I am not watering the garden sunflowers but am watering the dog yard sunflowers to turn them into an appealing plant for the differentials. Whatever it takes...... Tim just came in from the Great Outdoors and informed me it is hot out there. Thanks, I told him, I hadn't noticed. I think being at work 5 days a week somewhat skews his perception of the heat here because by the time he arrives home near 7 pm, we usually are a lot cooler than we were just 2 to 4 hours earlier. Today, for the first time in ages, instead of working on something at home, we went to the fire station and worked on various projects. I cleaned the kitchen, filled up the fridges with additional bottled water and Gatorade, inventoried firefighter snacks, etc. I noticed that, in our neighborhood between the fire station and our house, areas that are heavily shaded or that get shade at least half the day still look half decent. Areas that are in full sun? They look pathetic. My garden needs trees in it to shade the plants in hot weather, but I don't want the trees there all the time. Dawn