Donnann, your Bee Balm garden sounds like heaven! and I am so sorry that naughty Woodchuck literally cleaned up his plate with your garden...I am sending much warm wishes for your Bee balm garden's speedy recovery...Yes, definitely get wire fencing for it. I would have loved to have seen your Bee Balm Garden.I am keeping my fingers crossed that Mr. Woodchuck will chomp on only the wild weeds instead, like crabgrass or nutsedge or those invasive tree shrubs! I recently saw Kristenflower's absolutely gorgeous rose/lavender heaven too at the gallery and was so impressed! Yours and hers are ideal bee gardens just like Celestialrose. I need to grow much more bee balm because I found out that my dwarf bee balm is not as "invasive" as I had hoped, LOL, no thanks to my crappy soil. I actually planted my bee balm away from my roses in a bare 3 by 3 area. My bee-attracting plants are too young, too few to really attract many bees so next time I have to amp the collection and not! deadhead my beebalm, hoping the seeds will scatter My dad on the other hand has 3 crabapple trees, a persimmon tree, a dwarf apple tree, his yard is completely overrun with wild honeysuckle bushes, lilacs, a forest of hollyhocks and sweet peas(which the bumblebees used to love before they died, one flowering redbud tree, winterberry, azaleas, gardenias, jasmine, 3 crazy rosebushes that are like 8' tall because he never prunes them, 1 rootstock Dr. Huey, all these bee and bird attracting plants which I am so jealous about...But! he does not have bee balm... I think he can certainly add this to his collection...Donna, LOL! I think you will be "enabling" him; the neighbors already think he's got enough of a jungle...Also genes run in the family, hahahaha! I tried to keep as tidy of a garden as I could, but my garden still looks like a jungle because I planted like 50! overly tall gladiolus and now I want to grab some of my Dads overly tall hollyhocks as well! Anyway, I cant wait to see your bee balm garden recover and flourish once again. Hugs! Greenhaven alas I have just a handful of those native beesbut am grateful that at least I have those few. Your post reminded me, do you remember that "I am so excited thread" I wrote? The wonderful cute Mr. Bumblebee that used to visit my garden in May did not survive it seemsIn Mid-June it disappeared after my next door neighbor hired a professional pesticide company to spray the foundations of their home. Perhaps it too was Sevin? It was not until an entire month and a half passed that my Dads bees disappeared... (he and I live in completely separate neighborhoods and bees only have that 3 mi. radius anyways) So as you can see I feel why I feel so guilty. Perhaps if I had mentioned this to my Dad, who knows something could have been prevented? Again, you may be right in that the wild bees are hardier in comparison. They have shorter life spans and dont have communal hives, and that is why they have survived You see if you do the research and look up native bees youll discover thisThey dont have the hives and therefore, they dont have the communal death that the honeybees experience when they are exposed to Sevin. Because wild bees have so many tiny individual nests, each is independent of each other ... Not so with honeybees. Once their hive is contaminated, their entire hive is destroyed, thousands are gone. But to be honest I will always love the honeybee and bumblebees more... There's just something so special about their fuzziness that I love!

You face several problems in the Denver area. There are some areas with natural wind drainage from the mountains where hurricane force winds are not uncommon. I am familiar with one such area between Boulder and Denver. Also, when Littleton was a new community, people were having trouble getting any kind of tree started. You will be facing several problems. 1) Alkaline Soil. Raised beds are the best solution for this. Rhododendrons and azaleas have shallow roots, so a raised bed that is 12 to 15 inches high is normal. Use a good acidic soil that is well drained. 2) Alkaline Water. The raised bed won't help if you use alkaline water. Use only rain water including water collected in cisterns or neutralized water. 3) Winter wind and sun. These are serious problems. A wind break and some winter shade are necessary. Summer sun is not trivial either. Some summer shade is necessary. 4) Hardy plants. Being from Idaho, you are probably familiar with this problem. All azaleas and rhododendrons have a characteristic hardiness. Winter hardiness and summer hardiness are both important. They usually go together. Here are some interesting references: Gardening challenges for newcomers to Colorado (Colorado Extension) Iron chlorosis (Colorado Extension) Growing Azaleas and Rhododendrons (Missouri Extension) Azalea and Rhododendron Care and Culture (Oregon State University) Here is a link that might be useful: How to grow rhododendrons and azaleas.

Thank you for all your kind comments. The Buddleia is my real treasure and Trudi and Tiffy I must thank you so much for your advice. I was planning to cut it back in the next few weeks, so you really saved me. I met a young man recently (horticultural student) who was surprised I could grow Buddleia here. He advised me to wrap it for winter, but it's about 7 feet tall. I think I will mulch the roots with leaves as I did to the little plants I put in last fall. v1rtu0s1ty, I sowed two different sets of Budddliea seeds and only one set germinated. They were fresh seeds, taken from my neighbour's sister's garden in Toronto. You may want to try again with seed harvested this year. Vera, I swear by M. fistulosa. I grew it in full sun last year and had a huge, 6 foot tall plant. This year in part shade, it's more manageable. I will be discarding my M. didyma which is always full of worms and gets PM even in full sun. Thanks for the hint about the tea - it's now 5:23 and I've been up since 2:30 a.m. This is the third year for the perennial sweet pea. I got the seeds in a trade in 2006. They grew beautifully in a large pot, and these plants were a few extras which I planted in front of my peony to grow over it. After getting no flowers, I realized they were the perennials. The plants grew last year and had only one bloom, but this spring they took off. They are very vigorous plants and I think I should move them - too near the front of the bed. But the blooms were glorious - perfectly formed flowers of pale pink, white, pale blue. I even had a small vase of them on my deck table. I spent my first few years of WSing planting lots of perennials and large flowering shrubs. It seemed spent those years madly scurrying around the garden, moving seedlings, planting, weeding. This year was more relaxed: fewer containers and it has been devoted to annuals: petunias, nasturtiums, marigolds, daturas, four o'clocks, which have been very rewarding. I have so many differnt types of petunias which are really very beautiful flowers, if you take the time to look at them. They are all still in bloom as well as many of my late flowering perennials, so my garden still has lots of colour. I would never have achieved this without Winter Sowing, so hats off to Trudi!! You are really a treasure!! Northerner.

I've really enjoyed reading about all the projects. Thanks for sharing! Maybe it will inspire me to get going. Very long, I'm sorry. This has been an odd year. It was not without its social drama. DH retired- twice- and DD got a new job in a new state (at least a little closer, only one time zone away this time). Then she got engaged, bought a house and got married. DS and DiL had baby #3 in June. We kept our older grandbabies for the month of June, at first only during the day and then full time. (Need a vacation? Keep an active 5 and 7 yr. old for a month then send them home. The relief and relaxation you feel will be as great as any you can get on a vacation.) Mom lives alone about 100 mi. from us and manages quite well. This year she fell. Fortunately someone was there to help. We were able to get there and take her to the doctor and nothing was broken but it continues to concern us. Next the weather- a long drought with less rain than normal at the beginning of summer, only a sprinkle or two for the rest of summer and then none at all for fall. Temps higher, at times recordbreaking. Till now. After Thanksgiving we began experiencing wind, rain, more wind, then cold, down to 20's and lately teens; actually not abnormal for early December. However, we had only about a week of fall and we are far behind in our fall chores. The biggest gardening problem we had this year came from a neighbor who decided to sell some of his wood in late summer during the drought. He cleared the right-of-way that he owned between our house and our neighbor to the NE and cut the trees behind our property and that of our other neighbors. He felled a good many trees that were deemed not market worthy and left them. However, very hungry wildlife, now with nowhere else to go, came into our yards hunting for food and water. The deer destroyed our vegetable garden and a good bit more of landscape and flowers. Even things that deer had ignored before were fair game. The exceptions were native salvias, lavender and rosemary or something deadly like digitalis or hellebores. So the projects- Drought and less time than needed for gardening have made me realize that I need to plan for these things in the future. With no water source in the front of our house, the bed beside the drive was reachable only by adding a long second hose to the first and then snaking it around to reach the bed. As a result, that bed didn't get the water it should have. The tree removal in the woods behind us didn't seem like a welcome change but it allowed more sun from the east in the back of our house. I am planning on making a new bed for those roses behind the play area/sandbox for our grandbabies. It will be a tight fit but I think it will work. I'll move my culinary herbs to the driveway. That bed is also a place where I planted a lot of my heirloom daffodils and iris, so I want to keep them where they are. Bulbs and herbs are better suited to low rainfall and not much supplemental water than the roses. Second project- On our own property, we also had a couple dead or dying trees removed that were likely to fall on our neighbors' buildings since the other trees between us had been removed. After clearing out some of the exotic invasives, we have some room to add a few natives; a sourwood, a carolina snowbell, a native smoke tree, cinnamon clethra, maple leaf viburnum and a couple of Guthrie chickasaw plums on the edge of the clearing. Someday they should bring in pollinators, provide food and shelter to some of the birds and forest creatures and be a delight to the people who live here. I don't know if we'll see much of it but it won't happen if we don't get it started. I will need to make wire cages to keep them deerproof. The weather has cooled and we have some rain so time to get started. Third project- I start most of my garden from seed or cuttings. I need to be getting my milk jugs ready for all my winter-sown seeds ready to go. First I have to finish planting everything that I couldn't get into the ground earlier this fall because of the weather. And somehow I have to get ready for Christmas. <Sigh>