I hope everyone enjoys nice pictures as much as I do, Heres another angle of the B & the beast. can u guess who the beast is? Greg

Yeah I'm in NY also and even tho the sun is out, my plants are not (yet). I did buy some primroses at the grocery store and stuck them near my front sidewalk. At least the malman can see them. I need a little color this time of year. Oh, shoot, one extra day in February!

We are having leftover night to clean out the fridge before we leave. Mostly the meal will consist of spaghetti and meatballs but I have some other bits and pieces to toss out there that sound more interesting than the spaghetti.......But my Dearest Darling will have the spaghetti. He'd like to have it every night.

This reply goes way beyond your question, but hopefully there is an answer in here somewhere. Words have changed meaning over the decades so I'll try to define my terms. If you read the old Farmer's Almanac from prior to the 1940s they refer to manure as a fertility enhancement. Back then anything you put on the ground, ranging from raw animal dung up to purified chemical fertilizers, was considered to be manure. Everything. Nowadays the word manure usually refers to animal dung in the fresh state. It stinks. Once animal dung leaves the animal it begins the composting process, but the bagged manure you can buy at the store still stinks to high heaven. After you use it still sinks for several weeks. There is another product class called composted manure. You never know what you're going to get with this. True compost is finished when it smells fresh as a forest floor after a summer rain. I used it get "aged" manure at my daughter's horse stables. I looked every bit like fresh dung, but it had been sitting for a year. You could scoop up a double handful and plunge your nose in it and get the fresh aroma of excellent soil. That's what you should smell when you buy compost or composted manure. Sadly that is not always what you get. If you are using an organic fertilizer for the first time in years (and years) it could be your soil does not have the full population of beneficial microbes to decompose the organic fertilizer. If you are new to organics, you might apply at half the rate (10 pounds per 1,000 square feet) and follow up 4 weeks later with a full dose of 15 to 20 pounds per 1,000. The 'aroma' you get from the modern grain type organics is a mild sour milk. You will notice it, but your neighbors will not.