OK, first-hand report. I love the Garlic Festival. It is one of my favorite annual events. Weather was good this weekend, so the festival attracted roughly 50,000 persons. The entertainment is excellent, with musicians on several stages, and even Morris dancers near one of the entrances. There are plenty of other fun activities, but of course we go for the garlic. The marketplace is the main event. In addition to the dozens of growers from New York, I saw growers from Virginia, Ohio and Ontario. I expect there were also growers from Pennsylvania and Vermont, as there have been in the past, but I tried to zip through the marketplace. I came home with three pounds of purple shallots, four pounds of Mediterranean softneck garlic, and a pound each of the hardneck varieties Danube Rose, Italian Red, and a numbered variety whose number eludes me for the moment. These get added to the Italian Purple Stripe, German White, Marino, and Mediterranean Softneck I have left from my garden. My wife bought some more ornamental alliums from Ulster County Cooperative Extension. As mentioned in another thread, I'll be planting garlic and shallots sometime in October (or early November), sometime after frost, after tomatoes and peppers have been pulled up. The crafts tent is very good, and an excellent way to occupy the younger family members while going from booth to booth buying garlic. The crafts tent asks for a suggested donation of only a dollar per child. Other children's activities include a climbing wall and a bounce house and big slide. With tens of thousands of visitors, food lines could be long, but I got some kachori and mango lassi from Chataka. Heck even if lines weren't an issue this might be what I'd want to eat. My wife got a garlicky pork sandwich, and my daughter got a hot dog from a boy scout troup. So now we need to wait nearly 52 weeks until the next Garlic Festival, but the allium year progresses. I need to make space for garlic, and plant and mulch garlic. In spring I get to watch the garlic grow. The scapes appear at about the time the weather turns warm. Garlic gets harvested in July, cures a bit and gets eaten. Then it's time to buy tickets for the 2005 Hudson Valley Garlic Festival.

Have I delayed lily-of-the-valley planting too long? Newby here. The silver maple in my front yard was planted much too close to my house in an area about 25' square. It's bounded on one side by my house and three sides by cement. The grass is fighting a losing battle against the tree, what with the roots heaving up the soil, so I thought lotv might make it a good companion (or adversary). (The tree seems to have spared the house, which was built in 1957, its foundation still intact.) I'm making a raised bed 7" high out of the 25' square and will fill it with þ HD âÂÂtopsoilâ (dirt) and ü HD humus/manure. It will drain. The problem is that building the supports for the raised bed is taking 5x longer than I thought it would, and those pips have been sitting in the service sink in the basement for a week. I've kept them perfectly evenly moist in well punctured baggies �" never soggy or saturated. The roots feel like they've been starched and smell like clean earth. No rot or mold at all. BUT...some of the tips (of the pips?) are kind of reddish brown, and some are green. I think they were paler when they arrived. So what's with that color? Are the pips dying? Have they passed the point of no return? Should I forget about them and get fresh ones? Or are they okay? And what do you think of my soil formula? I'm going to plant them tomorrow or the next day, at the latest. Thanks very much for your thoughts. Bernard-in-Ohio

They are horticulturally distinct (for the most part), but all azaleas are rhododendrons biologically. Yours are azaleas. They are most likely evergreen types that lose their leaves in a colder climate. True deciduous azaleas such as the native American species look very different from your plants. By now azalea varieties probably number in the 1000's. Many of them are very similar in appearance. So any attempt to identify your particular variety from a photo would be pure guessing. Someone may offer a name, but there really is no telling if it is correct.

I am sensing by your comments, NYC, that you are not quite getting the purpose of the sketch I offered, which is to inspire a direction, not to prescribe a specific, etched-in-stone solution. The concept is: visually obscuring the back door some from a distance, and using minimal signage, combined with a modified walk layout (which you are invited to improve upon,) in order to direct traffic to the front of the house. Once people are on the way, they will continue to the front door. The concept would be refined by working out all of the details of how it is to be done in PLAN VIEW, not in a perspective view picture. The measured plan view lets you know exactly how much distance you have from one object to the next, in order that you can place things properly. Regarding proximity of arbor to back door and the issue of impeding light entering the house, it looks to me that you have roughly 40 or so feet of space between the house and the parking area with which to "play." By the look of the sketch, I think I've plopped the arbor somewhere between 12' and 16' clearance from the house. In the plan view that you create in order to organize future work, you could place the arbor 20' from the house, if you thought that improved upon its placement. So I can't really grasp why you'd use light entering the house as an obstacle. The arbor goes where you put it. Where I put it, it doesn't even look like an impediment to light to me. Any nearby trees have a much greater chance of affecting light entering the house. In another, separate, picture, it looks like you have much less distance between the parking and house. One, or possibly both picture views, may be misleading as to what the real truth is. That's, again, why the actual landscape-work-to-done must be laid out in a measured-to-scale, PLAN VIEW. Regarding "framing" -- edging -- the drive or walk with shrubs and/or groundcover, I do not see why you think this is necessary or desirable. Well grown and tended grass, in the places where there is sufficient light, seems preferable. In the areas where there is not sufficient light, a low groundcover would be best ... not as an "edging" per se to the paved areas, but as a bed of groundcover that works on its own accord. If it happens to abut the pavement, that is not a problem.