Yesterday morning my thermometer read just under 26. Peaches are at or slightly past full bloom. I still can't detect any browning in J. plum flowers- those that aren't past petal fall. Blossoms still look healthy and buzzing with various pollinators. There is some browning of spur leaves on pears and apples. I really don't know what to make of this. Charts say that damage should be pretty much complete on my stone fruit but I don't really see it yet. I'm hopeful that the charts are not accurate because they don't take into account duration of lows. The hard freezes we've had only linger at the lows for an hour. On the hardest one 2 weeks ago we bottomed somewhere around 23 and wide open J. plum blossoms were frozen solid but have looked fine since thawing. All my fruit may come from the market this year and I've partially accepted that strong possibility but my eyes have not yet corroborated the verdict.

I had a similar problem in Montreal, except for the browning blades part. The thing people seem to have trouble understanding is that a lawn that looks bad isn't necessarily dying or even sick. Another thing people fail to understand is that a quick clean-up is often already half the solution, and a lawn that people would be tempted to simply destroy and start again from scratch is very often easy to save and not worth scrapping. I got into a few habits. The first was to help the grass grow deeper roots to make the nutrients more readily available to it. This means I started deep-watering, and I mean really deep. You know the fan-shaped water jet extension of your garden hose? I used that, shooting from a distance of about six inches. I wasn't watering the grass, I was drenching the soil beneath it. Visually, it looked as though I was combing the grass with a brush with water tines. I think I gave two to three inches of water to my grass every time. I did this about four times over a two-week period, so that amounts to about six inches of water per week (about five times the actual needs of the grass). Also, for grass to grow long, healthy roots, it needs to be allowed to grow tall. That golf green look is just plain nonsense, it makes your grass so shallow you constantly have to baby it. Rolling mowers would be my favorite choice if it weren't for the short cut they produce, so I bought an electric mower that cuts up to 3.5 inches. I have decided that my grass should never be shorter than three inches, which is considered quite long by many. The thing is, grass roots are about the same length as grass blades. So, if you don't allow your grass to grow tall, the roots will not penetrate deep, either. Now, I only mow when the grass gets to four inches. Within a few months, my lawn became greener and lusher. It looked sad and sickly when I started, and a few months later, it was already one of the nicest on the block. Now, all I really do besides normal watering (rainfall + watering = 1.5 inches per week) is reseed patches under trees and patches that fell victims to dogs. The only problem remaining is field bindweed, but I think I will just learn to live with it. If your lawn has less than 50% weed, I don't think it is worth it to change it altogether. You should just give it a bit of therapy. If your neighbours don't tend to their lawns, the rewards of a brand new lawn will not last, anyways. I think you may just want to do a deep-watering therapy like I did, then aerate, add a half-inch layer of compost (rake it in) and reseed. You can do this in early September.

According to someone on this board, if you do not believe in man made global warming you are: a crackpot, reckless, the same as a holocaust denier and should be drowned. There is no discussing the issue with these people. It is their religion. For others willing to listenÂ. Someone on this board wrote. "There is a direct and positive correlation between average temperatures and the amount of carbon in the atmosphere and human activity generates carbon on a massive scale, unprecedented in the history of the earth." This is not true. Check into the amount of CO2 generated by one large volcanic eruption. In addition, when CO2 levels were over ten times higher than they are now, about 450 million years ago, the planet was in the depths of the absolute coldest period in the last half billion years. Some scientists believe their studies show that CO2 varies up and down because of temperature changes and is not the cause of temperature changes. Water vapor contributes many, many times more to the greenhouse effect than CO2. If you want to fight the greenhouse effect you should be targeting clouds since they provide at least 60% of the greenhouse effect. The atmosphere is only about 0.037% CO2. The fact is we have no idea how man made (or mother nature made) CO2 will affect the climate. (Computer models so far have been wrong). I will finish with the fact that I love the beauty of the world we live in; otherwise I would not be on this board. Keep you yard, neighborhoods and parks beautiful. Drive the most gas efficient car your comfortable with. Travel less by air if it makes you fell better. Just donÂt try to use legislation to run my life so it conform to your beliefs.

Okay, let's see if I can catch up on all of your helpful posts! I met with a landscaper and we were pretty much on the same page but there were a few things that I didn�t agree with. Maybe I just have no clue what I'm doing and maybe his recommendations are truly better than the picture I have in my head! I'll be meeting with another designer on Monday to get his take on it. The first guy was free and we just talked about what the plan would be. The second guy charges $50, but will draw up a whole design. They also do driveways, which the first company does not do. The one thing that I really didn't like about the first guy was that I felt like I had seen all of his ideas in my neighborhood already. I don't want something crazy that doesn't fit the house or neighborhood, but I also don't want the same thing everyone else has. How do you get your house to stand out from the others but still "fit"? Just because everyone else has "x" number of garden beds and "x" amount of front yard grass doesn't mean I have to, right? I did read over our HOA docs and they simply state that no more than 20% of the yard can be raised garden beds or container gardens. I would really like to make maintaining the lawn easier and to shade the front a little more. He wasn't on board with that. As I said before our yard is quite short, only 25 ft deep from the sidewalk to the front brick. So that will definitely play a big part in the design. The front tree is a cherry tree (with fruit) and I have been told that it will grow large enough to provide cover for the front window, not too sure about the door. Every arborist and landscaper that I have talked to seem happy with that tree and tell me not to touch it. The shutters have actually done quite well with all of the sun and heat that they get exposed too. No warping or anything. Considering the roof color is a good point. I think the wrought iron color would look great. I still don�t know what I want to do with the door. I have been playing with pictures of the house for days now. I've cut and pasted so many different designs I'm stuck. I think that there are some styles and looks that definitely work, some that definitely don't work, and then there are the in-between ones. I don't mind having my house look a little different then the neighborhood. I have two tri-levels on each side of me and three true 2 story colonials across the street from me. From my mock-ups I think can get away with some different looks that neither of the other two styles could pull off. And that is why I'm stuck. Too many ideas. I think a designers eye is what I need. The other challenge I am having right now is prioritizing what to do with the house first. The inside still needs to be painted. I could use some new furniture too. If I did do painting I would want to update the lighting while the ceilings are getting a fresh coat. As far as the outside goes, we obviously need landscaping. But we could also use new gutters and soffits, possibly a new door, and new hardscaping. My husband would also like to close in the carport. There is just so much to do and I don't know where to start. The changes we have already made to the inside were easy because they were done out of necessity. Really none of these other things have to be done. I think that I would like to focus on the outside simply because I have a 4yr old and 1yr old that make it a little harder to maintain the inside versus the outside. And I can handle the inside myself. I obviously need professional help with the exterior. So, any ideas on how to prioritize my projects?