Temps are dropping to near normal 40's with nights in the 20's this week here, even with a hint of snow. I hope it will slow growth down and back into semi-dormancy. The tulip magnolia buds were starting to swell and I hate that, it nearly always blooms too early and gets hit by a hard freeze. Other trees and shrubs are beginning to show a hint of green too, much too soon. No hostas showing yet, though! If it doesn't get any colder than that, and we can get through the next 4-5 weeks, we should be home free!

Hi guys! Does cotton root rot effect milkweed? If not then bring on the Monrachs! Maybe I can grow milkweed in this MESS I have for soil. Yikes! Okiedawn I had never even heard of cotton root rot until your post today! Oh dread dread...it sure sounds like a possibility for me! I am here picturing my 4 year old apple tree dead with leaves still attached..and the apples still attached. The leaves turned reddish...I saw it happening and was panicked...watered it really good, worried and prayed but it was totally dead very quickly. From a thriving, bearing apple tree to dead in a very short time...I am guessing less than one month and maybe even only a couple of weeks. And I know when one of the peach trees died.....oh gosh I hate admitting this but when we went to dig it up there were almost no roots at all and I remember some weird "stuff" like strands of an old rotted rug or something hanging from them. I showed DH and we were both really puzzled and kept wondering how in the world pieces of an old rug got in there with the tree!!!!! We for sure know we didn't do it. Oh no! I didn't know that might be a clue to why it suddenly died. I still have trouble remembering all the specifics on all the other trees and plants. It could be the fig trees just didn't like it here? Neither of them lasted long but I keep thinking they must have made it longer than a year or I would have gone for REFUNDS.....lol. Gosh you get tired of paying so much money just to have it die. In talking about all this with DH he has helped me remember trees I had forgotten....we did have two apple trees....one died sooner than the other but even it lived until at least the third season and was growing and doing well. We have just lost a wisteria too. It is trying to come back from roots now but it SUDDENLY died and it had been here for 8 years as long as we have lived here. And over the past 3 years all of my English Ivy has slowly all died....but I only say slowly died as it all died suddenly which was planted in one area, then next year all of it died which was in another area...and last year got the last of it which was growing in yet another area. All these deaths of trees, plants and all ornamental bushes have been such a puzzle to us for SO LONG now. We would assume we didn't take care of it right but I know I have had the same kinds of trees and plants to thrive even with my occasional neglect at the place we used to live. I finally told DH it is nothing we are doing wrong we KNOW how to grow things...there is something terribly wrong with this ground...this soil. Still I just thought it was because of it being such mucky hard poor draing stuff. sigh...this is just SAD. But if this is really what is wrong then I am so thankful to find out so at least I can STOP buying plants and trees and just save the money for my bigger new 5th wheel which I will have when I sell this place and forget it all....lol lol. I wonder how I could find out for sure? Perhaps talk to someone at the Noble Foundation do you think? Oh my....and nothing can be done about this cotton root rot. How horrible! Anyone want to buy a nice home with lots of extras? Including fungus in the soil? lol lol Yikes! Many times I have thought that my trees must have lived long enough to have grown out of the nice clean fill dirt we put in when we plant them and thought it was when they hit the 'muckity muck crap' as I call it, then they die. And wondered why they were not strong enough to stand it by then? This is just great....NOT! Did I mention however that two houses from us the street ends at a large field which is farmed every year? also behind the houses right across the street are some of the same fields farmed yearly. They have raised wheat some years and hay some years. The info I found said alfalfa couldn't grow where this fungus was in the soil. I guess there are other types of hay though....hey I am not a farmer I have no idea....lol. Also crops or things which doesn't grow deep enough into the soil will perhaps make it? So Dawn what have you done about living where this stuff is? Tell me your experiences. Thank you so much for this info. I would never in a million years come up with this as I didn't even know anything about it. And have not really tried hard to find out what was actually wrong I just kept buying and planting and wasting money. But that will now STOP unless someone can tell me a way to keep it all from dying. Now I worry about my roses... will their roots eventually go down far enough to get into this tainted soil and I will lose them too? Oh God I do pray NOT! That is just painful to think of. Thank you so much for taking so much time and trouble to help me out. I appreciate it so much! Just sign me SAD HEART tonight.

Yes, I'm so glad that I live on the sunset end of a timezone. Maine, for example, has sunrise and sunset times a lot earlier than mine, which makes for even longer winter evenings and shorter summer evenings to work outdoors. When I spent a week in Madison, WI at the 4th of July one year, the light broke on the eastern horizon at 4:15, and the sun was up a few minutes before 5:00, but set a little after 8:00. Kind of a waste of daylight. IMO -- Daylights savings time should be made permanent, and maybe even bumped up an hour so that we are on Atlantic time zone. Yes, I realize that parents don't like their kiddies going to school in the dark in winter, and that would happen even more, but we could use the extra daylight in the evenings all year round to accomplish something outdoors, or even indoors.

We receive two commercial TV stations. One has "The Doomsday Man" predicting the weather. He always sounds so cheerful as he talks about tornado watches, storm warnings, and high winds. According to him, we never have good weather, and if the sun does peep out, it's an anomaly. On weekends he is replaced by a guy that bought his hair in a spray can from Ron Popeel. The other station has "Robot Man" who just can't figure out what to do with his hands, so he waves them about jerkily as he tries to tell us about the weather in Duluth (we're in Texas). Robot's weekend replacement varies from a nasal female to a young man that is so afraid of the camera that he visibly shakes. We watch the weather reports for entertainment value, and predict our own weather by looking out the window.