This is equipment that belong to our subdevision that we use for clean-up ( fall/storms/etc/firedepartment). This chipper gets a work-out from chipping very hard bark. 12 bags from Lowe's makes about 11/2 wheelbarrel full of very nice finds and you have a container leftover of too bigge pieces that could be regrind again.The fines are blown in back of a pick-up truck.

I vote for Saturday afternoon. I come from Tacoma and just can't get up there early, because I have to count on an hour lost in Redmond somewhere. Excellent idea! Susan

hi cookie...welcome! well, at least the rain melted most of the snow. the ground is easier to work being all mushy. weeds pull out real nice. i'm trying to get a few new beds in order as i am expecting a major shipment of various plants from a coop that i'm participating in. not too bad, still within my gardening budget! also need to get my act together and get my greenhouse built. purchased a 10x12 harbor frieght that's just sitting in my garage screaming to get out. my yellow and purple crocus are in bloom and have been, even before the last couple of snows. maryanne

I am worried about some plants, but not excesively so. However, we'd already had a hard freeze here a couple of weeks ago that hit plants fairly hard so I didn't have much left in the ground, except lantanas, that were likely to shock. The lantanas were protected from the previous hard freeze by adjacent plants that were taller and very dense and which protected them so they still looked great, after I removed all the plants that had fallen over on top of them after that hard freeze hit them. They still had green foliage and were in full bloom until a couple of days ago. Today they look pretty bad. Our soil is heavy in clay content and doesn't drain well, so some years the lantana overwinter fine here and some years they die. I always dig up my Texas lantana, put it in a pot, and overwinter it in the unheated greenhouse, but the rest of the lantanas have to sink or swim on their own. A lot of our trees here still had green leaves as of Monday. Some still have green leaves now. A lot of those would have had nice color, but now I expect the leaves will turn brown and fall off the trees. We were just starting to see some reds in the red oaks and ornamental pears, and lots of yellows in the elms and other trees that turn yellow in fall. I think it would have been a gorgeous and colorful autumn, albeit a late one, if this big, wicked cold spell hadn't hit the trees before the color could fully develop. I still have hollyhocks, Malva zebrina 'sylvestris' and a few other plants that aren't frozen yet, but we're expected to hit the low 20s tonight, so they all may be brown and crispy tomorrow. We just lost the comfrey plants two days ago, but they are pretty cold hardy and will come back from the roots. The native grasses and forbs that still had any green or any flowers whatsoever now are wheat colored. With existing plants in your area, I think if they are several years old, y'all might not see much of a long-lasting type of damage on them, but I never like seeing plants freeze when they weren't already sliding into dormancy. Newer and younger plants always seem to have the most damage from sudden cold spells before dormancy hits. We are in a low-lying microclimate and tend to freeze before anyone around us does, since they're on higher ground, and I rarely lose any zone 7 plants at a time like that, though sometimes we lose some of the current year's growth. With any zone 8 plants that I've tried to sneak into zone 7b and grow, this is exactly the kind of sudden cold spell that kills them after they've grown well here for 2, 3 or 4 years.