Buford, that is quite a transformation! I think you definitely got your money's worth! And Steve, that's funny.....but I can see a number of front yards in our neighbourhood with just that scenario. Maybe not with roses, but other plants. I have thought of the idea of a landscape designer to have a look at our place. It's a difficult location, it's on a slope, and the grade is steep in some places. But what has stopped me so far? 1. My yard is a sanctuary where I keep myself involved and busy. I always have to have a project active at all times. For example, I just completed an arbour early this year. Installed flagstone paving. Put in a shed. Cleared some climbers. Got rid of topiary dwarf cedars. Etc. Next projects - putting in paving behind the garage, installing water reservoirs, reroof the green house. Those are the things I enjoy and those are the projects that keep me going. I simply can't fathom the idea of having someone else take the pleasure of the thinking and conceiving and labour for me. It's like a child paying someone else big bucks to snatch the candies out of his/her very own hands! 2. My yard is a laboratory of continuous experimentation. I am a restless gardener. I find myself constantly doing "something" to the yard - including ripping up something and implementing somethng new in it's place. I can't imagine paying thousands of dollars to have someone else design and landscape the property - because I know that in the years to come, I will find myself systematically dimantling the very work that I paid big bucks for. 3. I am a plantaholic - a plant hoarder. My backyard is more of an arboretum than a garden. I will probably go into deep depression if any landscape designer should come up with a scheme that is going to mean losing some of the plants. On the other hand, I have many friends who simply are not into the kind of gardening stuff that I do. For them, the somewhat haphazard style of our property is simply not their cup of tea. They want something that looks good, without having to take the time out of their busy schedule to either design or implement landscape plans. Almost all who have used landscape designers and landscape contractors have been happy with the result. The only thing they uniformly find hard to swallow is the cost involved in getting a landscape scheme designed and implemented. And lets give kudos to the landscape designers - good designers can make a huge difference to the final outcome. Think of all the factors that they have to consider - color, texture, line, form and scales, and the principles of unity, balance, transition, rhythm, proportion, etc. And then they have to unify function with style. I have been reading Robin Willams' books on garden design, but I still have difficulty looking 10 feet beyond my immediate surrounding - let alone come up with a master scheme for the whole yard!

Well, Im "swooping in here" late, Dafy! I pretty much second what everybody else has said! Cram them in! When IÂve helped make up hanging baskets and mixed pots in the past, we pretty much knocked the plants out of the pots (they were grown in) and crammed them into the pot or basket side by sideÂand then filled in what little soil we needed in the (small) cracks between the plants! Doing that gives you a nice, full look, FASTÂand if anything should die off on you, you still have lots left to fill in. And, Re: what David said: When I was furloughed after 9-11, I went back to Illinois to help my brother, who sells bedding plants, baskets, and veggies in spring (he has commercial greenhouses and grows the stuff himself), we joked about the same thing! Back there, in addition to knowing people would let them dry out, it was often the people who would come in "too early" and then not know they had to bring annual baskets in when there was a sudden cold snap! More business! Replacing frozen ones definitely made up part of his business. Since heÂs only open for about 6 weeks in spring, he didnÂt get into a lot of replacements for the ones that dried out and died! HeÂs already closed for the season by the time itÂs getting hot out! AndÂspeaking of things drying outÂcoco mat baskets are going to be reallyreallyreally hard to keep wet in our climate! The first garden center I worked at out here in Colorado sold them, and we had trouble keeping them alive long enough to sell them (and we were watering constantly)Âand I seriously doubt that any of the people who bought them were able to keep them alive for more than a couple weeksÂand they were like $60 a basket! PaulinoÂs doesnÂt even sell them. I strongly recommend that you line the inside of the coco mat with a couple thin layers of plastic before planting in themÂwith holes in the bottom for drainage. Without something to help keep the moisture in, youÂre going to have a lot of trouble. Even with a plastic lining, and even in shade, youÂre probably going to have trouble keeping them moist when it gets hot outÂtho I must add that begonias definitely donÂt like to stay wet all the time, so be careful about that. TheyÂll rot off quite easily if they stay too wet. So with begonias itÂll be a pretty fine line between too wet and too dry! For petunias and anything youÂre hanging in the sun, theyÂll probably need to be watered a couple times a day when itÂs hot outÂand thatÂs if you put the plastic in to line them. When the plants get big, theyÂll use a LOT of water in the heat. ThatÂs true for most of your things in pots too! I know IÂve been telling you to let them dry out between waterings, but itÂs still cold out now, and the small plants donÂt use much water. ThatÂs all gonna turn around when they start getting big, and when the heat goes up! Hope thatÂs not too discouraging! Growing in pots and baskets just takes more monitoring than growing in the ground where the moisture levels (and temperatures) are more stable. (Glad youÂre gonna have a little piece of dirt to plant in too! ;-) ) Oh! One more thing! IÂd pick up a couple trailing somethings to put in the baskets to hang down over the sides. There are several different things you can get if you go check out the bedding plants at a "real" garden center. I like, and recommend, Vinca major. ItÂs the large leaf vinca vine, and it looks really nice in basketsÂI think! It comes in plain green, and a green and white variegated oneÂand thereÂs also a green and yellow variegated one that I really like, but itÂs harder to find. ItÂs Vinca major ÂAureaÂ. Time to cram! Digit, the only thing I can think to add to the "houseplant" list is pothosÂtho it doesnÂt grow fast, so youÂd need to buy one, or have one that youÂve been growing inside long enough for it to "hang." But you didnÂt say what kind of light youÂre putting it/them in! Pothos is pretty much a shade or no hot midday (outdoor) sun plant. And as Mayberry and Poly have said above, anything thatÂs been growing insideÂor even in a greenhouse, will need to be very gradually acclimated to a new life outdoors in "outside" sun. Glass filters out a bunch of the "stuff in the sun." Ever try to get a suntan sitting behind glass! And, as Mayberry said, God didnÂt create plants to live indoors, but just introduce them to their new life s l o w l y. Dafy, are you REALLY successfully growing Tillandsia out here??? TheyÂre "air" plants, and "our" air doesnÂt have what they needÂmoisture! When I was a kid and my parents brought some back from Florida one year, we didnÂt even have much luck growing them in "wet" (yuck) Illinois! IÂm amazed that theyÂre working for you! Skybird

"Also, out on the farm, a formal dining room seems a bit out of place, while an open country kitchen, with a big work table, woodstove and lots of light sounds just right...at least for me!" Many people expect a "farmhouse" to look like that thanks to images in magazines of remodeled modern kitchens. The reality was that after a long day toiling in the fields, being able to close off the hot kitchen from the dining room so you could eat in relative comfort was a blessing. In the country at least, it wasn't until the widespread use of electric fans, water coolers and air conditioners was the kitchen considered to be a room anyone wanted to hang out in; before then it was just a hot, steamy, and pretty much no nonsense work space for preparing meals and washing up afterward. There was a reason women of any means at all hired someone else to cook. ;^) I would never, ever open the wall between the kitchen and dining room here. Mainly that's because there's a whopping 15 to 20 degree difference in the temperature between the two rooms in the summer after I finish making dinner. That said, since we bought this farm, we have done some rearranging in the 100+year old house. The bathroom had been created by taking a corner of what used to be the screened sleeping porch at the back back and closing it in; MOL just crammed in a closet directly off the kitchen. We moved the bathroom to the other end of the porch, away from the kitchen. And we've been working to open up the wall between what had been the former porch and bathroom and the kitchen so when we're done there will not only be room for the washing machine, but also a tiny, walk in pantry, a place to sit and take off muddy boots, and a small table and chairs with a window looking out over the backyard toward the west. As further sacrilege, I'd like to one day move the bathroom off the back porch all together and put it in the middle bedroom, and turn that part of the porch into a laundry/utility room. You can't get to the second bedroom without going through the middle bedroom, and in otherwise similar sized homes the same age and with an otherwise similar floorplan, that space is actually a small, short hallway and a bathroom. I'm guessing that the family that built the house needed the room to sleep more than a bathroom, as they didn't even add one until almost 60 years later. So as far as eventually moving the bathroom into the house itself, you could say that I want to upgrade the floorplan to the high end version of what was available when the house was built.

I used blue gingham check and lined baskets leaving a rectangle of fabric hanging over the edge. Then, I embroidered the names of office supplies on each of the rectangle. One said "Note Paper" another said "pencils" etc. Then I lined the baskets up on a shelf over my desk. I also drilled holes about every 1/4 inch along the top edge of a basket and then used a blanket stitch and yarn in each of the holes. That gave me something to attach yarn to so I could crochet around the top of the basket. I double crocheted enough rounds so I had 12 inches of crochet on the top of the basket. From there, I made a crocheted chain and ran it through the top of the crochet as a draw string to close the crochet on the basket top. I use it to store my current handwork project by my chair. I also use just plain baskets on shelves to hold various things in my craft room. I like symmetry, so I bought several of the same basket and put them side-by-side on a shelf. You could do the same thing with mismatched baskets if you like the look. I use baskets on my patio to hold cutlery for BBQ's and to put pots of flowers in to dress them up a bit.