I've got at least another week. Tomorrow, I am up-potting peppers and watching the weather so I can move them indoors at the last possible moment. Tomatoes are just getting orange. Some of them will be ripe by the end of the week. I'm picking pears and the first of the apples. We just finished my shade house last weekend (finally!), so it is ready for the seedlings in the spring. The zucchini has slowed down and there are not many eggplants racing the frost. Winter squash is not ready and might not make it. We are still picking hands full of strawberries every morning, but they have definitely slowed down as the weather has gotten cooler.

I don't know what is going on with gardenweb, but I haven't been able to post a response on here all day. A while ago I tried for the umpteenth time and the prior post is all that showed up. I am going to try this one last time and if it doesn't work, then I give up. *Ok, so my husband just figured out what the problem was. I mentioned Daves Garden in the post and Gardenweb saw that as my posting an ad for them. Here is my update on the trunk: Well, I have my answer. As dismal as it is, at least I know what is going on.We had our neighbor stop by, he's a tree farmer, and has a couple hundred acres of trees he sells. He asked me a lot of questions. I told him I bought this tree from an online nursery, and that when I received it, it had spots all over the leaves. It was not dormant when I got it, it was fully leafed out. I then called the nursery and said I think the tree has leaf spot, but the nursery told me it was not leaf spot, but instead it was their overhead watering, and that it wasn't a fungus or anything. It being my first tree I never questioned them for a minute. I found out the next year that it was in fact anthracnose and after that I picked up every single leaf it ever dropped in the fall and sprayed the tree before the buds opened in spring. I thought that would work and really never gave it another thought. Even yesterday the whole anthrascnose never entered my mind as a possibility. The tree has 4 cankers. He believes that the anthracnose never left the tree and eventually the cankers showed up. He said the best thing to do is to remove the tree and demand my money back from that nursery for selling me a tree that they knew had anthracnose. I actually had contacted them when I found out what it was, and they said they weren't aware of any problems with their trees, however, on their Dave's feedback someone was completely irate that their trees arrived with anthracnose. If I remember correctly he was livid that the nursery had not taken them off the website and not notified anyone about the anthracnose.. I am going off of memory as this was a few years ago but I remember it. Anyway, I'm not calling them and demanding my money back or a new tree. The tree cost us $30, we gave it the best start that we could, we loved it while we had it, and in the end this was all out of our hands in terms of this tree's future. Thank you for everyone's suggestions and advice.

Oh, they'll be back. I'd leave them until Spring,.. then cut whatever parts don't get buds. Alternatively, you can cut them low now and have all new growth in spring.

Sadly, the mass of blooms are only now just getting started, though I've had blooms since early July. The soggy June really set things back. Frost is coming the next two days. The third shot shows my eighty foot x four foot bed. I have it supported by horizontal fencing two feet from the ground, and twine wrapped around 5-foot t-posts set every 14 feet along the row. This method works pretty well for me, as long as I keep up with the twine-wrapping as the plants grow. The average height is 5-6 feet, with some overachievers at eight feet.