Wow Lynne - what a trip!! I feel like I've just been through a new catalogue, and then I realize it's someone's garden and I feel like I'm in Kindergarten - or maybe even just beginning to crawl!! Lovely pics.

The tree fern will remain potted in the shade house during warm weather. I'll probably put it in the heated GH (the one the hummer was trapped in) during the winter. It just takes up so much room. Hopefully I won't kill it. Daniella I have no idea what the variety is and it's not tagged. Is there an easy way to tell them apart? Lucy the gh's are actually pretty empty right now. The shade house holds mainly orchids during the summer and never gets too crowded. The other one in the backyard gets way over packed during the winter but the GH at the farm has plenty of room. It's 15,000 sq ft but only gets heated to about 45 F. It's just too expensive to keep it warmer then that, even with using propane instead of electricity. The last time we heated the farm GH to 65-70 F was 3 winters ago and it ran about $8000. Too much to spend on a hobby and the cost of fuel is significantly higher now.

In Colorado I saw a hummingbird buzzing around the Agastashe 1 week ago. It does seem a very late! I know that hummingbirds can survive freezing temperatures because in the mountains here there can be year-round frosts, and I've gone camping in June and woke up to frost dusting the ground (and the tent) while the hummingbirds were busy flitting around like there was no problem. Hummingbirds are extremely common in the Rocky Mountains all summer and you'll come across swarms of them around meadows especially when the shortened growing season has everything blooming all at once. I've heard that hummigbirds migrate based on a biological clock, not food - and that there are frequently stragglers - so it's a good idea to have a feeder out to help the stragglers make it. I wonder if they are also adapting to environmental change? Regardless of whether or not you want to point to climate change (and personally, I absolutely would cite that), it's also a fact cities extend the growing season an additional couple weeks in each direction because of the heat island effect, and also provide an abundance of non-native, late-blooming plants growing in gardens (for example, brugmansias!) that are not normally present this time of year. Maybe human populations are serving as a secondary "corridor" for the hummingbirds to migrate later than they did 200 years ago! Cities and towns certainly do form chains that would be easy to migrate along. It would be silly to think some species wouldn't take advantage of the environmental change humans bring just as much as some other species are negatively affected.

I've got a lot of hungry woodpeckers so I have to keep them happy. ;-) I put all of my feeders in one place for the webcam - except for my thistle feeders because the goldfinches are shy. I'm thinking of putting up a 2nd Hummzinger off camera. I'm really impressed with how well it works! The hummers are definitely spending more time at the feeders now. Since we're on the bluebird forum I should mention that I didn't ever have bluebirds nest in my yard this year. Instead I had chickadees nest twice, which is unusual. I was all ready for the blues to move in. Last year I had chickadees nest and then bluebirds came along later to use the same box. Hopefully next year! The nest box is visible in the photo further back in the yard behind the feeders. I put a camera in there and got some good videos of the chickadee nest. Hopefully next year I can get some of a bluebird nest as well!