Good advice above. Here's another choice. I'm in Zone 6 and have often planted bareroot roses in the 3rd and 4th weeks of March. Admittedly those winters weren't as cold and crazy as this winter has been, but I notice already that parts of the garden are quite diggable, and I transplanted a rose last week to a new spot in the garden--worked out fine! So my advice would be to soak the roses in water, keep them in a cooller place (unheated garage is good) with little or no sunshine, change the water each week, and when you encounter a diggable day in the garden in the next week or two, go ahead and plant them. Good Luck! Kate

That is so funny, Gesila, because every time YOU post, MY list gets longer!!! Don't tell me we are a bad influence on one another!! I'm dying here....... Yes, the UPS guy and I have brief chats, and he has expressed wonder at where am I putting all those packages he delivers...time to run when they begin leaping over the privacy fence. All my hosta arrive UPS or USPS. Yes you are very fortunate to have local nurseries who know and sell hosta. Locally here, it's Lowes. Have not checked Home Depot, no plans to do so either. I did not mention another order received the day before, from Naylor Creek. I got TWO Paradise Islands and ONE Orange Marmalade, all because of pictures you posted I'm sticking to that story-- plus a few others which I have yet to upload to Flickr. Mug shots are ready though. A lot of nice gold in them all. More news at 10. :)

Thank you again, everyone! Glad you like the baskets! They came from a neighbor of my gram and pap's who recently passed away and pap helped with the auction. We could look through what didn't get sold and I found these baskets and I also found some vases and jars :). Poseidon, lol I haven't the slightest idea of what I'm going to name them but I do have a few here and there :). I'll post them later on when I have them all figured out. PG, that is a clay pot in the middle. I've had it for awhile now (orginally had a bromeliad in it and was a cache pot for awhile and then when I learned of Forsythe pots, I decided to use this. Tried a cork and it leaked too much so I used duct tape instead so it can seep but not too much. The larger pot is a plastic 10 inch from one of the dollar stores downtown. MD, I know at least cardiophylla will twine around the handle and it will look great :). For the other two they will literally be hanging baskets if I can find a stand to set them on LOL. I will post later on a picture of the spider plants in their pot (same place where I got the baskets and I have more that I got there that I didn't use yet) and the names of my new plants. The one cardiophylla is in happens to be one of those pots. Brad AKA Moonwolf

Lynn, I am SO ready for the planting games to begin, despite the cold temps and wet ground. Quailhunter, I have a raised bed at the western end of my garden where the soil is naturally a little bit sandier than the clay in the rest of the garden. I've amended that bed a lot with organic matter over the years and it probably has the best drainage of any of my raised beds. It is still muddy, but not as muddy as the rest of the garden and property, so I think it will be OK to plant them there. If I didn't have that well-draining bed, I'd likely put the plants in the tornado shelter and hold them there until March. I have absolutely no idea when I'll be able to plant potatoes, though, because they're going into a new garden area that has had little amending and which has no raised beds, so it is still extremely wet. I have high hopes that the sunshine and warmer temps we're having this week will help dry out the soil some. I suspect the mud will continue to plague us and we'll just have to deal with it. It is almost (but not quite) enough to make a person wish for a drought. Glenda, I always have them ship at their recommended date for my zip code too because some years I can plant them at that time, but other times I have to hold them a couple of weeks. Since you can easily hold them for 3 weeks, I never have a problem getting them into the ground within 3 weeks of receiving them. How much cold onions can take seems highly variable. They are hardy so they can withstand a lot of cold, and I've never seen a 'drop dead' temperature below which they will not survive (although I'm sure there is one), but it seems to me that once the temperates drop much below 23 or 24 or 25 degrees that I start seeing signs of freeze damage on some onions. In terms of bolting, it is a combination of the plant size and the temperature. So, smaller onions can take more below-45 temps than larger ones can. I've never seen anything like a specific number of hours that onions can tolerate below 45 degrees before they'll bolt...just general comments that 'prolonged' exposure to cold temps can cause bolting in onions that are larger than 1/4" in diameter when those temps occur. In most of Oklahoma, onions are pretty safe from harm if they're planted anytime in March provided you cover them up if the traditional Easter cold spell is especially cold. I know that some people here in Love County plant them in January or February but onions put in the ground in January run a big risk of bolting, and if planted in Feb., the earlier in the month, the riskier. The worst possible scenario is to plant the onions at the appropriate time, from mid-Feb. to mid-Mar. and have them growing very well in prolonged mild weather and then have a very cold, very late spell of prolonged cold weather in--let's say--April. If the weather is mild and they're growing well and have gotten larger than 1/4" in diameter, that late prolonged cold spell can cause them to bolt. When that happens, it seems like some bolt and some don't. So, cold weather early while they're smaller is not so bad as long as it stays above the low 20s, but the later in the spring that a prolonged cold spell hits, the worse its effect on them. Highly variable temperatures is one issue that causes onion planting to get tricky here. Short daylength onions need to go into the ground as early as possible in winter so they can get their maximum green leaf growth before the appropriate daylength triggers bulbing. (Because each green leaf represents one layer of the onion.) If you hold short-day types too long because of cold weather fears, their days to grow are limited and you get fewer leaves which results in smaller onions. Intermediate daylength types can be held a little longer in spring before being planted because they'll have longer to grow leaves before the right daylength triggers bulbing. The difference is the reason my 3 individual bundles are intermediate types and my sampler is of shortday types...because intermediate types give me larger bulbs more consistently, all other things being considered. Dawn