Kewl! Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery!

MARK YOUR CALENDAR & TELL YOUR FRIENDS Here is the basic information: Please email me for address (N.J.) Date: Sunday October 5th, 2008 Arrive 10:00 AM (unload plants and food in driveway and park across road on Sedgwick-no street sign on Sedgwick). Walk around garden, socialize, etc. potluck 12 noon Afternoon-plant swap(informal or prearranged trades), visits to nearby public plantings of hardy palms, crape myrtles, etc. TRADING MATERIALS:Labeled plants, cuttings (rooted or unrooted), bulbs, shrubs, happy seedlings, seeds, garden ornaments,garden magazines, extra gardening implements, or any other garden-related items. POT LUCK: Please bring a lunch dish (with serving utensil) to enjoy and share. Bring a chair if you have one (extra chairs here if needed). Plates, plastic silverware, napkins, cups, and iced tea & water will be provided. This will be a wonderful chance to share our passion for gardening, meet other avid and learning gardeners, have a festive and delicious meal, acquire some new plants & share our extras. In addition, there will be a side trip to visit nearby public plantings which include cold-tolerant palms. This should be a FUN, informal day to share our love of gardening! I'm contacting some gardening friends & posting on several boards. Hopefully we'll have a good crowd. You should bring a gardening friend, too! PLEASE EMAIL if you need the address and so I can get a head count. HOPE YOU CAN MAKE IT TO THE SWAP! pic from last swap needle palm in front yard Dicksonia antarctica Nearby public plantings of trachys, seeding minors, & seeding louisianas 3rd summer for this filifera on a south-facing courtyard surrounded by a building in town a flowering trachy similarly sited http://s117.photobucket.com/albums/o58/SteveNJ7-a/?start=0

Nancy, I bet the dinner was fun. Tim is going to tackle one thing at a time, so after the ball bearing or bearings come in (I don't remember if the problem was one or more than one) and he fixes that, he'll work on the electronics control panel think. Tim's incentive to be a great handyman is that he is cheap and hates buying new appliances. lol lol lol. I don't disagree with him either, but I also don't like having an appliance that only partially works. When I was telling him about the control panel on the dryer, I pointed out that having all those different drying cycles means nothing if 75% of them don't respond to the little button beside them being pushed. I also mentioned I was researching new washer/dryer sets while he was gone and that, if we have to buy a new dryer, we'll buy a matching set in blue or red to add some color to the mostly neutral laundry room. He said "okay, we'll get new ones if we have too" but I noticed that he then got really, really busy researching our appliance models and how to fix them. I suspect we won't be getting new ones anytime soon and I'm okay with that as long as he can fix the old one so it will work. (Calling a repairman chaps him because he believes he can fix these things himself, and he usually can.) Amy, I love baby goats. Especially the cute little dwarf goats. Every single time I see a video of fainting goats, I want to run out and buy a dozen of them. However, I know better. Lots of kids here raise the larger goats for FFA or 4-H projects, and goats can be cranky, stinky escape artists. If they escape from their pens and find an unfenced garden, then heaven help that garden. My brother had some of those big goats and they took great delight in climbing up on his boat. Yes. His boat. We have a family joke, ever since then, a sort of Dr. Seuss type comment on goats and boats "Could you, would you, with a boat? Could you, would you, with a goat?, goat on boat?" etc. Such silliness. Whenever someone brags about how sturdy, strong and prolific Heidi is, I am so happy and proud for Heidi. If there is a better paste tomato plant for our OK weather, I've never found it. To me, Heidi is the energizer bunny of the tomato garden. I have to be careful to avoid planting too many Heidi plants or it will kill me trying to keep up with the harvest. Gotta love plants like that! Of course, it goes without saying that a tomato variety whose seeds were brought here from Africa is likely to be able to handle our weather. Owasso sounds so lovely, even though it has grown a lot and become concreted over. It happens. Eventually people found those lovely little quiet spots, move there, etc., and the increasing population can make it challenging to keep the lovely little town from changing too much. Owasso sounds like it still has a lot going for it---good schools are priceless. I agree about digital appliances, but they're taking over the world now. You know, last year when our brand new dishwasher wouldn't work, it was the digital stuff that wouldn't work---and replacing the two digital control boards (thankfully, under warranty since it was brand new....) was approximately the same price as the new dish washer had cost. That made it our choice to either get a replacement dishwasher or a repair, and we chose the repair as opposed to having the brand new one uninstalled and another brand new one installed. What if the second brand new one didn't work too? I'd lost faith in appliances at that point. sSo, are we to believe all the value is in the digital stuff? I did get to watch the repairman replace the boards and it was so simply...unplug old ones, plug in new ones. Test to make sure it works. I bet it didn't take him 10 minutes from the time he came into the house until he left, and we spent a good portion of that time just chatting. It was amazing how quickly it was fixed. So, of course, I'm hoping the clothes dryer electronics are as easy to replace, but I bet they won't be. I'm also hoping our local top-notch repair guy doesn't retire (he was definitely thinking about it) because he is so good at what he does. Our local weather didn't seem that bad last night. Of course, with these storms that tend to move from the sw/w to the ne/e, we are the last ones to get them, so well before the rain even arrived here, we were hearing the news about the probably tornado hitting the RiverWind Casino in the Norman-Goldsby area, and even seeing the photos of the damage. When our weather arrived, we had maybe 10-20 minutes of strongish wind, but nothing scary here---you could hear the roar of wind arriving at about 50 mph, but that part was over quickly and then we were only getting gusts in the low to mid 40s, while rain and lightning raced through pretty quickly. We only got 0.60" of rain, and had only the most minor of tree limbs down. I have seen photos posted of worst damage from locations significantly further north and east in our county so they might have gotten more wind than we got. I also remember that at a certain point our local Emergency Operations Center lost power and was operating on a generator. We never even had our power flicker here...but we are so far south that our electric feeder lines come up from Thackerville, whereas the power further north of us (by less than a mile) comes from feeder lines running down from Marietta, so often we keep our power when folks further north lose theirs. It just depends on where the power pole/power line/transformer damage occurs relative to where one's home is located. The forecast for the weekend is looking awfully cold. Not complaining here. I've been waiting for relief from the heat forever and forever. The trees this weekend have a lot more gold in the foliage than they did last weekend, and our baby red oak is turning pinkish-brownish now. It is a random seedling from a large, old red oak right beside it and the baby turns red about 3 weeks before the mother tree does. So, our baby red oak tree ought to be red 7-10 days from now, and then the mother tree will be red a couple of weeks later. Lots of leaves are coming down now, at least from certain types of trees like elms and hackberries. This afternoon's sunshine sure is nice. It is amazing how nice sunny, mild weather feels---so much more pleasant than sunny, roasting hot weather. Dawn

Nancy, Gold is better than plain brown. Honestly, anything is better than plain brown. Around Thursday or so I noticed green leaves falling from some trees---they didn't even turn brown first. I think our trees are confused. Why wouldn't they be? Every week they are exposed to lows in the 30s and highs in the 90s. How they even know what season we are in at this point is beyond me. Currently it is 90 degrees at our Mesonet station and 89 at our house. There's reports of haziness and smoke in the air, but none of us are spotting any plumes of smoke, so I think that, as the rumored cold front moves across the state, it may be pushing smoke, fog, haze, smog, dust or whatever ahead of it. There was a 1,700 acre wildfire in the county west of us yesterday and it looked like smoke was hanging over the river this morning, so maybe it is that. Our gold foliage peaked around Thursday or Friday and is going to a dull golden brown today. I believe the hard freeze we had a few days ago has really impacted the tree foliage. Further south in Texas where the freeze didn't happen or at least was not as prolonged as it was here, they have better foliage color than we do right now. At least 3 or 4 of the red oaks in the yeard near our house have some red, and our big red oak near the road, which is my favorite tree, is beginning to show some red. It probably will peak next week though it is hard to tell in this weather. We turned back the clocks at bedtime last night so at least we'd be in sync with the rest of the area when we woke up today. It didn't matter what time the clock was showing---I woke up at the same time I do every single day, even if the clock showed it was an hour earlier. My body clock gets pretty firmly set on a time and doesn't really care what the clock says. It takes me at least a month to adjust to a time change and then before you know it, we're springing forward or falling back all over again. Jennifer, I'm glad you feel a little better today and hope you didn't cough your way through making the announcement at church. Hot and windy, hot and windy, hot and windy. It feels more like earliest September than early November. Chris sent me a text about a half-hour ago---a shooting at a church in Sutherland Springs, near San Antonio, TX. Word is several people were shot, including children, before police arrived and took out the shooter. He said he had heard 15 people were down, but I haven't seen any firm number on any media yet, and often early report are erroneous. It just seems to me like the world has gone mad---it is sad when people are not safe in church. And, in a state like Texas with open carry, it is unfortunate someone in that church wasn't armed because perhaps they could have stopped the shooter. It seems wrong to carry a gun to church, but we cannot kid ourselves---these shootings can happen anywhere any more. I'd like to be working in the garden, but all the swarms are still out there---Asian lady bugs, wasps, bees, yellow jackets....so I'm indoors. Oh, and the fire ants and harvester ants all are out and scurrying around. I guess maybe they are busy storing up provisions for winter. Dawn