Indoor plants that aren't rootbound only need water about once a week and only enough to where a little water appears in the saucer. I have houseplants that are over 20 years old that have never been watered more than once a week, and some Fridays I forget to water so they wait until the next Friday or until I notice they are drooping. I haven't grown herbs indoors, but they can stand quite a bit of neglect outside. I've overwintered huge pepper plants inside, and I just water them once a week too. Good luck!

Rebecca, I understand about plants that do their own thing despite what we think that ought to be doing. I think every gardener has at least one type of plant that behaves bizarrely in their garden. I do think that morning glories and moonflowers just behave that way sometimes. I had trouble getting them to sprout in the soil here the first few years, though I have no idea why. Admittedly, it was awful red clay and we were in drought, so maybe the soil, even though I was amending it every year, just hadn't reached that right point yet. Now, and you just have to laugh, they reseed everywhere with wild abandon and have become a royal PITA because I want a few dozen morning glory plants to grow along the south and east garden fence of the front garden and enough sprout to cover every square inch of the garden in morning glories. They sprout irregularly too, so I am yanking out MG volunteers literally every single week of the garden season. I've never grown them in the back garden for fear they also would run amok back there, but this year some Grandpa Ott's popped up back there, perhaps planted by the birds, so now I am sure I'll be yanking out millions of them back there too. It baffles me that they were so hard to get started in the early years and now you cannot stop volunteers from sprouting and growing to save your life. And, in that same way that tells you plants have their own minds, we have had Milky Way and/or Blue Star morning glories pop up in a crack in the concrete near the garage for over a decade. They get no irrigation, no food, no care, no compost, no mulch and no relief from the hot summer sun beating down on them and the concrete---and they come back every year and grow like mad. I guarantee you if I had built a bed for them back there and tried to grow them on purpose, there probably wouldn't be a single one there. These are plants that know their own mind. Nancy, Hydrangeas do not do well at my end of the state---we are just too hot and too dry for much of the summer most years, but your soil and weather up there is very different from mine. There's a lot of plants that grow really well in eastern OK that don't grow well in other parts of the state, and I think hydrangeas are one of them. It isn't really the 95 degree days or 100 degree days that get them down here, but in those years where we have a lot of days over 105 in combination with little to no rainfall, you can just see the life leaving the hydrangeas even if you're doing your best to keep them well-watered. I started out with a lot of hostas our first year here, and the deer taught me they were deer chow, so we have none now. Daylilies do great here as long as they are within the fenced garden where the deer cannot reach them. Crinum lilies are an unstoppable force of nature down here and they don't care how hot and dry it gets. They bloom in the worst of the heat. Will they eventually wilt and die back to the ground if we are hot and dry for months on end? They will, but since their root clumps are the approximate size of a Smart Car, they surely do not die, and I've never had deer eat them either. The crinums will just sit there dormant and wait for better weather so they can green up again and regrow. I have had crinums in the same spot for over a decade and need to dig them up and divide them but don't even know if it is possible at this point---it might require the use of a backhoe or some other form of earth-moving equipment. Speaking of hungry deer and the lengths they'll go to in order to eat....a friend of ours a couple of miles north of us had to release two deer from the hog trap (these hog traps are not big enough for the deer, but try telling the deer that) the other day. I guess the bait in the hog trap was too attractive to the hungry deer, they crawled in and couldn't get out. That happened a lot in 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014, but hasn't happened since. I guess the fact it is happening again shows how much the autumn/winter drought has hurt their winter food supply. Kim, lol at the cartoon. Dawn

Campanula - I am still in an urban environment and I do find I have a lot fewer critters to deal with than those on GW who are more rural. I think trying to resolve critter issues must be very draining. The few times I've had to deal with them in anything more than a minor way, it took away some of the fun of gardening. But then again, dealing with heat and drought is no better. This is the first summer out of the last four, that I didn't have to drag the hose over every square inch of my small property on a regular basis. I appreciated it very much. I find I've expanded my interests to include more than gardening alone. I was so intensely invested in gardening for so many years, that I found I was burned out to some degree. I believe I will never have any pursuit that will replace the number one position that gardening holds for me, but my expectations have changed quite a bit from when I first began. You have to take the "should" out of it. And having other interests, keeps gardening in balance for me. My expectations are not nearly as dependent on outcome now. It's a process and you may as well get the most out of where ever you are in the process and enjoy it. I think we are saying the same thing. It's lifelong. As for the long season of bloom. I have only that front bed that I have that expectation of. The rest of the property has to be about what is the best fit for the conditions. I have a lot of fun, tinkering with just that one bed to see how much I can fit in there to keep the interest going. And it's not too large, that a change from year to year is a monumental load of work to accomplish. And it started out with a loose plan of how to accomplish that but since then it's become the most spontaneous decisions I make in the garden. I love annuals when I can start them from seed, otherwise, it's too expensive to use them in numbers that make much difference. Cool fall weather will get the same enthusiasm from me that spring does. I love to get out there when it's comfortable and try to get a jump on spring. This year though, indoor projects are competing for my attention. So maybe a mad dash next spring instead. I am planning to get some bulbs in though. If I ever get an order made.

dbarron, I didn't go look. I'd have to venture into the woods and we were too busy with the grandkids all day Sunday. I could have dragged them off into the woods with us to see what we could find, but the youngest is only 4 and she thinks we live in a Bambi world where all the wildlife more or less love one another and everything lives happily ever after, so I hate to ruin that for her at such a young age. She'll learn soon enough. I also am not overly fond of stumbling upon animal carcasses because I'm just not into all that blood and gore. I thought I'd just wait and see where the vultures show up.....if they show up. Sometimes, you know, the larger predators carry their kill away. We are close enough to the Red River that they often drag away what they kill back down into the river bottomlands where they tend to roam, or sometimes the cougars cache it underneath brush. In particular, I do not want to find anyone's cache because that would be too scary. I'll tell you this, though. The deer usually come and eat their deer corn overnight. This morning, the deer corn we put out last evening was untouched. It didn't even look like bunnies or coons had been around (still muddy enough to see their tracks if they show up) overnight to nibble at the deer corn. This morning, the deer came around 8 or 8:30 a.m. to eat, and they came in a large herd, not in the usual small groups of 3 or 4. So, of course, at the very least we know that they heard what I heard, or they smelled death....or....somehow....they just know. I wish they could tell me what they know. There's not many predators that scare the deer so that narrows things down in my mind a bit. Rebecca, I do try to plan herbs somewhat, but they also have their own way of popping up in random spots---particularly the catnip. I think the cats sometimes carry catnip seeds on their fur and deposit it just wherever. When they do, I just leave it wherever it pops up. Grasshoppers love catnip and lemon balm, so both of them are early indicators of a developing grasshopper problem if I just pay attention. When I see the catnip and lemon balm leaves riddled with many, many small holes as the grasshopper hatch is occurring in Spring, I can tell from the damage level if it is going to be a bad grasshopper year or not, and if I need to order Semaspore or Nolo Bait and deal with the young hoppers or if the population is so small that I don't have to bother. That's one surprising way herbs have proven to be very useful in the garden. Dawn