I have kept trees in their original shipping boxes, in the sawdust in the bag, for almost a month. I just opened them up to water them a little bit. Not ideal, but I was too sick to get out there and plant them. There were several hundred so it wasn't some little job. I had no one I could trust to put them in the ground the way I wanted and where I wanted. I think you are making a mistake if you put them in a bucket of water, but if you have done that before and it worked for you then you're golden. I had better luck keeping them in the box than I did heeling them in and then transplanting the, but I think that is because the guys doing the planting let roots get too dry. Ask yourself how the nursery kept them. In a thirty two degree room with 95 percent humidity. Often they don't even put them in sawdust. They are just stacked up there.

The snow has gone, the sun is out and it's quite mild now. My snowdrops have recovered along with the Hellebores which I thought were toast for sure. I've grown Hellebores for years and have never seen them keeled over before. I think it happened because we had it so mild the first part of winter, everything had started to grow and then Wam!!! the deep freeze hit. I actually got a bit of weeding done today. I've got an invasion of Herb Robert and Buttercup, I don't think I'll ever get rid of :(. Annette

Jay, No! Say it isn't so! Winter has a lot of nerve arriving at the end of December. At least you had some good weather for a while so you could work on your outdoor projects. I guess that is over now. We have one more good day here (high temp today was around midnight--68 degrees at that time and we still should stay in the 50s all day) but we'll be much colder after the front moves through tonight. Being a lot further south, I think the lowest our temps will drop will be about 18 degrees tomorrow night. Still, after a couple of days in the 70s, that 18 degrees will feel really cold. Carol, I saw on The Weather Channel yesterday afternoon that Dr. Forbes had given a fairly high (for Dec.) TorCon Index to parts of the south today, but didn't really think it would hit OK. I hope the hail missed y'all and I hope Dorothy's place wasn't hit too hard by the storm. We had a brief rainshower during the early morning hours, bring our rain for this week to about 1.5" and to about 2.5" for the month, so we've had a good, wet December here. Hopefully the residents of Arkansas and other states that are at risk today will not be hit too hard by the forecasted severe storms. Somehow, tornadoes on the last day of this year just seems to fit right in with all the other wild weather we had in 2010. I've linked the Storm Prediction Center's Convective Outlook below for anyone who wants to read it or look at the graphic of the risk area. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: Storm Prediction Center's Outlook

10:30 AM 26 with a real feel of 10 here. Going to 29 with real feel of 13, then down to 7 degrees tonight with a real feel of MINUS 11. This is Georgia? Stay warm Glenda.