Guess it depends on where you live, too. I remember Fancy Woman winning the Cook Cup in Detroit back in '97. This was mainly a median show, but FW was in bloom in several gardens, and most of the conventioneers were TB fanciers. So, Detroit may not be affected by late cold snaps. The two tenderist irises for me have been Chocolate Vanilla and Skookumchuck. The least amount of cold in the spring after they had started to grow would kill them post haste, and there were no nubbins or small increases to try for a comeback. These accounts are not based on one season happenings. Both were replaced. I think I tried CV three times. Walter Moores

Well, we know how to make it snow. Just get all ready to plant onions and Mother Nature rolls out the snow-making machine. I tried to work in the garden early today, but the mulch was frozen together in big chunks. It looked like it was held together by mortar made of frost. It was the best time of the day to work because even though it was very cold (31 degrees when I went out there), there was no wind and the sun was shining so it didn't feel that cold at all. A couple of hours later the temperature had risen about 10 degrees but the wind had really increased so it actually felt worse out there. You can't do much with frozen mulch, so I just came back inside and figured maybe the mulch won't be frozen solid tomorrow. I'd like to finally get the onions in the ground, but every time I look at the forecast, I think to myself that I should wait 3 or 4 more days. I guess I should at least wait until the mulch thaws out. It probably had thawed out by afternoon, but by then I was busy with other stuff. My onions still are heeled in and biding their time in a box of barely moist potting soil sitting on a table in the greenhouse. I might plant them tomorrow but it just depends on how the day itself unfolds. Bon, I used to push really hard to get everything in the ground as early as possible, but decided I get better yields if I am more patient and wait a bit longer. Potatoes, for example, aren't at risk right now even if the weather gets really cold, but if I plant them now, they will sprout, grow and get big, and then freeze when we get really cold weather in April. Sometimes waiting just a couple of weeks makes a huge difference. I don't like for them to get so big so early that it is hard to cover them up in April when we have the inevitable late freezes and late frosts. We always have a late frost, freeze or sleet/freezing rain/snow around Easter, so I don't plant more than I want to cover up until the Easter freeze is behind us. Covering up tons and tons of stuff gets old really fast, so I try to keep my urge to plant under control until a little later in the season. I don't mind covering up lots of rows once a week, let's say, but doing it 2, 3 or 4 days a week would get old really fast. We usually stick close to home in ice or snow, but might make one trip to the store mostly just to get out of the house because we have cabin fever. We cannot get anywhere without having to cross a couple of bridges at the very least, so most of the time, it is just easier to stay home and not risk sliding off into a ditch. To go to Marietta or Thackerville, there's 2 to 4 bridges to cross in either direction, and then to go further to either Ardmore or Gainesville, there's tons of overpasses and too much traffic on the roadway for the icy conditions anyhow. It seems smarter to just stay home. There's snow in our forecast for next week, Carol, so I'm guessing your forecast is even worse than ours.

Marlorena, I am so sorry about your crocuses. We have strong winds today, but my crocuses went missing before. Eaten, perhaps? Do varmints enjoy them? I've tried Firefox and Safari, and can't get back to just easily checking in and posting if I feel like it. Stupid pop-up boxes that incessantly ask me to pick a topic (and if I do, I still get the box asking me to do it again!)... Alana, if they fix it so that I find it easy to use, that's fine, but the Houzz programmerz gotta program, and they seem determined to make changes for the sake of change. Unless they really are trying to make things worse? vesfl, I'm glad you like the poem; it really speaks to me on many levels. I'd like Houzz to get their act together, and decide that their increasing obtrusiveness is not welcomed by all. Thank you for your kind comments. Melissa, yes, the name is goofy, but it's the "can we make money out of hosting GW?" perspective that gets me. I am truly uninterested in Houzz as a commercial enterprise, and if they just stuck to ads in the sidebars that I could ignore, well, I'd just continue to ignore them. For me, using a desktop rather than a "device", the formatting has changed dramatically in the last day or two, and not for the better. It's weird that everyone here seems to have a different experience of the site. Do they choose random users to be beta testers? Perplexed and annoyed, Virginia

I've typed and submitted the Week 4 thread twice today and when I hit submit it just disappears into outer space. I wonder where it goes? So, I'm going to try again, with only the word test, rather than typing everything and losing it again. I think I'll change the Subject line too in case the system is having a hard time telling week 3 from week 4. Rebecca, In Texas in zone 8, we only could grow tulips as annuals, though I sometimes had them come back for a couple of years. I planted them here anyway when we moved here, hoping that being further a little bit further north would help them live longer. It really didn't, although they came back every year--sort of. The second year most came back, and then less of them in the 3rd and succeeding years until there were none left at all. I love tulips, but don't bother with them any more. The warming climate worries me too for the sake of earth and all its flora and fauna. I had big plans for working outdoors today, but the wind has been gusting more than 10 mph higher than it was forecast to gust, and the things I want to do are not something that can be done easily with wind gusts at 40+ mph, so I ditched those plans. Tim's flu has relapsed and he is upstairs sick in bed with aches, pains and a very sore throat. (I told him he went back to work too quickly after only staying home for two days last week, and now he agrees with me.) Wow, we had great plans for this day in the bright, sunny early morning hour just after sunrise when it was fairly calm, mostly clear and 61 degrees. Then the clouds and wind rolled in and everything just fell apart. Today's weather now looks better on paper than it feels in real life, if that makes sense. Nancy, Think of what you and I could do if we didn't have all those pesky deer! And, for Rebecca, it may be the same---only with the squirrels. If they come back this year, I imagine the war is on, though I am not sure how you can war with squirrels within a proper city---out here in the sticks, people just shoot them if they must. Dawn