IN the groups of birds, there were some that were similar to the Robins, dark gray, yellow beak and eye, but clearly no reddish orange breast coloring. They quickly moved away from my yard (still covered with a lot of snow and water) to another farther down that had more open grass and soil. The Northern Mockingbirds are too light gray, and I didn't see any white whits markings, though I could have easily missed them due to the distance. The Cedar Waxwings are a wishful possibility, but again, the birds I saw were of a uniformly dark color. Also, there are no berries around here. They were all gobbled up quickly in fall, and any drupes left on some trees were chased down by the squirrels on their high-wire act. The squirrels even go into my yews and eat all the little red berries. The birds I saw were clearly pecking and digging in the ground to find food. Today is colder and windy, and there aren't as many birds around

Bella, I'm just going to take a WAG (wild-a**ed-something or other) and guess that the lake you reference above is Bond Flowage? We used to camp all around that giant, many-bayed body of water, even some spots that were way back beyond civilization. I agree with all sentiments expressed immediately above: the arb is not the issue really, and in fact, a vertical element at the corner of a taller structure is an enhancement. Those yews have not been treated well, and if you-OP-or anyone else cares, we can talk about that too. +oM

Lisa, I don't doubt that quite a bit of the fog is related you your illness, but I'll bet some of it is just normal. I find that if I try to hard to remember something, the neurons go on strike and refuse to fire, but if I can just relax and focus on something else for a bit, the neurons will sometimes put down their picket signs and go back to work somehow... I think a milk case/crate would be a good idea if you really want to get your babies planted. I'm assuming it isn't so hot yet that there will be heat stress + planting stress coming quickly after travel stress? I can't recall if you have hot summers, or fairly mild ones there... all the zone tells me is that your winters are not really winters... :>) Virginia

My dilemma was whether to put the plant back in the smaller pot, but Al was right when he said that it would actually do better in the letter pot with ballast. I don't know how much you've read about water movement and PWTs (perched water tables), but what the ballast does is keep the root zone above the PWT. Say you have a three inch perched water table at the bottom of a pot of water retentive soil that stays saturated long after watering. When you add three inches of ballast to the bottom of the pot, the PWT is now limited to the soil columns that extend from the main soil mass to the bottom. The plants roots can now safely colonize the upper part of the pot without ever being exposed to long periods underwater. But if you put the plant in the smaller pot, the PWT would still be three inches high, taking up more of the pot, so that the roots will have much less space to grow without periodic die-off from suffocation. As for which soil to use, you never want to have different soils in different areas of the pot, because one area will absorb more water faster than the other, leaving dry uninhabitable areas that limit the growing area. Because the ballast will keep the roots above the PWT, using water retentive soil is much less of a worry, so use what you've been using. If you read my thread you'll see that my schefflera had almost no root system at all when I added the ballast. I didn't get to repot this summer, and when I pull the plant out of the pot the root system looks really, really nice. I can't think of a reason to water sparingly after adding ballast. I'd water normally, carefully monitor the moisture, and water thoroughly as soon as the dowel tells you it's dry. 5:1:1 makes it even more important to water regularly, because it drains well and dries within a few days add opposed to the weeks you've been experiencing. Water slowly, moving the stream of water back and forth over the entire surface of the soil, leave out for a while, then repeat because 5:1:1 doesn't wick water around, so all the particles need to come into contact with water to moisten it evenly.