I love lilies for their stately appearance and scent... but hate the red lily beetle battle. We live along a river and worry about pesticide run off. So there are only two clumps in our yard. However, we do have many varieties of daylily. These are one of my favorite flowers... but my DH is not crazy about them. He thinks the long slender leaves and the same green tones look boring. The compromise was to place them among plants with different leaf textures and colors. And I have to agree with him that this helps to hide the ratty look of day lilies as they mature. (You're so right about that, Kevin.) A favorite new day lily is H. 'Light the Way' which I found at Bloomingfields Farms in Gaylordsville, CT. These are magnificent! The stems are very tall, which means the plant can be tucked behind shorter plants and the whitish blossom will peek out above its neighbors. Here is what LtW looked like the other day in our gardens. The flower color is more like the second shot...green and white tones. One "problem" ..... day lily clumps can get enormous and crowd out other things, even when divided. That happened in our small yard. The 6 tiny Hemerocallis 'Malaysian Monarch' fans that I planted years ago spread like the plague. We gave most of them away to a friend with lots of property. Molie

I did say it strangled trees. I see it growing right into the small ones. It wraps around the smaller trees and the tree has to grow into them to expand. I don't see that on the larger trees. The larger trees seem to get deprived of sunlight. When I look it up online, there are two warnings about Virginia Creeper. One warning is not to let it grow on a structure unless you want it to be permanent. The other is not to allow it to grow up a tree you enjoy. The articles do not say they strangle the large trees though. They say the vine deprives them of sunlight over time as they spread over the tree. What I had to do on some of my trees is cut the base and wait for the vines to die and fall. The vines look yukky for a long time until they rot enough to fall. I still have quite a bit of it in my gardens spreading over the ground though. It comes up everywhere. My neighbor does have one on top of a stone wall like the photo that looks nice in the fall.

Yum, I'm with you... I only have room for 2 tomatoes in my new retirement garden. (I used to grow 24). I also agree with Carolyn... Taste them in your own garden to try them as I did using pots if necessary. I tried Sweet Million a couple of years ago and it was terrific, but it cracked!! Then last year I tried Nectar. It was even more delicious and no cracking. I planted it again this year but also taste tested it in a pot, along with 5 other cherry tomatoes grown in 1 gallon pots. Now before everyone jumps in to tell me these pots are too small, please note they are TASTING SAMPLERS, not intended to be full grown tomato plants. When I get a taste of the tomatoes to compare, I'll toss the tomato plants. Nectar had to be one of the plants grown in a 1 gallon pot so all tests would be equal. It had ripe fruit second behind Ample which was also very good, but not good enough to bump Nectar out of first place for taste. Still waiting for Sakura, Sunsugar, Sunpeach, and Sugary to ripen. Sugary has the most blossoms at this point... Absolutely loaded beyond belief!! This experiment has been totally perfect in every way for me. It allowed me to see which cherry tomato was the best for my garden and my tastebuds with my qualifications... Early. Sweet. Delicious. No cracking, lots of tomatoes. Nectar wins the test. If I run into a tomato I feel I can't live without, I buy a bigger pot and plant one. :) I encourage you to try it next year and enjoy the ride!! Rebecca

Re: alfalfa. I've read wildly differing reports of it's NPK content; some saying it's especially high in nitrogen(eg 512), some saying it's a very good balance (usually still slightly lower in P, eg 212 or 323). It seems it varies according to the source/form. All agree it also contains a fabulous assortment of minor and micro-nutrients, thus, as Jeri points out, making it an especially effective rose fertiliser/amendment. As I understand it, the micronutrients make other nutrients more bio-available, amongst other benefits. I've been wondering lately about growing it amongst roses - it has a very pretty violet-blue flower which I thought might be a reasonable alternative to eg catmint in aesthetically complementing the roses. However, I haven't actually seen it growing to be sure of of whether the whole plant would actually look good enough. Since alfalfa hay is often on sale around here, I'm assuming it suits our hot, dry Mediterranean (mild, wettish winter) climate. The point I'm getting at is that after flowering, it could 1) be used as a green manure, ie cut down at ground level leaving the roots in the soil to do their nitrogen-fixing thing; 2) the stems could simply be chopped and left on the soil as mulch, providing soil moisture evaporation protection (or composted first, if preferred) 3) meanwhile all its other important minerals and micronutrients would be released into the soil as it gradually rots down 4) eventually the whole plant would become incorporated into the soil, where it could do its spongy long-term moisture retention/soil structure improvement thing... 5) sow more alfalfa. Or maybe it would self-seed if plants were left long enough before cutting down? I kind of think this sounds like it could make for a pleasingly simple and cheap all-purpose system, in theory at least! Nate, maybe some system like this could be just enough to keep your HTs fed and healthy??? While placating management's rather unusual horticultural 'idees fixes' - 'cos after all, you're only putting back what was actually growing there. Of course they wouldn't have grown alfalfa with their HTs in the 50s!! :¬D - but maybe management could be persuaded, perhaps, say, to allow it to be grown as a border around the bed if not actually between the rose bushes - like the clover suggestion, though ahem!.. rather more conspicuous? Just a thought, anyway... I'd be very interested to know if anyone has actually tried this, or has any comments/ thoughts on the idea. Comtesse :¬)