Lorna, have you ever heard of using those wooden skewers (like for grilling) in pots? I don't have the right type of roses to use canes. The squirrels bring the nuts up onto the deck to use the hard surface for cracking open the shells! A lot of what has been mentioned will work here... My petunias seed out and I've got a lot of seedlings coming up. I have a lot of rosemary, thyme and lavender. The bees do flock to the lavender, though. (DS1 carries an epi-pen) I have 3 fargesia clumping bamboo in the ground, so those work here, too. They are difficult to find for a cheap price. One of my providers had these and I snatched them up to try. There aren't any on his availability list so far this year. Notice the unsightly heat vent on the back of the chimney? I'm thinking of hanging a "decorative" bucket over that during the summer since we won't be using the fireplace inside. I just got a bronze thermometer and bronze clock for outdoors -- large, round, "iron" looking. I'm trying to decide if I want to hang those on the screened porch or out on the side of the house by the pool. I must confess that I was against DH's pool idea (since it had to be above ground). However, I found that I enjoyed it immensely for the short time we could use it last year (it was completed in August). It's a salt water filter and maintenance is so simple. The water chemistry was balanced every week without any adjustment after the first testing and correction...pretty amazing to me.

Betty: I live in Central VA and have a year-round veggie garden. I got my main inspiration from the book Four Season Harvest, by Eliot Coleman. Coleman's in Maine and has to use more extreme protection measures than we do in VA. I think of our mild winters as being spring with a little ice. The three principal things: 1. Plants won't actively grow much during the winter months, so to get much of a winter harvest, the plants need to be fairly well matured before the cold hits. So it is something of a race to get things to germinate in time especially if late summer and fall are very hot. However, even with late germination, your winter harvest may not be huge but you'll have a splendid head start on spring. 2. Rig up some kind of protection for the winter. Here's what I do: my vegs are in raised beds and I use plastic mesh and stakes to rig up a little fence around each one. This gives me a structure over which I drape row cover. First time around, I used one layer of row cover and during very cold spells or snowfall reinforced with a layer of plastic. I spent the winter taking the plastic off and putting it back on, dumping melted water out of the plastic, etc. Next time around, I doubled the row cover, left it on that way all season and didn't use plastic. It worked very well and enabled the plants to get more water from melting snow and ice - and I didn't have to be always dealing with the plastic layer. Of course, if there had been a bad hailstorm or other extreme there could have been some setbacks. 3. Stick with cool-season vegs and you will do very well. Don't try to grow summer crops in the winter. Save the corn, tomatoes, peppers, squash for summer. One really nice thing about the winter veg garden here is that it allows you to grow cabbage family crops during the time of year that there are no pesky cabbage worms. Many fewer pests of all kinds in fact, although slugs kind of like the environment created by a protected bed in winter. I had a very good crop of collard greens last winter. With temps currently hovering in the mid to high 80s, and rainfall, we have ideal conditions for germinating many fall vegs for our area right now. When you garden year round in our area, you discover that what we really have is three seasons for cool-weather vegs, and one (summer) for the hot season stuff. -Organica

I've pulled out my seed spreadsheet (seeds that I personally have, so it's not comprehensive). Here are the ones that can be sown in the fall: WILL BLOOM THE FOLLOWING SPRING/SUMMER: Centaurea - bachelors' buttons Consolida - larkspur Cosmos Cynoglossum amibile - Chinese forget-me-not Gypsophilia - baby's breath (mine self-sows, so it should be okay to sow in the fall) Malva - mallow Morning glory Nigella - love in a mist Papaver - poppy Nasturtium Portulaca - moss rose (another that self-sows, so should be okay to fall-sow) Ruta graveolens - rue (the herb) WILL NOT BLOOM THE FOLLOWING SPRING/SUMMER--WILL BLOOM THE ONE AFTER THAT: Alcea rosea - hollyhocks Aquilegia - columbine Chrysanthemum maximum- shasta daisies Cranesbill geranium Dianthus barbatus - sweet william Digitalis - foxglove Lupines Myosotis sylvatica - forget-me-not NOT SURE IF IT WILL BLOOM THE FOLLOWING SPRING/SUMMER--MAY BLOOM, OR MAY WAIT TILL THE YEAR AFTER: Chelone - turtlehead Chrysopsis mariana - asters Delphinium Dicentra - bleeding heart Euphorbia - cypress spurge Geum - geum/avens Rudbeckia - black-eyed susan/gloriosa daisy Stachys byzantina - lamb's ears Verbena Hope this helps! DL

What a wonderfully thought out house. I like that the guest room can accommodate a health aide, in the future. Something like that can extend the amount of time one can maintain some form of relative independence in one's own home. We're also building an empty-nester house & we could have reduced the footprint of the house by putting all of the "guest" bedrooms in the lower level (unfinished, for now). However, we chose to generously size the room and include an en suite bath so that whoever may need to stay there for a more extended period than the occasional guest would be comfortable. Even if we don't have a health aide, there may come a time when one of us needs extra equipment (hospital type bed, oxygen, etc.) so it will be nice if the other can rest more comfortably in another room while still being within calling distance. Tell your kiddos, "Well done!" You have every right to be proud and thank you for sharing. Jo Ann