Thank you so much for your warm comments. Reading them is the ideal way to wind down after all the hubbub. A2Z, the key roadside plants are 'Nearly Wild' rose, penstemon, shasta daisies, catmint, thyme, salvia, scabiosa, catanache (Cupid's Dart), 'Pawnee Buttes' sand cherry, and echinacea. There are also some oriental poppies and Siberian irises. I am adding more shrubs such as a groundcover honeysuckle, dogwoods, 'Summerwine' ninebark and 'Drift' roses. Next year I will also try some rugosa roses or something along those lines. The garden really is a mishmash collection that allows survival of the fittest. I am certainly not attached to any particular plant out there, and the whole thing just evolves over time. I would like it to be more shrubs and fewer perennials though, because deadheading it and cutting it back are daunting tasks. Next year I will sink some time into adding shrubs. (There are more photos of this garden in the first 'combination pics' thread from June). The clematis on the arch are 'Perle d'Azur' (2005) and 'Comtesse de Bouchard' (2007). I selected them for their later bloom so that things would be interesting in late summer. The arch is metal and was from one of those junky-type antique stores. Yes, I think it's 5' wide. Some day relatively soon it's going to collapse. You should see it sway in the wind. I have to cut back the clematises in order to preserve the opening in the archway. Otherwise they would join hands and seal the whole thing off! It's very pretty in the winter too - I cut about 2/3 of the clematis vines off but leave enough for some winter interest. We put sunflower heads on it so the birds have an easy place to eat (away from the cats). Mollie, the tour was organized by a local arts center. We were on the tour in 2007 and they had been asking me again for a few years now. I hope they don't ask again anytime soon. I need a enough years to pass so that I can forget about how stressful this was! I think I'd rather help out by being on the selection committee or contributing in some other way. I did learn things! The coolest thing I learned was all the types of native bees that live here. That was the highlight. I also learned that I need to use my compost, particularly in the greenhouse which is ailing this year. So yesterday I put down a 4" layer of compost throughout the whole greenhouse. Another visitor suggested I use straw as mulch in the raised beds, and I'm definitely going to do that. I hate spending money on mulch so straw is perfect and cheap. Oh, and back to the bees, I learned to use sunflower stalks as wintering habitat for them. DH did once consider making the sculptures as a profession. But the idea didn't resonate with him, I think because the sculptures don't have a function. The bicycles are a much better fit for him and use all the same skills. But thank you for the vote of confidence! Thanks again for being by my side (virtually) through the whole thing. I am still looking forward to regaining all my energy and it's great to have an 'empty' to-do list!

What hilarity! Love the fun posts, and learning a bit about y'all in the bargain. For those who have ever read my few posts, I'm the clueless one, the transplant subset. If there's subsets of subsets, I would be the transient transplant. I spend my life following my spouse's work, geographically speaking. I pack houses, and unpack. I accumulate all manner of flower pots and containers, then downsize, give away, and move again. My gardening efforts are full of hearty enthusiasm, as well as serial plant murdering (I like to blame it on local plant ignorance and not my PJIC disease, *plants jump into the cart*). Since we never get to live in one place long enough for either the humans or the plants to put down deep roots, we transient transplants collect any and all plants fervently, via swaps, pinching starts at public malls and other venues, and the local garden center. Then, we moan and groan about disposing of our pot ghetto when the next move is announced. Transient transplants spend way too much time covering up and disguising the objectionable architectural features of our current rental digs. We creatively hang plants, put up fishing line trellises to cover up nasty window views, and annoy the neighbors with our homemade garden accessories, obtained in pre-dawn trash-day scrounging. These charming accents (yes, even the old commodes planted with petunias), feed our collector (#6) genes, which we fervently nurture upon arrival in our latest garden planting zone. We don't consciously try to be specialists (#7s), but once we latch onto a type of plant that we don't kill in the newest climate, we grow it in every color known to the species. Oh, and yes, we have even been known to dumpster-dive in #2 and #4's trash bins, where the plant pickings are amazingly healthy, lush, and green. We transient transplants have become experts at covertly watching your work through our mis-matched window coverings (read - sheets), knowing there's gonna be really good pickings in YOUR trash this week. This serves to help our garden budget go further, knowing we must fill up our pots and fronts of landlord's planting beds to overflowing in such a short period of time, before we have to frantically put it all back, to get ready for the next household moving cycle. When the next move is announced, we lovingly dig up, label, package, and mail starts of all these frantically planted pot ghettos to our Northern friends, for safekeeping until we get settled into our next digs. In actuality, our Northern plant recipients can't even remember our names, or why they are receiving these care-packages of dirt and mushy, frozen green blobs, resembling a refrigerator science experiment....

All right, you guys, keeping the water in the clay soil is easier than it seems......I HAVE CLAY SOIL. Heavy, red, thick, mucky, yucky, impossible-to-drain-when-it-is-wet and impossible-to-wet-when-it-is-dry clay soil. The issue for us, therefore, is not how to hold the water, but how to get the water to drain. So, the pond was impossibly easy to build. Our backhoe guy, Elvis, was here in the late spring of 2000 digging a hole in which to place our 6' x 8' pre-fab tornado shelter. I asked him how much more it would cost to get him to dig me a "little" pond for my water lilies and he told me that his hourly rate was the same no matter what he was digging. So, I asked him to dig me a more-or-less-round (but not perfectly round) pond about 15' in diameter, two feet deep, and with gently sloping sides (so turtles could wade in, etc.). It took him about 10 minutes! The dirt he removed was used to fill in a gully elsewhere on the property. After he dug it, we filled it with the water hose and of course, the water was about the same color as what you see in the Red River (we are VERY close to the Red River so that is not surprising.) We put the water lilies (in pots) into the pond although they eventually outgrew their pots and rooted into the pond bottom. Over time we added other plants like saggitaria and pickerel rush. Native sedges and other water loving plants essentially appeared out of nowhere and began growing at the edge of the pond. The first few months, it really wasn't 100% "waterproof" and there was some seepage. Over time, though, as decomposing plant material deposited on the bottom of the pond, it formed a layer (and that layer has a name and I remember seeing it in Tim Matson's book, but I don't remember what it is) that basically helped seal the pond. Once that happened, the water cleared up and has been pretty and clear ever since unless we dig and disturb the pond bottom. Even then, though, the water eventually clears on its own. In a rainy year, the pond stays full all on its own. In a dry year, I add water a couple of times a month to make up for whatever is evaporating out. The fish, frogs, turtles, dragonflies, water skimmers and other critters showed up on their own. I do think DS may have "saved" some small fish from the creek and put them in the pond during a drought year when the creek was drying up. Because the pond is close to the house, the wildlife don't bother it a lot although we'll see an occasional blue heron "fishing" in the pond, or find raccoon tracks, or (worst of all) see a water moccasin hanging out in the water. Because of the lay of the land, if the pond is totally full, the excess water during a rainstorm runs downhill to the north so there isn't too much excessive puddling around the pond itself. The thick, heavy, red, mucky clay is the reason we have five ponds. All you have to do is dig and wait for rainfall and you have a pond. POND #1: The oldest pond is in clayey-sandy soil and is probably 65-80 years old--no one who lives here really remembers how old that one is. Because of root infiltration from nearby trees, it doesn't hold water all that well so it is essentially an overflow pond that holds runoff during the "rainy season" here, which is roughly from March or April through July or so, at least in a non-drought year. This pond is fairly well silted in but still about 5'-6' deep and is about a half acre. It catches runoff in general, and specifically catches excess water from Pond #2. Pond #2 is the "old stock tank" that has been used to provide water for cattle on this land since about the 1940s or 1950s up until we built the house in 1998-99 an the cattle had to go. A lot of the locals here have told us stories of swimming as kids in that pond--it was a great place to cool off after a hard day's work. It is also pretty much silted in and is about 6' to 7' deep and, when very full, is about 3/4 of an acre. We have a fishing dock there, but it has dried up repeatedly since the drought of 2005-2006 and currently is empty. It will take a lot of rain to refill it. POND #3 is the lily pond behind the house that Elvis dug for us in 2000. POND #4 is the sewage lagoon, dug by Elvis and Ed early in 1999. When the perk test showed that we'd need hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of feet of lateral line to drain the water from the septic system, the DEQ guy recommended we put in a lagoon instead. So, it is about 150' from the house, has what is essentially sterile water by the time it reaches the lagoon and is a wildlife haven. All the wildlife prefer it. It never dries up but it almost did during the exceptional (D-4) drought of 2005-2006. POND #5 sits at the northeast corner of my veggie garden. The veggie garden is on a slope and we had Elvis put in this small pond (about 5' deep and about 13' or 14' feet in diameter) to halt erosion. It is essentially a wildlife pond and is usually full of frogs and such. One of our dogs considers it his own personal swimming pool when it has water in it. It has been dry for over a year now because too little rain has fallen to refill it since the heavy rains stopped in July 2007. I think it probably dried up about Nov. or Dec. '07 and hasn't had any water in it since then except for temporary runoff that soaks into the pond bottom within a few hours of a heavy rain. We also have springs in at least three areas, but none of those areas are suitable for a pond or we'd have put in a spring-fed pond. One spring does feed the swamp and the other two feeds the creeks. One dries up periodically and that creek has been empty for most of the last three years (since the 2005-2006 drought) but the other two have never dried up). If y'all had my heavy red clay soil, you could have all the ponds you wanted. The larger issue is how to garden in that clay. In the veggie garden, I have build raised beds, for the most part, or at least have really, really improved the clay tremendously even where I didn't build a raised bed (the corn and pumpkin patch are not raised) and neither are the flower borders). Around the house, it has taken tons of amending the soil just to be able to plant shrubs and trees that "tolerate" clay. I don't have anything in that area that "needs" good drainage. On the east side of the house, the clay was truly impenetrable. Couldn't dig it. Couldn't rototill it. So, while Elvis was at the house putting in Pond #3 and Pond #5 and the storm cellar, he dug out the clay for the east-facing shrub bed, essentially leaving me a 12" deep bowl that held water just like a regular pond. How did we turn that into a well draining bed? It took six years of sheet composting.....putting every compostable material we could get our hands on into the bed and letting it do its' thing. We also added back a small amount of clay over time, and bagged potting soil and lots of bagged soil conditioner (a humus/pine bark fines mix). It was not terribly attractive, but every spring I planted annual flowers in there and mulched them and no one knew sheet composting was occurring there. Finally, between the sheet composting and the action of earthworms, the clay bowl stopped being a mini-pond and became a well-drained bed, but it took forever. If our clay had refused to hold water (which I never thought was going to happen), we would have used betonite. In the rare exceptionally rainy year (2004 and the first 6.5 months of 2007), we have standing water everywhere. Since a rainy year is fairly rare, we don't have that too often though. And because we're on a slope, it basically runs off. Two books I read that I really enjoyed were Tim Matson's first book on building earth-bottom ponds and the late, great, Ardmoreite (that's a resident of Ardmore for all you new Oklahomans) Louise Riotte's pond book, which is called "Catfish Ponds and Lily Pads". Dawn

I was living in town when Mr. Walski was giving talks about the wild turkey project. Although the article describes the CT River valley, I think there were other release sites that weren't mentioned. I thought our town was one of them because of the corn, apples and water. We don't have apple orchards any more but although we are down to one dairy farm, a neighbor has quite a few beef cows (and lots of manure). We used to enjoy seeing the turkeys roost in pines along a corn field. As day was ending, they would gather and one by one fly up into the trees. The cattle farmer made improvements to the field since years of not keeping up with things let trees encroach on the field. About 100 feet of pines were cut back. There are plenty more pines but too much heavy equipment activity. The heavy equipment is now parked a distance away and finally we saw three male turkeys in our yard and then exploring the corn field. Last winter we counted as many as 60 coming down from the pines to see what they could get in our yard before making the tour to other places. I don't recalled seeing blue birds in winter before but this year we probably have 8. I counted 4 females and one male picking up suet scraps and thistle seed. We do not have nesting boxes up so I have no idea where they nest but it is probably somewhere behind our house. Thanks for posting the wonderful pictures. A friend has been getting some good shots at the Nashua airport and posting them on facebook.