Hello all, Thanks for a fabulous swap. I owe Matt a special dinner or three for loading the truck and staking out the spot! I am so excited about all my swaps, and the great scores from the Gambler's Circle. I am such a plant-a-holic! Even after the swap, a great visit with Sean & Bev - who gave me a bounty of plants, (I'm her backup / insurance garden) I was still sorely tempted to stop on the way home from Vienna at a roadside plant sale of fabulous blooming sweet williams... Matt saved me from that danger, but only just. I think I may need to get a fourth arbour to hold all the climbing vines from last year and this year :-) This is the first time I've smelled my vining honeysuckle from a trade a couple years ago, it's is the middle of the Friendship garden out front, and is usually tough to get to for all the tall plants. There aren't as many self seeded sunflowers this year, so I was able to tiptoe over there. My garden is so much richer and fuller for all the trades and happy memories of friends who have given them to me. Thanks again, like Ross I am already looking forward to next year's swap. But I am rather daunted at the task ahead of planting all my bounty! Thank goodness a large number of boring iris and black eyed susans are getting torn out this year, that'll make some easy room for newbies. Cheers, Heather / BlueIris3 Hope to see you all at Signet's picnic in daylily season.

Hostas, definitely, for your shady areas and astilbes, and maybe sweet woodruff, lamium, or lily of the valley for a nice ground cover. For sunny areas, I love stargazer lilies, veronica, beebalm, catmint (not catNIP, and baby's breath. Creeping thyme is another fast spreader for me. Don't nelect geraniums---the real ones (aka cranesbill) are lovely. Be careful with mint---it can become horribly invasive. I've never had much luck overwintering herbs---my lavender just up and disappears every year!

My favorite mint, bought as "Vietnamese" from Richters seems to have overwintered, seed-grown beebalm looks to be doing very well where it was planted last Fall. Alpine strawberries are blooming away. Thyme doesn't count, I just planted it, along with some more sage. My lemon grass (what's left after being cat-attacked) will go out soon. Chives are popping up too. All the other herb-essentials have yet to be started from seed (or bought), I'm a little behind. Borage, though I'm waiting on because it got frost-bit last year. I think my lemon gem marigolds have reseeded themselves again this too! I'll probably be replacing my rosemary this year too, it made it through the winter but might not transplant well. I decided to move my pomegranate to the warm spot where the rosemary was.

My mom planted mint in a big, deep plastic pot with the bottom cut out. I'm not sure if it grew out from under the pot, but the stems flopped over and rooted outside the pot, plus seedlings appeared some feet away from the mother plant. So, I'd have to say No, lawn edging would not be an effective containment system for mint. For anything as tall as Joe Pye Weed, I'd guess you'd need something about a foot deep - and my JPW spreads more by seedlings than by spreading. I do use both steel and plastic edging - 4" wide - to keep the grass out of the beds. I still have to monitor that edge, but it's fairly effective. I use it along with bricks for a mowing strip. It's much better than bricks alone, since they're not quite deep enough to stop the grass (plus, there are gaps between the bricks, of course).