Jeff, the swap itself begins promptly at 2 pm, but I'm hearing many people are arriving earlier, some with food in tow. It is located at the Lake Cunningham Recreational Facility where I have reserved the covered area for the day. This park is on N McElhaney, right near the intersection of N McElhaney and Rte 101 (behind the fire station). Here are the original rules I established to help keep things from being totally chaotic: 1. If you bring one plant, you take home one plant. If you bring two, you take two, etc. 2. Houseplants, annuals, perennials, herbs, vegetables, shrubs, trees, vines (did I miss anything?) are all welcome. Seeds or cuttings can be swapped for other seeds or cuttings. 3. I prefer to separate the live plants into "swap rounds". Each person will put one plant into the "round", and numbers will be drawn to see who gets first, second, third, etc pick of that round. New numbers will be chosen each round so the same person doesn't always go first. If you brought only 3 plants, you can only be part of three "rounds". This may not be the way you have done it before, but I'm appealing to you to humor me and try it my way. 4. Since I don't want to keep everyone for hours, I'm limiting the live plant "rounds" to 6. We can swap seeds/cuttings in rounds after, if needed. 5. Please schedule your personal trades for a time that does not conflict with the actual swap. I believe the park is open sun-up to sundown. The Plants: * Please make every attempt to label the plant with its latin name, including the variety. Plastic cutlery or popsicle sticks work great for this if you use a Sharpie. * Please bring plants that are free of bugs, disease and/or weeds. * Please remember to water the plants thoroughly the night before, not the day of the swap. This will help prevent muddy messes. Sandi

More than you wanna know about too much other than Zone Maps, but... OK, well I'm gonna hit it again, then, but this time I opened a blank email, first... I can put it in that and if it fails on me and I can't get the posting page back, either, I can send myself the email... even if my net connection is broken and it won't send, I can just mark it to send later, then close the program and reboot and log back on it will still be there waiting to send, which won't be required, as I'll have the text in it to post on a freshly booted machine, lol... No more condolences for the lost post, please, by the way, that was one of several since I set up a wifi network, which got my internet connection "finicky" again (used to be a long time ago, then I got it running straight... never knew what, but time, fixed it)... Anyway -- Zones, or Meteorology 0.19, based on how much I really know of the science, lol... Most weather patterns follow prevailing winds, which are influenced by the jetstream coming over North America after thousands of miles of Pacific Ocean... Most of the time, this seems to sort of follow a pattern that gently slopes up to around the Canadian border on the Pacific Northwest, then sort of makes a steep dive for a ways and levels off for a bit across the middle of the country, before climbing again, steeply, near the Atlantic coast. You can find Zone 7 all the way from Alaska to New York... an almost continuous band. Most of the other zones seem to follow similar patterns although the further to the extreme they are the more spotty they become, from what I see when I look at the zone map... It's like a map of how the jetstream flows over North America in a typical winter... Now on those occasional winters when we have really deep freezes in the South or HARD freezes in the North, you sometimes hear about things like a "Canadian Chinook," I believe it's called... That's when the jetstream (for reasons I don't know -- don't know what the meteorologists know on this), makes an unexpected STEEP climb way high up into the Canadaian Arctic, then either a long extended sweep across the northern Midwest and the central and northern East, or makes a STEEP dive way down into the South and we get record temperatures in Zones 7, 8, 9 and sometimes 10 or 11. All I know is what I've caught over the years from watching the weather, and also from assorted shows on The Weather Channel and Discovery Science, things like that... and I may have a detail wrong here and there, but I think I have this pretty straight... Not sure where hurricanes fit into this mix, but I think they're so big they're considered their own weather system, often a thousand miles wide... I know that when some of the big hurricanes passed through last year a few hundred miles to the west, we got plenty of rain here, but little or no wind. I simply assumed it was outer bands from the same storm system that contained the hurricane, as if you watch them on TV you'll see smaller storms clustering around them sometimes... And also as they downgrade to tropical storm, then depression, there's no reason they can't get bigger, since there's no longer a rotating eye holding them together... bigger but less intense. Here's the hurricane I think people should remember more than even Katrina... Mitch. I don't recall the exact year, offhand, but it was just a few years back when Mitch was in the Gulf, then downgraded to first a tropical storm, then just a depression, and then just SAT on Honduras and POURED for a couple of days, raining more than 36"... Tens of thousands died in the mudslides... REMEMBER? I don't think they ever found a lot of the bodies, even... washed to sea or buried under tons of mud in the seaside... Well this was a mountainous area, so that's how it went down there... but WHAT IF instead of doing what it did, Katrina had suddenly lost its "oomph" and gone to a depression and sat there and dumped 3 feet of rain? That would have been even worse, in a place like that... Anyway, I got off the topic of Zones -- way off, lol. The most IMPORTANT thing to know about a zone is that it's NOT a "guarantee," even if you don't push at all... They don't necessarily accept one extreme year out of 20 or 30 for the rating... they look more at how many years it gets to a certain temperature and which temperature that is most often and consider those, as well... So if you had a 0 28 years ago, like we did here, which is Zone 7a, then why am I now in 7b according to USDA and 8a, according to Arbor Day? Probably because we haven't seen a temperature below 5, and very few below 10 in the past 20 years or so, and lows even below 15, even once for the year, are becoming increasingly rare... We're ALL risking a year when a freak Chinook event gives us 6b when we think we're 8a, but we just have to figure that's not likely, based on the pattern, and BE PREPARED just in case... How do you prepare? Well, really about all you can do is mulch and maybe black plastic, which I'm NOT in favor of, as it could harbor fungus and whatnot and make the root zone TOO warm on mild, sunny winter days... Even though what I read on them says my colocasia would probably overwinter without mulch, I mulch them as soon as first frost kills them back and I cut them back... I mulch my angel trumpets that are in the ground, and took FOREVER to get going this year... Gonna have to work on that next year, I guess... still no blooms on them, but last year they bloomed very late -- October. I recently deadheaded my two bigguns in the pots and will fertilize again tomorrow... try to get at least one more good flush out of 'em... They take about 5 gallons of water a day, each, I'd estimate... I think they need bigger pots. Hmmmm... Gee, wonder where I could find some? :)

Still hounding carwashes but haven't gotten the timing right. I'm as patient as I am cheap, though. I'll get one yet! I called the Guilford County Extension and they're selling them for $100, which I think is too much for a pickle barrel with a spigot. The Extension does hold occasional classes to make barrels, but then you only pay $50 to keep the barrel you make. So it's at least a $50 markup for a premade one. Gonna try to sign up for a class, in any event. $50 is more like it. I know it's a supply/demand/whatever-the-market-will-bear thing, but it seems that a partly govt-funded agency could sell rain barrels to taxpayers at a more affordable price. Raleigh's are less expensive, but then again, Raleigh seems to be the NC hub of all things rain barrel.

Madgallica, he neighbors on the other side of the chain link have grass on their flat area. They are lucky enough to have a garage at street level so no need of a ground cover on their slope. Farther down the street, some neighbors have pachysandra (which looks nice now but is weedy in the summer), English ivy, or a combination of things including shrubs or small trees on their slopes. No one has a solution that really looks good, IMO, although the pachy and ivy aren't terrible. Yaardvark, I need groundcover ideas for both the flat areas beside the path and the large slope close to the street. Right now the sides of the path are planted (sparsely) with vinca minor, which I love, but it doesn't have to be the only ground cover in the garden. I'm open to more variety on that lower slope as well- it's just not as important to me because I almost never see it. As long as it is low maintenance and looks decent, I'm happy. Embothrium, thank you for the heads up about thyme (and other short ground covers) for weed suppression. Is there a ground cover or covers you would recommend here? I'm starting to think it might be better to choose some low spreading shrubs and put down cardboard and mulch between them once a year to keep down the weeds.