Well I was up early so went ahead and opened my SS gifts. WOW thank you Plumbnelly! I got the most beautiful hand painted gourd, a snowman spoon ornament, a Christmas Tree cone, a magazine, and a bag of peach marbles. Here is the photo of my stuff below. As you can see in the background, my newest cat just had to get in the picture. I'm single and live alone with my 3 cats so couldn't include a photo of myself. I tried and tried to wrap their little paws around the camera to take my picture, but they just couldn't do it. LOL Thanks so much for all my beautiful things. I had a great time opening them all. Donna in Florida From Garden

Hello again :-) So, after another year of trying to schedule better...here is where I am at. veggiecanner said.. 'I have a garden plan going every year but find that it is only a guide to what really happens. ' Exactly! I had a plan but in the spring, I got sick and couldn't get out to garden until the end of May and by then I had a LOT to do out there, so the veggie garden was off to a slow start again! I did manage to start tomato seeds with the winter sowing method but for some reason, this year I had only 1 container germinate. I kept waiting for the others to germinate and by the time I gave up on them and headed to the nursery it was June and they were out of my favorite varieties. I think that will work out okay though. I am trying two new varieties from the nursery this year. Wayne...didn't get to sowing the broccoli in June again. BUT...I have a feeling I am not going to have room for them anyway. I have 3 of my raised beds planted with tomatoes that were planted very late. They are still only about 2 feet tall and it is mid July! So I don't think I will be pulling them too early. I will be lucky if I get ripe tomatoes at all. I only have one bed with string beans and that will be the only vacant bed, which I plan on planting with cover crop this year. My large containers that had tomatoes last year, have squash, cuke, watermelon and pumpkin in them, so I don't think they will be coming out early either. That is what you get with a small garden. I am actually feeling very good about our vegetable garden right now though. I have realized that part of the problem is I am trying to renovate the whole yard and the work that has to be done is always competing with the veggie garden too. Once I get a lot of the other work done, I will be better able to concentrate on the veggie garden. I am actually keeping up with it really well when I stop and think about it. I have gotten the frame work of the veggie garden finished and this is the second year of working with it and it is really as good as I can get it in the space I have, I am sure. I don't mean that it can't be improved upon later, just that the groundwork is done. The raised beds are working out great. As for looking neat and attractive, we had laid down cardboard with bark mulch all around the beds last year. This year the weeds were up like crazy right through what was left of the mulch. I don't know why I was surprised. We decided that we can't be weeding that whole area every year, so we bought weed fabric and layed it down in the paths and around the perimeter and put the bark mulch on top of that. The label said 15 years...I would be happy if I got 5. [g] I did something right since I last posted. I did buy a cover crop, Hairy Vetch, last year and even though it was late to put it in, it stayed warm so late, that it had plenty of time to grow before any bad weather. I turned it into my containers this spring and the soil is much better. Everything looks pretty healthy. Also added compost to my raised beds this spring and they look healthy too. I used Hay to mulch the raised beds which has eliminated weeding and is looking nice too. I also am keeping a daily journal now [thanks for that tip George and tjg911] for the first time and taking photos as often as possible. chaman's idea of keeping some space open for fall planting so I don't have to worry about scheduling the earlier crops was one that I think might be the only way I am going to get a fall crop. [g] I am going to have to rethink if there is somewhere I can put a couple of beds or containers that I could leave free every year, just for a fall crop. tjg011...I did wait to sow zucchini seed until July 4th. So we will see how that works out. It feels so funny to have little zucchini seedlings in the middle of July. Well, I have a good start I think and I am keeping a copy of this thread on my desktop to refer to, since there are so many great suggestions that I hope to try. Thanks again to everyone for sharing your experience and veggie wisdom. Photos taken first week of July. :-)

Anybody know about Burgundy Cotton? How well they bloom? Fall color? I'm trying to figure out a good color combination for my backyard. I'm thinking of a row of light pink with a row of dark purple in front of that. So I'm thinking of the Burgundy Cotton in the back with Zuni or Catawba in the front. I know that Burgundy Cotton is said to have white flowers, but I've seen it in person and it's more of a very light pink, which I think would look nice with the purple. I did a combo of red and pink in the front (dynamite and Sioux) so I'm trying to do a different color combo in the back. Fall color is important to me. Thanks in advance for your advice.

My aunt, living in Ukraine, is a crazy gardener. Every country she visits, she always brings back cuttings, bulbs and even whole plants in pots and she manages to smuggle them across the borders with no problem at all! She had been visiting me in summer 2006 - and guess what? I drove her to every big nursery around Toronto and in 2 botanical gardens and in different parks (of course, we were equipped with scissors and cameras to take cuttings and pictures! LOL). When she was going back to Ukraine, her suitcases were loaded with all kinds of plant cuttings, she even hid in her luggage a whole tree!!!!! Well, it was just a small potted ginkgo biloba, but the fact is: when it comes to plants, she is just unstoppable ! I paid her a visit in Ukraine this summer in June - she grows some weird exotics from every country she has ever been: Egypt, Turkey, Italy, even from Paris she brought back not foie gras or French vine - she brought some begonias and petunias! LOL. Well, of course, when I was returning back to Canada, I had some "gifts" from aunt. Some of her bulbs I hid in my videocamera case. Now, imagine my horror, when in the Odessa airport, after my luggage was screened in x-ray machine, a security guy demanded me to open my luggage and show him my camera. Mentally, I was already saying goodbye to $500 fine and to my flight. I turned the suitcase such a way that the lid was blocking his view of what I was doing (thank God, he was not a curious guy :-) ) and promptly fetched a bag of bulbs from the case and re-hid it under the clothes, then handed out my camera case to him. He just checked the case, asked me to turn my camera on and off and let me go. Feeeew, I was relieved. And I learned one important lesson too: never hide the plants in your electronic equipment when travelling abroad, they are subject to screening in the airports! :-)