Kevin,when do you normally uncover? The thing that was so cool about this snow is that when I left the house at 2 or 3pm there was still at least a few inches left and when I got home around 5:30pm it was all gone!

It just needed to reboot. It will be fine as it ever was. But you should have cleaned it out while it was hot. Now you need to wait 24 hours to stabilize the temperature.

When I sold my apartment people assumed we had staged it, but we didn't really change a thing except we probably kept the desk and mail more neat. Ida, I think that people are really losing their sense of the mind's eye and their ability to visualize and imagine despite being otherwise intelligent. Most people don't need that skill anymore and as knowledge gets more specialized, this just get shoved to the back. We also don't need to be able to spell correctly, or write grammatically in many fields anymore. Obviously one sees a lot of misspellings and and poor grammar in these forums. Or at the very least poor proofing, which still sort of proves it's not important. How many times have you read posts by people who misspell, have poor grammar, and don't seem very culturally literate who are building a 6000 square foot house with all the bells and whistles and no mortgage. It seems to happen enough. Obviously they are good at something. But being "educated" or well rounded is of less and less importance.

"I can't be bothered to go out and scout out examples for photos of ivy doing just as floral described ..." Unfortunately, without evidence, I can't feel compelled to believe your and Floral's claims. If it were true what you both say, then the physical proof should be available within ten seconds of entering the "ivy infested woodlands" that surround you, GG. The personal assurance of an ivy hater, such as yourself (and possibly Floral) might not be based on pure, objective fact. Ivy haters tend to not grow ivy or study the nuances of its habits. Instead, figuratively speaking they run from and throw rocks at it. "But it requires far more maintenance than any other groundcover I can think of ..." I know you wouldn't want to think this, but is it possible that with this particular plant, you are not managing it in the best way? I've heard this claim before -- where I lived and where I had ivy and where it grew with seemingly unbridled energy -- and found it to be baseless. In fact, when I managed ivy, I credited it for being not only the most dependable groundcover that would accept almost any and all conditions, but for being the biggest landscape time and work-saver ever!. The two half-acre properties in Atlanta I owned personally were each covered in 1/4 acre of ivy. Not even mulch -- which would need annual top dressing -- could have been easier or cheaper. I guess if one was set on hating it and their perpetual goal was to get rid of it, then having ivy around would seem like the cause of an endless struggle. But for those of us who consider how we can put this durable, disease-free, evergreen plant to work solving everyday landscape problems, find that barely any other plant is as versatile and dependable. "And if you skip the maintenance for any length of time or if you inherit a garden where the ivy is already established but has not been properly maintained, then all bets are off!" Interestingly enough, that was my initial introduction to it and ultimately, what caused me to come to love it. I bought my first property in Atlanta ... a neglected house and yard that was borderline abandoned. It was owned and previously rented out to faculty by Agnes Scott college. But their plans had changed and it had sat dormant for period of years. Ivy was literally everywhere in the neighborhood, which was primarily wooded. The yard was large oak trees, about a billion saplings, and chest-high weeds everywhere. In the house-half of the yard, ivy was front and center, In exploration of the wooded and weedy half, ivy seemed to underlie everything. I wondered if I could get rid of the weeds and keep the ivy (I needed to have something nice looking covering the ground.) It turned out that I could spray the weeds and their existence protected the ivy from a direct hit of herbicide. In about a year's time, I had what would have cost several thousand dollars, had I had to install it, of ivy. I also had ivy running amok on the house but it was not difficult to kill with herbicide and be done with it. I decided I didn't want ivy growing up the large trees and severed it all at the base of each tree, except for one which was a special project. That chore on a quarter acre of tree took probably took no more than 2 or three hours. It was much more time consuming to cut and remove the billion weedy saplings. It was a relatively short time for all the dead ivy leaves to fall off, making it much less visible. Within two or three months, all the ivy stems were falling off of the trees. All I had to do was walk around and pick it up, as a one-time thing. I won't go deeper here into how bad IT WASN'T, to convert a complete weed infested eyesore into a handsome, groundcovered landscape, thanks to ivy, but I have its general maintenance factors pretty well discussed in another thread devoted exclusively to that subject ...[Managing Hedera Helix[(https://www.houzz.com/discussions/managing-hedera-helix-english-ivy-dsvw-vd~5352716?n=16)