I like to get some lard melt it and empty old dried fruit, cereals, cornmeal, peanutbutter, some flower and even some frozen chunks of fruit like mango pieces. I put the frozen fruit in last to help it all cool. Then I pour it into wax-paper lined sheet pans and chill to make suet blocks. This year I splurged and got a feeder for finches. Haven't seen a one on it. It's got about 18 opening with little perches the fan out like little cuphooks. I also got a block of dried corn and seeds on a chain with a spring. Thought it would be great fun to watch the squirrels bounce. The finches went for that, the squirrels here are too fat to work that hard and the snooty finch feeder is obviously yard art! gotta love the little guys. Had a small flock of robins here this evening. One see an occasional mockingbird. yes, there are nandina and holly berries. Guess mine are waiting for tomato time too. c

this particular infection which is definitely what it sounds like he has, blocks your antivirus program so it does not matter if he has one or not he can not use it and it will not allow you to go to an antivirus site and get one.(there are several that will disable your onboard AV however) It blocks most known addresses for security programs. Some variants have shown to turn off system restore and not make safe mode available. With out the use of specific written scripts for it there is not much that a regular person can do. Which is why the security help forums are so important for these type situations, they work hand in hand with program writers to get the newest and latest programs to try to clean these darn things out. Unfortunately many people have no clue help is out there. One of the reasons we all try to cover so many forums so we can direct them to help. To bad we can not help them all.

I know this is really old, but I just found it now. The pictured plants look nothing like the aegopodium I have in my yard, but I have the variegated version so might not be able to recognize the plain green one. An easy way to distinguish mine from QAL is the height (along with variegation). Aegopodium is quite short - 8" out of bloom, maybe 15" when blooming. Queen Anne's lace is TALL - I have 4 foot stalks and flowers in one of my perennial beds and they are one of the weeds wrecking it. It's fall now and they've gone to seed, so the seeds are sticking to my clothes like crazy. I have found NOTHING so far telling how to get it out of a flower bed. Hand pulling? Yeah, if you can recognize them when they're small. Herbicide? Not when they are in the middle of my irises and daylilies. Mowing? Uh... no. If I can yank them all out this fall - which would be tough because the only way is to dig up all the irises, daylilies and other plants in the bed - I suspect a pre-emergent herbicide might be the best thing, because undoubtedly a lot of seeds will fall into the soil while the plants are being removed. By the way, aegopodium can be controlled by putting metal edging underground around them, as it does spread by roots/rhizomes, but while the variegated variety is gorgeous, plain green would be deadly dull and boring.

>>Let's hope morpheus can help with a winterizer fertilizer. I think morph likes to use organics all year long EXCEPT for the final winterizer. He uses a high Nitrogen chemical fert for that application. The idea is to prepare the soil fertility for the spring. Any high-nitrogen, low anything else, fast-release fertilizer is great for winterizing the lawn. This year, I'm using Vigoro 29-0-4 (or some such, that's very close) because it was the second cheapest in terms of nitrogen cost per thousand square feet. The cheapest, pure urea (45-0-0) is too touchy for me to be terribly comfortable using it, even in November. Winterization goes when the lawn stops growing but it's still green. That date varies widely by locale and weather that year--for me in Pennsylvania, Thanksgiving is pretty close to the average date, but it can vary by 2 weeks or more either way. The rest of the year I use soybean meal (7-1-2, give or take). My applications are May 1, August 1, September 1, and October 1, but the August application is technically optional. I lean toward 15 pounds per thousand square feet to deliver 1 pound of protein-based nitrogen per thousand square feet--making the grand total N on the lawn about 5 pounds per thousand square feet per year including the winterizer. That's more than sufficient for Kentucky bluegrass and well into luxury consumption rates for fescue and rye. >>Christmas sounds about right. Again, I'd like to see morph's comments on frost seeding. Christmas would be fine. Whenever the temperatures have taken their final tumble into winter and aren't going to recover until spring is great. Perfect would be to time it right before the first significant snowfall that's going to stick around--but that's not assured in all locales. So off the cuff, any time from late December through February 10th or so is perfect. After that, temperatures are about to start rising for spring, and you want that seed to freeze/thaw for a few weeks, get wet, and go through pre-germination before spring hits. Sprout will happen when soil temperatures rise over 50 degrees consistently, which is another date that varies widely. Late March through late April are the normal dates.