No they don't have a fit when we take them...but they sniff around the area hunting them. Then they look at me like "what'd ya do with it?" They did bring in a live bird once.That was chaos! Me chasing the bird,the dogs chasing after me....but we managed to get it out the door.Mostly though it's things that are already dead. Emmie caught a big dove once though.It was hysterical! Little Emmie with a dove in her mouth by the tail end,the dove flapping it's wings...I thought it would fly away with her.I yelled "Drop It!" though and she did.It took off so I don't think she hurt it.And once Mic caught a lizard,saw him walking proudly around with a head out the side of his mouth and a tail out the other side.But he dropped it too when I yelled,it ran away.Best thing I taught my dogs..."Drop It!" :) No snakes or other critters so far. Doggie TV! They keep me entertained.

Jess: The ideal time to prune roses is when they go dormant, at the COLDEST time of the year. I prune roses right after a hard frost which zaps out the leaves. Then I prune roses again in spring time, since we have more dead branches from -20 below zero. Crown Princess Magareta got pruned twice, right before winter, and again in spring before the rain hit. My second pruning produce more blooms. I checked on multiflora rootstock: 1) yes, it likes acidic, and my Comte de Chambord (grafted on multiflora) loves sulfate of potash (21% sulfur), gypsum .. but hate pea-gravel (pH 9). It loves tons of acidic rain, so I run the down-pour from my rain-spout via a hose onto that rose. Salty fertilizer isn't best for roses grafted on multiflora. Multiflora picks up salt well, thus more prone to rust. Multiflora prefers cool & rainy like the climate they are native to: Japan, Korea and Eastern China. They are imported to cool & rainy eastern United States in 1866 as rootstock for ornamental roses, and became invasive. I notice that my 2 own-root Comte de Chambord can take heat & drought much better than my Comte grafted on Multiflora: it sulks at temp above 90, and can't handle dryness.

I had one family move into the Norway Maple in my backyard. She chose an inconspicuous crotch on a downward pointing branch. I wondered what kind of growth was occurring on the tree branch until I finally saw her returning home! It was a hummingbird nest, after all! The nests are well camouflaged and resemble mossy caterpillar webs. If you're trying to judge a nest from afar, use binoculars. Without actually seeing the bird fly to the nest there would have been no other way to identify it from the ground.

If you planted both peas at the same time and they germinated at the same time, if you base your expectations on estimated Days To Maturity, then Sugar Ann should be about two weeks earlier, but there's no guarantees because Oregon Giant Dwarf Snow Peas might like the cooler weather a little better. I do like that they are giants and dwarfs at the same time, which kinda makes me grin because it just sounds wrong. That is part of the magic of gardening---sometimes plant names make no sense. There's an heirloom tomato that illustrates this perfectly (really, there's tons of them). It is called Big White Pink Stripes. So, are you picturing a large white tomato with pink stripes? That seems logical, right? Nope. It is more of what I'd call a medium-sized peach colored fruit both inside and out, with a faint pink blush (sometimes) on the blossom end. Many people never see the white striping, so I guess we can assume the white striping might happen in some climates but not all or perhaps at a certain stage of fruit growth. Who knows. I bet when someone named it Big White Pink Stripes, it was a name that made sense at the time. I believe the first dwarf tomato plant I ever grew was called New Big Dwarf, because a big dwarf makes sense too, right? At least the silliness of the names can keep us amused. Early GIrl is one of the stragest tomato plants I've ever grown. Don't get me wrong. It produces great. It doesn't run out of steam and stop producing at mid-summer. It just keeps going. But.... In my garden, Early Girl is rarely early. Almost never. Sometimes plenty of other varieties that have DTMs in the 70s produce ripe fruit before it does. Every now and then, though, it will produce early if not earliest. It makes no sense, and it makes me wonder if there are various strains of EG out there, with some being the true ones that produce early and others having mutated or changed somewhat and producing later. Regardless of whether EG produces early or late, the fruit and taste look the same, and it produces heavily so I grow it. I just know I cannot count on it to be early every year...or sometimes ever. A couple of years ago it was early and the shock almost killed me. This year's earliest ripe fruits have come from the Better Boy I bought in January, which produced ripe fruit by around the third week in March (when it still was inside the house) and SunGolds I grew from seed. The next one to produce ripe fruit will be either the next round of fruit from Better Boy or the fruit on the 4 or 5 Sophie's Choice plants I raised from seed for early fruit this year. Sophie's Choice is a workhorse that produces well and heavily, and it generally is early. All veggie varieties seem to do as they please though, with mid-season and late varieties sometimes freaking you out by producing fruit before the early ones do. Gardening is just weird that way sometimes.