Have 7 bluebird houses currently all occupied. 2 Owl houses so far no screech owls but I hear them in the woods along with my resident hoot owl family, the largest about 15 inches tall. Always have hawks sitting in the trees along the fields waiting for the mice and voles to show their nasty head. Have a wren currently sitting on 5 eggs in one of the small gourds I put in the little greenhouse for them over the winter. Lots of cardinals and every other song bird. Got a mockingbird nesting someplace. Yellowhammers in the field beside me. A covey of Bob White Quail I see in the woods behind me sometimes. Had a couple of Canada Geese in the pond awhile back. Also have a Kingfisher that hits the pond in the afternoon, have to chase off a great blue heron every couple of days and sometimes have a green heron at the pond and last but not least Charlie Chaplin The cockatiel that I bought my wife before we got married almost 17 years ago that is still talking away and whistlin Anchors Away I came back from 6 months at sea before I retired to listen to that!

Looks like you're coming right along with the camera work. Love your rainy day pics. That rose looks good enough to eat! It's raining here today also....a slow drizzle. I did manage to get the dead heading done and see what new ones were blooming today, although, I got a bit wet in doing so. :) I haven't taken the camera out...don't want to get it wet. If it stops long enough, I'll run out and do some photos with rain drops too. Thanks for the show. Jan

We just had our first grosbeak in three Springs, too! A fine, fat male sat right on the Droll Yankee feeder next to the French doors for a good ten minutes... We've also seen lots of goldfinches, house finches, the usual downy, hairy, red-bellied woodpeckers and flickers, but we're noticing rather unusual sparrows (chipping, song, black-throated...)and some great blue herons are using us as a flyway, too. Oh, and a pair of wood ducks visited the silver maples a while back--it was funny watching them wobble on the branches, trying to perch! Dh thinks he saw bluebirds in the fields over the weekend, too. The STRANGEST thing we've seen since moving here was last year, when a flock of what turned out to be AFRICAN CATTLE EGRETS (!!!!) grazed the fields for a few days. Becky

Nancy, Welcome home! How tragic that accident must have been. I'm glad you made it home safely and can just picture Titan going all out to welcome you home. I'm glad GDW, you, Tom and Jerry survived Titan's enthusiasm. I hope the animals will leave you alone and let you sleep tonight. They might not want to let you out of their sight. The combination of heat/humidity has been awful, especially up there in the northeastern quarter of the state. Jennifer, Winter's harshness can depend somewhat on whether El Nino develops or not, and they usually don't really know if it is truly going to develop until almost December even though they can see changes in the Sea Surface Temperatures months before that. The problem is that sometimes SST changes signal that an El Nino (or a La Nina) is going to develop, and then something happens and it never develops or it develops and is very weak or it just fizzles out before it really can develop. And, its impacts vary a lot and can range from minor to major and everything in between, so who can say, really? They cannot even get our forecast right a week in advance, so I don't put a whole lot of faith in long-term forecasts that have lots of moving parts. I think that we'll know by February 2019 if we're going to have a bad winter or not. (grin) Rebecca, Nice plants! Are the squirrels leaving things alone now? Jacob, Start it in flats indoors if that is how you prefer to start seeds. As soon as it sprouts, move it outdoors into the sun so you won't have to spend time hardening off plants raised indoors. Or, direct sow it into a prepared bed outdoors, cover with maybe 1/4" soil patted down gently on top of the seeds, water lightly. Keep an eye on it and water lightly every day just to keep the soil surface moist until it sprouts, which at the temperatures we're having now should take a week or less. I don't start basil indoors any more because it has reseeded all over my garden. This year I thought there were not many reseeding volunteers in the garden, but that was because they popped up late---in May and even in early June. Now I have basil growing in the middle of my Laura Bush petunias and my catnip, and they're all just slugging it out and fighting for control. Amy, I don't know how you get anything done with a grandkid climbing all over you. Nancy, Mortgage Lifter is a late variety, so it isn't a huge concern that it hasn't set much yet. In my garden, they tend to start late but set almost all summer even after other large-fruited tomatoes have stopped setting, so I consider their lateness a good thing---it keeps you in tomatoes late in the season. Jennifer, That is what I'd expect with a pumpkin plant. I think I was able to grow pumpkins and squash like crazy---more than a dozen varieties of each of them each year for the first 6 or 7 years we lived here. Then the squash bugs and SVBs found us and the squash and pumpkin party was over. I've never grown as many since, and mostly only C. moschatas because they can survive the SVBs and can outgrow the damage and diseases carried by squash bugs. In our climate, squash bugs and SVBs are just everywhere and are highly mobile and can travel long distances searching for food. It is just our cross to bear in this region, I guess. Jacob, And that is one of the reasons I've never even wanted to try the Florida Weave---I doubt I could keep up with it during the peak part of the growing season. I prefer cages because once I set them up and stake them, that's it, they're done and I don't have to worry about it for the rest of the season. So, y'all, today we had hornworms in our garden. Not tomato hornworms. Not tobacco hornworms. Nope. We had the hornworms of the White-lined Sphinx moth (probably the sphinx moth that is most abundant here in our area), which even is my favorite sphinx moth that I see flying around. I like them because they have a splash of pink on them. These were not the first White-lined Sphinx moth caterpillars we have had in the garden this year. There's been a couple before this. So, let's say that all this season, I've seen two of them in the garden and I relocated them outside the garden. Then, today, I looked across the garden and spotted a bat-faced cuphea plant that had been devoured. Just devoured. I walked across the garden to it and found 3 5th-instar hornworms on it. That was just the beginning. We found 13 hornworms on the cuphea plants, and Tim relocated them to the Back 40 behind the barn. Then tonight I found a 14th one. It was getting pretty dark so I relocated it to the ground beneath my shoe. Ooops. Were these creatures on the dozens of four o'clocks and daturas that we grow just for them? Nope. They were on one of my favorite little flowers that I raised indoors in flats under lights to ensure we'd have those flowers this summer. In all, we found seven of them on that first mutilated plant that I had noticed from the other side of the garden. I'll watch for more tomorrow. Y'all know I am usually very hornworm-tolerant, but I have to say that finding 14 in one day did not make me very happy. That's a lot of damage occurring at once. If the plants are too heavily devoured, they really lack the strength to bounce back. So, I'll be watching more closely for them now. I think they are a bit easier to spot than the tobacco and tomato hornworms because of the color of their spots, which stand out a bit more. Worried after finding those first 13 that there might be more, I tried to quickly check tomato plants for them. I didn't find any on them, but found a ton of stink bugs and leaf-footed bugs on the tomato plants, especially on the SunGolds. I guess I'll work on that problem tomorrow. Tim and I went to Spanish Fort, TX, today to the cemetery where my paternal great-grandparents, grandparents and my oldest uncle (I think he was the oldest) and his wife are buried. They all died before I was born but we used to go with my parents, aunts and uncles to visit their graves and tidy them up every June. So, today, Tim and I went back for the first time in a very long time and hardly recognized the place. It is a very old cemetery, and one that never had a perpetual care plan in place, so whatever care it gets is from folks who have family buried there. The grass has largely been replaced over time by Mother Nature with wildflowers. It is so much more beautiful with all the wildflowers than it ever was with just the grass. Someone has cut down all the tall, very old cedar trees, and I used those cedar trees in the past to find the family graves, so it was harder to find them this time. Luckily, as I eventually discovered, the lone cedar tree left in that cemetery still shades some of my relatives' final resting place. The oak trees that grow along the cemetery fencelines are twice as tall as I remember. Tim thinks it has been about 30 years since we last were there, but I think we went once about 15 years ago. Since the cemetery was full of wildflowers, it was full of bees. Tons and tons of bees. Spanish Fort is a virtual ghost town now, but the cemetery, the wildflowers and and the bees remain. It was a great reminder to me that Mother Nature does as she wishes and plants her flowers and other plants where she wants them, especially when there's no one around really fighting her wishes in that regard. And all those bees----while we gardeners may worry and fret about where all the bees have gone, I can tell you where thousands of them are....they are buzzing around the wildflowers in a tiny little old country cemetery that has been in use since at least the mid-1800s. Not many people have been buried in that cemetery in this century....most of the more recent burials are in the New Cemetery, established in 1939, but I didn't see many wildflowers and bees in that one, just a lot of short, clipped grass. If there is a shortage of bees anywhere in that county, it is just because there's not enough flowers elsewhere to lure them away from the old cemetery's wildflowers. I liked that cemetery with its flowers and bees. All cemeteries should be filled with wildflowers like that. It was just such a peaceful place, quiet except for the buzzing of the bees. Dawn