I have since use my Mantis for dethatching. I LOVE IT!!! It pull so much stuff out of the lawn it fill up a 40 gallon can and more....stuffed. The lawn looked nice right away, not like what other people warn me that it will look bad for 2 weeks. It does not beat up the lawn at all. It immediately look better right after. I end up re-dethatch few weeks later again and the grass looks very good now. Mantis as tiller....not so nice!!!! Jump to much, really not a substitude for even a cheap front tine tiller. I still use my cheap Poulan front tine tiller. Cultivator is a joke. It jump a lot more with the tine reverse for cultivation. I know it will work better if pulling backward. BUT, cultivating usually done around plants which is in tight space, where do you find space to pull backward. I tried for 2 minutes, it throw dirt all over the place, made a big mess, I quit end up using my hand roll cultivator instead. If you think of buying it as a cultivator around flower beds, think again!!! Get it from Mantis direct so you can return within one year free shipping. I am surprised very few people use it for dethatching. It work so well, no jumping, I can't imagine the Blue Bird can do much better, just wider so you dethatch a wider path. The tine look to be high quality that can stand up to use even commercially.

lsimms, I've posted some pictures of the garden I help out in over the years. This is my friend's garden and I'm sure you can appreciate that I can't be posting pictures of her garden. I have posted pictures over the years, but the pictures are always isolated pictures of the plants themselves, all with the thought to respect her privacy. She has no problem with any of this, and her garden has been featured many times in some of the gardening magazines. Her work is well known. If you're ever near the North Western part of Connecticut, let me know. (Do I have any pictures? I've gotten very interested in photography recently and I've got literally thousands of pictures of the garden.) Roseberri, Blue Billow, for me, in zone 5/6 has never failed to bloom profusely for me. Never. I've been working with some for as long as 20 years and they always bloom. I know they've done the same for a couple of friends in slightly colder zones. Like a real 5. I haven't had the same luck with any of the few other Hydrangeas I've tried to leave out. I don't know that I've put Blue Wave to a good test, so I can't be 100% sure about saying that it probably wouldn't work for me. I'm surprised that you're not seeing blooms from Blue Billow. I'm another person who has not had any luck with Endless Summer. I can't figure it out. I bought some of the very, very first ones, and some over the years from all sorts of sources, so I really doubt that I've only gotten mislabeled plants. I think, for whatever reasons, I am right on the edge of the zones that will allow Endless Summer to work. Right on the edge of the zone that will allow almost any of the Hydrangeas to really work. Egoct lives just down south of me and quite clearly has all sorts of Hydrangeas that do quite well for him. I've seen it in other instances. Less than an hour away, as far as Hydrangeas blooming, the difference is like night and day. It's not a matter of degree. Go one hour South and you get great blooming. But where I am, it's zilch. I think that may also be a reason that lsimms gets great flowering. Her garden, I think, is perhaps closer in climate to egoct's than mine. It's a small difference from mine, just like egoct's, but in the world of these Hydrangeas that seems, to my eye, to make a world of difference. For me the plant will mostly get killed back to the ground each year. But sometimes I get lucky and the plant is not entirely killed back and I'll get some blooming. Again, just on the edge of its hardiness in that regard and just enough on the edge that, for most years, I get very little of that initial bloom from the "old" wood. I was just scanning one of the threads about Endless Summer being a bust and it seems to me that the ones posting great success were, from what I could see, all posting from zone 7 or higher. Zone 6 is iffy, and zone 5 is a bust. My plants almost always die back to the ground each winter and you might think that with an Endless Summer, one that is supposed to bloom on new wood, that wouldn't matter, that there would be plenty of time to develop a flower, but it just doesn't work out. Someone used to post here from someplace like Mississippi and would show these great pictures of a reblooming Endless Summer. Wow!!! There is definitely something different about the plant in that environment. She posted pictures and you'd see all these flower buds developing along leaf axils of the new growth. I can't get even a terminal flower blooming and she's posting pictures in which after the terminal flower blooms and she deadheaded it, the remaining stem sends out buds all over the place. I have a suspicion that the sun plays an important role in all this, but I don't know exactly how. None of mine are in serious full sun and I wonder about that. Right now, I get more sunlight hours than someone in Mississippi. Could that be a factor? (It'd be interesting to me to know what these plants would do in a place like Juneau, Alaska that is getting close to 18 hours of sunlight a day right now. Would more sunlight hours mean better or worse flowering for ES? I'll let you know if I figure it all out. I've rambled a bit in this post. Hope it all makes some sense. Hay

Nearly forgot that we had this thread!!! Not updated from last year, but there are some wonderful links here. For those new to the forum, we "bump" this thread to the top periodically so that it is easy to find. Kathy

Thanks Bet! A very comprehensive listing. Beakless Bluebirds is one of my favorites. Imagine raising orphaned bluebirds in a convent! Some parts are hysterically funny, like the penguin story. Other parts made me cry. The convent where she wrote the book is near where I live; her vivid descriptions gave me a new appreciation for the area and its history. It might be thanks to her that we have so many bluebirds in our area. You can find this book on amazon for under a dollar. Every copy I have ever seen is signed by the author, with her little bluebird drawings. Wonderful gift for any bluebirder or nature fan! Bluebars