We are suppose to have a wonderful week here in northwest FL...upper 60's during the day...upper 40's at night. I know we still have cold weather ahead, but this week will be a welcome respite. I've been outside cutting back the rose bushes this morning. I have lots of dead foliage on other plants that also need to be cut back. With this weather I can space it out and won't have to kill myself trying to get it all done in one day. I'm ready to dig in the dirt and lay mulch and enjoy the outdoors! We have huge flocks of robins that come in our yard every afternoon. They tear up the grass looking for worms and insects...messy birds...but fun to watch. For those of you up north...hang in there...spring is around the corner! Kathy

Outdoor dreams??? Well, let's start with the 200,000 dollar + dream backyard/oasis. In ground pool, diving rock, grotto, lazy river, hot tub, etc with the beautifully landscaped yard surrounding it with raised gardens, accent lighting and the gardener/pool boy to maintain it all. More realistic (not NECESSARILY requiring a huge lottery win) would be replacing the chain link fence with a privacy fence for the backyard (8,000-10,0000) and finish having the driveway poured. Our current driveway is mostly gravel with only a small portion of it concrete. We sit on a corner lot and our property is higher than the roads. Our driveway curves from one road to the other, I.e. very long, and expensive to pour. Since our driveway is uphill from all directions, during the winter there are times we can't get up our driveway. Once we reach the concrete, we have the traction to reach the house. The issue is literally timing and gunning the engine at the entrance to the driveway at just the right moment in order to make it from the road to the concrete. I'm hoping that in the next year or two that we can at least finish the concrete to the road on the garage side entrance so we don't have to leave our vehicles in the snow drift on the road and hike to the house. Did I mention that my new stove and fridge are coming on Friday? I will post a picture when they arrive. I'm so excited to finally have new appliances (a first for me) AND they are what I wanted and picked out!!

Terri, consider looking up no-till gardening/farming for the area over your tree roots. Even making a raised bed one or two boards high can give you the space you need to plant, and the plants' roots will take care of themselves. I prefer raised beds, actually, and will be building 3 more this year. I hate the messy edges of directly in-the-ground planting. Got those beds, but I think they look like crap. I think I showed you the raised bed I made last fall, where I used Hugokultur and lasagna gardening methods, didn't I? Hugokultur would be perfect for all the untreated scraps of wood, saw dust, and even brush from cut-down trees. That's why I decided to try it. Can't wait to dig into my new bed to see what turned to dirt over the winter. There's also a preservative called Ecowood ($about $17 on Amazon) that you can spray on any wood. It's nontoxic, environmentally friendly, blah blah. It does weather wood, which I like. It's purpose is that it changes the make-up of the wood so it doesn't rot. It's not a sealant, in that it'll still draw water, but the wood doesn't rot. I used this on my new bed and the giant potting bench I built. I figure what the heck. It got great reviews from long-time users and if it makes my outside stuff last a bit longer, great.

Nancy, I expect it will take a while for the house to feel normal again. We had gotten used to the screeching of the tropical birds, the sounds of a lot more feet going up and down the staircase, etc. Yesterday I came into the living room and automatically turned the TV on to Nickelodeon just out of habit because I'm so used to having it on for the kids to watch the cartoons. It was on for a minute or two before I realized there were no children here and switched it to The Weather Channel to see what was going on weatherwise. lol. We had a lot of rain considering it rarely rained hard but was mostly just a steady light to moderate rain that came in waves as the storm rotated around the low pressure center. We're back to being a colossal mud pit again, but I have high hopes that maybe it will dry up fairly quickly in the drier, warmer weather we're expected to have for the next few days. I believe rain and the chance of severe weather return mid-week. Centaureas in general don't like our clay, especially when it is wet, so I don't grow them much. I think I've grown Sweet Sultan only once, and it was in a very wet and cold Spring and didn't do well here. Mullein does fine but tends to be invasive when happy so, believe it or not, I avoid it because I do not want for every single plant in my garden to be an invasive one, and I have too many of those types already. I have no issues with tropical milkweeds and think it mostly is just a pawn in some sort of power struggle between different factions in the gardening-for-monarchs segment of the gardening world. When I have grown it, the monarchs seem to ignore it for the most part---perhaps because we have fields and fields around us with wall-to-wall (or maybe I should say fence-to-fence) native milkweeds in season. The monarchs always seem to prefer the natives, so those are the ones I try to grow for them. I do love the colors of the tropical milkweeds as they seem to blend nicely with a lot of the hot-colored flowers we have in bloom in our garden in summer, including Pride of Barbados (Caesalpinia pulcherrima), Cape Honeysuckle (Tecoma capensis), Texas lantana (Lantana horrida, a name that always makes me laugh), miscellaneous other forms of lantana, and Yellow Bells (Tecoma stans). Because of our heat, our summer plants tend towards flowers in hot summer colors of yellow, orange, red, coral, etc. I might feel differently about tropical milkweed if I lived in a coastal area where it undoubtedly is overplanted and probably in bloom far too late in the season. I can understand why it probably should be cut back near the end of their migratory period so the monarchs will keep on heading towards their overwintering grounds in Mexico. If disease builds up on it, then obviously that is an issue we don't see as much with the native milkweeds that are not as long-lasting each season. Jennifer, Oh those cages and sheets sound like a mess! I would imagine the trees would have been fine uncovered. Our cats finally have calmed down and stopped nibbling plants so much, but to some extent, it always has been a problem. It is just as they get older, the prefer sleeping in the sunroom to devouring my plants. When they are outdoors it is not such a big deal, maybe because there's a large area to roam and they don't focus overly much on the garden, other than coming in there meowing to find me when they need to be petted or to have their tummy rubbed or whatever. After they get a little loving attention, they run off to play again. It might help that we grow catnip, catmint and catgrass in the garden for them. I don't know. One thing they've never outgrown is nipping the bean sprouts and eating them, so when beans are sprouting I try to keep the cats away from them until they've leafed out a bit more and no longer are so appealing as cat snacks. Our chickens lack the sense to come in out of the rain too. We combat that somewhat by only opening their door to go out into their chicken run instead of letting them free-range. They'll get bored if they aren't free-ranging and often decide to just go back into the coop after a while, thereby staying dry more of the time. Yesterday while we were covering up plants, the winds rose into the 40s and the trees were waving and the wind was sort of roaring and it scared the rooster. He started having a big fit...the sort of loud screaming he'll do when there's a coyote, a hawk or some other perceived danger. We couldn't find any reason for his distress, other than the loud wind, so Tim just herded the chickens into their coop and closed the door leading out to the chicken run so they would feel safe and sound. It was only a couple of hours earlier than they usually would put themselves up, and it probably was good for them to get inside out of the moisture. I think the most frustrating thing yesterday was that we are so used to being outdoors and being busy on the weekends. It was really hard to stay indoors. We rarely have days like that where it literally rains all day, and I'm glad. The weather news is just so dismal this morning. The Franklin TX tornado and the others that hit about 100 miles from Franklin killed several people and the one near Alto tore up the Caddoan Mounds museum there during some sort of festival. Then there were more tornadoes last night and this morning, all of them destructive and some of them deadly. I hate severe thunderstorm and tornado season. It doesn't even take a tornado to do massive damage---large hail stones and strong winds do a lot of damage too. The propensity for severe weather makes April and May less enjoyable, weather-wise, than they otherwise would be. Last night's weather was odd. We were down to 40 degrees by around 9 p.m. with an overnight forecast low of 39. Then, before midnight the temperatures begin rising again and didn't drop again, so the time we spent covering plants was in essence wasted time. Oh well, that probably was it for this year and I'm glad. We just as easily could have gone colder than forecast, so it probably always is better to be safe than sorry. Last night a cardinal was perched on a little ledge up underneath the roof of the back porch when the dogs went outdoors one last time before bedtime. Poor thing. I think it was just trying to stay warm and dry. I imagine all the songbirds would like for the cold to back off a bit too. It just seems so bizarre (yet it happens every Spring) to have highs in the upper 80s or lower 90s and lows in the 30s all in the same week. Maybe the new week's weather will be kinder, but I do see possible severe weather in our forecast for mid-week so maybe it won't be. Dawn