The coldest temperature at my house was -8F but I had five nights at -5F or lower. I had some winners and losers but I think I also benefited from solid snow cover for the coldest parts of the winter. I covered my trailing berries with row covers too. My Siskiyou and Kotata blackberries didn't have any dieback and kept most of their leaves. Both are already sprouting leaves and the Siskiyou are kicking up new cane sprouts already. Interestingly, the Kotata escaped vole damage although they were in between fully consumed plants. I think that because they are so thorny, that the voles decided to bypass them. My row of boysenberries were covered but could not lay flat, so they only had partial snow cover during the winter. They had some dieback but were impacted more by voles (mice) and cane borers. I lost about 80% of the canes in total. It does look like boysenberry (thorny) plants are reasonably hardy. I had a couple of boysenberry plants in pots that I moved inside in mid-winter (after the -8F temps) and they had about 30% winter kill but they are also leafed out and getting ready to bloom. My marionberry plants that were planted in ground had about 50% dieback but they also had some cane borer damage. They are leafing out now and I should have a decent amount of berries from them this year. Loganberry plants overwintered with about 30% dieback but they had decent loss from cane borers. They are popping leaves and canes now. My Obsidian blackberries died a horrible death from vole damage. There wasn't much left of them. I decided to pull them since they seemed to have a leaf curl problem last year anyway. My black diamond survived the winter but lost it canes to cane borers (I had to prune them off). I'm going to remove black diamond and replace it with Columbia Star. I did leave a wild treasure uncovered all winter and it survived but anything above the snow line died back. My semi-erect blackberries (triple crown and black satin) seem to have had little to no winter damage. Kiowa had minor dieback but it was to canes that would have been pruned back anyway, so there was no practical loss there. Surprisingly, I had two Kiowa canes that tip rooted (tip layer) which I though erect blackberries didn't do. PrimeArk 45 is sprouting leaves now but I'm not sure how much winter damage it incurred due to the fact that part of the canes had to be pruned anyway due to fruiting on the primocane part of the canes. I did let them grow too long and they didn't produce very many laterals which will impact summer fruiting. Ouachita seems to overwintered with little winter damage after pruning but they are starting to leaf out now which makes me nervous because our frost free date isn't until early May. It looks like all of my raspberries survived the winter fine. One interesting finding is Cascade Delight. It was uncovered and seems to have overwintered OK but is a 'Western' raspberry. It is starting to leaf out now. There might be some winter damage but I'll report back on that. I think you should try out Siskiyou, it seems like a pretty hardy trailing blackberry.

jianhuayegreentree, A blanket statement like that does not help anyone wanting to deal with their squirrel population. But since you have resurrected the thread I will say that I was able to thin the population with my Kania by about 30 squirrels this winter. It works quite well in my book and I recommend it highly.

Lol! Tried that sonic one and had trails leading straight to it, then all around it. It called them in! We went through 4 different kinds of mole traps/repellents before finding that one on the OT. Really worked great last year, now this year we can't seem to catch anything. Not sure if the moles smartened up or we dumbed down.

Rickey, Of course it was Fred. Who else his age is out driving around visiting gardeners in the middle of the afternoon? LOL If you see Billy Fred, do see if you can find out what he knows because he may know more details. Nowadays, when I ask Fred "who" he is talking about, he often can't remember names and will say something like 'you know...that guy that lives over yonder' and, of course, I have no clue who he means. Having said that, I hope that when I am Fred's age (and I'm not sure what it is but think right around 90?) I still get around as well as he does. Sometimes I do have to get Billy Fred to tell me who his dad is talking about because, while Fred always seems to have his facts straight, he does have trouble remembering names now and then. I had wondered about those goats....about how he keeps them safe because I've never seen any kind of guardian dog like a Great Pyrenees out there with them. I heard a loud growling this morning from the woods oddly enough (and I was inside the house and it sounded like it was right there in the room with me!) and it about scared me to death. As far away as your house is from ours, it is odd we've both heard that growling sound recently. It isn't like we're so close geographically that we'd hear the same growl at the same time. I've never heard this sound before and I pretty much thought I'd heard everything there is to hear around here. The dogs were going nuts in their dog yard, and I ran downstairs and didn't see a thing, but the cats were on the porch wanting to come inside. After that growling sound, I canceled my plans to work in the yard. James, I feel like much of what you say is true, but we have both good and bad government employees and always will. I know sometimes the local wildlife people seem to say whatever the 'official' story line is but their eyes and body language are telling you something else. Our local law enforcement officers are pretty good about telling us to 'do what you have to do' to stay safe, because they know they can't be everywhere at once. They also come as quickly as they can when called, but with only 1 or 2 or 3 county deputies/reserve deputies on duty at a time, their response time can be frustratingly slow. Game bird, I promise, if you tell me you see three dinosaurs crossing the road, I'll believe you. And. on a funnier note....Chris was 15 when we moved here and had a huge iguana named Alex. He built Alex a nice roomy outdoor pen, but somehow Alex would escape and run around although he always came back to the cage when he was hungry. We alerted our neighbors, and I showed Alex to Bill one day. We were watching Alex from the road and he climbed to the top of the pecan tree, which was then losing its leaves for autumn, so you could see Alex very clearly. At that point he was about 5' long. When Bill saw him, he said he needed to warn his wife and daughters because he feared they'd about run off the road and wreck their vehicles if Alex ever ran out into the road in front of them. Bill was afraid the women in his family would think Alex was an alligator. Carol, I do think a lot of people know exactly how to play the system. Tim and Chris both work at D-FW Airport, which is incorporated just like a city, and has a large Department of Public Safety consisting of police, fire and emergency medical personnel employees. Their department has several hundred employees and most are wonderful, but there are a couple that of virtually worthless. How people like that keep their jobs is just beyond me. Dawn