Just a reminder that the Georgia Native Plant Society's annual plant sale will be this Saturday in Marietta from 10 am to 2 pm. McFarlane Nature Park 280 Farm Road SE Marietta, GA 30067 We haven't had the sale for 2 years due to the drought, so we are pulling out all the stops to have a huge sale. Trees, shrubs, perennials, ferns, bog plants - all native. Plants were rescued from construction sites, donated by nurseries and members, grown from seed and some were even purchased just for this sale (several hundred native azaleas, for example). We'll have extra people on hand to help answer questions and give suggestions. Have a mystery native plant? Bring a piece and we'll try to identify it. I'll be hanging out in the tree/shrub area - stop by and say hi.

I went to the CNC sale today. They have several types of trees, including magnolia acuminata (cucumber tree) and magnolia ashei - two very nice native deciduous magnolias. Also they had about 4-5 types of trillium, 4 types of ferns (including Southern Shield fern), lots of phlox (fragrant!), two kinds of lobelia and many other perennials. As always, they have a TON of native azaleas, many one gallons in bud and bloom for $8 and some bigger sizes. They have one of my favorites: the plumleaf azalea which is the symbol of Callaway Gardens and blooms in late June or July. I got one there about 4 years ago and it is loaded with buds this year (and bloomed great last year). The sale goes through Saturday.

Nick, Congratulations on your new place and your plans for this coming year! I just got into butterflies in late summer of 2005 and absolutely love wildflowers. I never tried any mix and have been gradually building up my garden over the past several years. The thing that I find to big the biggest honeybee and bumblebee attractant in my garden is Anise hyssop (Agastache foeniculum). On just about any day I could go outside and see hundreds of honeybees gathering nectar from the anise flowers. The leaves have a heavenly scent and I just love the plants. I've read that honeybees are having problems so I want to help them out and hope that my pesticide-free garden will be a haven for bees and butterflies. One of my passions is Monarch butterflies, so I have a couple hundred milkweed plants outside and have raised a little over 500 this year. I have also planted other nectar and host plants for various types of butterflies, some of which I already have and some that I hope to be able to attract here someday. Not only do the butterflies go to the milkweed but so do bees. Other good wildflowers to plant would be purple coneflowers, Joe Pyeweed, blazing star liatris, ironweed, black-eyes susans...there are just so many wildflowers to choose from. I'm still reading about wildflowers and trying to decide which ones I want to plant yet. It's really fun looking at pictures of them online. A good place to get wildflower seeds from is Prairie Moon Nursery. Best of luck with your venture.

It is almost time to start indoor planting for flower seeds for early spring here. I used to have a semi-inside, semi porch room in my house on Chippewa before I remodeled my kitchen there. It has a lot of windows, concrete floor under the indoor-outdoor carpet, and a teeny tiny heat vent that barely kept it above freezing. I used this room to start seeds. I used some heat mats to warm the soil. I moved to self-watering systems after I learned that a single day of day of neglect could wither tiny seedlings. I had fluorescent lights that could be raised as the plants grew. Then in 2003, just as I got the system working well, we remodeled that room with the kitchen. The next year I did my growing in the mid-sized bedroom (right next to the bathroom, so close to water). Then Dad moved in and this became his room. The Chippewa house still has Forget-Me-Nots, Scabiosa and Dianthus that I planted from seed. I have never had a place to grow my flowers and veggies from seed in this newer house. DH got me a little polycarbonate greenhouse cabinet, but I have not used it much. I still have to start seeds indoors for it, then move them out when it gets warmer. This year I think I might use the desk area in the new kitchen to set up some seed-growing. I have these neat little set-ups from Lee Valley and this more complicated one from Gardener's Supply, except mine is 4 ft long I have room for one 4-ft growing area, so I am not sure which I will use. I have not mentioned any of this to DH yet, so we will see how it goes with him. I guess I could try to put it in Dad's former bedroom, but it has a better chance of living if it is where I see it every day. Dad's room is where we staged the kitchen remodel from. My friend and I just rearranged the junk in Dad's room yesterday, getting ready to bring in and assemble the far-infrared sauna we got at Christmas into my craft room. Some of my craft stuff has to live in the closet in there now, since the sauna will take up so much room in my craft room, which is already home to an upright freezer, a 3 ft wide cabinet, and a four foot wide cabinet. We hope to today,bring in the sauna today if we can get the layers of ice off of the front porch. BTW, for anyone waiting for the final kitchen pics, that project is on hold until we have warm weather. I have one cabinet door to sand and stain, baseboard moldings to buy and stain, and a backsplash to do. I just could not face doing wet saw cuts in a freezing garage!