Hi Kathyjb, Your orange flower pictured is a cosmos, which is an annual. If the other blooms in the pic, have similar foliage as the orange, then you have Cosmos Bright Lights, an annual mix. They are great for reseeding themselves for the next year. I have even had them reseed in the same year. When the earliest plants are pretty well spent late in the season, there are often new ones that reseeded that will then bloom clear up until frost here. Sue Here is a link that might be useful: Bright Lights.

FN, On the subject of overthinning, since we each have different sized trees what is the measure? i.e. Space between individual fruit, or number of fruit per linear foot of branch etc. Along with plums I already have, I am experimenting with growing some of mine as fans and others with horizontal scaffolds. Last spring I planted various plum cots/aprium varieties. I have FS, Flavor King, Flavor Queen, Dapple Dandy, Flavor Delight, Splash, Flavor Grenade, etc and 3 (Geneva, Metz, Nancy ) .They all went in the ground last summer and I was surprised by the growth. I got 48 inches on some new branches so that by October I already started tying some to the trellis starting to form the base structure. Mike

Dorothy, Maybe you did wipe out all of them last year. We have potatoes in 3 separate areas and only one of those areas has had the potato beetles. Other beds in that garden that sit directly across a 2'-wide pathway haven't even had them. I grew potatoes in that raised bed two years ago and did have some CPBs hatch out in it last year, but thought I got all of them. Apparently I didn't. I planted far too many potatoes and planted them in little spurts of activity over a fairly long period of time, so the oldest ones are between 3 and 4' tall and the youngest ones are only about a foot tall. Merely because there's so many potato plants, I have been expecting major CPB trouble, but so far it has been only minor trouble. I'm hoping I caught and squished them all before they could lay more eggs. All of the plants aren't blooming yet. About 60% have bloomed, and the bloom time definitely seems linked to the variety. In most cases you see where one variety stops and another starts because either the blooms change colors or there are no blooms. I'll be miserable at potato digging time. We have 6 rows of potatoes 40' long , 8 rows 12' long and 4 rows 10' long. I'll be hot and tired and cranky while digging them....but we'll likely have a year's supply of potatoes when I'm done. Since I planted far less tomato plants this year, that opened up a lot of space, and I filled it with potatoes. Wbonesteel, In my garden, it is teeny-tiny grasshoppers that are eating holes in the potato foliage right now. They've been at it for days. The ones I've seen this week are about 1/16" long and are brown. I have a lot of song birds in the garden all the time (until I walk into it) and I think they are catching all the grasshoppers they can find and are eating them, because the larger grasshoppers (maybe 1/4" long and most were green) that were in there last week aren't around any more. I've also found some potato leaf hoppers in there and have killed every single one I've seen...which has been only 3 or 4. Last year was a bad year pretty much statewide for cutworms, including the climbing cutworms, and for army worms. After I sprayed the plants (although I wish I'd sprayed earlier) with Bt, that was the end of them. We must have wiped them out for the most part because I haven't seen many of those this year either, or maybe the birds have been eating the army worms. Today while I was in the garden picking sugar snap peas, the rows of potatoes were buzzing with lots of bees, especially big fat bumble bees, visiting the potato flowers. The sugar snap peas have been doing great all spring and we've picked a lot of them. Today was the final harvest. Ever since we started hitting the mid-90s a day or two a week, they have been developing powdery mildew down low to the ground, and now it is moving up the plants. So, after I harvested two 5-gallon buckets full of snap peas this morning, I pulled up all the pea plants and hauled them to the compost piles. I'll work compost into those areas tomorrow and plant a summer crop of something else in the now-bare space. I get too enthusiastic when weeding too and am my garden's own worst enemy once I get going. Luckily, since I overplant and have too much of everything, we can afford to lose a few plants here and there and we don't even miss them. (I deliberately overplant so that I can kill a few plants and still have plenty.) I loved working outside in the garden this morning. It was so cool and foggy and really pleasant despite the high humidity. Then the sun came out and ruined it out....it is too muggy out there now to be considered pleasant, so I am going to process all the snap peas this afternoon, putting aside some fresh ones to eat over the next few days and then blanching and freezing the rest. Dawn

Way kewl pic! The robber flies have mostly managed to elude me so far. They wait till the shutter is halfway down, then they flit away. I'm pretty sure the last one was saluting me with a 'thumb' on it's nose. ;] ICA, Sophie ^i^