I had a hornworm victory this year. While showing some friends around the garden, I spied a hawk moth on the back side of one of my tomato 2x2 supports. That dude was huge, like the size of a chickadee. After my friends left, I raced out there to catch him, but he was gone. Luckily for me, he was back the next morning, and I was able to do the deed. I had no way of knowing whether or not she had laid her eggs, though, but damned if I didn't find them a few days later. Tiny little hornworms, just hatching, and lots of unhatched eggs too, all on the same leaf. Of course they are all in hornworm heaven now. I can only hope these were the only eggs she laid, and that she didn't have any sisters who visited. I will be ready with my scissors just the same. But it taught me to be on the lookout for the huge ugly-a$$ moth early in the season.

I think it is more of the popularaity of the fast food places than it is working moms or kids vegging out in front of the TV. Kids today are involved in much more activities as compared to when I was a child. When parents have that much running around it is much easier to run through a drive thru or get pizza on the way home (stay at home or working mom) then it is to make a meal, get everyone to sit down, clean up and get out the door. I know because I have four kids and it's not that they are in too much by themselves but with 4 kids it makes for a busy week. I am a sahm but I still struggle with getting them from school, getting homework done, and getting them a nutritious dinner. When we get home in the evening that is when the dishes are cleaned off the table. It is so tempting to just run to McDonalds. Also, did you ever notice how many kids have lunchables packed in their lunches? Those things are packed with sodium, fat, calories, and tons of preservatives. Plus my kids' schools starting selling snacks (like nutty buddies and ho hos for lunch) I tell my kids "no you eat the snack that I pack and you are not getting a ho ho" But of course their friends get them (12 fat grams in the pack of 2) and share some of it with them from time to time. Can you imagine the amount of fat grams these kids are getting? Over 30 at lunch with their lunchable and their nutty buddies and then 30 more at dinner if they eat at a fast food place... not to mention any cookies they might snack on through the day? That amount of fat will make an adult gain weight. I hear that some schools actually have fast food like McDonalds available to them. So even if the kids were active in sports and activities they are getting too many fat grams to offset it :( Also I heard that kids today are getting too much juice. There are a lot of calories in juice and a lot of natural sugars. It is better for them to eat the fruit than it is to drink the fruit juice. I always have OJ but after 2 glasses of it they have to switch to water. My kids would drink a half gallon of OJ a day if I let them (each one of them) So kids are drinking a lot more calories than they use to as well.

Brad, No Susan Weber has not been a good bloomer for me either, but, its staying here as I really like the few blooms it does put out. Its always been planted, but, this year its in a pot, and did produce a better bloom on a taller scape, so I will keep it in the pot, and try babying it a little and see ifit will improve.Have to keep all my daylilies in pots now, since I moved a few months ago anyway, as the ground is sooo hard, cant dig a hole in it anyway. I didn't have good soil before and had added amendmwnts for years to it, but,at least Ic ould dig a hole in it to plant some thing.Here , I cant even do that. I had my grandson trying to dig a hole , for me,andhes a nice stout young man and he tried several places to dig a hole for me, but finally gave up and said we need some thing besides a shovel to dig a hole in this.I even , watred the spot forever and it didn't help either.so pots is the only way to grow anything.

Melissa, It is easy to forget bulbs in the fall. I do it all the time. This year I actually remembered. Sometimes by the time I think of them, it's just too late. For the gladiolas you want to move, I think fall is a good time. Just be sure to mulch them well after you move them, and no, I don't blame you for wanting to move them from the present location! Macarame' is easy and it is fun. We had a cool art teacher in 8th grade who let us work on artwork that was sort of trendy for the times (late 1960/early 1970s) so we got to learn macarame' (so easy a caveman could do it), beading (with tiny love beads), batik (which I loved!), pottery and tie-dying, among other things. It was so much fun and such a change from the standard art projects done at the time. Camo in the living room? Hey, deer season is opening, and you are right on trend. : ) It can get old to paint swatches on the wall and stare at them in all kinds of light as you decide what you want, but it sure beats painting a room a color you're sure you'll all love, only to discover that once it is on the walls and has dried, it doesn't look at all the way you thought it would. It is so much easier to paint over a few swatches than to repaint a room. Removing old flooring is my least favorite thing, especially if you're removing a tile floor and the backer board beneath it, but once the new flooring is in, it is such a monumental change. We did the laundry room and kitchen floor at the same time in a wood-look plank tile back in October. It looks great. I was hoping we'd be working on the breakfast room and living room floors by now, but it is looking like we won't even start them until after Christmas. I'm okay with that because I don't want us messing up the main living area during the holidays. Tim has either 2 or 3 trips scheduled for December and then, he swears, his travel is over for the year. Ha ha ha. Only because the old year is ending. I think early January might be a good time to start on the breakfast room and living room floors, but we'll see. He may come home any day now with a list of scheduled trips for January. I hope not. I think he has to stick close to home in Jan-Mar 2017 because his boss will be away at a 3-month-long course at the FBI Academy, and they usually both are not gone at once that often. Tim's traveled more in the last year than he did in the first 34 years of his career in law enforcement combined and it has been crazy and very hard to keep track of which weeks he is scheduled to be gone. His long honey-do list of projects his wife wants done didn't shrink much at all this year, but we did get a lot of the kitchen and laundry room done so I'll cut him some slack on the rest of it. I might drive him crazy a little because I'll take something that was in one room and repurpose it in another room. Or, I move it to the garage to wait while I am refinishing it or painting it so it can be repurposed in another room. So, our decor changes a bit but sometimes it is just that I am moving some things around to get a different look. The garage is full of works-in-progress. You're supposed to be able to park the vehicles in the garage, right? Well, at our house, that's not happening right now. Jen, Waiting to paint to your own taste when you get into a more permanent home is probably smart. If you followed your heart now and painted each room a different color, the first thing your real estate agent would tell you when it is time to sell is that you need to paint everything a neutral color again, and that would be a lot of repainting to do in just a few years when y'all are ready to buy your place in the country. I think I could live in neutral rooms for 5 years, knowing that when I got to my country home, I could paint whatever colors I wanted. You know, when we moved here in 1999, each room (except the breakfast room and living room which adjoin and were painted the same) was painted a different color. I loved it. However, all these years later, now I'm painting everything quieter, more neutral colors. I've finally gotten tired of all the bright walls. Change is good, though, so I'm just trying to enjoy the process as we go along. If the neutral colors make you crazy, you can brighten up the rooms with plants (lol), artwork, blankets or throws, painted baskets, etc. That is the one advantage of neutral walls---you can bring in color in many other ways and the colors won't clash with your neutral walls. It is sort of the same as in the garden, where our garden neutrals are the shades of brown (soil, mulch, wood, etc.) and we bring in colors via foliage and flower colors. About 10 years ago, my cousin and her family begin plotting their move to the country. It involved three families selling their city homes and buying one big piece of land in the country where they could put three houses close to one another, but not too close. I believe they bought 15 acres. For three years, my cousin had a vision in her head of what their home would look like when they moved to the country. She spent those three years buying the furniture they'd have in the new house, drapes, artwork, accessories, etc. By the time they moved she had a huge stockpile of boxes of new stuff for the new house, and because she planned it all along, it coordinated from room to room in a manner that pleased her greatly. Because she accumulated it over time, antiques were a part of the mix, so her new place instantly had a 'collected over time' look once they finally were able to move. When the house was ready, they moved in and she had it all decorated in absolutely no time at all. I was amazed at how quickly she got everything unpacked, in place and looking like home. When we walked in the door the first time, it didn't look like a brand new house---it looked like a perfectly loved, well-decorated, collected home. It was awesome. I loved that it looked so flawless without looking like a display from a furniture store (not that there's anything wrong with furniture store displays). Jen, I believe there's worse hobbies than gardening for a man to put up with. Sometimes when Tim is looking at all the space my gardening stuff occupies (you know, fenced garden plots in the yard, the potting shed, the greenhouse, the space in the garage devoted to storing garden tools and stuff, the plants in the mudroom, the seed-starting shelves in the weight room, the pile of garden catalogs on the coffee table, and on the nightstand upstairs, etc.), he gets a pained expression on his face. I can read his mind. He's thinking there sure is a lot of space devoted to gardening and all the stuff that goes along with it. I just sweetly remind him that at least he isn't married to a woman who collects expensive handbags or dozens of pairs of shoes and boots or fur coats or expensive jewelry. Everybody has 'stuff'. It is just that we gardeners have gardening stuff instead of some other kind of stuff. Oh, and there's the other stuff I didn't mention---food processing gear for our home-grown food, vases for bouquets of flowers, and watering cans stashed everywhere so one is always within easy reach. Hmmm. That's a lot of stuff, isn't it? Dawn