It will be interesting to see what the sawfly larvae do here. I don't use any insecticides, fungicides or other chemical intervention in my flower gardens. Japanese beetles do get knocked off of plants and plunked into "the bubble bath of doom" (jar of soapy water), but that's about it. I don't even chase the voles out of my garden - it looks like we've worked out a peaceful compromise with them and now that the plants are maturing. They damage a few, but there's plenty left. Our approach for flowers is to grow tons of plants, space closely, no mulch, well placed tending rows so all parts of the garden are in easy reach for weeding, let garden thug plants fight it out on their own, and let insect pests work out a balance with predators. Of course, that means that some plants are just doomed to failure here. Hairy balls might be one of them. They were a great snack for hundreds of monarch caterpillars and then just tall twigs. If they were perennial I'd actually be quite content to leave them there to get savaged each year, but I do draw the line at sowing sacrificial plants every year. I figure that since one the main purposes of the flower garden is to grow enough seed to flower up the rest of the 15 acres, if a plant species is going to cry, die, or just be a ratty looking food source for insects they are going to eventually get phased out anyway. I hope that the columbines don't go that way, but if they do I'll just enjoy them until they are history. I do get a kick out of watching nature sort things out. But I'm also the person that's perfectly happy to let our goats make the decisions on how to landscape the rest of our land. I don't totally agree with their decision to eradicate about 5 acres of mature black raspberry plants, but they also took out the catbrier, poison ivy and multiflora rose. What's left is pretty cool, even if it isn't exactly how I might have done it. One other thing that has turned out to be really neat about the front flower gardens - the tending paths are being used by a number of birds as grocery shopping aisles. Several sparrows, chickadees, and cardinals come by at various points during the day and walk up and down the aisles - selecting munchie bugs, seeds and greens as they go. I wonder what will happen next out there! Lynda

Hmm, interesting. I'm all for the tiny house movement, but anyone who's so snotty about building a nice small house (mini-mcmansions!) would have more credibility if she weren't touting those particular constructions. I'm sorry, but stapling rusty tin cans on the outside of your house is just trashy--it's been around a loooong time (not a new brilliant idea) and it's the sort of thing that caused municipalities to come up with all the restrictions that make it so hard to build a tiny house most places. If I were anti-tiny-house, I'd love that video as ammunition for why we should keep the old laws and not allow them.

a2gemini, my utensil drawers are 36" wide, but the inside drawer dimension is actually 31". Those bins look good! I do agree about the odd sizing. I had to buy a few of each size and lay them out to see how they would fit. Looks like you managed to almost completely fill the drawer. You do lose just a little more space due to the thickness of two adjacent bin walls, but I like the way they look and the ability to clean them up. For me, the key was to group like items in each bin. So for example your two small bins right in the middle with measuring spoons could all be in one slightly larger bin, if such a bin exists. I would even combine them with the measuring cups directly above them. One 6x12 bin would probably hold all your measuring utensils perfectly as it did in mine. But, you have to go with what fits in your drawers. I found that fewer of the big bins wasted less space that a whole bunch of the smaller ones and the organization didn't suffer at all.

Spring is coming! I noticed some crocus blooming yesterday. I have hellebores in bloom, but they aren't blooming as well as they did last year. They were amazing last year, which was almost as cold as this year. We've had more snow this year though, & the cold hit earlier, so maybe that is the difference. I have daffs up & some have buds, but not in bloom yet. Just as well, supposed to get a big snow in a few days, & temps to get down to single digits again. If that happens we'll break some more records. Drat!