Eduarda do plant a winter jasmine I think you will really enjoy it, this is a bit long winded but....I also grow winter jasmine, mine is quite old somewhere around 40 years. Not only a beautiful plant when covered in flowers but is also very attractive when in the green, so to speak. It is tough and reliable, depending on the weather it can start blooming in November and continue on through the winter or if it's a really cold and stays cold I've seen it hold off on flowering till the beginning of March. The year it did this it put on a magnificent show. My or I should say taken ownership of W.J. is growing on a trellis on the side of the neighbor's carport, why on the neighbor's carport you might ask, well my neighbor at the time planted it on her carport but it's planted in our driveway. Years later after their place had been sold several times another survey was done and what do you know the carport encroaches 8 inches onto our property as does the concrete retaining wall. The poor lady who owned the house at the time had just sold to a young couple and the whole deal was going to fall through, we went to her lawyer with her and signed a waver to the effect the new owners could have access to our driveway if they need to work on their concrete carport. I've also claimed my side of their concrete retaining wall (on our property too) I've covered it in ivy, clematis and other stuff. This is now the wall that helps contains my little courtyard, use to be the top end of the driveway but that's another story :o). I prune the jasmine right back to stubs every spring and I'm rewarded with fresh green growth by summer which is lovely to look at even when not in bloom. Annette

linnea56 said: "Finish all the projects that are half done. Learn to decide faster and then just DO it. Stop starting a new project because itÂs more fun than finishing the piddly little details from the last one. . . . I need a "get it finished" buddy like some people need a dieting buddy. Someone to hold me responsible. " __________ EXACTLY!! I have so many half-baked ideas floating around in my head, its a wonder anything ever actually gets done. But we are on a roll so far this year, because we got the new light hung in the DR today. Woohoo! Let's hope this is not our swan song for the year. On the drawing board: 1) Total kitchen redo (I already have my plan done for IKEA cabs. I think we have the granite and backsplash decided, and the sink, faucet and range hood are sitting in the barn waiting to start. We cheated and went ahead and installed the new DW two months ago. We have had the money set aside for a long time but I got laid off in September. If I get a job offer I really want next week, we'll get onto this one right away). 2) Finish putting cork everywhere there is currently carpet (we did one small bedroom Labor Day weekend and haven't had the gumption to deal with the disruption necessary to move on to other, more often used rooms). 3) Run power down the driveway to the gate so we can have a light down there and eventually upgrade to an electric gate. Would love to put in some landscape lighting on the drive (uplights/downlights in trees) while we're running the power through there. 4) Maybe do the big landscaping plan we had drawn up in the fall. (We were set to break ground and my gut told me to call it off. I got laid off two weeks later). 5) Get organized enough to have a great antique/yard/moving sale in the spring. A by-product of this will be a trip to the charity and to the dump. Woohoo! 6) Think about changing the beds in the MBR and the guest room to fit the more modern home. But I don't know about all those LOW modern beds . . . more thinking required.

Minflick, my condolences. I can believe it's very hard, but it sounds like you're pulling through. Good luck! I have unconventional ideas about Bermuda grass. Here's how it works with me. We have patches of it here and there in the garden, which I admit is a fairly wild-looking place. Like debbym we have summers that are too hot to garden in, at least for me, and so the Bermuda grass grows all summer long before I get around to attacking it when fall arrives. Well, we don't water in summer once a plant has been in the ground a year. Our heavy clay soil and high annual rainfall allow this, though we have dry summers. I also permit all kinds of annual grass and little wild herbaceous plants to grow in the beds: veronica, vetch, annual euphorbia, etc., and I mulch the beds lightly with old hay, pruning clippings, cut grass, and so on. Between the drought, the plant competition, and the mulch (which also lightens the top layer of soil so that the Bermuda grass can't root quite so firmly) the Bermuda grass can't get so far ahead in summer that I can't push it back again in fall. I can't eliminate it, but I can keep it under control, and mostly out of the beds. The downside of gardening this way is that the roses go into semidormancy in summer. That doesn't bother me, since we have a long growing season and when it's that hot I don't want to be out in the garden anyway. And summer offers other beauties. Shade also discourages Bermuda grass. My starting point in thinking about it was that in nature Bermuda grass doesn't grow EVERYWHERE, in some places it gets outcompeted. So it has to be possible to establish conditions in which it doesn't thrive.

Jackie, you can do it. Maybe you will be snowed in next week and can work on it then. I don't have any resolutions, but I do have 22 goals for 22 1. 22 dates with hubby 2. 22 hikes 3. 22 bike rides 4. finish 22 quilts 5. reduce stash by 22 yards 6. new floor upstairs 7. new roof and remove sky lights 8. meet 22 new people 9. donate 22 items to charity 10. try 22 new recipes 11. 22 family game nights 12. reach my maintenance weight (145) 13. save $1 per day 14. 22 acts of kindness 15. help mom clean closets 16. clean garage 17. give someone a compliment daily 18. travel someplace new 19. handwrite a letter to someone monthly 20. listen more 21. try a new exercise weekly 22. stretch/relax daily