Many (((hugs))) to all of you. Have missed everyone. Thanks for sharing your lives, flowers, family, and pets. Love it! I sure would have enjoyed that plant exchange, Cindee. Our garden club has one each May. It's such fun. I, too, was not with you for the whole summer. This has been the worst ever summer time-wise. Each time I turned around, something HAD to be done. Art class ran into June (which is no good for me). Then it started again in Sept., but I told her there's just no way, so I got a two-month reprieve. Start again this coming Thursday and am taking my 15-year-old granddaughter Katie with me as a visitor. She has awesome talent and is as bad with art as we are with Hippis. I purchased another garden tractor this summer - I now have three and use them all -- there is just so much to take care of. Have also been picking up kids from school - into June this year, and come Sept. that started again. It's 1-1/2 hours r/t which really cuts into my days. Next year they will at least both be in the same school. Now I'm dog-visiting. My friend went to FL for many weeks and her husband pays me to come and be with them for an hour each day while he works. Oh, and I decided a truck would be in order, so purchased my son's 2000 black Dodge Dakota V-8 Sport. The price was right, and this will be better to carry mulch. It was hard to get with the Explorer (plus it's fun to drive). This way I can just drive up to the mulch heap and have them dump a bucket into the truck. Then I can drive it right to the garden that needs it. My days are all just cut up and I get nothing done. Lots of my plants got frosted, and the hippis were under blankets for several 30 degree days. Had some construction going on until beginning of Oct. and could barely squeeze through the furniture stacked around for probably two months. It was not a bad summer, actually a pretty good one, but it was stressful. For the most part I was healthy, and pretty much kept up with things like the 25-year-old I think I am -- not the 74-year-old that I just turned today. I neglected my orchids and many of the gardens, but the hippis grew and grew. I repotted most of them for the sake of better growing medium. I could probably exchange some orchids in the spring if I get a chance to repot. Right now they should be throwing spikes, so not a good time. Also, some Hippi bulbs. I have to say, this has been like sitting down at a nice table under some palm trees with warm breezes relaxing with a bunch of dear friends that enjoy the same things and understand eachother's obsessions. Soon we'll all be sharing tons of gorgeous pictures. I also have a bunch of bulbs coming from RC and want to order some of those on my wish list. But gotta run now and try to dig the rest of my dahlias.

Well, I kinda like the "Lots of Love" idea. Heh. That year I had such great success with my candy onions -- actually great success with ANY onion -- I did something that I don't know if it helped or not. I soaked them in Jerry Baker's "Root Revival Tonic": 1 tbsp of mild dish soap, 1/4 cup of strong tea and 1 tbsp epsom salt, mixed well into 1 gallon of water. This is from his book, "Old-Time Gardening Wisdom". I had used it to soak some bushes I was planting and instructions said up to 24 hours. I didn't soak the onions in it but about an hour. They made the water really "onioney" and I was worried I'd made a big mistake. But I set them out right away and those were the best and biggest onions I'd ever grown. I also didn't set them out till April 15, the approximate date of our last frost. We got a frost after that and I went out and covered them all. What concerns me is that sometimes the frost will cause the onions to think they've had another winter, and that triggers bolting to seed. Last year, I didn't soak the onions. I put the ones I got from Dawn out immediately, which was sometime in early March, I think. And then I planted Southern Belle Red later on. Of course it was a weird year and so hard to judge because of that. Got some decent-sized onions from Dawn's plants, but nothing like the previous year, others stayed small and a few of them went to seed. The Southern Belles that were planted later didn't bolt to seed but they didn't grow any, either. I dug them back up and will be planting them around April 15 to see if they'll go ahead and do anything. This year, whatever I end up getting, I'm going to try the soak again, and wait till April 15. I know this goes against standard practice, but it did work for me that one year. Maybe I was just having "Dumb cluck luck". We'll see what happens.

I've planted 1 flat each of pansies, petunias, verbena, and dianthus, Two flats of snapdragons, 2 'Texas Pink' phlox, 2 'Veranda' skullcap, a Mex. lobelia, 'Dancing Lady' ginger, Peacok ginger, Philippine violet, Green-eyed rudbeckia, Sweet almond bush, Hawaiian snow bush, pothos, 2 Red Bleeding heart vines, a coral vine, a 'Candy Corn' vine, tuber vervain, 6 Ground orchids, 10 Pink spider lilies, 12 Yellow spider lilies, and 82 Red spider lilies. Trade plants that I've repotted because I don't have a place to plant are: 2 Heliconias, a Red leafed Hibiscus, a Yellow honeysuckle lonicera sempervirens, 'Tropicana' cana, 3 different crinums, 3 pots of iris, 2 Rubber vines, a Red Mex. flame vine, 2 kinds of lipstick plant, 2 caryopteris 'Dark Knight', found rose 'Old Gay Hill',and a Purple leafed Sweet potato vine. I'm going to another Plant Swap next Saturday, so may have more to plant then. I've got to build more beds this winter! Jim

Hazel, It isn't common for the chickens to drop dead in the heat. It is just that 2011 was so insanely hot. There are many ways to keep them cool. Some chickens will stand in a flat water pan filled with only a couple of inches of water and will cool off that way. I have used a small cat litter box for a chicken wading pool in this manner. They will dig into cool soil in a shady area, spread out their wings and cool off that way (just like they do when sunning themselves on a cooler, sunny day, but in this case they usally do it in the shade and I think they're cooling themselves. Oh, I did put ice cubes in their waterers that summer. I would put a whole lot of cubes in. Well, actually I made cubes. I froze blocks of ice in my deep freeze, using those freezer containers sold on the canning aisle. They hold 32 ounces. I'd put one block of ice in each waterer before I filled it with clean water in the morning, and I'd refill the freezer boxes to make new blocks of ice for the next day. That kept their water cool, which I think helped them in the tremendous heat. We keep a fan running in the coops, and the coop windows are open because we have quarter-inch hardware cloth nailed over the windows to keep coons and other beasties from breaking through the window screens that came with the windows. They are small windows, but between the windows and the fan, the chicken coop is not, at least, unbearable. I also gave the chickens some sort of melons every day, or Armenian cucumbers. I'd chill the melons or cukes, then slice them in half and put them on the ground. They'd clean out that rind completely, and I'd pick up the rind and toss it on the compost pile. I just did everything I could to help the chickens in the heat. When it became apparent that it was going to be a hot summer, I hurriedly planted more melons and Armenian cukes just so I'd have something wet and cold to give the chickens in July and August. I don't remember if I had anything like that to give them in June. On the day I came home to 3 dead chickens, we were at a wildfire in a Wildlife Management Area that was very hard to access and we were out there for many hours. We had at least one firefighter get a heat-related illness. He had to be treated by paramedics. I remember that Fran and I took coolers and coolers and coolers of bottled water and Gatorade and everyone stayed hydrated, but the heat was overwhelming that day. The ice in our coolers melted ridiculously quickly. I remember sitting down once in the middle of the road to cool off because it was the only shady spot. It was a twisty, winding road and you could hear someone coming from a long ways off, so it wasn't like someone was going to be able to sneak up on me and run over me. A young woman who had family members fighting that fire showed up unexpectedly at the fire and brought us Fire Rehab people soft drinks in very large cups filled with tiny ice cubes. At that point, it was like manna from heaven and I've never forgotten the kindness she showed us that day! We'd already had so much water and Gatorade that we were tired of both, and an ice cold soda was a refreshing relief, and then we got to enjoy eating the ice for as long as it lasted. I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised that the chickens died, but I felt terrible about it. After that, for the rest of that hot summer, the first thing I did every morning was the whole ice and cold water routine with the chickens. If we were at a fire overnight and came home sometime in the morning or middle of the day, I made it a point to check on the chickens and get them their ice first thing before I even went indoors. We didn't lose another chicken all summer, but I also don't think we hit 115 another day except once. I only remember that day because our big fire of the day was a moving truck on the interstate that had a family's whole accumulation of possessions, including their car, inside the moving truck and the thermometer on our fire rehab vehicle showed 115 about the same time a young firefighter began getting sick out in that heat. Our ice melted fast that day too. The hardest part about the ice jugs wasn't freezing them. It was having to clean them every day before I could put them back in the extra fridge to refreeze them. Being chickens, you know they managed to make the ice jugs dirty, so I had to stand out there in the blazing heat at the water faucet outdoors, sponge and dish soap in hand and wash those jugs. Then, just to be safe and not dirty up the fridge, I dried the jugs and put them in trash bags before putting them in the freezer. Because, you know, I had nothing else to do in that hot weather than stand outside and wash those ice jugs off. I was worried about our chickens yesterday but they seemed to take the heat in stride. Maybe I'll freeze some ice jugs this morning. I do have two banty hens sit setting on eggs in the big coop. I really wasn't ready for it to get this hot this early. Dawn