Good Morning, Everyone! Thank you all for the "welcome back". I missed each and every one of you. Stormy here today on this Good Friday. Dark and a bit chilly out. Good weather for gardens though. Glad for the rain though. We've had high temps and high, dry winds this past week and wildfires every day. Nothing close to here, but close enough that I could smell the smoke. My dogs erupted in chorus with every firetruck that passed by over on the highway.(hehehe). I took pictures of the gardens on the 31st. Glad I did, as the hot, dry winds dried out all the pretty yellow Jonquils later that day. Blasted hot winds ruined them before our Easter Sunday family picnic and egg hunt. They were magnificent in chorus with the yellow forsythias, white Bridle's Wreath, and Redbud trees now in full bloom all over the garden. My beloved Jane Magnolia is breathtakingly beautiful this year and smells so wonderful. I planted out some Orange Perfection Phlox yesterday. Tried them last year, but they didn't make it. This rain may ensure these do. I dug around in the bin at the store until I found one, just one package with moist peat inside. Holding it up to to sunlight, I could just make out something possibly alive in that dark green plastic bag. Makes me mad to pay five bucks for dead rootstock. They are not the best looking root stocks I ever saw, but think they will make it. I only need one to survive to establish a nice clump this year for next year's blooms. I also planted a package of purple Liatris and a package of Freesia bulbs for summer blooms. I love the smell of Freesia. Yummy. All the Peonies are up and beginning to make tiny flower buds. Hopefully the red ones and deep magenta ones will bloom this year too. If they do, it will be their first time. Some deer came into the yard this winter and ate the top branches off the one surviving River birch sapling, but it is recovering nicely now. I caged it with a tomato cage and for now they are leaving it alone. They are "camped" up on the hill, hiding in wait for my juicy, delicious roses to start blooming, no doubt. :[ I've been taking the dogs for walks up there every morning and hopefully their pee and poop will make them think twice about coming any closer to the back yard. My English Shepherd could easily take down a whitetail deer. DH said this weekend he would finish stretching field fence around on the inside of the existing barbed wire fencing to keep out critters. That won't keep deer out, but it will keep our dogs in, so we can let them run loose on the property. That will be great. They need the exercise and I need them to do their job protecting the place. They love it, too. Hopefully the raccoons & coyotes will take the hint. Keep Out! Anyhow, so far so good. Gotta go check on my chicks. They poopy up their water really fast and will be ready for breakfast. :) Talk to you guys later. ~Annie

I knew it would be great to be back here....thank you so much for looking at my pictures and commenting! I enjoyed your comments. To answer your questions, the pink rose in the first photo with the foxgloves is the Canadian Explorer rose 'Frontenac'. It is completely hardy to the tips here in zone 4 and yes, it blooms like that every year, completely loaded with flowers. It is one of my most recommended roses for the north along with the Buck rose 'Quietness' and fellow Explorer rose 'Champlain'. Champlain is the red rose in photo #9 on the left. Yes, the foxgloves re-seed themselves every year. It all started a few years ago with ONE plant that my daughter gave me for Mother's Day. I end up having to dig lots of them up and give them away or plant in other spots. This year there were over 60 plants! The pink plant in photo #5 is the rose 'Mozart'. It appears to be a plant not a rose because it had rained and it was weeping down into the lilies. It does have a cascading habit anyways. No, Julia, my daughters and son do NOT help me in the gardens or yard at all. I have to beg them just to go out and look around. Frustrating to me that none of them inherited my gardening gene! But I take the grandbabies out in the yard to look at the flowers all the time and hopefully out of the 5 boys one of them will be my garden buddy. And for the most part the roses are planted behind the lilies and perennials but I like the messy cottage garden look so I don't always follow that rule and some roses tend to fall over into the other plants. Celeste

Teresa, your post didnÂt get lost, I think it was on the other thread, grin. IÂd like to cover Wales, Scotland and the lake district next time. I wasnÂt as impressed with Bath as much as everyone else is. Over run by tourists, and IÂm more interested in history than architecture. Mitch, nope, we were heading for dinner next door at the time, so no Sally Lunns for us, I figured I could make them at home, myself. Bizzo, LOL, I tried pushing through that wall heh heh, would have been shorter than the drive to OxfordÂs Christ Church college for the dining hall of Hogwarts. Linda, wait a bit. The dollar is a bit stronger (1.6 exchange, better than the 2.0 of a few years ago) now but it was still horrifically expensive. Pam, nope no cupboards for me, LOL! There are whole HP filming site tours, kids weren't interested, :-(

I have been doing craft shows since 1996........biggest year i did 14 show dates, about 11 shows, almost every weekend from the end of sept till 1st week in dec. MAJOR burnout!! Some are just good learning experiences, some you actually make money at! What ever you are SURE will sell never does...and the stuff you think you couldn't GIVE away people want, I mean really want! Just don't set yourself up for a let down (like saying, I KNOW I'm going to sell EVERYTHING & make tons of money) & you'll be fine. Just go, & plan to have a good time, & learn some things & you'll be fine. Hazel