Tsuga junkie, you’ve got a nice garden. Do you open it up to tours? I frequent nurseries in the region, but rarely do I see the plants you have. Do you primarily source them via internet mail order? Edited after noticing this: “I'd say 80% of my plants came from the usual mail order spots (Coenosium, Porterhowse, Girard, Greer, etc) in 1 gal. pots or less”. Never mind....

As Joey reminded me -- today is the first day of the SABG plant sale. They always offer a lot of good plants for our area.

Lyfia, For younger kids, a group lesson usually works well. They have the advantage of being able to watch other kids learn and it tends to be more fun for them as well. If a child has special needs, or is likely to learn faster or slower than their peers, then a private lesson would be helpful. But in general they enjoy the camaraderie of other kids. That said, a private lesson with a good children's instructor can be a fabulous experience - for both parties usually! Definitely do not teach your daughter. That's a total no-no. Pro instructors have a million ways of explaining and demonstrating things, can keep kids happy, and won't get frustrated if things get off to a slow start. I always cringe when I see parents teaching kids, and even more so when husbands try to teach wives (total facepalm - as they harp on totally irrelevant "failings" of their spouses technique!). As a random aside, I recently had a gentleman ski up to me and a female client, and offer us his unsolicited suggestion to help us be better skiers (which had the added bonus of being totally incorrect). Somehow he missed the fact that I was in uniform? But I didn't let on. The guy was really proud of himself. We found the whole thing to be both astonishing and hilarious. Mtn, when do you need to commit to the location for this trip? In all honesty, I would be gun shy about the location and the snowpack. But if you can decide in say, December, you'll have a chance to see if the drought pattern has persisted, or if it has changed. It's very sad, and it must be just crushing their ski industry, not to mention the whole natural environment of the region.

Ooooh, that's pretty! (I had to google it but I saw all the images with hummers in the pics.) I wonder if it's available anywhere else locally? The ladies at the sale site were so helpful and even brought around a wagon for me to fill up. Of course, I couldn't because DH was with me and he reminded me that we were with friends. They sat and had tea and dessert after our walk through the gardens and I ran over to give a quick look at the sale. I bought one other plant, brought it home, and promptly lost the tag. I probably buried it in the ground... bummer!