daylillies range from the short hybrids with 'fans'( the leaves) only a foot or so tall, to the local 'ditch' lilly, which can have 40" fan in full sun, and the flowers are right in my face in the summer (I'm 5'7") the ditch lilies have the advantage of being cheap or free- and they spread freely in anything short of drought conditions. but they are the tallest. the forsythia is a full shrub, can get 8' square without thinking about it, or can be pruned to shape. they can also be propagated by 'stapling' a branch to the ground, and letting it root. in a full sun condition, there are a few other choices- spiderwort spreads like hateful gossip in the sun, forms dense clumps, and I'm in love with the deep violet-blue flowers...and if you planted it now, you could dig the clump up in september, divide it, spread it out, and have six or either clumps by next spring ( if you're in Bucks Co close, I can provide them for a fraction of what the nursery will want for them) gout weed (I prefer the name 'false lamium' which sounds a little less painful) is another damned aggressive monster that's impossible to kill, and isn't unattractive- green and white striped foliage, spreads by seeds, runners, and roots, not too tall (the stems fall over when they get about 14" tall, and tend to root where they touch the ground) groundcover roses is a lovely, but pricey option. Rocks, since you're a local, can be a good option to interplant with the plants. the upright sedums are also a viable choice for a slope around here- mine came from a single leaf I plucked from a roadside planting, it was a cauliflower-sized clump that fall, and it roots REALLY fast- you can break a 'branch' off and it will root in the dirt in a week with no trouble at all.

Hi Annie, Don't worry about too much afternoon sun and leaf burn, especially if you're planting in the ground. Sango kaku is fairly sun and heat tolerant. If you keep it watered properly and give it a year or two to adjust to it's new environment it will do well. I live in Los Angeles (Hollywood). I moved from a place that faced north to a place that faces west. My container maples are now getting direct sun from about 12:30p to about 6:00p - 7:00p. They are doing better than I expected. A little leaf burn on the most delicate Shindeshojo, but not as much as I expected. I was going to put up shade cloth, but I'm finding that not necessary. I am finding that this extra light is better for them. Next year they should be acclimated to their new environment and exhibit less leaf burn. It's better to protect from desiccicating winds like you have. Though I've never tried anti-transpirants I would avoid using it on a prized Sango kaku. You have to remember that transpiration is a natural and necessary part of plant biology. Plants need to transpire. http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/T/Transpiration.html Layne

All we had here was wind and rain and I doubt there is much damage, except it is likely some of the corn was blown over. I haven't walked down to the garden to look at it yet, but know from experience that wind in the 30s and 40s will blow down some of the corn and then it will straighten itself up without any help from me about 95% of the time. We have 1.25" in one rain gauge this morning and 1.5" in the other, and they sit about 100' from each other, but our mesonet station recorded 3.5" of rain and we had some flash flooding in the portions of our county where the heavier rain fell. Today looks to be another very windy day, and the risk of severe weather remains high for much of the state, so we'll see how our gardens look tomorrow I guess. The cloud cover generally is not an issue. First of all, the plants are still getting light--they just are getting less of it. The plants are fine and, if they are smart, they are enjoying the cool, cloudy days because once the summer heat sets in, they'll be sweltering in too much intense sunlight and heat. Has growth been perhaps a little slower this season? Of course. Remember that the plants had recurring very cold weather, including late frosts and freezes, through the first week in May. The colder soil and air temperatures can slow down growth. Most have had plentiful rainfall in May (except for the people in the panhandle, we all need to be praying they get some rainfall up there!) and, while rain is good, too much rain can clog the root systems and interfere somewhat in nutrient uptake. This manifests itself generally as slower growth and off-color foliage that can range from a yellowish-green to a purplish-green, depending on how lacking they are in nutrition because the roots are clogged. My plants are a little paler in color, too, than I like, but all we need is a sunny week to dry out the soil and they'll be fine. Soil improvement is important, but even in unimproved and unamended soil, most plants will produce surprisingly well. That doesn't mean you shouldn't work to improve your soil, because we all should and most of us do, but it does mean that you still can get a decent harvest even in the early years of your garden, long before you feel like the soil has arrived at the 'excellent' status you're striving for. Soil improvement never ends because "heat eats compost", so no matter how much organic matter you add to soil, the organic matter does break down really fast in our long, extremely hot summers so we always have to be adding more. Most of my soil improvement nowadays comes in the form of organic matter used as mulch. As the mulch decomposes it feeds the soil and the soil feeds the plants and I keep adding more mulch on top of the decomposing mulch and the process just repeats itself continually. Our soil was horrific when we moved here. You could make red clay pots from it. In some areas where we haven't done soil improvement, it still is that way as we discovered when the shifting of the clay in extreme to exceptional drought broke our water line twice in 2011 and once in 2012 and we repeatedly had to dig in that dense red clay (speckled with bits of gray clay) to repair the water line. In areas where we have gardened, the red clay is now a brownish sandy loam at least in the top 8 or 10" of the soil, then is slowly gets redder and clayier the deeper you dig. I try to double dig one long raised bed in the big garden every winter and amend the entire double dug area, and then that bed is where the main tomato planting goes. That means every major raised bed only gets double-dug about once every 7 or 8 years, but considering that the soil broke shovels and you couldn't dig it at all in the beginning, being able to double dig shows huge soil improvement over the years. Our soil pH tested just over 8 when we first moved here and our water tests at 8.2 to 8.3, but with many years of amending and with tons and tons of chopped and shredded autumn leaves and also finished leaf mold added as well, much of it now is in the 6.8 to 7.0 range, though irrigation works against me since I have to use such alkaline water. Our first few years here, I added every form of organic matter and other soil amendments I could get my hands on including various forms of compost, manure, lava sand, greensand, dry molasses, blood meal, bone meal, etc. Our place was just a fallow farm field when we bought it, though cattle had been run on it since the farming stopped a couple of decades earlier, and it was pretty depleted in terms of nutrients and organic matter.. After I started planting, I started encountering cotton root rot and it took several years of heavy amending to get that area improved enough that cotton root rot wasn't an issue any longer. Oddly, a band of deep sandy soil (perhaps an old silted-in creek bed or contour swale) runs along the western edge of the garden and, while sandy soil sounds wonderful, it was almost pure sand and silt with no clay and no organic matter so it drained so fast I couldn't keep anything alive, even with irrigation, in it during the summer months for our first few years here. Finally, by about 2004 we had amended it enough that plants could survive the summer in it. In some ways, fixing sand that drains much too quickly is harder than amending clay that won't drain at all. Because we have such a high soil pH and I need to do everything I reasonably can to lower it, leaf mulch is the ingredient I add every year though I also am constantly adding other materials throughout the year as mulch. Grass clippings alone put as much nitrogen into our soil as most plants need, and we have a virtually endless supply of them since we have to mow several acres. I tend to add grass clippings, old spoiled hay and straw and some home-made compost year-round as mulch, and add lots of chopped and shredded leaves in the fall, and leaf mold/composted autumn leaves in late winter before planting time. One thing I never have to worry about here is having anything turn my soil too acidic.(I wish!) With a high natural pH of the soil and water, it is a constant better just to keep it near the neutral range. It doesn't really matter what you add as long as you add 'stuff'. I use anything and everything I can get my hands on that qualifies as organic matter, but am very careful to always make sure all animal manures (cow, rabbit, chicken) are completely composted before adding them. We also use cover crops and grow some compost/green manure crops which are grown purely for use as compostable material. The biggest sign that our soil is reaching the desired state of tilth and texture? When we first moved here, we had a few earthworms but no snails and slugs. There were some sow bugs and pill bugs (they are decomposers and there wasn't much organic matter for them to decompose), but not excessive numbers. Over time, the earthworm population has skyrocketed, as has the sow bug and pill bug population----so much so that I have to work now to control them. If their population gets too large, they start climbing plants and eating tomato fruit, for example. About 3 or 4 years ago snails returned, in low numbers at first and now in much higher ones. As a gardener, you're never truly happy to see snails or slugs, but still, in our garden it was an important sign that the clay soil had become loamy clay soil with at least adequate organic matter. If you watch your soil and your plants, they will tell you when they are happy, as well as when they are not. Then, as the gardener, it is your job to figure out what needs to be 'fixed' in order to make the plants happier. Nine times out of ten, they are unhappy due to soil/nutrition conditions or moisture levels (too much is as bad as too little). Sometimes it is just air temperatures making them uncomfortably hot or cold and other times you may have pest issues. For all the pests that I see in my garden every year, I rarely have the kind of damage that requires I do something drastic to fight them. Generally I just do all I can to attract beneficial insects and then rely on the beneficial insects to kill the pest insects. One thing you learn as a gardener is that you cannot control everything, and you just have to go with the flow sometimes. Plants are amazingly resilient, and with all the challenges we face gardening here, that is a good thing. I don't think feeding plants with a water-soluble fertilizer will help if the issue is that your plants are waterlogged. You'd just be adding more water. Sometimes when waterlogging is causing foliage to be off-colored, you just have to be patient and wait for the soil to dry. Organic fertilizers like Espoma Garden Tone and Tomato Tone are wonderful but, unlike synthetic fertilizers, these are slow-acting (which is great for the plants) so you don't see a big, fast boost, which is fine. You just see the plants gradually get happier. I don't use many synthetic fertilizers except for plants in containers, where heavy watering leaches out nutrients continually, but there is nothing wrong with using them if that is your choice. One way I do like to use Miracle Grow is to boost flower production in summer once the temperatures are so high that they impede fruit production. What I do is watch the forecast carefully for a "cold front", which normally is accompanied by rain, and then about 3-5 days before it is expected, I feed my tomato plants and sweet pepper plants (and maybe the hot peppers, but only if it is so hot that they aren't setting fruit, which rarely occurs) with the MG Bloom Booster formula. It sort of primes them to be ready to bloom, and then during the cool spell or immediately after it, I'll usually get heavier blooming and some fruit set. This method works most years, but in 2011 it didn't, mostly because we never got that summer cold front that would drop temperatures back to a decent level. It is sunny here today and I am enjoying seeing the sunshine, but it likely won't last long. Just wait until July or August.....we'll likely be complaining then about the relentless sunlight and we'll be hoping for clouds!

Home drain/sewage pipes are commonly coated with a black slimey sludge that resembles grease. It's bacteria/bio-slime, call it what you want. It sounds like you may have it in your toilet tank, which seems odd but I'm not a plumber. I'm surprised your plumber didn't mention it as a possibility. Try cleaning the affected area with a diluted chlorine solution (maybe 4 water to 1 chlorine) plus some dishwashing detergent. Scrub the affected area and let it stay on for 15-20 minutes before rinsing off. Wear rubber gloves. See if that helps. There are also some commercial products that can be used to clean off the slime but the bleach/water/soap combo often works.