terrene, I total understand your view. I was saying unless we know for sure we cannot assume because it is our point of view of how the land is kept. Depending where you live there are rules. In some areas you are required to landscape a certain way. In my area if your grass is not kept at 2" or below you are fined 100.00 a day. Rules dictate what you can and cannot do with a area. I look at it as if we followed all the rules of "We are killing our World" because we do not have a total natural landscape we would not have public parks, football fields, baseball fields etc. I loved George Carlin's humor.....I remember a concert where he said "Man thinks he is so great that he can destroy earth" "When in fact earth can flick you off it's back like a tick." Earthquakes, Tornado, Fire, and any other natural weather events will take you out with all the natural landscape you can create. So I say this to say.....Man can think he is so great that he can destroy earth but he is not as great as he think. Mother Nature will bring you to your knees. You can continue to think you are good enough to destroy earth or fix earth but you are just a tick. I feel we should just enjoy the pics that was posted and not assume how it was developed and harm it is creating because of what one might think of how it is maintained. My goodness now I have written a book. I am sorry. I get upset when people pick and choose how they want to save the planet. When they live in a house running electric (to post how we are destroying the planet on a computer) or gas, drive a car using gas, cook with gas but look at a lawn and scream about a little gas to mow a lawn. JMO

Well, since it's been a little over a month since I started this post, I figured I would chime in with some updates. The garden has been extremely prolific in all its glory, providing an overwhelming amount of vegetables the last 3 weeks or so. I have harvested dozens and dozens of zucchinis, peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers, and a great assortment of veggies. I have stuffed zucchinis and cucumbers, canned tomatoes and made homemade salsa and given baskets of vegetables away. The garden has thus far been extremely successful. I went away for vacation Jul 28th-Aug 4th and took with me any vegetables that were the slightest bit edible, including several small zucs and cucs and five of the first large tomatoes that only had the slightest color of red to them. I was fearful that while away the deer would enter the electric fence and/or climb the 6 foot horse fence and destroy whatever they could while I was gone ( which they have done in the past.) The evening before departing, I surround the woods and garden in fishing line and chairs, ladders, buckets and whatever large objects I thought might deter them. I also tied up over 30 pie pans and used LIQUID FENCE and several sweaty shirts that I had wore the previous week. I also set an outdoor stereo on a timer from 8pm-8am. I did all this in hopes that I would return to a great harvest and not that of sadness. I arrived home on the 4th, just as the sun was setting, and was ecstatic to see my possibly "extreme" measures had been a success. To my delight, dozens of ripe tomatoes, large peppers, zucs and cukes galore. For the last week I have been harvesting a dozen tomatoes minimal daily. In the pictures below, I picked nearly 4 dozen tomatoes in one day. I also spent this evening canning some tomatoes and making salsa and 4 loafs of zucchini bread. While in the garden this evening, I plucked 7 tomato hornworms off my plants, 4 of which had the parasitic wasp cocoons on their backs. It makes me happy to see the good bugs (the wasps) are helping me out since I'm proud to say I have not used insecticides. The hornworms and squash bugs have both been bad the last week since arriving home from vacation. It seems while I was gone the bugs have come out form hiding. I have been hand picking and destroying daily and it seems to be helping. The only other real issue I have been having is powdery mildew. I have used 2 homemade remedies to try and control but to no prevail. The first remedy of baking soda actually killed all the leaves of my crooknecks and for a short time stunted any vegetable growth. But in the last 10 days or so they started growing nice and green again and once again are baring fruit. The mildew has spread to the cucumbers and zucchini in the other part of the garden and I attempted to control with a milk remedy, but that seems to have done nothing. With temps in the high 90s and extreme humidity, this is more than likely an endless battle. Truthfully I have gotten such a wonderful crop of cucumbers and zucchinis that if they poop out now, I won't be disappointed. I look forward to my planting of a fall garden in the next couple weeks. Well, I apologize for going on so long but as a gardener knows, there's always something going on in the garden :-) Hope you enjoy my pics from today's harvest!

Security is an issue for me but I'm much less concerned then most people, and I think at least(knock on wood) for now, I have good reason. First, I avoid putting any plant down by the street that would just KILL me if it was stolen. About the only plant down there that has much emotional attachment is a 2-3 year graft of Picea abies 'Dandylion', a golden-seedling gift from Bob Fincham. That said, I'm sure Bob has a dozen more grafts in the works so it's hardly irreplacable. I try and keep my 'really coveted' plants closer to the house where you'd have to drive up my driveway, park, dig up the plants and then leave before my neighbor called the cops. This leads me to the second point. My neighbor is a retired police officer and he's also a neighborhood bulldog. He constantly walks his dog(3-5 times a day, every day), mows the yard and generally watches things with a California-cautious eye. It's good to have neighbors like this who can monitor things when I'm gone. While he and his wife do take small trips, it's certainly refreshing to know that it wouldn't be easy to dig up a half dozen plants without him noticing. Especially now since there is no parking on the street, you'd really be out of place parking next to this new bed. Finally, we're in a dead-end cul de sac in a VERY quiet, low-crime area of Washington. People frequently leave their garage doors open, etc. without too much worry. I guess ultimately if someone wanted to rob me they could and in this day and age, if someone really wants to rob me for my plants then I guess they need the plants(or money) more then I do. Hopefully it never comes to that. If they asked, I'd just give them a few for free and show them my plants. -Will

Wetsuitor: The only ones I dug up this year were 4 washies and a sago palm, each of which would take considerable protection here including heat. I will be leaving those in when they get 2 big to handle, but the washies seem to take root distubance very well and overwinter well indoors. There is of course some set back and it is slow to get growing in the spring, however I'm not ready to get into an elaborate heating system yet. I'm trying to work out my kinks this year on a trachy. Plus my wife would kill me if I had Jim's setup! I live in maybe the coldest winter 6a in America. This will be my 3rd winter here, the lowest low each of the past 2 years is -2, and -8F, HOWEVER, it is the norm to go 3 weeks at a time never getting above freezing. Last December and January, we had 9 days that got above freezing during the day, and most of those were in the 33-38F range for highs. We also had 2 3-weeks seesions of consecutive below freezing weather. The other problem is that I generally don't see grass from Dec.1 to mid-March, it never gets warm enough to ever melt the snow. Last year I lost 2 decent sized trachies and a sabal palmetto, and my minors and needle that survived received considerable damage, the minors burned 98%, the only things left were the emerging spears. Needle had spear pull with surving pups. That was with frost cloth wrapped unheated leaf cages, which provided 0-30% damage and no losses the year before.