I decided to take out any "sea" plants and try for others without sea or ocean in the name, since we really aren't on the ocean. So my new updated list is: "Nautical mix" petunias "beach comber" mix petunias Coastal Mist bearded iris Toy Boat dwarf Iris Sandy Beach Iris Beach Dance iris Ship Shape Iris Ships Are Sailing Siberian Iris Dover Beach Iris Lake Effect day lily Aye Captian day lily Beach Music Day Lily Moonlight Sail Day Lily Celestial Shore Day Lily Sailing Along Day Lily Aye Captian day lily Queen O The Lakes rose Rosa rugosa/beach rose Cottage Rose Lake Ontario hosta Great Lakes Hosta Lakeside Beach Bum Hosta Lakeside Beach Captain Hosta Lakeside Breaking Waves hosta Great Lakes Gold Hosta Lakeside Pebbles Hosta Lakeside Shoremaster Hosta El Capitan Hosta Summer Breeze Hosta Great Lakes Gladiola Sea Shell Cosmos Yellow Sand Coreopsis Sand Love Grass Lake Currants Cottage pinks (Dianthus) Splish Splash Larkspur Lobelia Regatta "Marine Blue" Lobelia Regatta "Blue Splash" Perennial Gerenium "splish splash" Sunset Coneflower clustered bellflower "marine" beach pea beach bluebells I also spoke to my hubby and we might eb moving the theme garden since we split some of our existing hostas over the weekend and ended up with so many splits we started a new hosta garden! Now it needs a companion bed to "even out" that part of the yard (aw, darn-lol) so this might move to a spot that would offer a greater variety of conditions, from full sun transitioning to open shade. Meaning I can add more hostas and other shade lovers! I am on the hunt for the Lake Ontario Hosta now, since I just found it in the registry. The registrar is semi-local, so I tried emailing him (he was/is? on the board of the local Hosta society). This is going to be a bit of a challenge to fill an entire bed without costing myself a fortune, lol. Gotta love plant swaps (got a rosa rugosa-beach rose-at one yesterday, as well as a dover beach iris), hopefully I can get a lot from seed too.

jackal411 This forum is supposed to be a safe place for people to learn through other folks sharing their advice and experiences. Forum concepts also include people having the right to ask questions and receive RESPECTFUL comments or answers in return. That way we all benefit and grow from the experience. Your comments, jackal411, are not constructive; they are abusive. I don't believe WacoJohn mentioned anything about living in an apartment (as you suggested) or using a generator (as you "assumed" in your post) for his project. Calling WacoJohn a "dum@ss" is simply uncalled for and you should be "booted" for it. Where do you get off pre-judging an individual for asking a simple question? As a matter of fact, it is my belief that creating a pond or "water catch" system on the upper plateau of his 200 acres and channelling the water source into a gravity fed mountain stream is pretty darned ingenious. And for your information, it is doable without generators or solar panels. I live on the west coast of Canada where substantial and old growth forests are being destroyed at an alarming rate. We just lost a man-made estuary down the road last week to a marina development. It used to be a "log pond" for a dry land sort. Now the roadside is littered with the bodies of woodland creatures that have been driven out of their habit and the seabird nesting sites are barren. Several years ago I had a property with a lot of natural springs. We drilled a well that tapped into an underground water source and it free-flowed fresh water like a fountain. We wanted to "give back" to nature what we had taken by building on this wilderness property so we let the well go. In a short period of time it formed a pond and gravity fed stream. Nature took over and an ecosystem was born. The benefits were incredible! Almost overnight, we had frogs, birds, animals, plants, insects, etc., living on our property in symbiotic unison. I can't tell you how beautiful it was to sit by that pond/stream and watch birds raising their young or deer coming by at dawn for a drink. At night, the wetlands came alive with bats, nighthawks and other creatures. The chorus of bird songs, crickets and frogs was so peaceful. It was like having a nature sanctuary in my own backyard. The new owners were from the city and bought the property specifically for the natural beauty we had created. As a matter of fact, we got a handsome profit for our efforts and the owners became habit stewards! That's a double plus...any way you cut it. I have been a conservationist for most of my 49 years and worked on several environmental research studies. Through those experiences I realised that nature is literally "under attack" by mankind and nature needs all the help we can give it. The environmental benefits of wetland habits are seriously under estimated so it is considered expendable and easily destroyed without malice of forethought by many. My only wish, is more people like WacoJohn would give more thought and consideration to the environment within their properties; instead of "plundering" it for their own personal/financial benefit. Imagine the environmental impact if each property owner created individual ecosystems on their lands. So jackal411 consider this... WacoJohn owns 200 acres and wants to create an ecosystem that will help the environment. I say his idea is pure genius and doable. Bravo for WacoJohn! What are you doing jackal411; besides throwing heckles from the "peanut gallery"? We're a global community. Are you doing your part? Kat

I have a Senna corymbosa that was mislabeled when I got it, so it's much too big for its current spot. I'm considering moving it on the berm to the area where the 'head' of the creek is. I also have a Lindheimer's muhly that I'd like to place next to on that left (east end). The camera makes the whole area all look huge and really long but from the front, what's to the left of it, is the neighbor's driveway/front and what's behind it is my side yard and wooden fence. So there really isn't a field behing it, thought it may appear that way. I also have 2 switch grass 'Prarie Sky' Panicum virgatum that I think I'll put where there is a wedge of grass righ now between the head of the creek and the berm, where the water will funnel in. I think the switch grass will be OK being in the water when it rains hard. DH really likes grass and doesn't want to mulch the berm. For the winter I think I'm going to put a cover crop on it and then next spring we can do the Habiturf. We'll have to edge the front side of the berm to do that to be sure no other grass runs up in there. Then hopefully we can leave the berm unmowed. I am going to plant all of it between the creek and the house and I've already done carboard/mulch over a big portion of it. We've been waiting all this time to get the walk replaced but they finally told us they'll do it next week. So that will help me a lot getting going forward on this. I do have some of the plants that I've picked up on sale, repotted and kept in morning sun only. I'n hoping to have it all prepped and be able to get them in the ground late September/early October. I'll do some more pics after the walk way is finished.

Amy, I do not want for this to be another 2015 so just stop all that crazy talk. The idea it could be is just horrifying and I'm not really expecting it to happen (or maybe I'm just hoping it won't happen). Really, though, the ground has been heavily saturated since last September, so I don't think it would take as much rain in May this year to leave us in the same terrible condition that 24+" (highly variable across the county that month, but 24+" at our place) left us that year. I really think we're almost there already. Every time it dries out at all, more rain falls. I have onions in the highest raised veggie bed at the top of the garden that are starting to rot just because they never dry out. There's nothing we can do at this point but wait it out and hope for the best. I have had multiplier onions set seed---maybe 6 or 8 years ago---and a couple of the seeds sprouted, but not many. I'd just blame all such oddities on this year's weather. Rebecca, It is the early stage of some sort of disease. Based on the tiny spots on some of the leaves, it could be septoria leaf spot or bacterial speck or bacterial spot. It is too early to tell. I'd just remove all those yellow leaves to prevent it from spreading. You cannot cure the plants once they have it, but treating the remaining foliage regularly with a fungicide would be the way to slow or stop its spread. You could use Serenade (Bacillus subtilis), copper or GreenCure (or a homemade baking soda spray) if you want an organic fungicide. If you prefer synthetic, Daconil or Fungonil would be the lowest impact (you can harvest the same day you spray with them) or either Maneb or Mancozeb, and those both have a 5-day pre harvest interval. Nancy, I hope the lake doesn't get to your daughter's house. Having the water just 8' from the deck would make me extremely uneasy. I'm laughing at the nickname Fluffy Ruffles. We have had more cats survive a snake bite than die from one, but much depends on where they were bitten and how much venom was injected. Ranger is the primo survivor, having survived (via very expensive vet care including being hospitalized for a week) having her face largely paralyzed by the venom. Her eyes remained paralyzed for almost a month but the vet let her come home after a week, telling us he did not even know if the paralyzed eyes would improve--there wasn't much in vet medical books or journals about such a thing.....and he is a cat specialist, so if this was a common snakebite thing, he would have known. Shady is our longest-lived cat snakebite survivor. He is close to 19 years old and was a year or two old when bitten, so he might argue he is the primo snakebite survivor here, but he never was as sick from the snakebite as Ranger was. It is hard to guess what your tiny flying creature is, but it sounds like a predatory wasp, so definitely a good garden helper. It is horrifying to hear that cat scream when your cats are out. I'm glad your cats are okay. Our worst cat scream wasn't even our cat screaming. It was my first cougar encounter, outside, alone, well after dark, calling our old daddy cat, Emmitt Smith, to come inside on a January night. We hadn't been here but a couple of years and didn't even have an outdoor security light (though we quickly got one after this). Anyhow cougars have an incredibly distinct roar that ends with a sound like a lady screaming---I heard it on TV growing up all my life because one of Fort Worth's nickname was "The Panther City" so in the 1960s and 1970s a lot of local businesses used panthers in their TV commercials. So, I called Emmitt and got a cougar roaring back at me. I was petrified because it was so dark it could have been 20' from me and I couldn't see it. I slowly backed up to the house and opened the door, calling Emmitt one more time. He didn't come. Tim was inside the house watching TV and never heard it, but the next day, two neighbors named Bill and Betty who lived 3/4s of a mile up the road stopped by to see if I as okay. I asked how they knew---they said they heard it and figured from the sound it was around our place. They wanted to be sure I knew what it was. Emmitt showed up 3 or 4 days later, after I'd given him up for dead, with a hunk out of his back....like he had been skinned. His hair never really grew back in that spot and he looked like a half-bald cat for the rest of his life. Foxes also make a screaming sound, as do bobcats when fighting. All of those are sounds no one should ever have to hear when their pets are out in the dark. Jennifer, Nope, I am trying to get rid of it all. After about ten years of overdosing on it, I'm just trying to clear that bed and put it to good use with plants that will produce a harvest the whole growing season, not just for a couple of months of it. It is really hard to get rid of asparagus though, as the roots grow together (at least ours have) into one long impenetrable mass. Onions prefer something higher in nitrogen. Blood meal would work if you have that, but any fertilizer will do. They really aren't all that picky. The thing with nitrogen is that the number of leaves and the size of the leaves determine the ultimate size of the onions, so lots of leaves and lots of big leaves are the goal. Those leaves will give you your onions. Once the onions begin bulbing up, they literally are drawing in the energy from the leaves, a process that continues long after the neck softens and the leaves begin falling over. This is why we leaves the leaves to turn yellow and brown on the plant....their stored up energy is flowing into the bulbs to feed them. Brown spots on tomatoes or potatoes or anything else wouldn't surprise me at this point---higher moisture years generally mean tons of viral, bacterial and fungal diseases, and the older the plants get, the more susceptible they are. I'm seeing reports of brown (or purple or maroon) spots on all sorts of plants right now---it is just that kind of year and it only will escalate as we heat up. Beans are very disease prone, but I ignore diseased leaves (I'll pull them off if those leaves obviously are dying) and still get a great harvest. One key thing to remember is that edible plants are not ornamental plants and often will not look that great at various stages in their lives---that is okay---they don't have to look good to produce a harvest. I hope you enjoyed your nap. Oh, I just saw your comment about Peggy. I am so sorry. Are you positive she is actually gone? If there's no sign of her body, she might have had something grab her but then she got away and will show up. We have had that happen before, and sometimes it takes a scared hen a day or two to come out of hiding and show up. No gardening here today...lots of wind and rain. We have the girls here, so after a late, lazy start to the day (a really late breakfast) we went to see the movie A Dog's Journey (sequel to last year's A Dog's Purpose) this afternoon. It was so good, and Lillie and I hardly cried at all (except each time the dog died.....which is over and over again as it is reincarnated into new bodies to continue its journey). The ending was beautiful though, and the skies were trying to clear off to the west as we were arriving home. I mean, no blue sky or sunlight, but lighter, higher clouds that weren't dropping rain. We have 1.75" in the rain gauge, so there will be no gardening or yard work tomorrow either. Monday is supposed to get pretty dicey, weather-wise, so I don't know if any work will get done. The Convective Outlook for Monday has a large portion of OK in the 'Moderate' risk area for severe weather, and Moderate in this case is worst than it sounds, as the scale (from least to worst) is: Thunderstorm, Marginal, Slight, Moderate and High. We rarely get a High risk day anywhere in the USA---maybe a few times a year, and Moderate always is serious enough to be of concern. I'd like to think I can go out to the garden Monday morning and harvest, maybe weed a little, talk to the drowning plants before Mother nature dumps more rain on them, or something. I think (hope!) the rain will be late in the day, but with this weather, who knows? Everything is lush and green if you just stand and gaze across the countryside, but if you look up close, there's a lot of leaf spot diseases on lots of stuff--I don't just mean in the garden but in the fields and yard and all that as well. Dawn