Carol, here's the list, and believe it or not, I have NO room left in my garden LOL Obviously, I will have to pare it down, just a little. Thank goodness for pots... Not Available (Yet!) at Pickering/Palatine: Karen Blixen Jardins de Bagatelle Martine Guillot Narzisse Pretty Lady Sri-un Silver Jubilee Truly Yours Urdh Violette Parfumee Available to order: Vick's Caprice Duchesse de Montebello Compte de Chambord Jacqueline du Pre Ispahan Laguna Yolande D'aragon (2nd try - ordered last spring but ended up not being available) Aloha (the Boerner one, not the Kordes) Bride's Dream The author says these are all hardy enough (with a little protection) in zone 5, so hopefully I will be able to grow them here. Wish me luck! Judith

All right acj, I am going to attempt coloring my petty markup here: Paul, I will take the liberty of highlighting things I feel need correcting though I feel your story is vastly improved. Greetings from the garden - I enjoy this time of year because we get a little rest. Not a lot of rest because of all the festivals and shows, including the Oklahoma Garden Festival next week downtown Downtown where? There is still plenty of gardening to be done. As my cohort says Nothing says Valentines like onions. This is true, at least in terms of when we need to plant them. Mid-February is the best time to get your onions in the ground to ensure that (use "the" not that) largest bulbs possible. You have a few choices variety wise. What ever (whatever, one word) you do dont fall for the Vidalia onion hype. The big V only tastes like the big V if it is grown in Vidalia county and the surrounding counties in Georgia. In Oklahoma it will just taste like a yellow granex onion. The Texas 1015y is the best sweet onion variety for Oklahoma. So do like I do and give your sweetheart a bunch of 1015s for Valentines. (1015y's?) There is still a little time for armchair gardening. The seed catalogs started flowing in after the holidays and they are sooooooo enticing. I love to dream about all the new gardens I am going to put in this year. The dreams are so much easier to handle than the shovel and wheelbarrow. I start making lists of the seed I want to order. There is (are)always a couple from Burpees and a few from Territorial Seed and a few more from Seed Savers and and and (and so on). I try to list all the seeds from all the companies on one sheet of paper with cost (including shipping). I try not to let my wife see this list. She gets to see version 2.0 or so. Once I regain consciousness ( I know you are being humorous but the consciousness line doesn't work for me as presented) I start to weed (weed out) the seeds. I try to cut the list in half and maybe half again. My eyes are always bigger than my appetite, or at least my budget. I know seeds are pretty economical, but I dont usually need 50 Echinacea. Why dont all the seed companies offer a seed packet with about 10 seeds for about a dollar? I would order a lot more from a company that catered to my kind of gardener. Once I have paired (pared) my list down I let my wife take a look at it. She is pretty good at reducing it further. I dont like this color, Im allergic to this, or we dont have 10 acres Gosh, I hope she doesnt read this? (not a question so ditch ?). Dont forget to visit your local garden center. They carry many of the seeds you want and you dont have to pay shipping. I would reword this to say something like: Local garden centers will carry many of the seeds you want and you will save the cost of shipping so visit them first. Ok, (Okay)now I have the secret (to success) for your 2004 garden. (something doesn't sound right here, don't open with okay, now) To borrow (to repeat a phrase,)an overused phrase Just Do It. Thats right, dont let this season go without doing something in the garden that you really want to do. I dont care if it is a water garden, an arbor, new blackberries, or an island bed in the front yard. You (front yard, you-no period just comma is it is a continuation of the same sentence) wont be disappointed if you go for it. Here is an example - last year we put a hoophouse in the backyard. Weve wanted a hoophouse for several years, (no comma) but we never got a round (around is one word) to it. It has been wonderful to enjoy a (ditch the "a" and pluralize salads) fresh home grown salad all winter. There are so many projects on my 2004 wish list that I need to quit my job or get another one so I can afford to have someone else do the grunt work. I want a new porch in the front and a new patio in the back The new patio will need an arbor. A water garden would be wonderful. Oh well, good luck with your wish list, (add- and I will dream on.) The story still seems a slight bit fragmented going from onions to what you want to what I want , your wish list, my wish list. I can't put my finger on it but I think JC forinari offered the best observations further back in the forum. This is all offered in good spirit. I wasn't going to post this here because it may seem a bit too critical. Again, proofreading of this sort will make articles more editor friendly.

Larry, That is a beautiful and awesomely tall example of variegated reed grass! Maybe yours is going to get head high to the Jolly Green Giant? Jacob, If I didn't have the 8' tall deer fence all around both garden plots, the deer and I would not be friends. I think Bambi lost her mother, perhaps to a hunter. We have tons and tons of fawns this year---it seems that most does had at least twins this year and one that comes regularly has triplets. I love seeing them. If only the fawns could stay little, cute and adorable forever. People who hunt the property due west of us (it is the buffer that sits between us and the river, so they get a ton of wildlife) are getting pretty large bucks every year....say they sit on their property and wait for the bucks to come off our property. I rarely see the bucks because they feed at night, but I know they are there because every now and then late at night when we are out late, we spot them as we are arriving home. I tried for the first 8 or 10 years to have nice landscaping around the house/yard, which my husband stubbornly refuses to fence off with an 8' fence. The deer ate every single thing I planted, so I finally gave up. Now we just have trees, shrubs, trumpet creeper vines (because apparently the deer don't eat those), grass and some four o'clocks. Everything else? Hostas, hydrangeas, roses, perennial salvias, any annual flowers I planted for color, day lilies, etc......all deer chow. They even would eat the tough, prickly leaves of the hollies in drought periods, but finally the hollies are so big and old and tough that they don't bother those any more. If I ever convince Tim to surround our house and yard with a big ugly fence to keep the deer out, I will plant everything I've ever wanted around the house. I think his desire to not have a fence is much stronger than my longing for one. Where he grew up in Pennsylvania surrounded by woodland, nobody had fences so you could look out and feel like you owned hundreds of acres of forest as all the back yards and farms just sort of flowed together. So, he remains anti-fencing based on fond childhood memories from the 1960s and 1970s.....even though, if you go back there to his childhood neighborhood now, everybody has fencing and the farms and woodlands mostly are housing subdivisions with lots of fencing. I still think that someday I'll at least have a fenced back yard I can landscape. We'll see! Nancy, I am so sorry about your mom's passing. I know I don't "have to" comment, but I want to. Tim and I send you and your family our deepest and most sincere condolences. What an incredible, long life she lived, and you did everything you could to move her to the place that was best for her to live out her final stage of her life. You were a great daughter and I suspect it is because you were reared by an amazing mom. When y'all do travel to Buffalo in a few weeks, I wish you a safe journey. I do think Tiny Dude needs to travel with you so he can enchant and delight your friends and family who see his photos on Facebook and undoubtedly want to meet him in real life. Many cats travel well in a cat crate. Do they microchip cats like they do dogs? If they do, I'd get him microchipped in case he escapes from the vehicle, or at least get him a collar with a tag so you could put your cell phone number on the tag. Being close to the interstate where wrecks are frequent, we get lots of requests to watch for/search for pets that escape from a vehicle (not necessarily a wrecked vehicle---pets can bolt from a broken down vehicle when someone gets out to check and see why the engine is acting up or to change a tire or just when their owners stop at a gas station or fast food place). Sometimes you can find the pet, even weeks later, but it is hard by then to figure out which traveler passing through was searching for that pet if they aren't tagged. In my meager 20 years of living here, an early winter almost always equates to a bad winter. Or, for snow-starved southern OK, a really good winter. But, we don't get the ice storms that folks further north get in bad winters so what a lot of you might view as a bad winter, I might think of as a delightfully cold and snowy winter....if we get snow. If we don't get snow, then who cares? All winter without snow means is that we are cold and wet. I don't like being cold and wet, but I love snow. Not that I've had much snow to love. Our county does sometimes get the ice storms that bring down trees and power lines, but so far, that sort of weather never has come as far south as our house---it has made it down to maybe 3 or 4 miles north of us though. The bad thing is that if we get cold enough for ice and snow, then we get cold enough to lose Zone 8 plants that I planted here in order to see if they would survive here. They will survive here for a few years until we get an extra cold winter and snow. So, I sort of hope for snow, and sort of don't. I rarely plant Zone 8 plants here any more, although I planted a couple this past year.....which pretty much guarantees a cold winter is coming so it can wipe them out. I haven't seen a hummingbird since a week ago Thursday, but left the feeders up in case any were going to ride down on the big cold fronts. I haven't seen any, but will leave the feeders up until Monday or Tuesday, just in case, and then take them down. We ended up with the oldest granddaughter coming to stay with us for the weekend after her plans to spend the weekend with her dad fell through at the absolute last minute. We are always excited to have her come visit for a weekend, even if it wasn't planned. So, we ate dinner out with her, her mom and Chris last night, and then they headed home to get sleep before the busy work weekend with long shifts scheduled at work. We went to Wal-mart after dinner and bought everything we needed to stay home indoors and out of the rain today. We're going to carve pumpkins, which she has been dying to do....but I wanted to wait for cooler weather so the heat wouldn't ruin the Jack-o-lanterns. I think the heat isn't an issue any more. We're going to decorate Halloween Jack-o-lantern cookies (pre-baked and sold with a decorating kit). She has a long list of Halloween crafts she wants to make, including the Halloween version of a gingerbread house (we'll see about that one), so we'll work out way through that list as much as we can. I awakened at six and saw on the radar that the rain was almost here so rushed to get the dogs outdoors ahead of the rain's arrival. Whew! That was close but we made it. We're supposed to have rain all morning. How deeply into the afternoon the rain lasts is the unknown. I wish it would blow through faster, but it might be a long, rainy day here. We're ready for it and aren't planning on going out in it. I have some amaranth in the garden with huge flowering seed heads I'd hoped to have harvested and drying by now, but the relentless rain has kept me from cutting them. I keep hoping for a warm, sunny, windy day without rain so they can dry out some and then I'll cut them. I think if I cut them while they are so wet, they'll just mildew and look awful. I want the flower heads for autumn flower arrangements, but the rain may ruin that idea. When I planted the amaranth seeds in July, I wasn't expecting record rainfall in September and October. Have a lovely Saturday everyone. I hope those of you that the rain keeps missing will get some of this moisture plume left over from Sergio. The unfortunate thing is that it seems largely to be traveling over areas that already have had too much rain recently, so flash flooding and flooding likely will occur in those areas. The Red River is up and running fast and looked ugly last night, so this rain will just make that worse. I am thinking the winter wheat crop here likely is ruined. Too, too much rain even for seeds to sprout and grow, so it is more likely that if the seeds sprout, then the young plants rot. That's so unfortunate, but that is how life goes here on the southern plains. Dawn

Whuuuuuuuut?! Ammonia, slugs, and soil? Have not heard of this, please tell me the details. Right now my main slug control is a shallow bowl of PBR, or Milwaukee's finest, whatever is cheapest. My slugs are clearly Irish immigrants, because they do love the open bar. I have an area by an aralia that has been so slug infested the aralia growth was cut in half last year. This year I've caught probably to 200 slugs at that one spot (keep in mind that given my location, we just started slug season). My heart leaps for joy when I see the baby slugs, less than 1/4" long, heading for the bar, knowing they'll never lay eggs. That one spot alone keeps my butt in the air for a few minutes every morning. Tell me about the ammonia! By the way, given that it wasn't too many years ago that most of us tried to kill every insect we saw, and now we are trying to save every insect we can (except for maybe Japanese Beetles), I asked somebody from the botanical garden if one day I would regret killing slugs. She said no regrets, kill away. I have many many slugs in the woods around me, but this one garden area is just overloaded. This is from last year, and the dish had been on the ground less than three hours when this photo was taken.