Proudgm, read up on this site and www.wintersown.org to learn about winter sowing. This was my first year and I love it. I planted 54 milk jugs of perennials and hardy annuals during the winter. It may have been a crazy winter to start but I had pretty good success. Oh, I lost some stuff in the ice storms followed by the "big freeze" but still have plenty. i look forward to doing it again next year. Basically, you're planting your seeds in mini-green houses(vented milk jugs or other containers)then set them outside to let nature take its' course. Read up on it, try it, you'll like it.

Adellabedella, I love mammatus clouds and think they are the coolest-looking thing. We see them a lot down here along the Red River on severe T-storm type days. If I am in the garden and see them magically 'appearing' in the sky, I drop what I am doing and flip my fire radio over to the NOAA weather channel to listen to it for a while. If I see rapid T-storm development off to our west, south or southwest plus mammatus clouds, I go inside to check the NWS website and the radar. When you watch the weather closely, you soon learn which clouds are a cause for concern and which are not. Sometimes my storm spotter DH comes outside looks at the clouds and tries to drag my inside the house or at least voices his concern that I "should" come inside. Carol, I am sure they got all that rain. I watched their storms on radar all night long. After I attempted to go to sleep, the weather radio went off every 15 minutes for one of the storms out west. All I could think of was that I'd surely be celebrating the great rainfall if I lived there! They've been so dry for so long. And, no, our weather radio isn't set for that county because it is so far west, but it is set for counties closer to it, like Montague County in TX, and Jefferson, Carter and Garvin Counties in OK. A lot of the storms that were hitting Cotton County were eventually brushing parts of the counties we do have programmed into the radio, so the thing kept going off. I didn't sleep much and was tempted to turn the darn thing off but would never do that for safety reasons, of course. George, I'm glad you got rain. Y'all sure did need it. That's a bit too close for a funnel cloud though! Dawn

Oh, yeah, grandiflora rather than folia, thank you. Have you just moved to the St. Louis area? Your member info shows Georgia. If so, you might want to also ask about this in the Midwestern Gardening forum. St. Louis isn't really in the Ozarks. We have several feet more soil than the Ozarks! I'm not sure how cold-limited the grandiflora Magnolias are. Those in St. Louis do come out of winter looking more droopy and brown-tinged than I remember the ones in Memphis after winter. I might just be remembering Memphis' Magnolias wrong. Even though Memphis is warmer, St. Louis is not quite so prone to those ice storms as is Memphis. Seems like having their big leaves encased in ice would be pretty hard on them. I can think of three Southern Magnolias in my neighborhood. I think the smallest has probably an 8 inch diameter trunk. The largest is probably 10-12, but well over two stories high. I have not seen any huge Magnolias, but that might just mean no one was plnting them prior to, oh, maybe thirty years ago. I do think they grow more slowly here than Memphis.

Well, we have power but my satellite Internet is spotty. I had a whole reply typed out here and lost it. *sigh* I woke up to THUNDER at 6:00 this morning!! Rain and more rain - and we are right at the freezing point. As long as we keep getting a little warmer, we can deal with the rain. Our gutters are a mess - full of ice and melting icicles hanging from them, and some of our trees are feeling the stress. OKC and Tulsa were hit so hard - the TV is saying literally one-third of the state is without power, and it may be 7-10 days getting everyone back up again. Here in NW Oklahoma, we are feeling SO very fortunate! We got hit hard with an ice storm five years ago, and it took our county six months to get rid of all the brush/trees. Parts of NE Oklahoma got hit hard last January, so they certainly didn't need it. I'll say a prayer for all of you who have felt or will feel this storm. It's a doozy!