I have about 6 or 7 flats started and mostly doing well. I have 28 tomato plants just put into separate pots (3 varieties: Black Krim, Iidi and Padova). Also, there are 3 flats of coleus, one flat with cuttings from last year's favourites and the other 2 with new seedlings. I'm trying for ones with a lot of yellow in the leaves but not having much luck. But I do have one rather small and weak one with almost completely black leaves. Probably the colour is why it's not growing very fast (not enough chlorophyl),but it seems healthy. I also have lots of baby primulas of 3 kinds. Two sets are in the cold frame as they are from last year, and the others are auriculas from this year. I got the seeds from France and had quite poor germination so I'm watching the plants I did get really closely. For unusuals, I have seedlings of things I collected in parks and nurseries locally. They didn't care if I collected seeds, so I went wild! Now I have red yuccas, pineapple lilies, phormiums, pearly whites (a local wildflower) and eryngium agavafolium.I also have 3 different kinds of penstemons, but while growing, they're very slow and tiny. Let's hope at least some of them survive!

"Also, out on the farm, a formal dining room seems a bit out of place, while an open country kitchen, with a big work table, woodstove and lots of light sounds just right...at least for me!" Many people expect a "farmhouse" to look like that thanks to images in magazines of remodeled modern kitchens. The reality was that after a long day toiling in the fields, being able to close off the hot kitchen from the dining room so you could eat in relative comfort was a blessing. In the country at least, it wasn't until the widespread use of electric fans, water coolers and air conditioners was the kitchen considered to be a room anyone wanted to hang out in; before then it was just a hot, steamy, and pretty much no nonsense work space for preparing meals and washing up afterward. There was a reason women of any means at all hired someone else to cook. ;^) I would never, ever open the wall between the kitchen and dining room here. Mainly that's because there's a whopping 15 to 20 degree difference in the temperature between the two rooms in the summer after I finish making dinner. That said, since we bought this farm, we have done some rearranging in the 100+year old house. The bathroom had been created by taking a corner of what used to be the screened sleeping porch at the back back and closing it in; MOL just crammed in a closet directly off the kitchen. We moved the bathroom to the other end of the porch, away from the kitchen. And we've been working to open up the wall between what had been the former porch and bathroom and the kitchen so when we're done there will not only be room for the washing machine, but also a tiny, walk in pantry, a place to sit and take off muddy boots, and a small table and chairs with a window looking out over the backyard toward the west. As further sacrilege, I'd like to one day move the bathroom off the back porch all together and put it in the middle bedroom, and turn that part of the porch into a laundry/utility room. You can't get to the second bedroom without going through the middle bedroom, and in otherwise similar sized homes the same age and with an otherwise similar floorplan, that space is actually a small, short hallway and a bathroom. I'm guessing that the family that built the house needed the room to sleep more than a bathroom, as they didn't even add one until almost 60 years later. So as far as eventually moving the bathroom into the house itself, you could say that I want to upgrade the floorplan to the high end version of what was available when the house was built.

I tell my daughter I’m taking her to a special place her immediate response” not the garden centre again “,but I respond back with we can go the beach after .. In the spring time I go to HD and Lowes and Wallmart hoping to be first to catch the roses to arrive , I do this every day until I see the roses( body bags) I travel for over an hour or longer to buy roses( Niagara falls region – Palatine rose) The manager at the big box store knows me now as I’m there almost everyday looking for a good deal on manure..go Moo poo go My neighbours ask for advise on plants For my Birthday I ask for more roses and manure I give away rose bushes to my favourite neighbours and secretly hoping they would return the favour

Thanks Jim! Lily here's a pic of MOP. Hard to tell a lot but she's prob 21/2 by 3 right now and loaded with buds. Love her! Judy enabled me on this one and many more lol We are quite hopeless when it comes to roses! And lots of other stuff haha!