I LOVE that link! I am copying it and posting it on the bulletin board at work- in a vet office. I have seen all of the above and probably more but people get stupid with visions of dollar signs dancing in their heads. How about when the girl is bred but it doesn't take and she gets a pyometra, a life-threatening infection of the uterus which requires emergency spay (at emergency surgery cost- like $600-1200 and even more if there are further complications) and even then she might not live? Or how about all the puppies have worms which causes diarrhea so bad that they strain so much their colons prolapse? Wait, the c-section at the emergency clinic is $1400?!

Thanks so much for the info on these amazing beneficial herbs Strawberry Hill, I will definitely plant all of them for my cat friends. I will cover the catnip with a small cage contraption so that they'll only be able to get to the new growth... :-) That is such great news - that after so much rain still no BS on your potted roses. We also had mega liters of constant rain for 2 days and I decided not to use the corn flour dusting, and there is not one BS leaf on any rose....just as you said, the soil is the key....I also gave the BS prone roses an extra teaspoon of Gypsum as you advised (along with the Potassium Sulfate) ...just before the rain started falling. I watered in in very quickly with alkaline tap water, the rain did the rest. I think that's another great idea - to keep feeding them Gypsum and Potassium Sulfate to keep them BS-free during winter - until our next spring. many thanks :-) I won't give any Nitrogen either, seeing that they stop blooming anyway during winter. Carol, maybe you can try wrapping just a tiny piece of any citrus fruit peel around the area where the aphids are worst? I did that over here and the aphids jumped of like flies... but the Hydrogen Peroxide sounds like a great treatment for the aphids plus it adds oxygen, I think that is the best solution, as advised by Strawberry Hill...I will also try that...I think clay can do with some oxygen.... thanks for liking the Nguni cows, yes they are so beautiful...and quite docile... we have another breed here called 'Afrikaner'-cattle...they are quite strong as well but not so docile...used in the beef industry. They are also much bigger than Nguni's. I hope you enjoy your snowy winter wonderlands, I hope you, Jim, and Strawberry Hill will post winter photo's. Today it is 96.8 F and a strong warm berg (mountain)- wind is blowing. really magical. I decided to look up the definition of a berg wind: Berg wind (from Afrikaans berg "mountain" + wind "wind", i.e. a mountain wind) is the South African name for a katabatic wind: a hot dry wind blowing down the Great Escarpment from the high central plateau to the coast. When the air that has been heated on the extensive central plateau flows down the escarpment to the coast it undergoes further warming by adiabatic processes. This accounts for the hot and dry properties of these off-shore winds, wherever they occur along South Africa's coastline.[1][2] Although berg winds are often called a Föhn winds, this is probably a misnomer, as Föhn winds are rain shadow winds that result from air moving over a mountain range, resulting in precipitation on the windward side. This releases latent heat into the atmosphere which is then warmed still further as the air descends on the leeward side (e.g., the Chinook or the original Föhn).[2][3] Berg winds do not originate in precipitation, but in the mostly dry, often arid central plateau of Southern Africa. On the other hand, katabatic winds are technically drainage winds, that carry high density, usually cold air from a high elevation down a slope under the force of gravity.[3] These are thus "fall winds", which occur most typically down the coastal ice slopes of Antarctica and Greenland. Berg winds blow off the African escarpment in response to large scale weather systems in the South Atlantic Ocean, the African interior, and the Southern Indian Ocean.

I found this article about roses and drought: http://paulzimmermanroses.com/care/summer-care/should-you-water-your-roses-during-a-drought/ The roses in my personal garden haven’t been watered in over a decade. And that includes during a drought. but then I read this in our rose breeder's newsletter: http://www.ludwigsroses.co.za/newsletter/ The way trees drink Scientists who study forests say they’ve discovered something disturbing about the way prolonged drought affects trees. It has to do with the way trees drink. They don’t do it the way we do — they suck water up from the ground all the way to their leaves, through a bundle of channels in a part of the trunk called the xylem. The bundles are like blood vessels. When drought dries out the soil, a tree has to suck harder. And that can actually be dangerous, because sucking harder increases the risk of drawing air bubbles into the tree’s plumbing. Plant scientist Brendan Choat explains: “As drought stress increases, you have more and more gas accumulating in the plumbing system, until they can’t get any water up into the leaves. This is really bad news for the plant because this is like having an embolism in a human blood vessel.” Like a human embolism, the gas bubbles stop the flow of fluid. If that persists, it means thirst, starvation and eventually death. Choat is from the University of Western Sydney in Australia, a region that has seen years of record-breaking drought. He wondered: How much drought does it take before trees start choking on air bubbles? He and a team of researchers studied 226 species of trees around the world, including desert trees, rain forest trees and many others. They discovered that for most, it doesn’t take much drought at all. “So this is the key thing,” Choat says, “that it would only take a small shift in terms of the moisture environment, the temperature … to push these plants across the threshold.” The threshold between drinking and choking, that is. The reason there’s so little margin of error is that trees have to finely balance eating and drinking. To eat, they open holes in their leaves, called stomata, to absorb carbon dioxide. But the more they do that, the more they lose water by transpiration through the stomata. Lose too much, and they have to start sucking harder — and risk a deadly embolism. Choat’s research, in the journal Nature, shows that it doesn’t take much drought before trees start to self-destruct. But what about trees that have evolved to live in really hot, dry places? They’re sippers, not gulpers. Plant scientists like Bettina Engelbrecht figured they’d have a larger margin of safety before they choke. “Instead,” she says of Choat’s research, “we find, well, it’s all the same — everyone is right at the edge and has a very risky strategy.” Engelbrecht, at the University of Bayreuth in Germany, studies rain forest trees. “Now, we have to worry about all of them,” she says. “We have to really deal with the problem at the global scale.” That’s because temperatures are rising around the globe. That makes drought more likely and more intense. Big droughts have hit southern Europe, Russia, Australia and the U.S. in recent years. The first 10 months of 2012 were the warmest ever in the continental U.S. Along with the heat came widespread drought, which still persists in the Southwest. Nathan McDowell, a plant scientist at the government’s Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, actually puts trees under plastic to see how they deal with less water and more heat. He says trees are adaptable, up to a point. “Now we’re changing that climate range really fast,” he notes, “faster than any of the living plants here have experienced. So can they change fast enough to adapt to that? You know, the preponderance of evidence right now is saying that [at] lots of locations around the world, they’re not adapting fast enough.” When they don’t adapt, they stop growing. Beetles and other insects invade. If droughts last long enough, the forests just die, and get replaced with something else. Please help me to understand this Straw.... What I've noticed in the past with severe droughts myself is that once a plant has reached it's threshold no amount of water can make it grow and live again...and if it does, it is usually riddled with all kinds of fungal (and other) diseases and bad insects. How can not watering your roses during a drought be a good thing, as stated in the site on the top?

The Garland quotes make me want to sit next to him and watch. Nice quotes to visit again. Syndey Harris quotes should be on a must read list, like them. Geraldine Harris I love. Have her books and which of her quote is my favorite? They are all. We both are cancer survivors, so there is a connection with similar experiences. Thanks, Don for all the quotes.