There is an important distinction that needs to be made here. OrTHENE and OrthoNEX are NOT the same pesticide. They are the same to the extent that both employ the active ingredient ACEPHATE. But OrthoNEX is a mixture of Acephate with the fungicide that is sold as FUNGINEX. The warning on the Funginex bottle warns against getting even the smallest amount of this product in your eyes...it can cause blindness. You should not inhale this product either. Orthonex is the product that used to be (and probably still is) sold as ROSEPRIDE, and is used to prevent blackspot in roses. These chemicals are not "nothing". They have an impact on the environment every time you use them, whether you see it or not. If you are using Orthinex and you don;t really need to be preventing fungal disease, you are using a doubly environmentally unfriendly gaent unnecessarily. I stopped using all forms of chemical pesticide and herbicide (like Round Up) when I began to notice physical abnormalities in the local population of native green treefrogs on my property. I live on 5 acres of land and have pretty extensive ornamental plantings, as well as a population of frogs that probably numbers in the tens of thousands (our property backs up to a Nature Preserve and a natural wetland). We noted that the new generations of baby treefrogs were hatching out on our property with deformities, mainly missing eyes and deformed heads, and some with missing limbs, when we were using Cygon 2E to control black pepper scale on bromeliads and Orthene to control magnolia scale on palms. The treefrogs were using our bromeliads as incubators for their eggs and tadpoles. We stopped using it and within 2 generations we stopped seeing these genetic abnormalities in our frogs. This was a very scary wakeup call to me, especially as we have a well for our water. THINK before you spray.

Hi Maggy, i think dogs always are upset with Halloween. All those strangers coming to their home is just so upsetting for them like the fireworks in July are, and thunder and lightning storms. My sister had a bumblebee costume for her dog. I don't think she liked wearing it much either but she does like to wear her winter coat and raincoat. She will not leave the house without them. I think she has boots too. She has lots of thick hair, but she still gets cold when she goes outside. My other sister's dogs always like wearing their winter coats too. The children were cute, but there sure was a lot of them. They were walking around in groups of 20 or so at a time. I don't think they really knew each other, just met along the way, but they seemed to have fun being together and a part of the group. Some of them were so little, but their parents were with them. Lots of them had colorful light sticks that they carried with them so the whole group was lit up. We must have had 500 children come. My street is flat and long so it is a perfect street to park at one end. There are no steps either. It runs along the ridge of a hill and most streets are hilly with lots of stairs. So I can see why it is so popular. I still have a little candy left but by 8:45 pm I was cold and needed to cook dinner. It started to rain too so I think the evening was pretty much over by then. The clove tree sounds nice, so if you are able to send me one I would like it. I don't remember seeing one here; maybe at Logees. My cymbidiums and camellias are still out with some containerized berries and veggies and a hardy hibiscus. I am hoping I can leave them out a little longer but next week's forecast shows temperatures in the mid 20°f s. I am afraid they might freeze as they are in pots. I really don't have an ideal cool spot to keep them in the winter now. My enclosed porch is on the north side and is not well insulated and not heated. I have tried wintering plants there but they always freeze. Some of my dwarf camellias are quite hardy, but I still am afraid to leave them out in containers. My basement is cool, but not quite cool enough for them to do really well. I miss my beach house sun porches. I guess Mike has the same problem finding a place for plants that need the cool but not freezing temperatures. Graduate school was a long time ago now. I have an MBA in Finance and Investments. I have always taken horticultural courses whenever I could fit them in as I have always enjoyed learning about plants and gardening. Those classes I never had to really study for as i would just absorb the information and I would remember it with no effort. I find it is a little harder to recall plant names as readily though these days. Maybe that is because there is always so much other stuff to have to worry about which crowds the names out. The names always eventually come back, but with a slight delay. Have fun at the orchid show tomorrow. You will have to restrain yourself tomorrow as you will not be able to sneak them in when he is not looking. All us plant people are like that. We just can't resist them. Non-plant lovers just can not understand it. So we end up sneaking them in when we think no one notices even though they probably don't really care, we just think they do when they give us those strange looks and comments about having so many already. Each plant is so different and interesting to us. We can spend hours looking at them in different lighting and see so many textures and colors that the non-plant people just do not see, and we are so at peace doing it. It probably helps us cope with all the other stuff going around us in life. I better get some sleep while I can. I still have to get over this flu so it doesn't linger. I hope you have an asthma free night. Cory

It's very good to have Benadryl on hand. I never thought of it in relation to snake bites. But then, no one in our family has ever been bitten. I got pricked in the thumb, this summer, by a small copperhead. But he didn't release any poison. Once, back in the 90s, when we were living in Hidalgo, Mexico we had an emergency on the grounds of the Bible Institute, where I taught. We had an ag program, and part of it had bees. Our bees had become contaminated with African bees. One day someone came running into my office to inform me that there were bees buzzing all over campus, stinging students. Well, I had to suit up and go see what was going on. Turns out that a number of hives had ganged upon one other and were trying to rob its honey. This caused a "Bee war." Since these were mainly African, they took out their anger on EVERYONE and everything within a couple hundred feet! I knew what to do, to shut things down. But it involved some manipulation of the hives (getting right up on them and handling them). Since my teens I've worked bees. Always, when stung, I had more swelling than most. I had never been stung more than 5 times in a week. Well, I , HAD TO get those bees under control A.S.A.P. in order to avoid a catastrophe. Within 15 minutes I'd been stung about 80 times. Those African bees always found the tiniest opening in my overalls. Still, I HAD . to finish the job. So I retreated to the school dispensary and found a bottle of Benadryl. I took two swigs and went out to finish, which I did. Not only didn't I swell up or have an allergic reaction. I could get stung after that incident, and the sting neither hurt very much nor swelled at all. This continued for a couple years until, finally, I guess I hadn't been stung enough to maintain that resistance. (This year I haven't been stung even once by my bees). So I guess Benadryl is good ... for what ails you! George

Dorothy, I believe the calling or honking is between family members, like parents and children, and is how they keep up with each other's whereabouts as they fly. I saw purple finches at the finch feeder just yesterday and that's the first time this fall I saw any bird at the feeder. It is half empty, so clearly they've been visiting it, but not when I've been outside. Jeanie, With the hummingbirds, I only know the migration has begun because suddenly the hummingbird traffic at the feeders increases a lot. It happens as early as early August some years and not until late August in other years. The major increase in hummer traffic lasts maybe a month and then tapers off, although I still might have occasional slowpokes passing through even well into October. Also, I've noticed we see ruby-throats, rufous and black-chinned hummers during spring and fall migration, but generally only the rubies stay here. So, when I see rufous and black-chinned hummers either in spring or late summer, they are the migrants. I hate the black snakes because they kill our chickens and also eat eggs. We have a lot more trouble with the rat snakes killing chickens that with chicken snakes killing chickens. It is always somthing, I guess. Without cats to control the rodents, I expect we'd have a huge rodent and snake problem, so I greatly appreciate the cats efforts at rodent control. Some years we see the geese in fall headed south, but we always see them headed north in spring. I am not sure if I am not outside at the right times in the fall to see them, or what, because if I see them headed north (and I always do), that clearly means they had to have come south at some earlier time. A lot of waterfowl overwinter at the Hagerman Wildlife Refuge, which is in Texas near Pottsboro near Lake Texoma, and so is a few miles east/southeast of my part of Love County. I've often wondered if the geese that I'm not seeing in the fall are taking a route slightly east of us and stopping to rest at the Hagerman Wildlife Refuge before heading further south. When we lived in Fort Worth, I saw the geese every year, and they always flew over my brother's place near Crowley too. Here, geese sightings are much more hit and miss in the fall but very consistent in the spring. Normally we have ducks move in to live on/near our big pond, but it was dry for so long that there aren't any here this year. We've always had a lot of turtles here because of the creeks and ponds, but the last three years, one large one (she's about the size of a dinner plate) has laid eggs right under the plum tree in our yard. The raccoons always dig up and eat the eggs laid near the ponds and creeks, so maybe by laying the eggs further from a body of water, her babies have a chance to hatch out. So, having the turtle digging in the yard (an activity that freaks out the cats) and laying eggs is now one of the signs of spring we watch for. Susan, It does sound like a Carolina Wren. I remember that Randy used to have wrens nest in his garage and/or greenhouse there in central OK. Tracy, How cool is it that you have the lovebirds? My son is a tropical bird lover and has two sets of lovebirds that are sitting on eggs in their little nests right now. The flycatchers are still here, so if you ever get to move back, you won't have to miss them any more. Jeanie, I think that Chuckwill's Widows are fairly unattractive as birds go, but not as ugly as the Vultures. Dawn