Riverspots, it was a surprise to see my old post return. I agree with everything you have said, but I understand that many good friends on this site have far different opinions, and I do respect those opinions. As I respond a year later, I realize that most of us take care of our own animals, and I should have noticed that those beautiful hydrangeas were coming through the slats of the fence, and should have not thought it was cute that the dogs would grab the orchid buds that fell. I cannot understand why cat owners feel that is is acceptable to allow their cats to roam at night. Lou M, did you know that vitamins are not regulated, and Vitamin D and A can hurt us? I have also heard that you cannot overdose with the D from the sun, but I overdosed on the pills. I told my doctor that I was only taking a little more than 2,000 IU, and he said that for all I knew I was taking 20,000. I used a name brand from a good store, but he said they were not regulated and I had all the signs of an overdose. AFter stopping the D for a week or so, the symptoms went away. We all know that excessive A is dangerous. Berndoodle, thanks. I allow the use of chemicals for termites. That is really necessary in our area. I also use DEET. Why do you dislike it so much? I always wear short sleeves, and crop pants, so I only spray a couple of areas. Your tick area is over the top isn't it? Our lot is on the larger size for a suburb, but we don't own farm property, and I can imagine that it would be overwhelming to try to control ticks on acreage. huttnem, one neighbor at a time! Little by little if people are aware of what they are using, and if they are aware that the FDA does not control nearly what we think they control, we will greatly reduce the harm to our neighborhoods. We need to encourage others to only spray where it is needed. To coat the yard with a dangerous chemical to stop snails is downright silly. Hi Patricia. Our dogs have their own yard, and also have the use of much of the house. Unfortunately they feel that they have a right to eat anything in their yard or our kitchen. We spill cheese, it's theirs. Thinking like a human, a spilled orchid became his, and either that or the hydrangea that spilled over to their yard made my dog very sick. We have doubled the length of the dogs' yard, and will not be bringing flowers inside now except for roses. My dogs never try to touch any vegetation when we walk them, and they ignore my roses. I need to think more like a dog to protect my dogs. ha ha ha I understand what Patricia was saying about her grandmother, but we live such a different life than our grandparents. My dogs are golden retrievers, but their life is not one where they can run in the fields, and burn their food like maybe nature intended. They can tend to overeat, and put on weight. Therefore, we control the food they get. Instead of digesting a bird or rabbit that might have fiber (ick), they digest dog food that is very expensive, and has the nutrients that the dog food company says they need. Mine would always like more, but the Vet says I am extending their lives by limiting their food intake, and keeping them slim. For this reason my dogs will tend to eat almost anything -- they don't have the instinct that a dog on a farm might have because we always take care of them. Thank you all for your replies. Sammy

Melissa, if our hummingbirds aren't one and the same, I betcha they're cousins. ;-) Thinman, how cool was that when the little birdie sat on your glasses?? I think these little guys just must be that sociable. Amazing! MeMo, I was at Walmart last night. The gal in front of me was buying some kind of mole poison and the gal ringing her up told her to just put out some instant mashed potatoes. The mole will eat the flakes, then without a watersource will supposedly dehydrate and die.... or go away to find a water source. I googled the idea and found a couple of references from other people who also claim this works on moles, as well as mice and gophers. It'd be pretty cool if it did work, eh? Gayle, this hummingbird thing is a new experience for me too-- I'd only seen a couple of them before in my lifetime. Now I've got a bunch of them hanging around. Saw one yesterday with a bright ruby throat. Oh man, gorgeous! Skye, I am having the same thing happen with my nasturtuims. Who knew! I planted a lot of them because they were about the only thing I could get to grow at the time. The more the merrier, I thought. 2ft x 2ft mounds, I thought. NOT. I spent much of last evening pruning those buggers. I gave a couple of them a little trellis. Not sure if they are going to be perennial for me. If not, I know for sure I will be much more careful with them next year. If they are, I think I am going to pull a few of them up after they stop their profusion of blooms. Look what the nasties are doing to my sweetpeas! In this one it's difficult to decide whether the California poppies are thugging the nasturtiums or vice versa, but look how they are invading my red poppies. Oy.

Thank you Jim! I actually have a couple of computers so it just depends where I am. My iPad is first generation and that's the one I generally sit at to read the gardenweb and it doesn't let me post. I can post to other forums Just not gardenweb. phone is the best but I hate to type on it so I usually just use voice recognition and I can't use that everywhere, if you catch my drift! Speaking of drift, red drift also does well for me but it has a slightly different growth habit and maybe a little less bloomy.

I am so far behind that I'm never going to catch up. It is hard to find computer time with a grandchild in the house. Jennifer, Tim's hawk/guinea rescue probably occurred before YouTube even existed. It was quite a while back. Regardless, he and I are so old school that we pretty much use our phones just as phones. We just aren't the type to whip them out and take photos or videos. It isn't a habit to us to do that and it isn't routine, and we don't even think about doing it. Jacob, I cannot even imagine temperatures in the 50s at night. That sounds heavenly and it will be months before it happens down here again. We had a lot of pop-up thunderstorms roll thru last night. At our house we barely got any rain, but got cooler nighttime temperatures from the rain-cooled air---a cool 70 degrees overnight low this morning and that felt heavenly compared to our usual 77-80 degree low temperature. Sometimes brassicas do odd things. We had some Piricicaba broccoli survive the horrendous heat (highs up to 115 degrees at our house and over 100 degrees most days all summer long) and lack of rainfall (a total of less than 11" from Jan-mid-August 2011) during the drought of 2011 even though I stopped watering the garden for pretty much all of July and half of August. We were at fires day and night---up to 5 fires in one day, and also some fires that burned for 3 to 5 days each, and I abandoned my garden for a very long time. In late autumn, I ventured in there to pick Seminole pumpkins, which had survived the heat and drought, and found the Piricicaba was producing heads. It was crazy. Native cacti died. Native wildflowers died. Native grasses died. Native trees (including the normally very resilient oak trees) died. A random broccoli variety in an unwatered garden? Survived. The other crazy thing was that even after I stopped watering, some tomato plants set fruit in 100-115 degree weather. The reason? My only explanation is that our relative humidity was very, very low, often in the low single digits, and some tomatoes will set fruit in high heat/low humidity but won't set fruit in high heat/high humidity. Pole beans often survive the heat here, growing well but not blooming, and go on to produce in the fall once temperatures cure. Bush beans are less resilient and the heat and pests seem to get them. So, I plant accordingly---plant those bush beans early, harvest until the heat stops them from producing and then yank them out. By then, the grasshoppers are devouring the foliage and the spider mites are all over them. The pole beans I just leave alone and ignore unless they become sick or pesty, in which case I yank them out and replace them with new ones for fall. So, this year my bush beans are long gone, but we froze a lot of beans from them, and my pole beans haven't produced a thing yet. They are still alive but grasshoppers are all over them. The lima beans have not one single leaf that isn't full of holes like Swiss Cheese, but are producing beans finally after stalling for a long time. In our heat down here, the usual production sequence is bush snap beans, Lima beans, southern peas (all summer long) and then pole beans (in the autumn) and another round of snap beans in the autumn. So, this year, that is how it has gone except the Lima beans stalled and the first variety of southern peas beat them to production, but now that variety of southern peas is fading fast (they only produce for a few weeks) and the Lima beans are coming on strong. This year's strange weather has caused lots of strange stuff like that down here. March and May were both extraordinary in how hot they were so early, but periods of cold in April complicated things. It has been so weird that I'm just glad my garden is producing a harvest. Amy, The cloudy spot can be ignored and the tomatoes can be used however you choose, including running them through the tomato machine. When the stink bugs and leaf-footed bugs insert their sucking mouth parts into the tomatoes, they inject an enzyme that helps break down the fruit juices so they can ingest them. That enzyme causes the little spots on the fruit and some people feel it adds a sourness to the fruit. It is not noticeable to me if there's just a couple of spots, but if there's 50 or 60 or 80 spots on one fruit, I cannot bear to look at those and toss them on the compost pile. Once stink bug and leaf-footed bug damage on tomatoes reach that level, I might as well pull my plants and toss them because the fruit isn't going to be harvested and eaten, and we are almost to that point now. It works out okay. I harvest all the remaining usable fruit, pull and toss the plants, and then the stink bugs and leaf-footed bugs have nothing much to eat----so they go away. Then I plant fall tomato plants and start all over. Usually the stink bugs and leaf-footed bugs are gone or almost nonexistent by the time the fall tomato plants are producing. I remember a decade or further back that some of the Texas gardeners on GW on the Tomato Forum would talk about how stink bugs and leaf footed bugs decimated their fruit and that they were done harvesting by May because of the heavy damage....and I couldn't even imagine it. Now, they have gotten just about as bad here even though we're a lot further north, but I usually can harvest at least well into July. This year the stink bugs and leaf-footed bugs are the worst they've ever been. I know I was seeing stink bugs in April while we still were having those really cold nights. Megan, I'll look at your photos later. I've got to wake up the kid in a minute and get her ready to go to a United Way thing in Ardmore. We're going to meet our son and her mom there for lunch and whatever else is going on at the BBQ bash in downtown today. Nancy, I am glad you found a home for the fox. Eileen, One reason we moved to such a remote area (we still had dirt roads when we moved here 20 years ago, and no TV reception, no internet except via satellite and no cell phone reception) was that we wanted to live surrounded by wildlife. We got a little more wildlife than we bargained for, I think, and you cannot just sit back and watch them starve in drought summers (or, at least, I cannot) so we started feeding them. Now, it is just a part of who we are and what we do. The deer understand it very well. I've been slicing up extra zucchini and squash for them when I have extra ones (usually it is the big ones that have escaped detection until they are gigantic) and I put those out with the deer corn. The deer get used to them quickly, and sulk on the days when there's no squash or zucchini. It is funny. They stand and stare at me and the deer corn as if to say "where's our squash?" They eat and leave, and then keep coming back all day, checking to see if there's squash. Sometimes, after I've harvested a gigantic zucchini and sliced it up for them, they almost meet me at the deer corn when I bring it out to them....so I think they stand in the woods and watch me come from the garden to the house and are just waiting for that extra food. We are going to have unhappy deer when/if the SVBs finally kill the squash and zucchini plants. I've done nothing special to protect the plants this year, and yet the SVBs haven't gotten them yet, which is odd. Still, it surely will happen soon, so the deer had better be enjoying their extra food rations while we still are getting them. Occasionally the deer become too friendly and start walking towards me to meet me when I am carrying out food for them. I have to stop and get a dog and bring it with me to force the deer back over the fence and away from the feeding area. The dog doesn't have to do anything---just the sight of it sends them back over the fence and into the adjacent woodland. I never, ever lose sight of the fact that the deer are not Bambi and it is never safe to let them get too close. Never, ever, ever. We've had people here in our county let deer get too close, and then the deer attacked them and hurt them and sheriff's deputies had to go shoot the deer to get them to leave the victims of their attack alone. So, we're friendly with them, but not too friendly---a safe distance has to be maintained. I also let bunnies live in my garden if they venture into it or are born inside it, and feed them in the same places at night so that they often let me get within 2 or 3 feet of them while I'm putting out food for them. Like the deer they often are waiting for me to bring out the food in the morning. I'm not sure if I have them trained to sit and wait for the food or if they have me trained to bring them food, but either way we always have a good population of cottontails, at least until the coyote population surges upward and the bunnies all get eaten. You cannot get too attached to your wildlife for that reason. Dawn