It is natures way of "cycling" the water. I had an awful algae bloom - green water for about two weeks the first spring I had the pond. I let nature take its course. I added no UV. I do have about 80% plant coverage on the surface. I have been lucky and have not had a major algae bloom since. I do have string algae which I scoop out. It is not a problem. It is all about patience and balance.

Nope, we didn't write it onthetheam, Linda did, but she stole the words right off my computer and my fingers. I'm just grateful that this isn't my first year attempt at gardening, or my first year WS. If it where, I'd have given up already for the rest of my life. OMG, the garden beds look like I just planted seedlings and it's mid June. Oh yeah, I planted those seedlings and I forgot to weed first. OMG, the bugs, the misquitos, and I'm just the biggest magnet to them too. Trust me, they find me from a mile away. 30 seconds outside and I'm being eaten alive. First the cold, then the rain, and more rain, and more rain and then finally a bit of sun, then more rain, and more rain. Finally the rain stops, sun out, and it's drop dead heat and humidity with thunderstorms pouring down 1-4 inches of rain at a time. You know you are in trouble when the zinnias don't grow, are blooming tiny flowers on 2-3 inch stems and the flower is supposed to be 4 inches, the marigolds are even looking sick all summer. Cosmos are finally beginning to perk up and show some blooms, but hello mother nature, it's Sept. 1 in a couple of hours. What's up with this weather and what did we do to deserve this horrible spring, summer and growing season? OK, done with the rant. thought about what do I want for flowers and all next year. Tried to figure out do I WS for deluges of water or drought? Some rain, some sun? Forget it. Just sow what I like, hope for the best, cause no matter how you look at it, we can't control mother nature, she's the boss. So it's back to the planning board for next year, collect what seeds I can, buy seeds if I need to, trade for seeds first. WS, and go from there. And, maybe, just maybe, "WSers, there is a kind mother nature and 2010 will be a good growing season. Fran

Moni, I love the garden catalogs....I can sit and look at them endlessly as the guys are watching football, for example, on a cold Sunday afternoon. Still, even after looking at the paper copies, I'll go and order online because it is faster. We do not have a lot of seed sources here in southern OK--mostly just Wal-Mart and Lowe's in Ardmore, and Home Depot in Gainesville, Texas. The farm and ranch stores don't offer much of a selection, and even less the last couple of years. I miss the places in Fort Worth that had a gazillion kinds of seeds, especially the ones with bulk seed in big cans that you scooped out and bought by the ounce. When we returned from doing a little Christmas shopping earlier today, I picked up the mail and noticed two new catalogs today: one from Vermont Bean Seed Co. and one from Totally Tomatoes. Both are owned by the same parent company, and it also owns HPS (two catalogs from them in the last 4 months) and Shumway Seeds (no cat. yet). If the grassfires or wildfires don't start up on this "Extreme to Very High Fire Danger" day, I hope to finish a fencing project in the next couple of hours, and maybe then I can squeeze in time to scan through the pages of these two catalogs to see "what's new". Well, my late lunch is over and I need to get back outside. Hope you're enjoying this wild and windy day. It's warm here this afternoon, but I think that changes tomorrow. Dawn

fwiw IE9 is my browser of choice.. I need activeX for some network servers & IE9 surely loads in a blink. Firefox upgrade, about 6mb, v11 to 12 failed here ... failed but graciously offered a full download. Uninstalled the FireFox11 manually in control panel before installing new Firefox12. Seemed fine. It offers remove personal settings or not.. I always do remove personal ... because I seldom use it MS Security essentials upgraded the beta 4 version without a hitch here thru microsoft automatic updates. It was like a wake up call to uninstall reinstall IE9 along with flash & java's... when I suddenly had errors .. page not responding ... and this is a new laptop, maybe 10 days old. Came with one error in the admin error log... i fixed that easy, a win7sp1 known error. Something that upgraded very recent hurt IE9 somehow.