Ok I am SORRY lol. I am roflmao you all. When I wrote the barefoot thing, you know how the saying goes....barefoot and naked. Well I did not want to say naked. Cause that is not something I would post. Then when I was ironing, I went over what I had posted and the NOTHING was WORSE lol. I realized what I had done lol. Karyn I would remove the chairs and put even more out there lol. I am thinking on building SHADED areas for the brugs next year. again sorry about the nothing. Ria did not meant it to come across like that. Me and my german again :-(

It's not so much the pond as the wet sand. Butterflies won't drink from standing water, but rather they land on wet soil and drink from the dirt. So by mounding the sand in the pool, I make a permanently moist beach as the sand will wick the water up at least 2 inches above the water level, possibly more, but I haven't mounded the sand up any higher than that. If you have a patch of open dirt in your yard, like around a citrus tree, spray it down on a nice sunny day and wait about 30 minutes. Over the summer I was always greeted by a veritable carpet of Sulphur and and Hairstreak (I believe) butterflies after watering my citrus trees. Which always annoyed me a bit since the pool was, at the time, about 12 feet from my Persian Lime that they would drink at. As far as bees go, the only thing that I have seen in my yard that will attract bees is my white-colored pentas. For most of the summer there were so many bees and wasps on those pentas that no butterflies would visit them. But I haven't seen the bees since the last Love Bug invasion and since then the Gulf Frits have been visiting those plants more frequently. Having said that, I'm more of a foliage person and so I don't have a lot of flowering plants yet. The white pentas are the only flowers I have on the west side of my house and I only have lavendar and white Trailing Lantanas on the east side. But that will hopefully be changing next spring as I set about building a wildflower bed (Yay! Even LESS grass to mow!). I also have cuttings from Purple, Pink and Red Pentas rooting, so those will be planted next spring as well.

Bernd, Sometimes a plant can take a full growing season to adjust to the site in which you plant it. Nurseries are growing under 60% shade cloth. When you take that plant and put it in a lot of direct sunlight, sometimes it is shocked by the change. You can help such a situation by potting a plant and gradually getting it used to its new location. Or you can let it suffer through the first year and then see how it does in year 2. I wouldn't move a plant after one year in a spot, unless you have other evidence that it's just not a proper site for it. Usually green Hostas can take a lot of sun. Steve

I miss Southern Accents too. But if truth be told, I probably wouldn’t subscribe if it were still around. I subscribed to Veranda for a year or two (really deeply discounted) and I got tired of the clutter in my house. I kept one issue, not because it was so terribly interesting, but because shirts folded around it fit perfectly into my packing cubes. 😂