I am in Houston which was zone 9 but changed now to zone 8. I studied the raspberry subject in the winter or slightly earlier and found a lot of likes for Baba Berries for the south. I ordered them with my fruit tree order from Bay Laurel Nursery. They have now been received, but since then, I have gone to a fruit gardening talk with one of the beginning heads of Urban Harvest in Houston. I knew he was an important speaker so went and asked about raspberries. You may know him, Bob Randall. He also belongs to the Rare Fruit News newsletter. He rather chastised me for buying the Bababerries. He said bababerries were prone to some type of disease plus the taste was so so. He grows all these in his yard plus the baba. The following varieties he recommended, Anne and Itsaul. I bought Anne raspberry from Etsy.com ( cheap) and finally found Itsaul at forestfarm.com. It seems that Itsaul blooms/makes raspberries continuously. Hope this helps, Carol

Our 16A wooded rural property produces TONS of leaves. We leave them in the woods but the ones that blow up against our shop building and cover the limited area of grass we maintain, have to go somewhere. This spring I took an old roll of rusty fencing and made 3 circles about 8 ft. in diameter and 3 ft. high. We piled and stuffed leaves into them like nobody's business. They've already sunk down to 1-1/2 ft. high (with all the rain). I just can't wait till next year to get some leaf mold. We have no indoor plumbing out there so I visit the leaf corrals to make liquid nitrogen deposits.

Suzie, I've only seen the seed at one place....Wildseed Farms which is down in the Fredericksburg, TX, area. Back when I bought my original seed 5 or 6 years ago, they only had purple and pink, but now they also have a mix which includes purple, pink and white. (The pink ones I have don't reseed as well as the purple ones, and I haven't deliberately planted white, but I get white ones from some of the volunteers that come up from the pink ones every year. I also get some solid pink and some pink and white streaked, striped or mottled ones.) Orginally, when I still lived in Texas in the 1990s, they had a petunia called VIP (for Very Important Petunia) and it grew better and better as the weather got hotter. You did have to cut it back once or twice during the summer or it would get sort of raggedy but it came back into bloom really fast after you cut it back. It spread out about 3 or 4 feet and was wonderful. Then, for a year or two, it seemed to disappear from the stores. Then, just as suddenly, we had 'Laura Bush' petunia which I think either was an improved VIP petunia, a selection from VIP or maybe had VIP as one of its parents. Then we moved here and I couldn't find them here. After several years of searching for them, I found seed at Wildseed Farms, ordered some, planted them, and they've been happily reseeding themselves ever since. The ones I planted last spring (volunteers I dug up from the garden and transplanted into the pots) in large containers (as understory plants under brugmansias and daturas) have been overwintering in the garage. They were in bloom until it snowed and our temperature dropped to 3 degrees. They didn't die, but the cold knocked their blossoms off and the tips of some branches are freeze-damaged though not dead. I need to cut them back and feed them and see if they'll come back into production, but am amazed at how cold-hardy they are and also at how well they flower in the heat. I've linked Wildseed Farms below. I get a lot of my flowers seeds from them, includng a wildflower blend, Texas Bluebonnets, Alamo Fire (Red) Bluebonnets, the Laura Bush petunias, and various types of zinnias, cosmos and sunflowers. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: Wildseed Farms

Stephanie, I don't know that one color of soil is any better than another, based solely on the color of the soil. Having said that, I prefer dark brown to black loamy soil like we have in our woodland where decades of decaying and decomposing leaves and wood have given us a beautiful layer of rich topsoil. Unfortunately that is not the kind of soil we have on the higher land near the house and garden---it is red clay with some medium-brown silty sand cutting across the property in a couple of places. Most of my soil is red clay and it is very mineral-rich and nutrient-rich and I have no complaints about its fertility. It is highly fertile. Plants grow like crazy in it once I've added enough organic matter that their roots don't suffocate in the dense clay. I believe that the color of soil is linked to the types of proteins found in the soil. Red soil often is higher than other soil colors in iron, for example. Brown and black soils often have that color because they have a higher percentage of organic matter/compost/humus in them, but not always. Where I grew up in Texas we had blackland clay that was beautiful to look at, but which also needed to have tons of organic matter added to it in order for plants to perform to their best potential in it. Just the fact that it was black did not mean it had good tilth. For what it is worth, I don't buy topsoil. In general, most of the topsoil you buy in bags is worthless crap that needs tons of amending before anything will grow well in it. If I am wanting to buy something to fill a raised bed, I buy organic matter (composted cow manure from a reliable company that never has sold me herbicide-contaminated compost, pine bark fines, mushroom compost, humus, soil conditioner [it usually is a combination of humus and pine bark fines] and rototill it into the native soil to create the raised bed. I'm not sure why you're buying top soil, but I hope it isn't for containers. You don't put soil in containers, you put a soil-less mix in them. Having said that, there is one time when I think bagged top soil can be worthwhile. If you have very sandy soil that drains very, very fast and you cannot get it to hold water, you can fix it by adding not only lots of organic matter but also by adding some cheap top soil that has a high clay content. The clay content when added to sandy soil plus organic matter can help you turn the very sandy soil into a beautiful sandy loam. Enjoy being new to gardening. There's nothing wrong with being new to it, and you can garden your entire life and still experience new things in the garden, yard, etc. every year. That is part of what is so fascinating about gardening---there are so many variables involved and so many issues that can arise that you're always learning, always trying new things, always figuring out that there is more than one way to skin a cat (with apologies to any cat reading this and saying "yikes!"). One of my favorite all-time gardening quotes is from Thomas Jefferson, who said "Though an old man, I am but a young gardener". Dawn