Hi, rosecorgis, I garden in Mill Valley and in Sonoma County. Golden Celebration is a blackspotted disaster in my garden. And we don't get blackspot. The only two Austins I grow successfully are English Garden and Tamora. Livermore has hot summers. Teas and Chinas will excel there. I hope you will experiment with at least one of each. Order mail order for the best plants. "Bermuda Anna Olivier" is a soft yellow Tea and is disease free. For a China, Hermosa (a complex hybrid, to be sure) will be about 4 x 4 with time and blooms all through the summer. Polyanthas bloom all summer, once they start, and never suffer from disease. Perle d'Or will eventually be a larger plant, blooms all the time and has no disease at all. If you have shady parts in your garden, then Raymond Privat is a must have. It likes some sun, some dappled light, for the best bloom color. It's 2.5 x 4 ft mass of mauvey pink. Jeri Jennings is a soft gold hybrid musk plant, in the tones of Golden Celebration but lighter, and only suffers blackspot in the wettest spring. It comes right back. As it matures, it blooms in flushes all summer, more than the average Hybrid Musk. Hermosa Little White Pet is a short by spready thing, blooms all summer. It has myrrh scent and small white flowers in profusion. One of the more mannerly old roses, with a quartered, button eye shape bloom, is Rose du Roi. The bloom is spread across the summer, and the foliage, old fashioned and lovely, is plentiful. I've seen budded plants 4 feet tall in England almost columnar, but here, own root, it's a bushy 3.5 x 3.5 high shouldered plant. In the moderns, Belinda's Dream excels in the heat and is a disease-free plant, 4 x 4 to 4 x 5. We have a fantastic local rose nursery in Sebastapol called Vintage Gardens. Order mails order from there whenever you can to limit shipping costs. Also in the west coast we have Rogue Valley Roses. Here is a link that might be useful: search for rose names after selecting plant type

PKguy was discussing a rainbarrel watering system elsewhere and said that he has found barrels for free at CocaCola bottling plants. Living in Georgia, that should be a resource you can locate! He says he asks for the barrels from phosphoric acid. He lives in Canada, so there may be different customs/laws/liabilities about being able to get these. He asks the guard at the gate for them. Someone else on the thread said they see them advertised in the want ads. gutter water distribution thread from the Renewable Energy Forum I have rainbarrels from the Garener's Supply catalogue. 75 gal rainbarrel They were very expensive, and I am certain you can do better. I just needed something that held a lot of water, and was very handy. I have limited do-it-yourself potential at my house! Check out the thread from Renewable Energy, I linked in my response there to a barrel tap that you might find usefull. I like my rainbarrels. The only problems I have had are 1)the one in the back yard was not elevated and I could not get fast enough flow to fill a watering can, and 2)the darned drain hose was always getting loose (dogs hitting it?) and draining the water out of the barrel. So this year I have purchased a platform to put it on to elevate it and get some flow, and will rig something better to hold the hose. The rainbarrel in the front garden is at the top of a slope, so does drain easily. I get the mosquito-control rings that have bt to inhibit the hatching of mosquitos in the standing water in the barrels. I also toss a piece of one in the bottom of all of my gardening containers that have water reservoirs in them. We don't need West Nile or more pesky skeeters! mosquito rings You may find these cheaper elsewhere, I only linked here because I was already on their site. I find that they last more than a month, too.

Southwold, Ontario (near London) has a 5-way "Stop" signed corner, Ron. Post office is small - about 20' on each side. There's a building that used to be a store, but now is closed. A truck backs up to the back sometimes and when I ask what goes on there ... they tell me that they raise bait worms. There's a trucking company about 200 feet south. The aboriginal settlement nearby is having a big furniture sale next week ... on Ball Park Road. They are not a reservation - part of the Iroquois Confederacy, the Oneidas bought their own land, many years ago. My landlord would explain how sod-farming works - he says that it takes two or three days for some companies to roll out a trailer-load of sod ... I think about 36 skids ... but his guys and he lay one in one day. I could show you my garden ... that I must clean up, now that snow's gone. While I was hitch-hiking to the "Old Farts (Senior Men's) Coffee Hour" at church yesterday, (a young aboriginal woman with a baby in the back seat gave me a ride) I found a lot of beer and pop cans along the side of the road. We can take a dozen garbage bags, you travelling one side of the road and I running the other ... ... at 10 cents a can recycling fee for beer cans and liquor bottles and about 2 cents scrap price for a pop can ... ... we could collect enough in an afternoon to go out to dinnner ... well, maybe lunch ... (coffee, maybe: if Starbucks, just us, but we could invite some friends if we go to Tim's). Then home to rub liniment on the sore muscles ... before bed. A bit short of space - there's another single in my bedroom (I'd have to clear the flying clothes off) and a double in the guest room. We could put up another single in the family room. If there's another person, you could have my bed and I'd use the sleeping bag on the chesterfield (couch) ... or the floor: I think that the air mattress still holds air. We could take a tour (about two miles away) of Toronto's new "landfill" (that's a double four-letter word for "dump") that's a couple of miles away, over by Highway 401, the Windsor-Toronto-Montreal Expressway. I expect that they'll build a new exit for the 140 or so trucks that will stop travelling to Michigan and drop their stuff near here, in a couple of years. Nearby London has Storybook Gardens, headquarters of John Labatt Brewery (used to be locally owned ... now somewhere in Europe). They sponsored the civic-owned John Labatt Centre, arena for Junior hockey that provides players for the N H L. There's an Agricultuiral Exhibition Centre, TV station and some flee markets ...oh, something wrong with the spelling, did you say? Used to be a biscuit/candy factory, but they closed. Oh - there's a cookie factory (Archway, Hollandia - similar to Voortmans) in a nearby village - they make great cookies, sometimes have 5-lb. boxes on sale. There's a motor vehicle licensing testing centre on a highway just on this side of London, should anyone be interested. If you're still around next Monday you could go with me for my next test - but you and my licensed required co-driver would have to sit in the centre, as no one allowed in the car but the tester (and me). When they test guys riding motorcycles, they give the guy being tested a radio collar (sorry - "headset") and the tester rides alongside with a transmitter to give instructions. Another driver-instruction session slated for after church on Sunday. Our London has a Thames River ... and ours has two branches, which meet downtown, with parks nearby and the former jail (now a municipal office bulding). I didn't say that we've become so civilized that we don't need a jail any more. Have a lovely weekend, everyone. ole joyful

I wanted to respond to Stargazer's post above. Where is your parents' winery? I live north of Houston, and it sounds like that would be a nice weekend trip up to visit your place! We went on a central Texas wine tour this summer, and I found several wines that I liked. As a native Texan, I was surprised to learn that we are number five in the nation in wine production. It is a fairly new industry here, but apparently growing fast. I love my California wines from Sonoma, Napa, even Santa Barbara area. I also adore French and Italian wines, the occasional Spanish, German, and Greek selections as well. But it's important (and fun) to support the local growers and vintners, so I am going to set out to explore Texas wine country this fall. I hope to gather up some friends for a couple of long weekend excursions. So far I have found that McPherson's Viognier is fabulous! And the Fredericksberg Winery's Zellebration is pretty good too. Allison