Cupressus arizonica 'MPH Biborlovag' Unlimited growth, silver-blue color, purple trunk. Cupressus arizonica 'MPH Biborlovag' Cupressus arizonica 'MPH Vitorlas' Cupressus arizonica 'MPH Vitorlas' Wild found in Lake Balaton shore, sitting in groundwater, 30 meters in 30 years, silvery, fastigiate, unlimited. Make tropical forests of this for lumberware. Zsolt

I'm watching TWC and it is almost painful to watch when you think about the people and animals in the path of these horrific storms. This storm that has run from Edmond to Arcadia to Luther to Fallis just won't stop---it is producing either one long-track tornado or many sort-track ones.I am watching the TV and Chris is watching it on his laptop on TVN where two chasers are live streaming from opposite sides of the storm. Now, peas.... When I soak, I just soak a couple of hours or maybe overnight if I am absent-minded and leave them in the water too long. Then, I roll them around in innoculant, wrap them in paper towels (some years) and wait for them to sprout OR I take them from the innoculant and plant them in 3 oz. bathroom sized cups filled with soil-less mix. I keep the cups inside in average room temperatures and the peas sprout in just a few days. I plant the cups in the ground as soon as a leaf or two appears. If I am going from sprouted peas to the ground, as soon as the little sprout appears coming out of the pea, I put them in the ground. If the ground is wet, I dust them with sulphur as I put them in the ground, although I have wondered if that counteracts the innoculant. So, if you held them inside for days, particularly in the friedge, I suspect that the problem. If you left them in the water to sprout, they likely absorbed too much water and rotted. It only takes 2 or 3 hours for them to absorb enough water to induce sprouting. Putting them in the fridge might not have hurt them had they not been in the water for a while. The reason we sprout indoors is that when the ground is cold and wet in mid-winter and early spring, they rot. If your climate is similar enough to Farmerdill's that you think a December planting would work for you, then why not try it? Is he the same zone as you? Since he is in Georgia,I guess I always have assumed he is zone 8. I have planted flowering sweet peas in late fall or early winter for spring bloom here in zone 7b.. I think that it would be harder here with sugar snaps because we tend to drop into the single digits every winter (sometimes as low as 0 or 1, but this winter I think only to 8 or 9 degrees), and temperatures that low might kill the plants. I might try it anyway just to see what happens. Very small plants will tolerate more cold than taller ones. Even when peas freeze back to the ground, they often resprout, but if they freeze repeatedly it can sap their strength. You have nothing to lose by trying it. If they freeze back, you can just plant a spring crop as always. We go from too cold to too hot here for peas in the blink of an eye. I just pulled my sugar snap pea plants but we had harvested for 3 or 4 weeks and, while I didn't weigh and keep track of the harvest, I know I harvested at least 15-17 gallons of sugar snaps. I'm still working on processing the excess since the last picking a couple of days ago was a smidgen under 10 gallons. I actually have about 15 plants I left in the ground because they had a lot of half-mature ones and I wanted to let them grow a couple more days. At this point, I am pretty sick of sugar snap peas and have begun the harvest of cauliflower.

Mosquitoes are a problem sporadically for us, but since we tend not to have the heavier rainfall many of you have been having, they're not much of a problem right now. We do have a huge platoon of dragonflies and damselflies who look for food relentlessly all day long and they love mosquitoes, and we have lots of birds (including Purple Martins) and bats that eat them too. I also put Bt 'israelensis' granules or dunks in all our standing bodies of water...like the rain barrels, the ponds, etc. Suzie, It can be very hard to identify caterpillars since there are over 300,000 species of Lepidoptera worldwide but Susan might be able to tell you what it is since she is into butterfly gardening. On the website linked below, there are additional links that identify known butterflies and moths of Oklahoma. If the damage to your shrubs rises to the level that you feel like you need to treat the caterpillar infestation, you can spray your shrubs with Bt 'Kurstaki' which is a toxin manufactured from a bacteria that specifically targets caterpillars. It is organic and won't harm anything other than the butterfly/moth larvae. It is easily found in stores and the products that have it as their active ingredient include Thuricide, Dipel and Safer Caterpiller Killer. In the veggie garden, I generally just handpick cats off plants because I have so many flowers there that attract butterflies and moths, and even desirable caterpillars like those of the Black Swallowtail, so I don't like to use Bt there. In an ornamental shrub bed, though, I wouldn't hesitate to spray with Bt if the shrubs had considerable damage. Anna, I'm in Love County and have not seen any decrease in fire ants this year (I wish I had), so I don't think the winter affected ours even though our low temps this winter went down into the single digits a few times. We had them all over the place beginning about late March and running through mid-May. Since the rain stopped in our county and the heat cranked up into the mid- to upper-90s, they've gone underground the last 2 or 3 weeks and I'm not seeing them as much, but I bet if it rained they'd pop up out of the ground overnight. I still find them in raised beds in the veggie garden when I'm digging or when I'm pulling weeds, and I still run over an occasional mound when mowing. I only treat mounds in the veggie garden and in my container-grown vegetables, the dog's fenced play yard, and the backyard where our granddaughter plays and I only use organic fire ant killers. We have almost 15 acres, so there's no way we could afford to treat all of it. In the past I have used some non-organic fire ant killers, but because we have a lot of edible crops in the form not only of vegetables but also fruit trees and berry crops, I've stopped using all nonorganic fire ant killers. We have oodles of native ants of all kinds, but the evil fire ants dominate the ant world at our place. We also have red harvester ants in and around the veggie garden, but I leave them alone because they are a food source for the horned toads and because they clean up the carcasses of dead insects. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: Butterflies and Moths of Oklahoma

We need to lend people with lousy credit MORE money to fix this. What a crock. The lenders and borrowers both deserve what they are getting at this point, bankruptcy and foreclosure. You are NOT entitled to own your house. The majority worked hard to achieve this goal, now the 'gimme' group wants everyone else to pay for them. Since WWII we have set up a system that encourages home ownership. It still required some effort on the buyers part to achieve. Now we have a group that did not want to work, greedy lenders loaning someone else's money( after they sell the note they are off the hook) and everyone is expected to feel sorry and bail them out. It took me 30+ years to accumulate the property I own. It takes work. And Dave, you do not appear in any way to be in the sleazy group. I have a mortgage broker I have used for 20+ years, and you appear very similar to him.