wow... THANKS some more!! ;-) It's been so hot these past few days I only go out in the morn and dusk to water my pots and veggie beds. Sharon - there will be 4 seating areas in Our Lady Gardyn: the bed bench at the entrance is the first, Arthur Circle should sit 3 or 4 unless people don't want to sit on the wall, Queens Court seats 2 in the 'thrones', and the exedra (one day I'll figure a name for it but that'll be when I decide what the mosaic theme is) is supposed to seat 6 people. In the rest of the garden I have benches and chairs scattered all around. Susie - When it's 100 out there winter doesn't sound so bad HAHA!! I've always wanted to visit Texas. I was once offered a job there, in El Paso. And yes, I'm from NYC. Always extreme weather there. Cold cold winters and brutally hot summers. I remember sometimes walking down the steps into the subway station and it feeling like a steam bath! Everyone would be looking at each other, shaking there heads, rolling their eyes in a kind of joined commiseration for the horrors we were about to enter. Like descending into hell it was. Sometimes so bad you could barley breath from the mugginess. YIKES! Those were the days! Hope everyone enjoyed their New Year. I watched the ball come down in NY and felt like I was home! Cait

Double digging in one section of my yard uncovered a tirod, a hub cap, and various jagged car parts. I've also dug my fair share of boulders from the garden beds. We use them for borders and edging. Twice during our ownership of the property we discovered a micro-sinkhole. Both gobbled up their unsuspecting victim like quicksand because of how saturated the areas became. I now landscape to prevent these problems from happening again. Digging up larger, unknown objects can spark a chain of events in the garden's evolution.

Harry and Jsvand, I found my Pickering mango. I called at least 10-12 nurseries within 70 miles radius and no one had it except Crowley's nursery in Sarasota(thanks Jb_fla) for letting me know they had them. I decided to pot this one up, with all the cold snaps we've been getting lately, I didn't want another one to cover/heat...I'll just drag it in the garage, since its a dwarf. It was in a 7 gal.but when I removed it to repot to a different pot...the roots were closer to a 5 gal. Wasn't as big as I would have liked and spent more than I wanted to but overall was pleased with the size considering no one had them at all in my area. I didn't want to wait till summer to get one, I'm very impatient once I decide on something,lol... Jsvand, if you don't mind I would love to see a picture of yours...thanks! BTW, when I was there she showed me a picture of a guy in Miami that grows one(Pickering) the tree is 10 years old, the guy standing next to the tree(holding fruits) was 6ft. 4" tall and the 10 year old tree came to about his shoulder...Wide but short...this is my kind of Dwarf tree! I think this would make an excellent container mango.

It took the birds 6 months to find my nyjer feeder when I first put it out. When they finally found it, the goldfinches attracted other birds to my other feeders. I had them hanging off the bottom of our seldom-used 2nd story deck, so they were semi-shaded. I also made a "bird bath" out of a boot tray - it was less than an inch deep and a good 2' long and about 16" wide. It was black, so I wouldn't put something like that out in the sun. I changed the water and scrubbed it out every day, and "sterilized" with vinegar (and rinsed and scrubbed again) about once a week. I sterilized the scrub brush in a bucket of bleach water overnight before sterilizing the "bird bath" the next day, so that the brush was fresh and clean for the post-vinegar-bath scrubbing. So - the night before, on cleaning day - I dump and scrub the bird bath; then fill it with vinegar; put the brush in the bleach water. Next morning, dump the bleach water and the vinegar thoroughly rinse the brush and let it dry in the sun (helps drive off any remaining chlorine). scrub out with the sterilized brush Thoroughly rinse the bird bath; start over again This winter I hope to make a large ceramic platter (I'm an amateur potter) with a glazed interior that will tolerate being sterilized with a bleach solution. I plan to bury that to it's lip in one of my raised beds and keep it filled with water via a dripper line. I'll make something similar for use as a butterfly puddler. Having a water feature can only help in attracting birds, but patience will help as well. One thing I would suggest is to get rid of the "songbird mix" and feed only black oil sunflower seed, safflower seed, and nyjer (in a tube feeder), in the way of seed. Every "songbird mix" I've ever seen has a high proportion of "junk" seed in it which attracts house sparrows, to your peril. At my former residence, they weren't much of a problem, but here they have mobbed my feeder to the point where I had to stop using it. They even scared my hummers away, as well as the mountain jays, mountain blue birds, and quail. Sadly, their seed scattering ways seemed to actually ATTRACT pigeons, LOL! I'm going to try to put the sunflower seed (which has to be hulled due to the former owner of this place having put in Astroturf - impossible to clean sunflower hulls out of) in a mesh feeder that only clingers can use and see if that helps. Otherwise, it's hummingbird feeders and the quail block, and the nyjer mesh feeders I have, and that's all I'll be able to put out here. Maybe an upside-down tube feeder. But nothing for the house sparrows!