Hi folks Thanks so much for all your encouragement and support! It's so nice to know that I'm not alone in this, and that there are friends out there who understand that roses are important to us when we've lavished love and attention on them - Bluegirl put that well. Part of the fun of growing roses for me is that they need me in a way that daylilies never would, but this year they've needed too much attention for too little return. And I am indeed a lazy rose gardener, at least as much as I can be with 700+ roses. I don't spray anything except very occasional Liquid Fence or insecticidal soap, and they've all built some resistance from "tough love" for years that will hopefully help them weather all this. RpR, that's one reason I am totally toast if I winter protect before the ground freezes - without the Serenade and more fussing than I'm willing to do, far more roses will die from winter canker in my climate than winter kill. For Nebraska, it's not the absolute low temperature but the constantly variable ups and downs of temperatures all winter that keep no reliable snow cover on the ground, and just enough warm spells to confuse the roses all winter (we've been alternating single digit weeks with 40's and 50's since Christmas). Thanks Hoovb for the sympathies that this is one of the toughest climates for roses! Statistically, Nebraska has wider temperature variations all year - hotter heat and colder cold - than any US state except South Dakota. A perennial breeder in Nebraska named Harlan Hamernik (who created Husker Red penstemon) says "if it'll grow in Nebraska, it'll grow anywhere". Not exactly true for roses, but we do make weather a challenge and a legitimate topic of conversation. Personally, I secretly think folks in zone 3-4 and below have it harder for roses, since I can get away with growing lots of hybrid teas if I winter protect a few inches at least, but the options are so much more limited further north. I totally agree with ehamel and intris and bluegirl that this was the year to hunker down and just concentrate on keeping everything alive. I always mulch well for long-term survival in a naturally dry climate anyway, and always plant new roses with the water crystals to help short-term survival. Yep, mori1 - I was watering even into December too, and my neighbors have long since stopped trying to figure me out in the garden. It's just that watering isn't fun, and a large part of why I don't spray is that it isn't fun either (though I like to believe health principles factor in as well as laziness). Harmonyp hit it right on the nose, in what I was getting across with all the wingeing. Gardening is one of my few "me" things, and the only one besides exercise I "have" to do enough to carve out time for it. I work more than full time and have kids and my husband and other responsibilities, so I rely on the garden for that extra boost of sanity and strength to balance me out with faith and family. This garden year was just plain depressing non-stop, and I didn't even want to sort pictures of better years to post since it so wasn't reality for now. It's reassuring though discouraging to hear the same from others like seil and bustopher and mori1 that have had the same kind of year in the midwest. Even though things sort of grew and stayed alive, nothing thrived - 25 tomato plants and maybe 25 tomatoes total for the summer, fewer potatoes out than I planted, well established blueberry bushes dying. Seil, I agree that roses are tougher than we fear they'll be and that if I can keep even the crowns alive they'll come back in the spring. We know that well in our zone 5-6 winters, and we're used to pruning the puppies down to little nubs in the spring. It's just that the poor things were so stressed already by the limited water, with the freeze added to it. Even with the mulch and crystals and weekly deep watering enough to keep them mostly green, their root systems were stressed. Still - it is what it is, and we'll see what happens in the spring. After all these years, I know that a rose dying is an opportunity to plant a different rose, and I certainly haven't stopped buying roses for spring. Lucille, Kitty, Melissa - I know you have your share of challenges in your year-round warm zone in different ways, so I appreciate your sympathies. And Jeri, don't you dare stop complaining about your drought or I'm going to feel like a real whiner. Tough conditions are tough, even if it could always be worse elsewhere. Thanks again Cynthia

There's the rub: no morning sun in my yard and 9 large maples planted just on the other side of my fence, exactly where I need them to NOT be. I can't remove those trees as they belong to the neighboring church. It's afternoon sun or no sun at all. On the bright side, it has been far milder for the last week and we had more rain in one day (Monday) than we had over the last 2 months. So far so good. Odd though, because mid-August is usually the most severe part of the season for us regarding drought & heat. I shouldn't be surprised--lol--the rest of the year has been Bass Ackwards, so why should it be any different now? :)

Thanks Melissa, Jle, Susanelewis, Suero and Jacobse, for your suggestions and comments. I bought my 22 yr.old house 4 years ago. No probs whatsoever with the exisiting 22 yr. old toilets. I'm having a tile floor put in the guest bath though, & was advised that now is the time to change the toilet if I think I may want to do so down the road. I hate to replace a trouble free, perfectly fine-looking toilet with something that gives me grief! I have frankly never used a plunger at this house or the at the 100 yr. old one I owned previously for 13 years which had toilets at least as old as my current ones. Have never seen a leaky toilet. Obviously, toilets have always just kind of been there in my life; a real non-issue. Now that I may need to buy one, & have started doing research, my eyes have been opened to the potential pitfalls of toilet ownership. How I yearn for the days when I never knew that a toilet could be such a troublesome loo! Nothing is simple anymore is it? Like so many things...they don't make them like they used to (for better and for worse.)

When we had to move from a house we had lived in for a long time, we emptied out a room. Totally empty. We then went through each room and left only what we knew we wanted and put the other things in the empty room. We then went though that stuff and separated out what we weren't sure of, what we could Craigslist or Ebay quickly, what was trash, and what was charity. We divided the room in quarters and put each item in its respective corner. We kept the not sure of and moved that stuff. We ended up getting rid of a lot of the not sure stuff, but at least we weren't forced to make rash decisions we regretted later. The charity and trash stuff went out the door fast. The Ebay-Craigslist took a few weeks. What was left was then in one room for the movers to pack all together, which made it easier for us to decide about them later as we were unpacking. Good luck. I must say - the purge was stressful and then liberating. This post was edited by nightowlrn on Mon, Jan 13, 14 at 0:19