Beautiful pics. It's nice that your Cosmos are still blooming. Mine started very early and are finished now. How I love that Heavenly Blue!! I grew it last year, but never got around to sowing them this year. It's a pity they bloom so late. My Belle Blanche bloom lasted for less than a day, but there are two more just ready to pop. Thanks for sharing.

Barb, wishing you a fantastic birthday! Hope you get lots more spoiling today, and then, continue celebrating for at least another week. Cheers!

Johnny, I understand all about that clay. I grew flax my first three years, maybe longer. Honestly, I threw everything at that clay but the kitchen sink, and if a kitchen sink would have improved the soil, I would have tossed one of those in there as well. : ) One of my favorite green manure or compost crops is grain amaranth because it is multipurpose. The plants tolerate poor clay pretty well (mine reseeded randomly over 2 acres and popped up here and there for several years), get huge (the golden-orange and red flowered ones got 6-8' easily and spread out 3-4-5' wide in a rainier year), have edible foliage (though I don't like to eat it), have big flowerheads that are spectacularly gorgeous and produce an edible grain (the little tiny seeds). I mostly grew it for tons of organic matter to add to the soil. The big fibrous stalks took forever to break down, but that served my purpose at the time because anything that broke up the clay could only be an improvement. When I first sowed clover seed behind the garage into rock-hard ground that had, at that time, defied us for 10 years (we couldn't do a thing with it!), Tim couldn't break up the ground because it was 2011 and we'd had horrendous drought. Although a little rain fell in mid-August and in September, it didn't soften the ground any. So, we cut the remaining dead grass down low in late September or earliest October, and surfaced-sowed a deer plot mix. Our hope was that we could get enough to grow to help keep the starving deer fed since the were so emaciated after that awful heat and drought. We surface-sowed the seed, walked on top of it to try to make sure it had good soil contact, watered it, walked on it again, watered it again. Amazingly it sprouted. I don't remember all that was in the deer plot mix, but it included turnips and clover. I remember them because they grew. We just left it alone (it was unfenced at the time) and left it unmowed all winter for the the deer to eat. I never saw a deer eat it, but something was eating it---likely the cottontails that I did seed eating clover every night and early in the mornings. The turnip greens looked great, so I thought we had turnips growing. Here's the rest of the story..... In the spring, I wanted to cut that back and build the hay bale beds there. We went to mow it, and there were no turnips in the ground. Only the smallest bit of the plant roots went into that hard clay soil, but we had tiny, thin, stringy turnips growing on top of the ground, and with tons of foliage. I guess the rabbits preferred clover to turnip foliage, and the deer never stepped foot in that area and ate a thing as near as we could tell. I don't know if it was too close to the garage (directly adjacent to it and the dog yard too) or if it was because I kept putting deer corn and other grains out by the compost pile for them. The deer always scavenge my compost piles, which are large and numerous, for good things to eat. To this day, we have clover in the pathways between the hay bale beds, and I leave the gate open so the rabbits can eat the clover. They also nest in the hay bales (now decayed down to almost pure compost) and raise their young there. Because snakes are so common in the hugelkulture piles, I only plants squash there in the years when I plant anything at all. That way, I don't have to step foot in there except to harvest. Some day I hope to find a way to keep the snakes out, but wherever there are hugelkultur piles or lots of mulch, there will be snakes, so I don't know about tht. Just when I thought we had improved the last clay soil I cared about (behind the garage), our son broke ground to build his house on a part of our land last year. He discovered a yucky yellowish-grayish clay that is, if possible, even worse than red clay. He is building his own house with his own two hands, paying for it as he goes, so it is going to take him a while. The good news, though, is that once he's done, he'll be mortgage-free. When the house is done, he wants to have his own orchard and garden. I'll gladly give him the hay bale bed garden or the sandy-silty garden and he can do with them as he pleases. I know he's not going to be able to do anything with that awful clay that sits close to his house. Until he found it, we didn't even know we had gray/yellow clay. I always joke about making pottery with our red clay, but now I know I could make some really beautiful red, yellow or gray pottery. Woo hoo. Three colors of clay. How lucky can a family get? You know that I'm always hoping and wishing the best for you and all your many agricultural endeavors! I hope you get rain, and at just the right time and in just the right amount! In our early years here, we had a bermuda lawn (undoubtedly planted for hay by the farmer who owned this land before us), but it wasn't doing that great in our red claycrete. It was thin and patchy with lots of bare ground. So, I got old spoiled hay from Fred and mulched our entire lawn on the south, west and east sides of the house with hay about 3-4" thick. I actually did it in order to keep the mud down. You wouldn't believe how much that hay, once it had decomposed, helped improve the appearance of lawn and the clay soil's permeability. Did it look good when the hay was covering the ground? No. It looked like a dead lawn, but we sit so far back from the road (300' and over the ridge) that no one driving by could tell. In fact, from the road, you can barely see our house partly because we're over the ridge and partly because all my trees and shrubs sort of block the view from the road. Did our friends think I'd lost my mind? Probably, but they also knew I was all about fixing that clay. Just mulching with hay that one time apparently attracted earthworms too. I'll put anything in or on the ground if it will attract earthworms and improve the soil. I like to either compost cornstalks or chop them up and mulch with them. They add a lot of organic matter to the soil. In a bad drought year when the cattle are hungry, though, I'll give the green cornstalks to my friend Fred to feed to his cattle for extra roughage. In a year like that, the cattle are more important than fixing the soil. Nothing I've ever added to the soil had hurt it, and anything organic that eventually breaks down into compost can only help it. Soil improvement is such a life-long process though and I think some people find that discouraging. I just think of all the compostable material as fuel that feeds the plants eventually. Dawn

I was one of 5, all born in Dec. so one present for birthdays and one for Christmas. My son is an only child born in Aug. and he has always received tons of presents. (I always got a laugh out of the show Mr. Bean.)