Thank you, Sylvia! He's the one who can crack me up with a silly look so discipline is tougher with him. And STUBBORN! "What? I'm cu-uu-te, remember... and anyway I want to!" Thing is I still have one wrist/thumb in a cast and I was crafting and hanging the decorations. Mr Sneakthief is faster than one hand can handle immediately ;] He enjoys the decor at least... fun fun stuff we have at Christmastime!

We have bees year-round so I imagine you will too. They really are starved for something to eat in the winter and spend the whole day foraging. I try to keep some sort of cool-season flower, cover crop or weed blooming for them. Sometimes I use hummingbird feeders without bee guards as bee feeders in winter. I've noticed for well over a decade now that when I put out cracked corn for the mourning doves, the bees feed on it, though I am not sure how they do it. That's especially true in the dead of winter, but also in every other part of the year as well. Buckwheat is wonderful and clover attracts many bees and other pollinators as well. Clover also is a cool-season crop, but I have little bits of clover here and there in shady areas that survives almost year round. Sometimes it dies back in mid-summer. Some of it was blooming last week behind the barn but I haven't looked at it lately because all I've done for far too long is harvest, can, harvest, can, harvest and can. It is amazing how much changes in the garden if you are only stepping foot in it a couple of times a week to harvest. I had a volunteer plant pop up in the back garden about a month ago. It is an Armenian cucumber. The cool thing is that it popped up in the middle of a hill of summer squash plants and it is growing over them, through them and around them. Their foliage is mixed it with the cuke foliage, and these plants are producing a nice harvest. I also haven't seen a squash bug or SVB near them. (Now that I said that, I'll go out tomorrow and discover SVBs have killed them all because that is how gardening works.) Say "I haven't seen a cucumber beetle all year...." and a million show up the next day. It will be interesting to see if the squash pests avoid the squash plants growing with the Armenian cuke (which, you may remember, is a melon and not a cucumber). I've often wondered if I could hide other summer squash and winter squash plants by planting them in the middle of Seminole plants. I haven't really tried it because the Seminole is such a rampant grower that I think it likely would smother any other nearby plants. Bon, Fred often complains to me that he doesn't have bees and I just don't get it because he is less than a mile from us. I know he does have them when the fruit trees are blooming. My garden is so filled with bees and wasps that some of my friends don't want to step foot it in. I work out there in it all the time and haven't been stung by a bee or wasp in the garden in years. Of course, if I was allergic to them, their presence would be a problem. And, of course, often people who don't have plentiful bees and pollinators have brought it on themselves by spraying broad-spectrum insecticides, which is something I avoid doing specifically for the sake of the bees and other beneficials. I planted my cukes late, trying to ensure I wouldn't have to start canning pickles while trying to finish up the canning of all the tomatoes. I checked the cucumber plants this morning and think it is going to work out as planned. The tomato crop is really winding down and I'm through canning salsa, and the cucumbers are in bloom. That is, of course, assuming disease or pests don't suddenly hit the cukes. In a garden, anything can happen. Dawn

I used to see the red fairy duster in stores but I haven't lately. They might freeze down to the roots and jump right back up on those bad years in San Antonio. You guys do get freezes a fewer temps lighter and a few days shorter. I really do notice the difference of what grows in SA and here. I am creating slowly NEXT year, my south of the house bed that will be effected by thermal mass of a large cement foundation thick cement pillars and a uninterrupted southern exposure to winter sun. That should buy a Zone, or so I am hopping, in my state of acute zonal-denial. Sometimes I think of the plants that I kill as my offerings to all the garden demigods that look over me and my verdant babies. They need something to eat to stay happy. I have not gone the extra step to human sacrifice. Instead of "eye for an eye", it is still "a plant for a plant" on a cold winter night. Another thing of interest might be that the older they get the more cold hardy and resilience the Pink fairy duster is. It froze down last winter and it is bigger than ever right now. I do not mulch it or water it and it is just planted in unadulterated limestone marl that was pick axed apart and maybe some DG sand added around the roots. It was slow to establish treated like that, but it is alive and well many tears later..

Amy, Poor little toad. Oh well, while unfortunate, it does happen. Those little generic plastic plant tags that indicate plant name, height, spread, etc. are the standard labels I was talking about. I buy bulk seed from a supplier that even supplies the tags if you want to buy them, so you can buy their seeds for, let's say, several kinds of marigolds and then buy and use the same little plastic tag for all the marigolds you raise if you're raising them for retail sales. The tags tend to be very generic, often just giving a general name like "Angelonia" with specifying which angelonia it is.....that's the most cost-effective way for them to tag things instead of having to buy separate tags for each type of any given flower. Sometimes, on newer named varieties that are higher-priced, they'll have the specific name on a tag like "Zinnia, Magella" or "Zinnia, Pinca" but often all they say is "Zinnia". I do buy plants from a couple of local organic nurseries in Texas that raise a lot of their own plants as organically as possible but they still don't label all their plants "organic" and I suspect that is because some of the things they buy from some wholesalers are not organic. Heather, I suspect it is virtually everything ornamental because that is just how large commercial growers operate. They use systemic pesticides so they can deliver "picture perfect" plants to the retailers who purchase stock from them. In one sense, I understand it. When a commercial grower is raising millions of bedding plants over a period of many months, they cannot afford any sort of pest or disease outbreak that will taint their stock so they rely on systemics. Understanding why it is done, however, does not make the process more acceptable to me. You might find local nurseries or small local wholesalers who produce their own plants organically and, if so, they should be labeled to indicate they are organically grown. I've found locally-grown organically-grown bedding plants and perennials at some farmer's markets. More and more, I just buy the seeds and raise my own. I'm getting pickier and pickier every year about what I'll plant on our property because anything I buy and bring in could have been sprayed with systemic products that I don't want on our property. With edible plants, there also are some systemic insecticides used to raise those seedlings that are sold in spring as transplants, so I find myself buying fewer and fewer of them as well. It has forced me to devote more time and effort to raising perennials and biennials from seed or from cuttings. I'm not going to say I'll never buy anything that was raised with the use of systemic chemicals, but just that I try to keep those sorts of plants to a minimum. It doesn't bother me as much to buy small shrubs or trees that likely have been treated with a systemic. I just cut off any flowers that form the first year those plants are in the ground, so there is less likelihood the local bees will be harmed by flowers from those plants. By the second year, the systemic pesticides should be out of the plants' systems. And, let us not forget, many of the groceries we buy from the grocery store (unless you are buying organic) have been treated with systemic pesticides, including systemic fungicides. It is very hard and takes a great deal of effort to garden and to eat in a clean manner. Dawn