Hi folks! Granny!!!!! Of course you count!!!!! I'll take pictures of the Mail Pouch "barn" and other stuff so Lee can show you on his computer. Beverly hasn't even seen them yet! I broke my little finger and am waiting to see the hand specialist to be sure I didn't damage any tendons or ligaments. I hope not. This nine fingered typing is for the birds! I keep trying to use the splinted finger and typing really weird stuff! I also pulled the muscles of my chest badly enough that they thought that I might have a broken rib. Sheesh! I'm still going to find a way to pot up those last few plants! There is NO WAY I'll let if spoil my once in a lifetime trip with the boys. We're going snorkeling, para sailing, catamaran sailing, swimming with the dolphins and even some time for just laying on the beach! No heavy lifting for me until after the cruise! I'm overwhelmed with all the stuff I need to do in the next two weeks so I'd better go make another list and start checking things off! Barbi, was that you who wanted the baby arborvitae? I'll save them for you. I did dig up the campion that seeded itself in my stone path before I hurt myself. (*again*) They are a nice biennial. Mine are white but Beverly has some rose ones so who knows what color the seeds the bees made! I have Solomon's seal that needs dividing and some salvia that seeded into my stone path too. The candy tuft jumped the path but it might have to wait 'til fall. I can't wait to see Betty and Ron all the way from Michigan. I keep killing my forget-me-nots! Wonder what I'm doing to them? I hope everyone is doing well and my penchant for injuring myself is not "catching"! ~~Mimi

Sounds like EVERYONE had a great time. Maybe next year I will make it there. I'm shedding my F.F.A. Alumni responsibilities. Our annual fund raiser for this group has been on the same Saturday as your swap the past two or three years. If any of you have any 'swapping' left in you and live near or feel like driving to Deerfield, there will be a plant swap and covered dish luncheon here on June 12th. Just thought I'd mention that. Between Akron and Youngstown. So far there appears to be about 2 dozen interested attendees. If you have no more plants to swap we will understand (800 out of 1800 plants ... someone is as bad as me) (95 plants taken ... again, as bad as me). There will be Door Prizes, Silent Auction, a garden themed craft project for those interested (very quick and easy) and of course extras available for those new gardeners or those unable to bring a plant. Oh, and we will have a local crafter of soap and other realted items. Perennial, houseplant, water/bog garden plants, tree, shrub, veggies, herbs .... it will all be there. Cheesecake ... with Raspberry sauce ... now that is just not fair. Mimi - thanks for all of your valuable information given. I really appreciated the input. Stardust

I'm just posting so that this thread will slide down the list like all the others.

Well, I don't want to speak badly of my family, friends, coworkers, or Santa Claus, but I didn't get a new compost bin, any new magazine subscriptions (except for the Organic Gardening subscription that I can't get them to cancel in spite of my numerous requests as a result of their increase in price), gift certificates to any catalogs or gardening stores, set of hand trucks, rolls of green velcro, packages of rooting hormone, expensive seed catalogs, home-raked pine straw, compost or manure, and I certainly didn't get a truck. However, one night I arrived home from work to find a very large bag of freshly collected pecans hanging on the gate. I live in a neighborhood where you wouldn't really expect a gift bag to still be there if someone left it outside your house, so this little surprise was doubly exciting. It came from a fellow gardener in our new community garden. And then a couple of days after Christmas I got a late present in the mail from my sons. It was a book, The FeederWatcher's Guide to Bird Feeding, which has turned out to be a very lovely book that has given me all sorts of new ideas about attracting birds to my yard. I guess I vaguely, on some level, knew that someone was counting birds, but apparently every year on certain days the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and several other major groups of bird lovers like the Audubon Society and others coordinate their efforts with birdwatchers and birdfeeders all over the continent to identify and count birds. This book draws from the personal experience of all those people to provide firsthand advice about the best practices of birdfeeding. I have learned so much in such a short time by reading this book, and even just by looking at the pictures I've gotten so many ideas. (To tell the truth, looking at some of the pictures makes me feel sort of stupid that I didn't think of some of those ideas myself. Some of the birdfeeder plans seem so darned obvious!) Anyway, immediately after reading this book, I went out into my neighborhood and started collecting discarded Christmas trees (I'm up to 7 now - of course IF I HAD A TRUCK I could have many more) and leaned them against the trunks of my oak and sweetgum and dogwood trees because I didn't have any conifers in my yard and the book said most birds really love conifers. Would you believe that within a couple of hours my yard was filled with birds, including the first woodpeckers I've seen this season - three of them at once? It was amazing. That convinced me I needed to plant some conifers, so I went shopping at Habersham Gardens, where much to my surprise they were having their annual Boxing Day sale which I never knew about before now - everything in the store was on sale, some things up to 75 percent off, and I got some incredible deals including two beautiful shrubs, a juniper salicicola 'Brodie' and a cypress "laredo cadelabra' both of which are supposed to be columnar in habit which is necessary for my small yard. The birds seem to like them already. I also went up to Hastings where they were having a good sale and found a very pretty little eucalyptus whose tag was half broken off but which I think I have finally been able to identify as eucalyptus gunnii. The birds have been landing on it, too, although it's still in its pot as I haven't decided yet whether it's ok to dig up my entire front yard to make an herb garden with this little tree as its centerpiece (I realize it won't remain "little" for long unless I keep cutting it back). And I splurged on a Black Beauty elderberry - also for the birds, I keep telling myself. And I found lots of cabbage and cauliflower and broccoli and rutabaga plants, all of which seemed still to be viable, for pennies, for our community garden, as well as a really healthy-looking thornless blackberry bush for the same place. In any event, I feel like the sale prices I found at Habersham and Hastings were wonderful Christmas presents, and the book my sons sent was a great gardening gift. So although Santa didn't leave me exactly what I wanted, it was still a very good Christmas.