Zackey, It does NOT matter if your plants are top watered or bottom watered. You are correct; in nature, violets are top watered, from the rain but they are also bottom watered when they absorb the water in the soil. What matters is drainage; in nature violets grow on mountainous terrain with thin soil that dries quickly. This must be emulated as closely as possible for growing success. This is one reason heavy soil is death to violets. Growers top or bottom water because of convenience, one or the other is not necessary for the health of the plant. Joanne, The reason your plastic works better than clay now that you're in SF is for the reason you stated. It is drier and warmer than where you were before (NJ?) In a dry climate, clay will release water much more quickly than in a warm, humid climate. In a humid climate, clay will keep the soil moister longer as you have found. Plastic is preferred in a drier climate because it will sustain the moisture in the soil much longer. In Orchid growing, clay is usually used for plants that like to dry out quickly which is one reason they are not so good for violets. Personally, I have found moving violets not to be a problem. I move mine around all the time. I totally rearranged them two nights ago. I have my blooming shelf which is eye level, I have my non-blooming shelf which is a high shelf, (I'm very vertically-challenged!) and I have my variegates shelf. Moving them around helps me find which locations they prefer. I also have my leaf shelves, my plantlet shelves and my almost-blooming size shelves. Everything is rotated on a regular schedule. Linda

Melissa, I am happy as long as the plants are thriving as well. Flowers will come and go. Spring was great....until that awful hot wind came and cut my flush short. But that was amazing having it all inside for a week! I never would have done that if I didn't know the wind was coming so thanks Jeri for the warning this spring. Hoovb escaped it, she was just south enough to be spared. After that, I had some nice blooms and then the heat came and cooked everything. I had a few pots get sunburnt and some leaves were so pale they were almost white when they formed. After the heatwave went by the leaves were beautiful and deep green again. Fall came in a trumpet of glory. The best fall flush ever. The Bourbons were loaded and DA roses were in their glory. It seemed to go on and on. I had roses like Jack's Beanstalk with giant blooms on top. Now there is a period of nice warm weather with cool nights. Almost every HT and Fl has something and the fragrance is very good. I haven't seen any rain since a teeny weeny sprinkle a few weeks ago so the plants are all clean with no disease except some mildew on SdlM buds from overcast/ coastal foggy mornings. This year's Halloween show Chrysanthemum crop was so good. I had the big pom-pom showy ones. They hid in part shade during the heatwave and watering them twice a day was worth it when the buds finally arrived. Thanks also to my folks who watered bands and other pots in the June-July heat for me while I was in Gettysburg for the 150th. Just now I am getting mulch and sifting the great soil I got from the neighbor who had some concrete poured. Why do people want to send their best topsoil to the dump? I have enough to make a raised planting and fill in the low spot on my corner where I want to put Perle d'Or (Perle the Great). The bands from Vintage in 1 gal pots now are growing very fast and all need a larger pot or to go in the ground. Actually, everything is still growing fast and I'm trying to keep up. Bulbs are up too early and I have some blloms on the plum tree. But the apple that I nearly lost has grown well and all it's spring grafts survived and are big fat branches full of leaves. The worst was the brutal heatwave of late summer. It killed many of my delicate plants that have been on the edge of growing here. My Japanese maples had all the leaves fry so that there is nothing left to turn colors but I think the trees themselves are fine and will grow nicely next year. The heat didn't bother my Camellias and fall temps have given me a great bunch of buds. Already, the Sasanquas look good and a few early Japonicas have begun to open. Ingrid, I think you would like Camellias because they can hide in the shade and give you pretty flowers through the winter. While they are small, you can move them around and enjoy them wherever you like and move them into the garage or in deep shade during a heat wave. If we get some rain in these upcoming months to wash the soil of irrigation deposits, I will call this year a good year for my roses.

Jeannie, I used his books (Roadside Fruits of Oklahoma and Roadside Trees and Shrubs of Oklahoma) to help me figure out what a lot of our understory plants were in the woodlands. It took me ages and ages and lots of other books too to get a good understanding of the diverse group of plants found in different places on our property. Every now and then I see a Rayless Gaillardia on our property, but it isn't terribly common. It usually is in a pasture that also has lots of clasping coneflower, which tends to be more aggressive and crowd it out. With wildflowers, you never know what you'll have in any given year because they ebb and flow naturally depending on what the weather was like in the previous year and depending on how well they survived or reseeded or the seed germinated or whatever. This has been a good year for regular gaillardia but I don't think I've seen any rayless ones yet. I usually see them later in the year, but with early heat this year, who knows when they'll appear? Because rainfall was so heavy in the autumn through spring, we had huge amounts of cool-season grasses and forbs. However, that presents a problem in and of itself because when the cool-season plants are that abundant and tall and thick, they can shade out the warm-season ones and keep them from growing much and getting established. Then you have a poorer stand of warm-season plants as long as the cool-season vegetation is still standing. This morning I was outside early with the string trimmer cutting back a large area we have not mowed at all this year because it had gotten too tall to cut with the riding mower. We left that field standing with no mowing so the cool-season flowers could disperse their seeds. Now that the seeds have been dispersed naturally, I cut back all the dormant, standing vegetation and am hoping that we'll get a good stand of warm-season stuff. Sometimes we do. Sometimes we don't. It kinda depends on whether enough rain falls soon to help the young warm-season plants establish. In an area where I haven't cut yet, the warm-season plants are only about 2" tall. I'll just cut the cool-season vegetation a tiny bit taller than the warm-season stuff so I'm not chopping off the tops of the warm-season plants. I only cut back about a quarter-acre. There's a couple more acres to cut, but I think they still are short enough that we can cut them with the riding mower. I hate to cut the tall grasses in May because it leaves the bunnies much more exposed. They put their nests closer to our yard full of dogs and cats than they should for their own sake. With the current dryness and having already had a big grassfire across the road from us, I want to cut everything possible down as short as we reasonably can without cutting it so short that the plants won't come back. It seems like a really good wildflower year so far, but only time will tell if that continues to be true under the current drought conditions. Last May, with abundant rainfall, many wildflowers germinated in May and into June, and then promptly dried up/burnt up in July before they even bloomed. I don't know that's there's been enough May rainfall to get much of anything growing if it already wasn't up when what little rain we have had was falling. Another grass fire here today....and it is much, much too early for that. Our area seems about as dry right now as it was around the first of July last year and that makes me incredibly uneasy. Dawn

Diane, You're welcome. Yes it is fiction but it is based on the drought that hit the Great Plains from approx. 1949 through 1957. During that period of time, rainfall averaged less than 40% of usual and many cattle ranchers were driven out of business. In one year in the 1950s, Lubbock, Texas, recorded no rainfall. So, the conditions were not unlike the Dust Bowl days although by the late 1940s the Soil Conservation Service had put many programs into place that prevented, largely, a repeat of the dust storms of the Dust Bowl years. I believe Mr. Kelton wrote this incredible book to put a human face on the suffering of the Texas ranchers during that time, when many of them were driven out of the cattle business. It was because of the 1950s drought that Texas embarked upon an ambitious program to build reservoirs so they could stockpile water to avoid a recurrence of the Dust Bowl Years and the 1950 Drought years. When you read "The Time It Never Rained", you can just put yourself in Charlie Flagg's shoes and imagine how horrible it was to not even be able to feed your cattle or sheep and, eventually, yourself and your family. For Charlie, there were some things more important than 'saving the ranch at any cost'. He wanted to do things his way and maintain his independence. He didn't want to take a 'handout' from the government and he didn't want the government telling him what to do or how to do it. He just flat didn't want to compromise his own principles. That's part of what makes the book so fascinating---it wasn't just a struggle with nature, but an internal struggle to stay true to what he believed in. I had relatives who farmed and ranched in Texas in the 1950s and 1960s and they thought Elmer Kelton captured the reality on paper so well. "The Time It Never Rained" is a great classic western tale and it is one of the reasons the Western Writers of America named Elmer Kelton the greatest western writer of all time. For as hard as times are now, this novel is just such a chilling representation of one fictional man's life during some incredibly hard times, and that's why I like it. It reminds me how easy we have it much of the time, and it reminds me that when you make your living from the land, it can be a hard life with, perhaps, more downs than ups. Can you tell I love this book? Dawn