Most likely squirrels will leave them alone. Now that the tulips are actively growing they arent seen in the same light to the critters as the tasty dried dormant morsels in the fall. The true reason chicken wire is suggested in the fall is because the soil has recently been turned which causes animals to instincively flock to the area, birds for worms, squirrels for the lost nut they obviously left there. Take it up now, I'd say.

I have not seen an endless summer with so many beautiful flowers for a long time! with our harsh winters for the last couple of years, my ES's only have a few blooms on each of them last year. This year (with milder) winter, there are a few more flowers. But one of them only has 3, one has none, 1 has ~ 13. These 3 are not winter protected and are in morning shade and 3 hrs afternoon sun. The one in the back yard (2-3 hr morning sun, all afternoon shade, close to house so more sheltered) has a lot more blooms (but much less than yours). So I think location is really important for us northern gardeners and 2-3 morning sun is more ideal. This one performs much better than the ones in 2-3 hr afternoon sun, every year since I had them 6 years ago. I will try to winter protect this winter.

Hazel, It has been a good week to be productive. I've been spending as much time as possible in the garden and have the aches and pains to prove it. My body always objects when I switch over from indoor winter laziness to outdoor hard labor. This week I'm paying the price for abandoning the garden last summer/fall to work on the kitchen remodel. All around the edges of the garden, persistent pain-in-the-neck plants crept into the garden despite the heavy mulch, so I've been digging out lots of bermuda and Johnson grass. It takes forever, but I'm determined to dig up all I can find and get it out of there before it can make headway and take back more garden space. I'm about 2/3rds of the way through the front garden and ought to have it back under full control in another week. Then I'll tackle the back garden. I guess digging out weedy grasses is a good way to kill time when most of the cool-season plants and seeds already are planted and it is still too cold to plant the warm-season ones. I am going to buy heavy clear plastic to solarize the area east of the garden where I want to expand it to make up for the northern and western areas that are getting too shady. I'd rather solarize for the entire warm growing season than rototill and dig out roots and go through all that this Spring. It is awful clay there which is why we haven't expanded eastward before now, and I'm dreading all the work it will take to turn it into good soil, but we started out with bad soil in 1999 and have made a lot of progress with the soil since then, so now we'll just start over with that process in a new area. Nancy, The worms will come. We had precious few in our early years but just kept working on the soil, and before we knew it, we had earthworms everywhere. This year there's a huge number of them. I don't know if there's more than usual, or if they are just more active earlier than usual since it has been so warm overall. When I want to attract earthworms to a new garden plot, I just put down cardboard and pile mulch over it. Earthworms love to eat cardboard and turn it into worm castings, so worms always show up soon after cardboard. I don't even know how they find it and know it is there, but they do. I love hugelkultur as a concept. It improves soil like nothing else. Many hugelkultur piles are built high above the ground in order to allow for the fact that the wood will rot and the level of the bed will fall. That is one thing I can't do because if the hugelkultur material is above ground in a mound-like shape, the rodents and snakes move in. I guess that is one of the hazards of living so close to the wild land alongside the Red River---wildlife is too abundant. So, when I build hugelkultur beds, I dig out a trench and bury 100% of the hugelkultur material. It means I have to keep adding more compostable material on top of the beds as the wood rots, but I don't care. I just pile on the mulch really thick and deep and let it decompose in place. We have a great many timber rattlers here (and their venom is very, very bad) and they come out of the woods and head for the garden, so I have to be careful that I'm not creating anything that makes the garden more attractive to them than it already is. While we also have plenty of copperheads, diamondback rattlers and pygmy rattlers, it is the timber rattlers that are the worst garden problem, followed by the copperheads. Generally I only see diamondback rattlers along the creek banks and pygmy rattlers in the woods. Water moccasins aren't a problem around the house ever since we removed the lily pond after the water moccasins moved to it in drought when the ponds and creeks dried up. I miss my lily pond, but having water moccasins in it eating the frogs made it too much of a hazard to keep. Sometimes I think about how much easier gardening would be if we lived in more of a city area where the wildlife is not so abundant, but I do love living in the country and never intend to leave. I just have to be a lot more careful. All my friends here are amazed I've never been bitten by a venomous snake considering how much time I spend outdoors and how many snakes we have here. I am grateful it hasn't happened yet, and won't be shocked if my luck runs out one day. I know how many close calls I've had, and I, too, am amazed that a snake hasn't bitten me yet. There's been at least two occasions when I was so close to a venomous snake that I can't even explain why I didn't get bitten, but I'm thankful it didn't happen. I'd build tons of hugelkultur mounds everywhere if I didn't have to worry about snakes crawling into their nooks and crannies. As it is, I have snakes in the compost piles all the time, so my actual compost piles never get turned once in the warm season because I don't want to stir up the snakes. I don't even want to see the snakes, and I'm careful to only load/unload compost nowadays with a compost scoop or shovel. I used to wear leather gloves and use my hands to lift compost from the wheelbarrow and drop it onto garden beds, but picking up a snake (non-venomous, but still.....) one day broke me of that habit. Most people here in my area (and by most, I guess I mean everyone but us) piles up brush and downed trees and burn them. We don't. We just find a place on the edge of the woods far from the house and make huge brush piles as if we were going to burn them, and then we never burn. We just let them sit there and decompose. I've done the same thing to fill in eroded areas where rain runoff has cut ravines and gullies. I just fill them in with brush and let it decompose in place. Add more to that year after year and the materials decompose and fill in the eroded areas gradually and then plants grow in the enriched soil and you stop the runoff from carrying off topsoil. It is a long, slow process, but we have healed a lot of badly eroded areas that way. It is sort of like building a hugelkultur for Mother Nature. After enough of the woody material breaks down, you end up with nice rich soil that supports native plants. Long before you even get the growth of the new plants, the piles of brush themselves hold the soil in place and stop the soil erosion almost right away. I'd rather be outside working than inside any and every day of the week. For a very long time, Tim worked evenings so I didn't even have to stop working outside until dark since I was the only one home. I was happy if dinner was just a bowl of cereal or a cold sandwich. Eventually he moved to day shift and I had to adjust to having someone coming home at night and expecting an actual home-cooked meal each night. It was really, really hard for me to drag myself into the house before dark, but I learned ways to work around it---the slow cooker, for instance, or cooking only every other day and making enough dinner to last two days, even though Tim is not a huge fan of leftovers. He still works days now and is unlikely ever to work nights again, but his workday is much longer, it seems, since his last promotion, so I still can work outdoors until almost dark, at least at this time of the year and still make it inside and cook dinner before he arrives home well after dark. During the height of the canning season, I generally don't stop canning just to cook dinner though. Either he brings home dinner or we eat leftovers or something that is easy to microwave. Usually after a long day of canning I am too hot and too tired to eat anything anyway, and he knows that and respects that because he does understand the amount of work that goes on in the kitchen during a full day of canning. The one things that having venomous snakes will do for you is that it will train you to get out of the garden and get the garden gate closed and latched before the snakes come out in the evenings. Our snakes use the gravel driveway like a snake highway and I need to be out of the driveway before they come out. I don't want to walk up the driveway to the house in the dark for sure. Some of my scariest snake encounters have been right there in the driveway, especially near the garden gate. It sort of makes me laugh to think that the snakes use the entrance gate area if they can, but it is true. We have 1" chicken wire fencing attached to the lower 2' of the garden's woven wire fencing in order to keep out the baby bunnies, and the snakes sometimes get hung up in that chicken wire, so they prefer to enter/exit through the gate area. Kim, I saw a news story on Facebook about the Tulia fire. My niece, who lives near Abilene, linked the story so of course I had to click on the story and read it. What an awful fire that was! It has been a long time since we've had a fire that large here and I'm grateful for that. Even though we're greening up early here, we haven't greened up enough yet to significantly lower the fire risk. At least a couple of fire departments are out daily fighting fires, but we haven't had a fire ourselves since last Saturday when we had a string of fires along I-35 that briefly threatened at least one home....and made a lot of people really nervous for an hour or two. I've been enjoying the quiet week and getting a lot done, but don't expect the quiet spell will last. I'm glad your greenhouse held up in the wind. With a new greenhouse, you never know at first how it is going to do in wind until you actually have that strong wind occur, so it is good that it seems like it can tolerate your west Texas wind. I've never yet seen a greenhouse here go airborne, but with some of the small ones that aren't anchored to the ground, I imagine it probably could happen. Dawn

Moses, thank you very very much. Your advice and time means wonders..I will look into those roses as suggested even try one.. Nippstress, how are you? I appreciate your input too. Yes that is the 'Stainless Steel' rose and I can tell you I love not only the fragrance, but the way the new leaves grow in. Like a deep red burgundy that turns almost brilliant and florescent as it opens. The prettiest looking new growth I have ever seen. So you are welcomed to come and shake my hand..I was concerned about this one. I did not prune that one as much because I couldn't tell the difference between the good one or bad. BUt now I can tell. I will take a second pic. You know, come to think of it, I kind of like my roses short and full as compared to tall and lanky of tall..I am thinking that cutting them back is not so bad after all. Alfalfa? Hum, I will take a look at that. Was confused about one remark. " (in your region you want to keep the mulch away from your canes) to keep in the moisture. " Are you saying that I need to pull the mulch away from the crown? When I originally buried my crowns, I planted them ground level instead of deeper so what I did to make up for that was pile dirt on the crown and then mulch to make them as if they are buried deeper literally raising the soil bed higher without burying them deeper. Altorama....The roots are completely buried by 'soil'...What I did was bury them as deep as they were in the pots they came in. At least what I thought I should of done. So basically the tip of the crown in just about an inch or two under the soil level, not deep enough forcing be to pile more soil on top then mulch.