Oh Josh! Would you believe I was scared to death to cut off that much? Lolololol. Now I have Al suggesting that I go even further down the road? Now that's chopped!lol Ok, first off I am happy to report that the TWO, yes, two plants are doing well thus far! They are responding very well. In fact, the mix fell right away from the roots of yours Josh. You sent that plant to me in a great mix and which in turn I used the very same mix to repot! It's a good thing we all use the same mixes. I never have a problem repotting a plant from you pal. Blake, I think I answered your question in there somewhere:-) Al, now, that is quite the picture and would you believe it still took me a couple of days to completely understand this? lol. Yes, I knew you would. Anyhow, I must say if I can get just ONE plant to look as good as your Bonsai, I would be thrilled. I really appreciate your guidence along with Josh and others. I can't really envision what that 'hornbeam' is going to look like, but I trust you. I never even heard of a 'hornbeam'! Guess I'll have to google that one. Now that mullberry bush is to die for. GREAT work! Have you ever posted it with leaves? It must be beautiful. Would you beleive I saw the workers at the Bonsai shop hacking their trees way back in the fall, and I just about died? It was very traumatic for me to see what they were doing to what I thought were beautiful trees as was, but then they laughed at me when I expressed this. lol I do have what would be a beautiful huge sweet maple tree that turns brillaint colors come the fall that I have been growing in a 3 gallon container for about 3 years now. Let's just say that if I planted inground, it would be a giant. Right now it's only about 6 feet high. What to do? I will snap a pic of it this weekend, ok? Mike

I would prefer you wait til the second week of May to fertilize, especially if you fertilized in October or November. At least let it green up completely before if itching too badly to wait a full month. LOL A shameful reminder..... 1. Get a soil test. Call your nearest county extension service for a test kit and details. It will likely take two weeks for results. If you need to apply sulfur, lime, or any other amendment per test recommendation (that is not applied in Step 6), you can do it after seeding if you don't get results back in time. 2. Apply that "R" word stuff and again one week after the first application. You can seed the lawn one week after the second app. 3. Scalp it down 4. Rake it up 5. Core aerate (or cheat with Nitron A-35) 6. Fertilize 7. Sow seeds 8. Topdress 1/4 inch layer compost, peat moss, or clean straw (weed-free). 9. Irrigation schedule water 15-20 minutes twice a day for two weeks water 20-30 minutes once a day for one week water 30-45 minutes once a day every other day for one week water 30-45 minutes once a day twice a week for one week move into deep irrigation, increasing the time to provide 1 inch of water all over and decreasing the frequency to just once a week. Starting off, the schedule supplies roughly 1/4 inch of water, then increases that amount while decreasing frequency of application at the same time. Like practically everything that concerns lawn care, this schedule is a general guideline and should be modified to accommodate your specific conditions. The lengths of time should be modified if you have an automatic sprinkler system since that will not take as long to provide adequate moisture. So, decrease amount of water (time) but maintain frequency as is. The tuna cans test is recommended. If it is still especially warm, you may want to irrigate 3 times a day (10-15 minutes if necessary) for that first couple weeks. Your objective is to keep the upper 1 inch of soil moist and not let the seeds dry out. Baby the grass for the rest of year. Once the seeds begin to sprout, don't walk on it if at all possible. First mowing is when the new grass reaches two inches. *************** Remember that? Not to scold, but the words were to be taken literally and seriously. Just walking on it was potential damage by itself (even while dormant), but dogs don't walk like we do. They scratch, dig into, and rip whatever surface is underfoot. But the lawn was not a surface, at least not yet. While the grass had developed a root system, it was a very shallow one. I don't think it a predictable conclusion. Whether it recovers remains to be seen. If you have seeds left over, I'd get them down just to be safe. Give it a few more days first to see if it will green up. You can use Tupersan pre-m though it is very expensive. Scotts has a Siduron and fertilizer combo.

Oh, forgot to mention for anyone who has been part of past dscussions regarding if more light makes the edges of h. kentiana or wayetti darker - I took a picture of my kentiana the weekend of Thanksgiving and the leaves were solid green. Since then it's receiving a little more intense sun because of the leaves falling from the trees in front of the window and now the edges are almost black and it's putting off new growth! The leaves are just gorgeous! When I received the plant labeled wayetti, it already had darker edges. It is under fluorescent lighting only and while it has retained the darker edges it is in NO way as intense as the kentiana in the southern window.

We've had a lot more sunshine the last two days and have been so glad to see it. I've been spending as much time as possible outdoors in the sun, so less time inside cleaning house or on my computer. I'm going to head outdoors in a minute now just as soon as the temperature gets up above freezing. It was 29 degrees the last time I looked at the thermometer, but the sun is up now so I should be able to go out shortly. Kim, Thanks for not keeping the sunshine too long. We needed it here too. I would have like to have watched you lasso the sun and haul it off to the TX panhandle. We awakened yesterday morning to a thin sheet of ice coating the trees and fences and other exposed surfaces. Since no rain had fallen, I assume we had freezing fog during the night. There also was very heavy dew on the grass, but I've never seen dew freeze on tree trunks and limbs like what we saw on our front yard trees yesterday. Of course, it melted away as soon as the sun rose. Bon, We are at a little over 71" of rain so far this year. Our previous record, from 1990, is a little over 59", so our rainfall record wasn't just broken, it was smashed. Everything here is mud, mud, mud. It is crazy....and yet we spent several months in various stages from being Abnormally Dry to Extreme Drought. Our weather here is just so bizarre. I always say I'd like to have a normal weather year for once, but I think for OK, bizarre weather that swings from one extreme to another is our "normal", so maybe I should ask for an abnormal year with no extremes. Patti, We have multiple rain gauges that I check and empty daily, and several thermometers, all posted at 5' above ground in full shade. I started tracking my own weather when I began to realize that our rainfall/temperatures almost always vary a great deal from our local Mesonet station, which sits NW of us by several miles. The weather data recorded by our local NWS Cooperative Observer is a bit more similar to ours than that from the Mesonet station as his house is about halfway between the Mesonet station and our house, but even so, some days he records a lot more or less rain than we have. For years, I used to record our daily high, low and precipitation total on a regular wall calendar, but found that when I got really busy in gardening and canning season then I would forget to record the totals. Now I mostly keep a running rainfall total in my head. For me, the big catalyst that pushed me to watch my own weather closely was a day in late April or early May almost a decade ago when our forecast low was around 50 degrees and we dropped to 32 degrees. Almost my entire garden froze to the ground, and I had tomato plants that were 3' tall and had fruit the size of baseballs (prior to that freeze, we had been frost-free and above-freezing for many weeks). I began to see the value of recording our own rainfall in the 2006-2007-2009 time frame on days we were forecast to have 2-3" of rain and got 6.25"-9.25" or 5" of forecast rain actually gave us a total of 12.89". Because rain can vary greatly over a small area (even gauges I have 200-300' from each other often record remarkably different amounts), I knew I needed to record our own actual rainfall instead of relying on the official totals. Most years, by the end of the calendar year, our rainfall total from home, the local CO-OP observer and the Mesonet station end up being fairly similar even if they varied from one another a great deal during a certain part of the year, so I guess it all averages out in the year. Still, I want to know how much rain fell on my yard and garden, not 3 or 6 or 9 miles away. I don't keep any written records of what, where, how, etc. I plant. I am not a numbers person. I just plant until I have what feels like "enough" of each thing in the ground and then I stop. I've been doing this for decades, and I know how much harvest I generally get from planting a set amount of each item, and I don't really mean that I know 30 broccoli plants give us all we can eat fresh plus fills up the freezer.....I just transplant broccoli plants into the ground until it feels right for that year's timing/weather and then I stop. So, my gardening is not mechanical/planned so much as it is intuitive. When you garden intuitively, your brain is, of course, operating like a little computer and is looking at the current weather conditions/timing (big difference in everything if the last frost is the first week of March as opposed to the first week of May) as you plant and directing you what to do. I jokingly say that I listen to "the voices in my head", but I don't mean that in a schizo way....I mean it in an intutive way. The great thing about gardening here is that we can sow succession crops from January or February through October or November, so there's always a chance to plant another round of something if you don't get enough of it planted the first time. I try to keep every square inch of my garden planted at all times, partly because I hate wasted space and partly because Mother Nature will plant weeds in any spot I leave vacant for a week. Since I'd rather harvest veggies, fruits, flowers or herbs as opposed to pulling weeds, I immediately replant any harvested area. So, for example, if I harvest the last of the broccoli or cabbage on a late Spring morning, then in the afternoon I am putting pepper plants, bush beans or southern pea seeds or whatever in the newly empty space. Just from being in my garden daily, I knew how much of everything is thriving, what is or isn't planted yet, and what I need to use to fill any newly open space that resulted from the harvesting of an early crop. I also often intercrop, growing 2 or 3 types of edible plants in the space most people use only for one. For example, I often grow lettuce and carrots as living ground covers beneath tomato or pepper plants. I grow sugar snap peas on a trellis, and grow cabbage or lettuce in a row along the south side of the trellis so that peas grow above and cabbage or lettuce (or kale or Swiss chard or whatever) below. For privacy and security reasons, I decline to give you or anyone else my coordinates and I don't post photos that show what our garden looks like since it is very visible from the road. My husband is in law enforcement and prefers we guard our privacy on the internet. Because of his decades in law enforcement, we know that criminal types often prowl social media and internet forums looking for folks to burglarize, etc., and we decline to make it easy for any of them to find us. I realize this not a popular stance nowadays when people post photos of their entire lives in ways easily accessible to public view but we are old dinosaurs and we aren't going to change. It isn't members of this forum we worry about, it is the fact that such things, once posted, can be seen by anyone who bothers to look for them. There was, in fact, a member of this forum (now deceased) who lived on the same road as us and not too far from our house. It didn't bother me that he knew where we lived until another neighbor (highly reliable) told me some troubling things about that person. After that, I wasn't entirely comfortable knowing that he knew where our house was but, in fairness to him, nothing creepy ever happened here, as far as I know. He figured out where our house was just because I once mentioned a next-door neighbor by name and he knew where that person lived, so I've learned to keep my mouth shut about stuff like that. I did look at satellite photos of our place from the air once or twice and it was disappointing. Because our garden is, in essence, in a clearing in a woodland, all you see are trees, which hide the house and the garden. In the winter, everything is the same color since all the mulched beds and paths are mulched with hay and leaves and blend in with everything around them. The only satellite photo I ever found of our place showing how it looked in winter was well over a decade old and looked nothing like our place looks now. All my raised beds are 4' wide and run east-west and all the pathways are 2' wide. It really isn't anything special to look at. There's no amazing layout or anything. It is just an old dirt garden and I am an old dirt gardener. This spring will be our 18th spring garden here and trees on the west and north that weren't too very tall when we broke ground for the garden are incredibly tall and wide now and looming high above it. (I knew this day would come eventually, but the garden spot is in just about the only really sunny place we have that doesn't flood heavily, so putting it someplace else was not an option.) In fact, the trees on the north lean over towards the garden at an increasingly awkward angle, stealing its sunlight more and more each year. I have been shrinking down the front garden for about a decade now, making it smaller every year by surrending space back to the woods on the north and west sides, but am tired of giving back space to Mother Nature. We are contemplating spending the month of January either cutting down about a dozen huge trees that sit north and west of the garden (this will involve removing the fence lest it be crushed and then putting it back up again), or moving the fence and taking in more space to the east to make up for what the trees are shading out on the north and west. We wanted to do it last winter, but it rained nonstop so we couldn't work outdoors enough to do much of anything. I worry this winter will be the same. I once had a garden that was almost square, considering we had to work around existing trees, a pond, the driveway, etc. Now it is increasingly become a longer, narrower rectangle year after year. Who knows what we'll end up with this spring after we cut trees and/or move the fence, etc. I built a lot of my early raised beds using the lasagna gardening method of layering materials atop one another. Now, as the garden stretches out in length and narrows in width, my lasagna garden is turning into a linguine or spaghetti garden. Now, I'm headed outdoors for most of the rest of the day. Dawn