Well just to let everyone know I have 3 hummingbirds as of today. They are still alittle nervous around me so pics have been hard to get at least good ones. But I will show what I have. I have planted esperanza or texas stan as known by many and I also have some turks cap. These are their favorites. I also have some salvia but it is not blooming for me at this time,well since I planted it actually. I also have some spanish lavender, mexican firebush and to my surprise they act like they are feeding on some of my crype myrtle trees. I started doing all of this in the end of june to the first of july and they are coming everyday. All of my plants are planted in planters since I am going to be trying to keep my plant selection that I plant in the ground limited to what they really like at my house. I wanted to see which ones grew well for my amount of sun and so on. Anyway I just wanted to let the people reading this site know what is working for me. Boy they are territorial. FIESTY I cant figure out how to post a pic on here. I know some of you are probably calling me stupid right now but hey. You can look at some of my photos at flickr.com and look up texasflavor. Any help on how to post a pic wil be appreciated.

Follow up 2 years later The Fairy (planted in full sun. doing beautifully, little disease, profuse flushes of bloom in spring and fall. Intermitent during heat) Little White Pet (planted in full sun. some black spot, but not horrible. profuse flushes of bloom in spring and fall. Intermitent during heat) Needs regular deadheading to get rid of old blooms (cling to plant and turn brown) Rose de Rescht (Some black spot in full sun, but not terrible. Gorgeous smallish deep rose blooms. Definitely worth growing. Great color. In a little bit of shade 10 ft away it was a black spot magnet) Mme. Alfred Carrie (1/2 day sun. How many ways can you say stunning and gorgeous? Drenched in white blooms in the spring. Intermittent from then on. A reasonable display in fall. Some mildew otherwise quite healthy. HUGE and very vigorous. Reached 20 ft in 2 years. I'm a little worried about having planted it next to a building) Lovely sent. Zeperine Drohin -- 1/2 day sun. Also drop dead gorgeous mass of bloom in the spring. very intermittent during the heat. OK flush of bloom in the fall. The spring makes it worth it. Absolutely mass of bloom -- think Tournament of Roses float. Lovely sent. moderate blackspot in no spray garden, but not unsightly. Sombruiell. -- absolutely healthy foilage. One of the most beautiful flowers I've ever seen. A tendency for the secondary flower buds not to develop or to turn yellow and drop off. I suppose this is a disease. Heavy bloom in the spring and fall, light in the summer. Huge, also extremely thorny. My garden is on a corner lot and my neighbors love all of these roses. Modern roses that fit into an old rose garden. Schneekoppe (Snow pavement). More than reasonably healthy rugosa. Very vigorous, spreads by suckers. Could form a thicket quite quickly. wanders into lawn. Beautiful flower. My neighbor's grade school sone said they smell like cherries. Blooms fairly steadily all summer. Summer Bouquet. Healthy, nice bloom. My only problem is it's quite wide. about 5 ft across. Heritage By vote of neighbors, the most beautiful rose on earth (or at least in my garden). Wonderful light sent. Little disease. Flower is a bit fragile, but worth it. Sophies Rose beautiful flower, some black spot, but not unsightly. The Sombriel was gorgeous. It's growning very vigorously and had almost no disease until it got a tiny bit of blackspot in late November. I'm really looking forward to seeing it this year. The Comte de Chambord was a disaster. It was covered with blackspot seemingly forever. Looked horrible. I pulled it and sent it off to the Fort Totten dump.

Beautiful birds that are very much at home in your yard garden. Lucky you and great video! :)

Farmgardener, I'm sorry you're having such a rough time with the garden this summer. It's this darned weather. Some years we just get to a point where you cannot water enough to keep the garden producing, and it sounds like your area is at that point now. (Mine is getting closer and closer to that point by the day.) There's no shame in walking away from the garden and waiting for better weather---either in the fall or next year. Jennifer, The chickens are fine. They are bored and they are aggravated with being held hostage in a nice climate-controlled area (and I don't care that they are aggravated because I want them safe from the extreme heat). I'm thinking we'll let them out tomorrow because our forecast high for tomorrow is only 106. There's only six chickens left, courtesy of the heavy predator population we've had the last two or three years. The predators get 1 or 2 chickens a week except when I lock them up in their coop/run and don't let them free-range. This is why I'm about to give up on having chickens. We have a much, much, much worse predator problem these last few years than we had when we moved here 20 years ago. The chickens get hot or bored or whatever and wander off into the woods, despite my efforts to stop them. They ignore me and just keep going, and if you try to pursue them, which is dangerous in snake season anyway, they just run deeper into the woods, which is more dangerous for them. Then, something gets them in the woods and we never see them again. If I didn't have these 6 locked up in the mudroom, we probably would have lost at least another one this week. I call these six the smart ones because now they stick close to the house when they're out, but I don't know if they're being smart and cautious or if it just has been too hot to roam around and get very far from the house. When these are gone, I doubt we'll get more. Losing them is hard to bear. If we ever do have chickens again, they won't be allowed to free-range. If chickens are never allowed to free-range and are always confined to a fenced chicken run, they're fine with that because they don't know what it is like to be free ranging. Once they've free-ranged, though, they hate being looked up permanently and it is stressful to them to be confined. So, I try to keep these as safe as possible while still allowing them to free-range, but I'm resigned to the fact that the bobcats or coyotes will get them eventually. We went many years with only losing a couple of year, but for the last couple of years it has been 1 or 2 a week. Jacob, You've had a very adventurous couple of days. I'm glad the garden held up to the hail, and glad the baseball-sized hail didn't fall at your place. My childhood home got hit by baseball-sized hail when I was about 20 or 21 years old, and by the time all the damage was repaired, my parents practically had a new house (and new cars). I'm envious of your cool weather. When we moved here, we thought we'd be able to sleep with the windows open in nice weather. Well, that didn't work out so well as the frogs made such a racket during mating season that you couldn't sleep at all. So, the windows stay closed now. Jen, That Boston terrier sounds very, um, energetic. I hope y'all survive the weekend. Nancy, I like gravel that has been taken over by grass (and/or weeds) just like Mike McGrath described. He's one of my favorite garden writers, and Organic Gardening magazine never was worth reading after he left his job as its' editor. You can have the appearance of a grassy lawn, but the ability to park on it no matter the weather. I'd like to gravel over our entire side yard that sits between the house and garage one of these days and then let the grass grow up through the gravel. The dense, compacted clay in this area holds puddles of water forever after it rains, turning into a lake when it rains a lot, so gravel on top of the clay would be a huge improvement. Kim, I agree with you. For the 3rd or 4th day in a row, we were over 100 degrees by noon. It might have been the same at your place out there west of us. This is ridiculous heat! I'm ready for a break, even though our break here still will include highs in the upper 90s. I bet 97 will feel fairly cool after so many days between 106-111. Tomorrow should be our last triple-digit temperature day for at least a week, if the forecasters are correct. I looked at the garden about an hour ago when I went out there to check on the plants in containers. Considering the excessive heat we've been having, it looks fairly decent. Not great. Not good. Not nearly as good as usual, but mostly still alive and likely to recover if the temperatures will drop down to normal or average July temperatures. Of course, August awaits, and our hottest weather usually occurs in the first half of August so it isn't like I think the garden's hard times are over. They aren't. Maybe, though, we'll at least get a few slightly cooler days. No chance of rain though. If the drought continues to deepen and worsen, though, all bets are off. Dawn