Quick Update: The roses are on schedule to be perfect for this weekend! Flowers are opening right now, with kajillions (and kajillions!) of buds not yet opening. After some hot days, we're back to being cool for a couple days, which I think will help the roses not to be stressed. But the weekend is to be back in the high 80s. Hope some of you can make it! Should be a great event. Malcolm

Hi Steve, If youÂre interested, thereÂs a chance I could come downtown on Monday or Tuesday afternoon and pick you up and take you over there. I havenÂt been there for a long time, and wouldnÂt really mind at all seeing the place again. IÂd be especially interested in the perennial gardens, and I really like the alpine garden. Then thereÂs the different dryland gardens that are interesting to see too. When I was in Chicago a little over a month ago, my brother took me to the Chicago Botanic Gardens, and I enjoyed it (I had heard people rave about it), but I was a little bit disappointed. ItÂs a LOT bigger than DBG, but a lot of it was set up like at a show, where they keep replacing plants with whatever is blooming at the moment to keep it looking really "pretty!" DBG (at least the parts I usually look at!) is mostly stuff thatÂs permanently planted, and sometimes itÂs bloomingÂand sometimes itÂs not. Just like a real live yard! I really like that since you can walk around and see what different things "really" look like, and make notes on things you may want to tryÂitÂs not just a bunch of pretty (mostly) annuals to look at. Let me know if youÂd like to try to make it work. The only possible problem is that IÂm in the process of trying to go back to work (it really IS a process!), and itÂs possible something would come up that IÂd need to do, but as of right now, I donÂt have anything planned on either Monday or Tuesday. Have a good trip, Skybird

Thank you, sjerin and everyone who has said such nice things. About the yogurt. It is in one of the Bayou Tales...I will eventually post it here...but one of the first possums I got had metabolic bone disorder. I called a possum expert in California and consulted with her on what to do. She told me to mix a portion of all kinds of chopped vegetables with a portion of Purina Cat Chow....had to be that brand...stir it together with enough yogurt to moisten it. I hand fed the possum for weeks and she never got any better and eventually died. I found out though that all possums love yogurt...most animals do. And I started giving them all some, since it is a good source of calcium and they have high calcium requirements. The possum...well "opossum yahoo group" wouldn't let me join, but I became good friends with one of their members. If any of you ever received one of my possum Christmas cards, she designed them. She truly loved her possums...had just one at a time, but one was quite elderly....they have short life spans...at 4 yrs. old and she even took it to an acupuncturist to relieve her arthritic pains. Anyway, she was telling me about a possum she was helping rehab and they couldn't get him to take the medicine they had for him. Their method was to take one of those little Baskin Robbins Ice Cream sample spoons and try to give him the medicine from that. I told her....that's not going to work. Under the best of circumstances, possums will gape their mouths open. It is a common behavior...even tame possums will do it....it is a response to show their teeth and growl, feign they are ferocious...if that doesn't work and they can't escape, they may play dead, or even bite you. Anyway, the way to give possums medicine, you mix it in a little yogurt. They eat every bit of it. (So see, I could have taught the experts something.) :-)) I like giving it to little possums because it is very filling and even fattening. They are much less likely to chew on each other if they are full and sleepy. I have never had a possum develop metabolic bone disorder, out of the hundreds that I have raised. Meanwhile, back at the possum yahoo group, the original possum expert...the one who taught the one that I had the phone conference with...a vet in Orange County, California, who spent 17 years studying possums, died. The possums group was beside themselves because Purina changed the regular cat chow recipe in some way, and now they were afraid to use it any more. Some of them decided not to ever feed meat based foods to their possums ever again. It made me so glad that I wasn't a member of the group. I am sure I would have made many enemies because don't tell me that an animal with 50 razor sharp, triangular teeth should not eat meat. People who can't figure out simple things like that....get on my nerves. So I am not a member of their group but I am going along without them. ;) No. I don't get any vacations. In a way I don't mind because I have traveled quite a bit...but there are a few places I'd love to go again...mostly east of the Mississippi. If my husband is home, I can go like to the iris convention for Louisiana irises in Lafayette, La. It is just three days. I haven't been in awhile but would like to go next year to see my old friends. I really don't mind staying home....I love it here. I have a million things to do...I don't ever get bored. Sometimes I get sleepy though. We do plan to do some work on the place, as soon as my husband can get back to work. If I was better set up to take care of all the animals...chickens, horses, possums, pigs...it would be a lot easier. My husband was very sick with a UTI about two weeks ago. I didn't sleep well because every time he woke up, I woke up, and he was so very sick and it was so stressful, and I felt so run down when he finally did get well. I am just now getting my strength back. I felt so wrung out. But I am much better now. I am glad you enjoy hearing about the animals. I don't think my rehab group likes us talking about them because it is their fear that someone will think they make good pets, but I always tell people, they aren't good pets, but I think by writing about them, it helps some people to understand them a little better.

I'm new to roses (planted my first rose garden in 2011) and, thus far, they're all healthy, but I do read a lot and want to be educated and ready to remove plants if it becomes necessary. I saw my first RRD rose at my local independent nursery a few days ago. A landscaper had brought in a branch and blooms. The horticulturist on staff at the nursery was kind enough to gather a few of us around and point out what to look for. In all honesty, it looked really different in person than what I had here-to-then seen online and read in descriptions of the virus. It was really helpful to see the "witch's broom"-like growth, the blooms that looked like it was grown at a leaking nuclear plant, and the weird thorniness that were like thorn-hair. This particular afflicted plant was off a Knockout variety but I know it can affect all roses, so I'm watching everything at my house, praying that I don't have to "euthanize" any. Pretty scary. Wish there was something we could do to avoid it. Makes you feel so helpless. . .