I live in australia and here the pineapple sage is very hardy. I made the mistake of planting it in my herb garden and it is now 5' high and 5' in diameter and it is the only thing left in that herb garden. it strangled everything else. I had to put in another herb garden for the other herbs lol. it survives heavy rains and scorching heat waves. it flowers and grows winter and summer, whatever season it just keeps growing!! but I wouldn't trade it for anything, especially on warm summer evenings when the sun warmed fragrance perfumes the air, I love sitting next to that herb garden. I use it in so many dishes! it is the most wonderful plant! not only do I use the leaves in cooking but I also use the flowers in salads, and I also pick the stems, both flowers and leaves, and put them in vases around the house, the fragrance is just so wholesome and fresh, and gives such a feeling of being on holidays to your home (hope u know what I mean by that lol - kind of like being in a tropical resort). I warm extra virgin olive oil and steep dehydrated leaves and flowers in it for up to a week, then strain and use it in oil burners or with wine vinegar as a salad dressing! so versatile!

I feel horrible ,all the leaves fell of my pineapple sage plant for no reason or so i thought.I got reading and found out it didn't like full sun and we were getting a lot of rain.I moved the bald plant to my east porch and hear it is September.Well now it getting all new leaves and it is still in a big pot.They usually die on me in the ground over winter and this one didn't even have a chance to bloom.Should i bring it in the house over the winter if it keeps getting more leaves.I already brought my white sage in and my Passion flower cus it has been getting pretty cold.Should i bring it in or not.It looks pretty sad right now with just green leaves popping up in quite a few places.I don't know how to use the links below and i don't know what they do,lol so i hope this goes through.Thanks for any help.Thank you all

Lemon Verbena (can grow 6 feet/like a small tree i've read, mine's at 2 feet+, used for tea/food/etc and smells amazing all the time), and Lemon grass (west and east type for tea/thai food), Honey Melon Sage(mainly for the smell, havent had a chance to cook with it) are the only 3 herbs I brought in for the winter. I am already covered on all the novelty/less commen herbs possible that I could find from the last year and a half, now moved onto fruit as you can see, which is more longterm/care/lifetime wise generally. I have about 15 types of mints I will regret planting later im 100% sure but worth the wonderful scents, outside in cinder blocks down the pathway i'm building with 50+feet of flowerbeds and trellis's around the side of the house that has never been used, on month 10 clearing it out from weeds/building plant related/sidewalk), On the left each cinderblock with a different mint to spread down the unwalkable/passable hill full of weeds. thats used to keep anyone from falling down the 20-30+feet and mints/catmint, goji bush,strawberries and kiwi at the with grapes for the trellis's, and right side Saffron bed with a few hundread bulbs now from the previous 50 and that is with animals digging them up to poop in the flowerbed, gotta protect them better. Tulip bed, flowerbed, etc on the right, Somewhere among this and on the porch and other locations, Lemon thyme, golden lemon thyme, with the following basil's - Cinnamon,Lemon, Lime, regular, sweet, Genvue, Box, Purple, Thai, spicy,red, and some others, Lemon grass west and east types. Lavender, couple parsley, cilantro, marjoram, lemon blam, garlic/onion chives,catnip,catmint, Mints - Orange Mint, Apple Mint, Berries n' Cream Mint, Hillary's Sweet Lemon Mint, and Lime Mint, Cotton candy mint - Of those only 2 made it? and none were pleasent overall, was refunded but i've given them a chance outside to smell better. But for sure have/better sources as well peppermint,lemon, apple,sweet,orange,banana mint (lowgrowing) pineapple,spearmint,chocolate,Kentucky Colonel, The best of something,curly, and at least 5+ types i have no idea what the name is, from the botantical/other places. Which are all unlabeled/labels faded/neighbors dog stole labels, or got mixed up, and all mostly near each other I have the seeds for that watermelon, moon&stars and some others. I didnt get any of those to fruit this year, I just found a watermelon in the yard yesterday in the monkeygrass, i mistakenly broke it and it fell out of the monkeygrass when i was digging it up yesterday, smelled so sweet, but it was cracked in half with dirt in it from the shovel. Random event actually. It was a yellow watermelon. I don't really use the herbs for food mostly for smell. Gotta love a breeze from any direction most of the year and get a good wiff of delightful mixed aroma of various plants. I did make some tasty applemint chips by mistake trying to dry them in the toaster oven, actually pretty tasty. This post was edited by JGlass on Wed, Dec 17, 14 at 12:32

We have a huge mosquito invasion here. Hordes of them hang around just outside all our exterior doors just waiting for us to walk out the door, and every time a person, dog or cat goes in or out, the mosquitoes try to fly inside. Hunting them down indoors and killing them if they make it indoors is very tedious. It is the same thing when you get into the car---the mosquitoes fly in with you. Many counties near us, mostly on the TX side of the river, are reporting positive findings of West Nile in mosquitoes caught in traps. Fort Worth has had 200 mosquitoes test positive for West Nile in recent days. Some cities have begun spray programs. Y'all be careful around all these mosquitoes. I assume that with this many mosquitoes active and testing positive for West Nile, we likely will start hearing about human cases of West Nile soon. Tim and I suddenly have wasps---three new, big wasp nests have appeared on the house this week. He sprayed those with a wasp spray just around sunset yesterday and will spray again this evening if any wasps still are on/in the nests. I imagine the cooler weather explains the sudden appearance of the wasps and the building of nests on the house. We had wasps around all summer and just ignored them because they are very beneficial insects to have as many prey on caterpillars, but they weren't around the house much in the hot summer months, and they weren't building nests attached to the house. We won't even mention the huge fire ant mounds popping up everywhere, other than to say they are here. There's tons of grasshoppers still, and we also still have stink bugs and this week I am seeing a few squash bugs. Y'all know that squash bugs will feed on Halloween pumpkins and decorative pumpkins you have sitting outside for autumn decorations right? I watch for them and try to kill them when I see them there. Any that escape death will overwinter and be the start of next year's squash bug problem. Back in the summer months I got tired of weeding the asparagus bed, so cut back the asparagus really hard and sowed a ton of leftover flower seeds into that bed. I figured if weeds were going to grow mixed in with my asparagus plants, they might as well be the weeds of my choosing. So, in the asparagus bed we now have a lot of plants in bloom: cosmos, the grain type amaranths, Nicotiana alata, daturas, Laura Bush petunias, zinnias, rose moss and more. I'm sure there's weeds in there as well but you really cannot see them because of all the pretty flowers in bloom. The asparagus grew back of course. Nothing kills asparagus. The seeds I tossed into the asparagus bed were slow to sprout and grow because we were in drought, but the plants are doing great now. That is a good thing as many of the summer bloomers that have been growing in the garden since March or April are worn out and dying back or going to seed, but that one long asparagus bed is full of fresh fall blooms. Many of the zinnias I planted in the spring are rapidly declining now after this latest couple of inches of rain that fell this week. The soil is just too wet for them now, but at the same time, a few small zinnias that sprouted in the mulch in adjacent pathways are getting ready to bloom. I'm glad I left them in the pathways when I saw they had sprouted there. Usually I immediately yank out anything that sprouts in the mulch, but I can't yank out baby zinnias in August because I know the older ones are tired out and worn out and declining. Some of the pineapple sage plants are in the same condition of decline---they like well-drained soil, but I have a total of 9 pineapple sage plants, which means we still have plenty in bloom because only a couple have died. I believe the monarchs are migrating through here now. We had tons of them nectaring yesterday and most are flying south. Some are flying southwest, which also is fairly typical here at this time of the year. Some of the males are puddling. All in all, there's still a whole lot going on outdoors even as the season is winding down. The most amazing garden survivor is 2 or 3 flat-leaf parsley plants that somehow survived all the heat and drought (not bad for cool-season plants in a 100+-degree summer, growing in full sun), followed by purple datura volunteers that sprouted in August and are getting ready to bloom in the next few days. The fall tomato plants still don't have much fruit on them, likely because we stayed in the 90s very deeply into September so it won't be a great fall tomato year here, but the SunGold I put in the ground in March still is producing so at least there's that. So many morning glories, mostly Grandpa Ott's, sprouted and started growing along the fenceline in late summer that they are beginning to shade the pineapple sage, Russian sage and purple daturas, so I spent some time last evening yanking out a bunch of them. With sunlight/day length becoming increasingly limited as we go more deeply into autumn, I want for the flowers in the border along the driveway to not have their sunlight blocked by aggressive, weedy MGs. Today's task will be to cut back four o'clocks that are growing through the western fence and shading my peony plants and adjacent container plants. If only the four o'clocks would stay where they are supposed to grow outside the garden fence, but four o'clocks ignore boundaries. It is all fun and games out in the garden later today, at least until I encounter a snake of any kind. Then, the party will be over. Dawn