Once the weather cooled down some everything just exploded, lol. I wish I live in a milder climate I can only dream of what my gardens would look like, lol. I spit out my coffee when I saw you thought I had 2 platypus. You been into juice early I think, roflamo. The striped one is a canna but doesn't look so hot. I am gonna plant it directly in the pond next spring and see if it keeps the leaves from burning. Right now its in mud like the lotus. The one I planted in potting soil rotted. Go figure, lol. The plumies are about 5 years old out back. The ones by the front pond are one year olds. I am going to plant some low growing things around the ponds and make sure I leave room to get in there to do maintenance, lol. I can only plant hardy things. The plummies are just stuck inside that wall in pots to keep them from blowing over in the wind. I am going to make a wall like that along the fence in the back yard for them next year. They blow over easily its so windy here and I can stick the pots behind something like that and weigh the down without it looking so ugly. I have sand bags and bricks around the bottoms of the larger ones. Yes, thats the lake I fish at. The pic with the wildflowers is up the creek. Its really pretty up there. I used to have the skinks in Louisiana and the boys would try to catch them and the tails would fall off in their hands. Some kind of defense mechanism. It was gross, lol.

Debra: LTA is new this year so I don't know and these are the FFO's. I got it for the applique pattern it has. Want to try it with a few others to see what develops. BLUE EYED BUTTERFLY is very stunning and the blooms are always fantastic. A keeper for sure. Nancy: This is the second seedling bed I've done and the ones planted last year in a backyard holding bed need to get moved at the end of the season to their new home. I wonder if I'll have the energy to actually do it LOL. CERISE MASTERPIECE took me by surprise as I thought it wouldn't open with the cooler morning we had yesterday. WILD SUMMER WIND is just a fantastic orange color for an early/mid bloom. One similar is SOMBRERO WAY which is a late bloomer so now I will always have some bright orange in the garden during bloom season. Thank you all for the comments. Julia

Plant hosta in pots that may live despite the generous dousing with 'Deep Woods Off', by 5-yr. old! I don't have much expectations of their sizes, for next year, though, as a result of their 'baptisms'! Water, water, water!!! Everything is very dehydrated, due to the 78 mph 'dry hurricane' we experienced last Sunday! Thankfully we were some of the more fortunate, with no extensive damage to our trees or property and we maintained water during the HUGE areas that were w/o power and many still are, including our younger married daughter! There was a lot of debris, a trailer load with more still around to be dealt with today, hopefully! Spread more of the wonderful horse manure and straw and leaves and tree trimming compost we obtained an abundance of this year. I still have about 1/2 a trailer load, that we finally unloaded into a potential bed for next year and I'm snitching buckets full to spread around the garden today! Other than that--not much!!!

Especially in this housing market I would sell now. Unless you can afford 2 house payments. If you can afford to make payments on both houses then you could risk waiting. Personally......I am with missstaceyh...I would not be able to stand the thought of not knowing whether the house was going to sell or not. And when we were making those decisions the economy was fine. We did sell within a week and had 6 weeks to pack up a house we had lived in for 23 years. We moved into our new house suite above the garage but if that had not been built in time we were prepared to camp in a travel trailer if we had to. I am glad it did not come to that! I guess since rentals are difficult to come by in your region you could rent your house if 2 payments were not an option but there are risks involved with that too. How quickly do you expect your house to be built? Do you have relatives who live close by?