Last winter I ordered from Lazy S's Farm Nursery, Bluestone, and Garden Crossings (and I always order some fall bulbs from Brent and Becky's,) and I would be happy to order from any of them again. All had some unusual plants and some more common. I think I got the biggest bang for my buck from Lazy S - plants were a bit more expensive than Bluestone, but a lot bigger and incredibly well packed. Garden Crossing was more expensive than Lazy S but they had some things I really wanted and they were lots less expensive than White Flower Farm. (Again, incredibly well packed and much bigger than Bluestone.) Bluestone plants need to be planted pretty much right away because they are in such tiny pots, so you either need to have a bed ready or plan to repot them to bigger sized pots if you plan to keep them for a while before they go into the ground. Mine from Bluestone always arrive looking a bit more battered than plants do from any other nursery I order from, though most of them seem to recover alright. http://www.lazyssfarm.com/ http://www.gardencrossings.com/ Digging has suggested some great relatively local nurseries - even if you mailorder this year, consider going to at least some of them this summer. You may find things that you'll want to buy, either for this year or when the budget (or a kind benefactor) allows.

I'm in Sonoma, my temperatures are probably similar to San Jose, but not as hot as Napa or Gilroy. In general, compared to other roses, David Austin's roses are water hogs in our climate; especially when the flowers are opening. In hot summer temps the flowers will shrivel and melt if not given enough water. They also require steady water after the flowers are done to coax the next buds to develop or the flower size will shrink in half. You will notice a difference when the roots get deep enough to reach the underground water table. For heavy flower production, they also like to be fed, a lot. Once your plants get about knee height or taller any rose fertilizer will do until you find your favorite brand, but small first year bands or gallons from heirloom will get fertilizer burn if you're not careful. If you must feed small plants, go organic with fish emulsion or use liquid fertilizer with NPK in the single digits (follow the orchid growers' mantra: feed weakly weekly). Because I have gophers, I generally pot bands up to #1 gallons and then #5 gallons their first year before putting them in the ground in wire baskets. After your Austins get established and grow enormous, look into summer pruning to get more flowers.

The flip side of those comments for those of us in cold climates is that even Austins may not grow as big for us when we have winter dieback. The winter dieback is an important issue in zone 5, since if you have good snow cover you might not get much and they would gradually get big like they would in a warmer climate. For me, 90% of my roses are pruned back to no higher than 12" (if I'm lucky) or all the way to the ground (for a majority of them). For roses in that situation, virtually none of them get so tangled above ground that I can't plant them 18" apart. In fact I admit to putting HTs and floris in anywhere where there's enough room to put a shovel. That means any given 12" space in my yard is triggering another rose planted there. Yes, it's totally not the way roses are supposed to be planted, but in my yard it works. The Austins in my yard that would not play nicely 18" or less from another rose are the ones that get either very wide or very floppy. I've got around 60 Austins and the ones that come to mind that wouldn't share space well would be Teasing Georgia (big bushy floppy rose if unsupported, big if supported), The Generous Gardener (not very big when dying to the ground but wide floppy canes), and maybe Scepter'd Isle (tall and upright but very winter hardy and bushy and has a lot of loose canes around the base). Queen of Sweden and Carding Mill get tall, but they're pretty narrow and I haven't had problems planting pretty close to them. I've left climbers off this list - partly because I have yet to have a climbing Austin actually climb (like the one-cane 4' wonder A Shropshire Lad) - but this spacing limit also might apply to Brother Cadfael or James Galway (ask me in two years and we'll see). Oh, Crown Princess Margareta definitely climbs for me with the limpest canes I've ever seen on a rose, but it never blooms. I have mine wound around a 3' high narrow pillar support and I freely plant other roses around the base of the support. The other issues I can think of that would limit the wisdom of planting roses too close together even in a cold zone where they don't get big, would be blackspot/fungal diseases and soil quality. I talked about the rose canes above ground not being concerned about being too close to each other, but you also have to consider the roots below ground. If you have sandy or otherwise not very fertile soil, your roots are going to be competing with each other and you want to give each one maximum benefit. I have the luxury of great loamy soil so I can push my limits that way. The other issue of blackspot means that canes growing into each other won't have enough air circulation to fight the disease, so you'd want to keep clear spaces around the rose. I don't get that much blackspot relatively speaking so again I can cheat on spacing. In your case lkayetwvz5, you're on the east coast so that sets off blackspot warning lights to my mind. On that grounds alone I wouldn't plant on anything like 18" centers, and put instead annuals or low growing perennials with shallow roots around roses to fill in. If you also have crappy soil at high elevations, then you doubly want to avoid spacing things too close. Until you know how roses perform in your yard, I wouldn't plant closely even if neither of these conditions apply. It's way easier to keep from planting roses closely than to have to move them when you goofed. Warm zone gardeners have plenty of those kinds of horror stories, particularly where the Austins are concerned. There's an obvious reason why DA roses recommends planting multiple roses on narrow centers. Instant gratification in the short run for gardeners, and more rose sales for DA roses when the too-close plantings die out. I'll bet you that the closely planted roses in the jaw-dropping DA gardens in England need frequent replacement, but they serve the purpose of thinking all of our DA roses should look that good. Well, Diane's do, but for the rest of us mortals... Cynthia

It was really nice of Ida to name it for us, because until now I just thought of it as "where to put the presents to make them look like more than they are and distract from our dirge-like singing," but I shall forever more think of it as a "birthday vignette," BV. Anyway, yes, you can easily freeze cakes and most cookies. In fact I read somewhere that it improves the texture! I would not go that far. What surprised me was that the raspberries on top stayed perfect. The flavor, the texture, the look. They did not even stain the cake when they defrosted or make a pink puddle as i feared. No change at all. Walt Disney may be on to something. To freeze a frosted cake, do not wrap it. Place it as is, on a plate or cardboard, in the freezer, uncovered. When it is frozen solid (a few hours), take it out. Now you can handle it without damaging it (unless it has a hole the bottom and you forget and it rains dragees in your kitchen and scares the dog). Move quickly, you want to put it back ASAP. First swath it tightly in plastic wrap. You don't want any air in between the wrap and the cake. Then, swath it again in foil. You can just pop it back in, but I put mine in a tupperware container just to add protection. It was too tall for the container though, so it did not have a lid on it. I think it was frozen 2 weeks. I lied, I did not defrost it in the fridge overnight, I think it was about 8 hours? In our case it was still pretty cold but not frozen. YMMV.