Brendon, I understand the concept, and if it were really the case that people were saying that fire suppression (whistling) was the primary trigger for the initiation of bark beetle outbreaks (tree death), then you might have a point. But no one says that, or at least it's not something that I've ever heard said or seen published among bark beetle specialists. And for that matter, the paper doesn't even report on whether there's a difference between the year without whistling (pre-fire-suppression) and the next. Based on their data sources, I doubt they had the statistical power to prove the negative. Drought stress is commonly considered to be a main trigger for regional conifer bark beetle outbreaks. But even when regional outbreaks are occurring, the susceptibility of a given stand to infestation is affected by that stand's structure and composition. Fire history is a factor that affects stand structure and composition. These points are well-supported in the literature for many systems. Back to your analogy, the idea that fire suppression could affect bark beetle susceptibility is not nearly as unlikely as the idea that whistling could affect tree death. There is a mechanistic connection. Also, these associations they're reporting are significant, but not absolute. For example, they find that 24% of the time that there was an AMO of at least 1.6, there was an outbreak in the study areas. Otherwise, when the AMO was This post was edited by saccharum on Wed, Oct 16, 13 at 23:50

Thank you, Mikey , Wanda and Youreit for taking the time out to write me. Good sound advice- all of you. However, although Sluggo is a darn good enviromently friendly product, I'd still like to think that toads could reside in my modest garden. I used to live in Monterey Park and had chickens , ducks ,guinea hens and albino peacocks- they took care of the slug and snail problem. Unfortunately they took to eating the Fence Lizards and Blue tongued Skinks( " alligator lizards") as well. Mikey- Hi neighbor!!. Again, thanks and I will keep all of you informed of any developments or " occupations!"

This thread began as a means to discuss the issue of Sunset zones. The secondary motive was for me to try to explore the notion that elevation is a factor to RMG but not the only factor. Over the course of looking at climate data, I discovered that annual precipitation and the time of its occurrence may be a defining feature for the RMG region. Aridity cannot be the only determinate or wed all be over in the Southwest Gardening forum. Previous and somewhat naively, I had thought that these evergreen mountains here and there indicated that there were areas with rather high rainfall amounts - what hadn't quite sunk in was that while that is true, these areas were all at elevations where gardening becomes impossible. I began wondering if a particular native plant species was representative of the broad RMG region. I'm no expert on native plants so this was a fun exercise even if it doesn't appear to be absolutely successful (perhaps, an impossibility). It seemed to me that the Arrowleaf Balsamroot was most broadly representative. I'm hoping that other gardeners are giving this some thought and will comment. By way of encouragement, my question now is - what the heck is this plant whose image is used here on GardenWeb to represent Rocky Mountain Gardening: Steve

Where in Colorado are you building? My builder just finished a 2500 SF ranch with 1700 SF basement finish, 3-1/2 bathrooms and well above average finishes for about $620,000 build cost. The house was located in a rural area just south of Loveland and had $40K-$50K extra costs due to a required, engineered basement and getting utilities over some distance. If you're building in Boulder or hot areas in Denver or some mountain communities, $300/SF might be what you should expect, but that price is ridiculously high for the rest of Colorado. You also have to be really careful with SF pricing. For the house my builder built, what would be the SF pricing? If you took the total build cost and divided by only the above grade SF, it would be $248/SF. If you took out the basement finish then it would be $220/SF, if you also took out the "extraordinary" costs that 99% of houses wouldn't incur, the cost would be about $200/SF. If you counted all finished SF the cost would be $148/SF. Basic structural costs per SF shouldn't vary that much. It seems that finishes and special circumstances are what really impact total build cost.