No Thursday tea for me either. We had a tornado! Southeastern Ohio, Wayne County - 8 houses down from me (about a mile) houses and property devastated! Ohio Agricultural Research and Developmental Center (OARDC) and it's arboretum nearly demolished! Sad, sad, sad. I just happened to turn on the TV news at 5pm Thursday, and they were putting out warnings of a coming tornado. The sky was ugly, but we had little rain or wind so far that day; they announced the path - coming right towards my road in 11min. Then the electric went off. Dummy me went outside on the porch and looked for it, couldn't see or hear a thing. Yes, the clouds were scary but I never saw a tornado before, didn't no what to look for. Saw a wide fuzzy grey thing hanging down from the wall cloud. Finally I went inside as a white wall of rain came across the field (as it's known to do) and I braced the front door from blowing open (as it's known to do). Rained hard for a minute or two and that was it. No hard wind at all. Afterwards the phone calls started, asking if I was ok! Sure, I was fine - why? Well, an hour later my neighbor stopped and told me it was pure devastation right down the road and she told me to get in the van and took me there. We and hundreds of other gawkers started out and went where we shouldn't have been. Getting in the way! We went around the bypass which takes you past the arboretum - TERRIBLE DAMAGE. I was shocked at all the trees down. I can't describe what it looks like closer to the city of Wooster near the OARDC and ATI agricultural university. Of course we can't get near even as of today. So many trees down and homes damaged. Anyhow, my electric has been off since 5:30pm.Thursday and just came back on an hour ago. I was at Mom's getting more water, came home to lights. I am sure luckier than those people right down the road. Now I know what a funnel cloud looks like, because there was a photo of it on the front page of the newspaper today - and that is what I saw from my front porch! I didn't even know it then. I saw no wind, heard no sound. Unbelievable. Good to be back - and safe.

Thank you Debra.I love this Torenia plantI use to have one years ago,and forgot to bring it in the first winter I had it and thought it had died, but, in the spring I found a bunch of little plants coming up and gowing, but,I finally had lost all of it,so I was very happy when I found a plant at our local nursery that only opens up a few months each spring.its a member of the African violet group, but,it tolerates a little sun very good.Thanks for your comments on the daylilies. MANTIS: yes the TORENIA plant tolerates heat very well, just not a lot of hot sun, but it does like a little sunshine.Have to be careful with the watering and not over water it.Thats how I have killed several of them, over watering.let it dry out before watering again.and yes,it does like a little early morning sunshine or late evening.just not in the hottest part of the day,it needs in the shade, then. This little kitty can be just a barrel of laughs..Every morning when it hears my front door unlock and open, it just comes from out of no where, just jumping up and down like a bucking horse, and it sits there waiting for its food it knows I am bringing. it sits there looking up at me,and moving b ackwards each step I make.It wants to be first to get its head in the bowl to eat, as the mother is always waiting by the step each morning, too.Shes wild and wont let me get too close to her, but, shes very pretty grey tabby. jean

Kathy, The frog and turtle bed should be easy. Ours is a lily pond in the ground, NOT surrounded by stone. (To me, a whole lot of stonework popping up in the middle of the grassy prairie where we have NO native stone visible just seemed too fake, and I am into having a landscape that fits in with our native prairie....up to a point.) Maybe someday I'll get tired of weedeating back the bermuda to keep it out of the sedges at the water's edge, and maybe then I'll replace it with stonework. Our pond is earth-bottomed so the frogs can dig into the mud to hibernate. It has water lilies, which gives them pads to sit on....and they DO sit on them! (I can divide the water lilies in the spring and bring some to the plant swap in April if your water feature will have room for lilies.) It has tall spiky plants (pickerel rush, horsetail reed, cattails (have them and wish we didn't) for the dragon flies to perch upon. The pond has a log in it for the turtles to climb on for sunning purposes. One end of the log rests on the foot of the 2' deep pond and the other end rests on the pond bank. Several turtles can sun on it at one time. Native prairie sedges planted themselves in the soil at the edge of the pond and the bermuda grass runs right up to the sedges. The sedges give frogs and turtles on land some taller vegetation for protection, because the chickens eat frogs (oh, yes they do!) and so do a couple of the cats (or, at least, they try to). In a bed several feet away from the pond, I have lots of plants to give the frogs and turtles a safe place to hang out on land when they wish to--away from the pesky cats and chickens. This bed has fairly low-growing junipers (a couple of feet tall, but with room underneath for both turtles and frogs), a chaste tree (vitex agnus-castus), a chinaberry tree (we had one when I was a kid and I love it even though it is not the highest quality tree), roses, swamp mallows, and various annual and perennial flowers. I let the growth here stay pretty thick to give the little critters protective cover. I also have cannas and the giant green elephant ears nearby to give the pond area a sort-of tropical look, and to give the frogs something to sit on. They like to sit on the big broad leaves. The turtles like to dig into sandy soil to lay their eggs, so a patch of sandy soil that can be dug up is handy, but they will lay their eggs wherever they choose. We have all kinds of frogs and turtles and, needless to say, all we had to do was dig a hole in the ground (Elvis, the guy who put in our tornado shelter dug the hole with his backhoe the same day he put in the tornado shelter) and the frogs and toads and turtles magically appeared. Our 'water feature' is more or less round--I didn't want it to look too perfectly round--and about 15' across. It is two feet deep, more or less, and has sloped sides so any small animal or child that falls in can crawl out. There is not a filter or pump, just Mother Nature, and the water is clear most of the time although we get an occasional algae bloom after a big rainfall in hot weather. We have a few mosquito fish and goldfish in the pond to keep mosquito larvae under control. A frog or turtle bed sounds like fun. I bet you could find stepping stones in a turtle shape if you like that short of ornamental thing in the garden. Of all the various landscape features we have, it is always the lily pond with its frogs and turtles and dragon flies and toads and fish that gets EVERYONE'S attention. People just want to sit and stare at it. I guess there's a little kid inside of each of us, and that kid loves the fogs, turtles and other creatures. The only wild things not welcome in our pond are the great blue herons who swoop in to stand in the pond and eat every now and then. The guineas always tell us when the herons have invaded the pond by gathering nearby and squawking their heads off. Then, the dogs and I walk out the door about 15' from the pond, and the heron flies away. Then, Honey, our little blonde terrier mix, chases the heron for as long as she can--usually until it's flown several hundred feet away, and then she returns to us, all proud and excited that she has protected us from the dreaded Great Blue Heron. (Yes, it is ALWAYS a zoo here no matter what.) I also like to have a lot of night-blooming flowers (daturas, brugmansias, four o'clocks, moonflower vine, etc.) nearby so we can enjoy looking at them and also enjoy their lovely nighttime fragrance while sitting out by the pond in the evenings. And, too, I keep several tropical plants in large pots near the pond because the smaller tree frogs love to hide in their foliage. (Not all frogs, after all, are water lovers! The tree frogs are one of my favorite local creatures.) Dawn

Paula, I worry about you and Ken and all that high water. Y'all be extra careful! After all these years of fearing that wildfire would burn us all out of our homes, now we are at the other end of the spectrum. It hasn't even taken hail to knock fruit off our plum trees. Every time we have had really high wind and heavy rain together, the ground is covered with fruit. I still hope to get enough plums to make some jelly, but that looks more and more iffy every day. My garden is the same as yours---without raised beds, there simply would be no garden left to produce anything. This week I yanked out the snap peas----the plants, though heavily loaded with peas and still in bloom, were rotting off at the ground, and they are in raised beds. I harvested all I could find as I pulled out each plant and put it on the compost pile. I'm not going to plant anything else in the ground where they were growing until we have had a few days of sunshine to dry out the waterlogged soil in those raised beds. I fear that any seed sowed there now would just rot or wash away anyhow. Robert, What is a sunny day? (grin) I feel like we have become obsessed with mowing and edging the property, precisely because we cannot do it. On the first sunny, dry-ish day we get, Tim will be mowing, and I'll be out there with the string trimmer tidying up the edges, and along fence lines and such. Tim did mow the other day, so at least the grass in the area closest to the house, garden and outbuildings is low, but the roadside and the pastures are high. You know, that snakey sort of high. I can't wait for us to at least be able to mow pathways through the fields. After Tim mowed the other day, he had just parked the riding mower in the garage when gas became pouring out from underneath it. As he was pushing it back out of the garage, I was running to the house to grab cat litter to absorb the spilled gasoline. He eventually found a hose loose and then two parts on the ground that surely must have had something to do with the loose hose, which I assume was a fuel line. So, before he can mow again, he'll have to fix the mower again. It is always something, isn't it? We've never had to work so hard just to mow the grass. Larry, Thanks for the laugh! You always say something that puts a smile on my face. I like the idea of a boat delivered by a drone. Yesterday when I heard the UPS truck coming down the road (you can hear it from a long way off once you are used to what it sounds like) I went down the driveway to meet the driver down at the road. I wouldn't have wanted for him to bring that big old truck up our flooded driveway as he might have gotten stuck in the mud. Has anyone here been counting days and nights of rain? Is anyone approaching 40 days and 40 nights? It might be time to start building an ark, and if I was building that ark, it would have two sections---one for two of each kind of animal and the other for two of each kind of plant. Oh, who am I kidding? It would have a third section for 100 tomato plants. Dawn