Welcome to the Carolinas! I'm a native of the area and can honestly say you are going to love gardening here!! I'm constantly amazed at how well plants do that all of the things I read say will die off during the winter. For instance, my herb gardens never see the die off that I expect. I've planted many impatiens that come back year after year. It's a wonderful place for people who love to garden. A recommendation for a store to visit: Try Kings Nursery just outside of Charlotte in Stallings NC. They have one of the best selections I've seen in the area. They carry unusual houseplants too if you are building that collection back up. Start to look for nice selections of plants in March, most places have decent shipments start then. By April, the gardening season is in full swing. The clay can be a challenge. I'm in Indian Trail for the next couple of weeks, I have a new house under construction in Kershaw SC. Here I have yellow "Bull Tallow" clay and it is almost impossible to work with. The first year in this house, I pulled out the tiller and spent a small fortune on dirt, but no luck. This past year I gave in and did all container gardening and had great results. The new house has sandy loam, and I'm much looking forward to that. I'm going just far enough south to get a sandy consistancy to the soil. And I'm really excited to have a "blank canvas" to work with. Good luck and happy planting!!

Mamachile: I'm glad you're enjoying your fabric stash--can't ever have too much :-D Todd: arrggh! Missed including your bands & tree pots--thank you! I'm intrigued with those big square 2qts (?) How space-efficient they are--thank you! I love the one quart bands--I can fit 30 of them on a Lowe's "mud tray" & keep all of the babies bottom-watered.

Amy, Jet's personality has undergone a tremendous change since his big brother, Duke, died. I think Duke was always the protector of us all, and now Jet feels it must be him as he is the oldest male. So, he barks at everything---he barks at Chris, he barks at Tim, he barks at our other dogs and our cats. He barks at thunder. (sign) He'll even bark at me if I come into the house wearing sunglasses and a hat. He is super protective and tries to put himself between Chris and I or Tim and I (Duke never did that). I think he is carrying his made-up oath to protect mama (the feeder of all pets and the giver of dog treats) a bit far, but mostly it makes me laugh at him. He might not appreciate that. This morning he did not bark at the thunder (I don't know why). He is 12 years old and going from gray hair to white hair (he once was jet black) so it wouldn't surprise me if his eyes and ears aren't what they used to be. He doesn't even chase deer, rabbits or squirrels any more, even if they are 10' away from him. He doesn't really even bark. He just stares at them and, if I am pretending to read his mind, I'd bet he is thinking something like "In my younger days, I would have run you off.....". He is sweet to me and very protective of me, but increasingly intolerant of the rest of the world. I just automatically put him upstairs in our bedroom if someone comes over because I don't know if I can trust him around anyone else--I'm not saying he'd attack, but he'd probably bark, and I would imagine that would make someone feel unwelcome. The Calloway's in Southlake has Renee's Garden Seeds too, but I usually order them during her late summer/autumn sale. Our proposed pantry off the north side of the house will happen, but I am almost positive it will not happen until Tim retires. At the same time we build it, we want to build a big sun room on the north side of the house...probably about 16' x 24' or something---a nice place to have nice indoor/outdoor furniture and a place we can sit in the summertime. The sunroom off the west side of the house, even with trees shading it late in the day and with an air conditioner in there, is just too, too hot for us to use it late in the day unless we really crank up the AC. The great thing about the west sunroom, though, is that it is a great solar collector in winter, so you can let heat build up in it, then open the door between the mudroom and the sunroom and let the heat flow through the mudroom and into the house and warm it up. I'd like to have a sunroom on all 4 sides of the house that I could use at will as greenhouse space or sunroom space or solar collector space, but that's never gonna happen. We have a nice wraparound porch on half the east side and half the south side of the house, but we just don't use them. The cats lay on them. Sometimes the chickens come up onto them (I wish they wouldn't), but if we're outdoors, we aren't sitting still. They are nice and shady though, and help shade some of the east-facing and south-facing windows from the sun, so I do like that about the porches. I had a hard time getting Zebrina started here. It just didn't thrive. Maybe my soil still was too high in clay content back then for it. Or, we were perpetually too dry. Over the years, though, something changed and now it is an invasive thug that even pops up and grows in the pathways, and sometimes in the grass or driveway outside the garden. Since it reseeds, it is possible the ones we have now are better adapted to our soil and conditions, but it is just as likely that the soil has improved enough for it. I like most invasive thugs that are volunteers from something I planted on purpose---if I am going to have to pull 'weeds', it might as well be pretty ones. I'm laughing about the bucket seat. You know, it is always something, and if it is not one thing, it is another. That's so true about gardening here. I seem most inspired to not do anything in the summer when Tim is at work. He's only at work for a few hours today and then he'll be some so we can go to that funeral. He only went in for the big Monday morning staff meeting, and he had to drive through rain all the way there. Miraculously, I fell back asleep after he left (which almost never happens) and I was sleeping so incredibly well when our fire pagers went off about 90 minutes late. Back to that 'it's always something' thing again. I bet if I was wide awake, the pagers wouldn't have gone off. The sun is out now and I bet we get steamy quick. We're supposed to have high heat index numbers down here this week, with them getting higher each day as the heat returns more and more. Oh well, we have had a good run of cooler, wetter weather and I knew it wouldn't last forever. Rebecca, Of course something wonderful will come out over the winter, probably in January or February after I've already got seedlings going. It is the way of the gardening world, is it not? Still, I like to beat the rush. I still remember when we had the big economic downturn of 2008-09 and tons of people decided that growing their own food was one way to deal with it. The seed companies were swamped with orders and shipping was weeks and weeks behind. It didnt' bother me, because I tend to shop ahead anyway, but a lot of people got really behind while waiting on their seed orders to come and I've never forgotten that. It motivates me to stay on top of things and order seeds in the fall. Renee's Garden Seeds has really pretty artwork on their seed packets---the same type of beautiful illustrations you'll see on Botanical Interests Seed Packets. You can look at their packets here to get an idea what to watch for in stores: Renee's Garden Seeds (Currently 50% off!) One thing, among many, that I love about Renee's seeds is that you can get some packs with 3 varieties in a packet, and each variety is dyed a specific color with non-toxic food coloring so that you can carefully select seeds of each variety to plant if you aren't going to use the whole packet. I grow a lot of her melons, lettuce, bean, greens and some tomato varieties. Also, a lot of her flowers and herbs. I tried growing Creole several times, both in the ground and in containers, and all I ever got was big monster plants that rarely produced much fruit, which is not a problem I often have. Maybe you'll have better results there than I had here. How crazy is it that the squirrels prefer OPs to hybrids? All my life I've heard the squirrels are mainly after the water and not the fruit, but now I am wondering if that's really true. If it were, it seems like they'd choose any tomato---so if they are choosing OPs, that makes me think they are choosing for superior flavor (like I do, lol). I hate, hate, hate stink bugs with a passion. I know that God created the world and everything in it, but I cannot help thinking the Devil himself somehow created stink bugs, leaf-footed bugs, squash bugs, squash vine borers and bermuda grass. Otherwise, why do any of them exist? Nancy, Don't overdo it on your first few days back in the garden. The pain is not worth it. I am always shocked at how sore I get in springtime when I'm suddenly out in the garden all day every day endlessly, trying to stay on top of everything for as long as possible before the heat and the snake season set in and cut my time in the garden significantly. Our garden in our early years here had tiny paths 12-18" wide. I wanted all the space possible for growing space, but we were in our early 40s then and life was easier. Now that we are older, a few years back, we widened most of the pathways to 2' wide, and now I'm wishing we'd made them 3' wide. One of these days we'll do that. One of my closest gardening friends down here has kept gardening well into his 90s, although now that he is in his mid-90s, his son does most of the heavy labor involved....and, they've always plowed with a tractor, which in a lot of ways is so much easier, except you cannot have the sort of raised beds we need for both better drainage and erosion control. I cannot imagine living into my 90s, much less still gardening at that age....but, if it were to happen, I'm pretty sure we'd be up to 4' wide pathways by then (hopefully long before then). If we ever get around to building raised beds in the back garden (also on the after-Tim-retires To Do List), I imagine we'll start out with 4' wide pathways in between 4' wide beds. It will mean giving up garden space for wide pathways, but it also will mean raised beds lined with hardware cloth to exclude the voles, so it will be totally and completely worth it. Even though we aren't quite in our 60s yet (Tim will be in a few more months), I'd rather do the planning and building for our golden years sooner rather than later....while we still have the energy to do it. One thing I've long noticed here is that the men and woman who retire and sit in the rocking chair on the porch do not live nearly as long as the ones who get outdoors and work in their flower beds, yards, gardens or with their horses, cows, chickens, goats, dogs, cats or whatever. I've also noticed those same physically active folks are involved in community activities and volunteer work and are busy all the time. I really think that staying active as long as possible, and as long as one's physical condition allows, helps a person live a longer life. Another half-inch of rain today puts us at 5.9" for the month of August, more than double our usual August rainfall. It is such a blessing and everything is turning green again. I just love it. Dawn

It was hot on our deck this evening, too, Amy. It's nice now, tho, with a fan going. In fact, I'd been inside reading all evening and just now came out. Our dishwasher is a Frigidaire and it's also quiet. We only run it once every 3-4 days, so maybe it'll last a while! I wash pots and pans and put in the drainer, sometimes meal prep dishes, same. Truthfully, though, it's the one modern convenience I'd be okay without. In fact, in the last 33 years, I've only had a dishwasher 8 of those years. I'm not a great housekeeper--those gets plenty dirty, we just don't mess it up much; well, except my "art" room, so it is easy to figure out which one of us can be a mess. And it's not Garry. But I've been doing deep-cleaning sorts of things, and that feels good. And the art room looks awesome right now since my organizing binge. (Key words="right now.") My four o'clocks have rebounded, for the third time after being wacked back twice. Same with nicotiana; lantana have gotten pretty big; I hope these hardier ones will overwinter; we'll see. I have new zinnias beginning to bloom; and I wanted to plant some nasturtiums; I did last year about now, and they did awesome, unlike the ones planted in the spring. But I'll have to wait until we get back from Wyoming to put more beets, cilantro, dill and nasturtiums in. The new batch of potatoes we planted around Aug 1 are doing well; I hope we get more this fall. The peppers, all, while not going gangbusters, are steadily producing and looking good. I have a question(s) for you all. I know we talked about roselle, but can't find the thread. Can I grow it in part (hot in the summer) sun? And daturas? And brugmansias? Well, the daturas and the brug are actually part sun where they are, getting about 4 hours of full sun per day; they seem to be doing fine, so . . . . I was thinking about where I'd put them all next year, since it sounds like they're all BIG. :) (I know the daturas and brugs are!) And do the roselle re-seed? I'm thinking yes. It was hot today, but supposed to cool off by Wednesday. We haven't had rain since the first week of August, so I do hope for rain tomorrow. Still worried about south TX, and now Irma. . .