Just sitting here nodding in agreement with a lot of posts. I think the most important thing at this point is to look at your property and decide the functions you will use it for down the road so you don't ruin the space when you get around to addressing it. Yes, leave access for getting trucks and machinery to various parts of the property, even on three acres. Especially on three acres you plan to fill generously with trees. Yes on considering some groves and avoiding onesie-twosies and when the tree bug bites you, and it will, it's very enticing to want 'one of everything' and three of nothing and the visuals on that can be busy and disjointed. You have a big house, and need to consider proportions so that the trees planted near it don't come off looking dwarfed and the house monstrous. We have an epidemic here of mini-mansions festooned with dwarf weeping cherry trees, the branches pruned abruptly like a bowl haircut. We also found it more logical to start close and move out with our plantings. Although we are not close to any other dwellings, I use plantings as visual blockades to scenes I don't care to see and for privacy, so do look out your windows in the general direction of any tree you consider planting to make sure it DOESN'T block what you want to see, and does what you don't want to see. Yes I do plant trees to block sun for the shading effect. If they are deciduous, blocking sunlight isn't an issue in winter and it has a tremendous impact in summer to keep our stucco over brick house cool. It sort of amazed me to see someone mention leasing solar panels. You lease from them for your power, or they lease from you for the exposure and buy the power you generate? In our neck of the woods, it would be a company wanting to sink an oil well, instead. LOL. I have a perfect south facing roof area, but any solar panels ever getting there would be self-financed and simply supplemental in their efficiency. I don't have central air, and having a boiler heat am not interested in retrofitting ducts to accomodate it. Trees size so much more quickly than you think. I have some aerial shots of our property taken fifteen years apart and it's astounding at the amount of canopy we have now, compared to then. Our annual rainfall is adequate for most of our plantings and we have installed some freeze proof spigots away from the house, but I got a chuckle over the remark of 100 gallon tanks for watering. Tried that one year and .........well....despite how large a tractor you have, you'd better have more than a trailer behind it to pull your water tank. The center of gravity shifts in liquid loads. It ain't purty. Yes on buying small for most trees. They establish more readily and catch up with the bigger, more expensive ones quite quickly. I've had just as good success with B and B, but really the only reason I got the ones I did was I couldn't find them container. This is going to take years and it never really gets done. That's as it should be and part of the adventure. I can honestly say I've never had to rip a tree out because of poor placement. Nobody shares the exact gardening philosophy and what's right for me might not be right for you as far as pleasing to the senses. Over the years I have found I've been much more pleased with a tree whose needs have been met than one unsuitable for the growing conditions. A healthy and robust, easy care tree is often more beautiful than one which you much struggle to keep happy. Remember it's a lot easier to attend to correcting things like improper branch angles than addressing the problems they cause down the road. Have fun with it and enjoy the journey, too.

Jax, That fortuniana survived for a decade without catching a mite was the hope, that and its distance from R. multiflora on the part of both of its parents. I wasn't going for a genetic salvation, but I hoped that there might be a cultural barrier tied to the preferred growth times of banksia and laevigata. I had hoped that the 'off' growth cycle of fortuniana might be a saving grace, that it grows through winter when the mites aren't out. Mine was relatively dormant through summer, and post bloom spring pruning sufficed. An example is R. setigera which doesn't get RRD often, even though R. multifloras in the same fencerows (unsprayed with herbicides) get RRD rather easily. R. setigera just doesn't get 'that' large nor is it actively growing through summers here. Not exactly a cultural barrier , but a reduced propensity to contract the disease. There are so many instances where one rose appears to have avoided infection, and the more we know, we find that others of the same cultivar are infected. Wind tunnels with a speeded up wind speed are not practical at all (although they work). I have always expected RRD to infect all roses, but I had hoped that some barriers might exist in nature, a lesser propensity to infection for the ones that go to near dormancy in summer, ones who have a limited window of opportunity for the mites to feed on undifferentiated meristem tissue in axillary buds or at the ends of broken stems (the latter seems to be the problem here). Or maybe have really tight buds that the mite's feeder tube can't get through. As to a pest that will take out the eriophyid mite: it's out there and was described early on in the Allington, Staplin and Viehmeyer paper. The predators are conventional spider mites; in the isolation labs at the University of Nebraska they were trying to study the eriophyids, but spidermites kept getting in and destroying the eriophyid populations. Amrine and his students have also found some unnamed species of predaceous thrips will feed on erophyids AND thrips. I don't use insecticides or acaricids on my roses. I haven't in a long time.

Sierra, I am so sorry that you are dealing with frost at this time of year. I just can not imagine such a short growing season. I hope things warm up and you have a nice long Indian summer! Cameron, I hope the bee sting is improving. My DH has been stung several times in the last few days. The darn things fly inside his shirt and then move from spot to spot stinging him repeatedly. Cortisone cream has helped him a lot. I have tried to catch up on housework this week while the temps have been so high. I'm good up to about 90 F. but anything over that makes me physically ill. We have two window air conditioners that do a decent job of keeping it bearable inside. DD2 and I were able to clean a large closet, sort out all of her clothes to make room for new school clothes, get the house in decent order and scrubbed a few walls and the floors. I'm terrible about letting the house go during summer so I can spend time outside. We still have her room upstairs to tackle when she gets home from her weekend with her dad. I have a good carload of goods to take to the community thrift shop next week and won't even feel bad about using the fuel to make two trips if it means we can get her room back under control by clearing out lots of excess STUFF! In the meantime the weeds I've been so diligent about keeping cut so they don't form seed are getting tall and setting seed anyway. Next time we mow we'll be forced to bag too. Sigh. We've had rain off and on for two days and it's been nice to not have the hot sun beating in the windows all the time. 11 days until DD2 starts High school. Lots to get done before then because I already know how crazy things will get around here then. Thankfully most of our harvest is done. Just one more cutting of hay to do. We still have to rebuild the calf lot fences but will wait until the weather breaks before we do that. PS to Eduarda...we did our branding and tagging two weeks ago and the #44 cow survived the cut one more year. Her yearling grandaughter almost got shipped out but has been given a one year reprieve to settle down. How did it turn out that my heifers are all decendants of that crazy old #44? Hang in there everyone! MeMo

Hey Janet - BEAUTIFUL pool. I'm glad to see it came in just right for you guys. I'm also in Cypress. Actually, our home is up closer to Tomball (2920 and Cypress Rosehill area), but my law firm is near Jones and Grant. I just had my FIRST meeting with a PB tonight, and we're excited, but COMPLETELY overwhelmed. Do you mind giving me the full name of your PB? If you had a really good experience, I'd love to speak to them and get a bid. I'd to get at least 4 or 5 bids before I pick a PB. My wife and I have an interesting situation in that we have a LOT of room in the back yard (we are on 4/5 acre lot in the forest), but we have two massive trees that we want to work around AND build an appx 800 sq foot outdoor living room/kitchen/bar. We need JUST the right PB to make our pool integrate with our house, our lot, and our forest. We really want to do this right, and it looks like your PB did a great job! (Although I'm very impressed at your design work!)