Ellen, In your zone, April 15 is about the right time to start them for May sales. According to my sowing records, I started mine last year on March 5th, germinated March 12th, but then I don't tranplant them outdoors in my zone till around June 1st. Sharon

I have a fairly large garden (about 1 1/2 acres) and I have several different gardens within my garden, rock garden, perennial garden, trees, shrubs, native, wildflower and this year I've started a vegetable garden. I made drawings of each garden area and identified the plants on the drawing. I'm not artistic so they are just little circles with the names of the plants and approximate size in proportionate to the area. I've saved the labels from the original plants and put them in separate envelopes with the name of the bed on the envelope, like "side of house" "entry way" "rock garden" "shade garden", etc. I've also printed out or copied from a garden book a page that describes the plant and how to care for it and put them in a notebook. This year I purchased the 2-prong zinc markers from Lee Valley to put in the ground in front of the plant because I like to walk around my yard and see the actual plant growing and know what it's called. I started out about 3 years ago when we moved to this house with land and I was pretty new at this level of gardening. I always had a small yard and did a little gardening, but nothing like this. This method has really helped me learn the names, site requirements and care for most of the plants I have. Keeping up with the weeding, deadheading, and preventing the critters from eating everything is another matter!! :)

Thanks! I just want to make sure I am doing all I can for my plant babies!! I have them snug as a bug, 1-2 inches away from the lights. They are nice and cool, I can actually touch them and think a plant could even rest against them and not get burned! Some where starting to get a little leggy in the window, but have been under the lights for about 5 days now and what a difference! They basically have stopped reaching! and are working on their first and some even second sets of leaves! Truely incredible, I am going back to get another shop light this weekend for some more plants! I gotta keep them going until I can get them into a cold frame, late march, early april. I am feeling pretty good about it though!

Ditto GardenGal's comments. To me the bottom line is not to be afraid of failure. Certainly you don't want to be removing a lot of huge dead trees from your garden after a hard winter. Some ideas are also just plain unrealistic (like the guy who expects coconut palms to grow in Seattle if he just keeps on trying - ha.) But plants will always perform better or worse than expected and there will always be pleasant and unpleasant surprises after a hard winter. To me, if my gardening style isn't flexible enough to account for those surprises and absorb a certain degree of risk, that takes a lot of the fun out of it - especailly as there are so many cool plants that are hardier than many nurserymen and books realize. A lot of useful weather data can be found at the Western Regional Climate Center: http://www.wrcc.dri.edu/Climsum.html The information necessary to calculate your USDA zone isn't provided, but what is provided is a more complete climate picture that is at least as useful, including record lows, averages, precipitation, etc. I haven't looked at the weather.com site but their numbers sound suspect to me. The WRCC data is from official NWS records. Olympia's all time low was -8F on January 1, 1979. Klamath Falls appears to be -17F in 1972. (Interesting side note - according to the Oregon Plant Atlas (google it), madronas can be found as far up/inland as the Crater Lake area (as is chinkapin) - I'm sure plants of that provenance would do fine in Klamath Falls.) You're certainly right about microclimates - they are much more variable than people realize, even over very short distances. When you find the all time record low for your area, it might not necessarily represent you. A fine example is the Olympia weather station, whose very cold winter temperatures don't really represent the rest of the area. I can tell this just by looking at some of the plants around town (eucalypts etc) after a hard winter. When I lived on the north side of Olympia, I usually had overnight temperatures 10-15 (in one instance 20) degrees warmer than those recorded at the airport during those cold arctic events. Another example of this sort of thing was during the Feb 2006 freeze when in the same night, Tacoma Narrows airport had a low of 32F and McChord, a short distance away, bottomed out at 12F.