I posted here early yesterday but it's not showing up ??? Anyway, the sale was FANTASTIC! Fairy gardening is definitely the trend. I told someone "I'm finally trendy for the first time in my entire life!" I took 4 vanloads of planters and came home with 1 vanload. Will do a farmers market on Sat. to try to move the rest. Kathy I wasn't sure if you were talking about winter care for hen & chickens or for the container gardens. Either way, care is mostly the same. H&C - leave them out and forget them. They like all the winter moisture. Also the fairy gardens, I tell people to remove the miniatures and leave the pans sit out in the garden all winter. I use perennial groundcovers for that very reason - they are very hardy and winter over. They need the moisture - I've had people tell me they put them in the garage to "protect" them and they dry up and die. (I even give them a handout on how to take care of it and they still don't listen sometimes!) Arlene

This was a very interesting thread. Well let me tell you a story. There is a house here in a very prominent well to do established neighborhood (the city's first full-fledged country club suburb). The house itself if painted differently would be beautiful but it sticks out like a sore thumb. It is in a curve and I swear when I turned the curve and saw her monstrosity of a house I almost crashed. I never remember where it is and always pass it by accident and I have the same reaction each time. LOL. I was going to take a photo of it but everytime I pass it the owner is in the yard. It is painted it a bright yellow (she used safety yellow) with blue trim and the yard looks worse than the one in sykesville. When I saw it I was like WTF is this!!? I could not believe my eyes. Well because of my job I had occasion 2 years later to run into this homeowner. She was telling me about how she had this house built (3000+ sq ft) and the contractor ripped her off, never finished the house but she closed on it anyway (paying close to 3/4 million in cash). From the conversation I gathered she does not work and of course my mind wondered to the thought of where did she get the money to buy a house like this for cash. And she did because I verified it. After she had the house built she decided to add a balcony outside her bedroom. As soon as she had it built the HOA raised holy heck because it was against the rules and they made her take it off. She was pissed so she looked up the covenants for her sub and crossed the line where ever she could. They say you can paint the houses certain colors and yellow is one of them but it does not specify a shade of yellow. LOL so she went to the store with a sample of the yellow of the lines in the road and had it mixed and painted her house with it. There is not a thing they can do to her because she did not break any written rules. Well while talking to her she showed me pictures of all the things the contractor left her holding the bag on and how her neighbors harassed her for this and that and telling me what she did in retaliation. I started laughing at her logic (at first). She told me about things her neighbors said and each time they spoke a mean word or action against her she would counter with something to piss them off even more. She made perfect sense at first because I was feeling her story and thinking the nerve of these uppity people harassing her for no good reason and good for her reducing their values. The balcony she put on her bedroom was really nice and I bet now they realize they should have left her alone. She has rocks and boulders all over her yard, really funky yard art and forget keeping the grass cut she grew weeds and herbs all over the place. LOL it is unbelievable what she did to that house. I asked her wasn't she worried about ruining the value of her house and she said she can care less, she is going to die there and I think she said she willed her house to some organization who agreed not to paint it in exchange for getting it free. It was funny at first but later in the conversation and after some of the other stories she told I realized she was just a rich eccentric lady who quite enjoyed pissing people off and she obviously did not have all her marbles. She took things too far. I also realized she probably pissed her contractors off and they walked off the job, thus leaving her with a half finished interior. It is sad that there are some people who are obviously crying out for help and instead of getting help they get ostracized. I am glad she is not my neighbor that's for sure. Although if she were I would not have bothered her about the balcony. Yup that house above is also a cry for help. If I can find the lady's house again I am going to post a photo of it. you will not Believe this house and the one in that article has nothing on this lady! As for the second house with the freaking batmobile. They just look artsy/eccentric to me. I might think their antics were funny. It looks like a fun place and depending on the neighborhood, could be an improvement. LOL!!

Candy, about the gate... I found that gate at a flower shop that also sold finds of old "stuff". That was years ago in Toronto. It was painted bright turquoise at the time. I NEEDED it. So then began my search for posts to support it and make it functional. There was a huge warehouse near the Humane Society and I went there and searched, resisting many other 'finds'. I found the two posts at last and managed to unify things by painting them the dark dark green. Then I asked my Italian brick layer friend (the guy who rebuilt our chimney and cement walkway and front porch pillars and more...) to install the gate in our small backyard. He sank the posts in concrete, installed a rose arch above it and lay a flagstone path to that area. About 15 years later we moved to the country and sold the house. DH said I could either keep the gate or the old Quebec pine fireplace mantle, but one of them had to stay with the house to give it character for selling the place. Not yet knowing what our new home would be like, I risked taking the gate. So Benny returned to remove the posts from the concrete! One of the bases broke in the process. Once we actually moved here, the contractor who removed wallpaper and sanded floors here found me a man who could repair the post and then he installed the gate in its present location. Given my age, it will either remain here forever or else make one more trip to wherever we go if this place becomes way too much for us to handle. And so it is well loved, even though I would never have thought to mix it in with a farm atmosphere.

You hit a raw nerve with this one, kt! When I lived in New York all those years, the idea of joining a garden club seemed obsure, at best. . .I had visions of Upper East Side ladies with their perfectly white-gloved hands, meeting over tea to "worry" over the tulip plantings on Park Avenue each Spring. . .an absurd exaggeration, I came to learn, but with the wealth of superb public gardens there - N.Y.Botanical Gardens, Brooklyn Botanic Gardens, Wave Hill, Central Park Conservancy, et al - joining a garden club just seemed so, well, unnecessary. . . Now, I'm located in a small town in New Jersey, and they had a garden club. . .but after attending those first two annual Garden Tours, and seeing what they were touting as "gardens", it came as no surprise that this erstwhile garden club collapsed. A few years later, at the urging of a town official who knew I was a gardener, I joined a group whose sole resposibility was to plant and maintain eleven (11) simple signpost plantings at each of the various entry points to our town. . .disaster again. These "interested gardeners" would meet once a month, with minutes read, a treasurer's report, a rigid agenda of new/old business, etc. . .it was an absolute farce - they were really only there to gossip and chat about anything and everything NON-garden! There's an interesting development to this particular story, but since it's not germaine to your basic point, I'll leave it for now. . .but the point is, here was a group charged with "gardening" and they didn't know an annual from a perennial, compost was an alien concept, weeding and mulching were things you hired other people to do. I also tried hooking up with the NJ Gardening Forum on GW but that turned out to be unbelievably sterile ground. . . it was when I went to click on their forum one day last year, that I accidentally clicked on NE Gardening right above it and discovered the whole lot of YOU - an eclectic passel of actual gardeners, and I've been happily contributing here ever since. (Since I'm a Yankee-in-Exile, born and raised in Massachusetts, I was told I could hang out with you kids. . .) Finally, right after moving here, I joined the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society (primarily because membership includes 2 tickets to their annual Flower Show, a life-long addiction of mine!) ,but what an extraordinary collection of fascinating people THAT revealed - gardening culture in the Philadelphia region is truly in their blood! - but since it's 60 miles away, being deeply involved is problematic. So, I guess my long-winded answer to your question about garden clubs is: sure, some of them might be great, but like most things, each of them is only as good as it's collective members - AND, their reason for having a garden club in the first place! My ultimate solution, quite serendipitous, was finding a local gardener (feeling equally cut off from other gardeners) with whom I share a lot of time in our own gardens, visiting other gardens (here a plug for the Garden Conservancy's Open Days program), and sharing a steady stream of books and magazines on our mutually favorite subject. This, to me, has been the ideal solution, and I fervently hope that every gardener out there is lucky enough to find one or two other soul mates - gardening alone is a fevered and wondrous passion, but being able to SHARE a garden is simply nirvana. . . Carl