mmqchdygg, I am recently disabled. My spine is broken at three places (not repairable by surgery due to a prior surgery gone bad) and I have numerous other nerve disturbances and degenerative processes going on in my body because of that. I can no longer stand, or walk very well, or for very long. Getting down on my hands and knees and bending over is completely out of the question. Kinda hard to garden if one can't do any of those things, wouldn't you say? My gardening friends here, are just trying to help me find ways to continue doing what I love to do. I would consider the planting pole a "tool" not a gadget and I think it would be great tool for anyone who suffers from back pain if they bend over too much or have bad knees or trouble getting off the ground etc. It works readily from a standing or sitting position. You just have to make it to the proper length that will work for you. Yesterday, equipped with my new planting pole, so beautifully created by you wonderful Cottage Gardeners, I was able to plant more than 300 Hollyhock seeds. There is a little trick to using it, I found. It took me a bit to figure it out though. Finally I realized that if you stick the attached stick in the ground at an angle vs straight down, with the pole lying directly above the stick, rather than pulling the wooden stick completely up and out of the hole and then fiddling to line the pole back up over the hole, you can instead pull the stick partially out of the hole (because it went in at an angle). Automatically the pole is lined up over the hole. You can now drop your seed down the pole and it acts like a chute sending the seed straight into the hole. One warning, don't push the stick into the earth so far that you plug the pole with dirt! It is a little bit tricky to get it up in the air so you can clean out the hole without spilling all your seed out of the yogurt cup that is up at the top by your funnel, LOL! Otherwise...You are in bussiness!! With many many thanks to all of you, I'm gardening again! I can't tell you what it means to me. MeMo

OHmygosh! And here I am whining about the squirrels - already chewing on one of the houseplants I set out on the deck and trying to get into the attic. We do have an owl that I hope is getting some of the squirrels - and I thought that was pretty wild, too. Of course I live in the middle of town, so I still think the owl and raccoons and everything else that shows up in my yard is pretty unusual. I had one lovely iris bloom greeting me when I walked out the side door to take out the trash this morning. They have spread and have buds all over them, unlike last year, when I got only one bloom. I was all set to move them because I thought they weren't getting enough sun, but I guess they like it there after all. My cannas have not come up yet, and I'm afraid I may have planted them too early. Reassurances, anyone, or do I need to replant? I spent the weekend rebuilding and painting a rotting trellis that was about to crumble under the honeysuckle and trumpet vine previous owners planted together there. Much more work than I expected, but my sweet son came home yesterday afternoon and said "Wow, That looks really good!" I don't know about that, but at least I've stopped the rotting for the moment, I hope. Correopsis finally showed its shy self. Gaillardia is getting TALL. And I think the caladium that was growing in the shade bed last year is coming back. Not positive yet, because it looks a little like the hosta that is also planted there, but just a little different. It was pretty well protected, and the winter wasn't real cold, so I thought it might try to come back. Boy, nothing grows better in that spot than caladium - so far, anyway.

Nancy, Listen to Rebecca because she speaks the truth about goldfinches. We feed them all winter and have dozens and dozens and dozens of them. We buy the finch seed in huge bags and it still lasts no time at all. I think we had 6 or 7 goldfinch feeders this past winter and I was filling up some of them daily. For such small birds, they eat a ton of food each. Lisa, Did you see Neil's post this afternoon or evening about the live oaks he planted and Barbara Bush's funeral? It was pretty stunning. I wonder how amazed he was when he realized the trees he was looking at on TV during funeral coverage were trees he himself planted decades ago? Kim, I agree with you about the shocking truth about 'organic' strawberries....and many other organic things. When they came out with the National Organic Program all those years ago, a lot of us were disgusted by some of the things they decided to allow....and it is a joke that the foods can be called organic. The only way for us to really know we are eating healthy food is to grow our own and not use that stuff on it, or buy at local markets from folks who don't use those things either. IN order for that to happen, you have to get to know your local farmer/market grower and be able to ask them how they grow the food they are selling. I've always said I prefer to eat food which hasn't been sprayed with anything---including many common and popular organic products. Just because a food is labeled organic doesn't mean it hasn't been sprayed with stuff that we don't want our food sprayed with.....and just because a pesticide, herbicide, fungicide or miticide is labeled organic doesn't necessarily mean it is better for us or safer than one that is synthetic. There are plenty of organic gardening products I never have used and never will use. Never, ever, ever. The advantage of growing our own is that we can decline to use all those things. There are many kinds of greenhouse watering systems available. I don't know if they're too pricey for a small grower to purchase and use---there's everything available from misting systems to irrigation booms to drip lines or flood systems. Maybe you can put a pressure reducer on the hose so it would be usable. For ants indoors, Terro ant bait traps are the best and I believe they contain just borax and sugar. To keep ants out, we spray around the foundation of the house with peppermint soap or an orange oil spray made from Medina orange oil and water (gotta keep the orange oil off plants thought as it can burn them). The peppermint soap (we use Dr. Bronner's) disrupts the scent trail so that ants cannot follow a scent trail left by previous ants. The orange oil either kills them (if you spray them directly or they walk into the liquid just after you sprayed it) by dissolving their exoskeleton. That's what we used to keep ants out of the sunroom when Chris' tropical birds lived there because he didn't want to use chemicals around the birds. For some reason, orange oil didn't bother the birds, but he was very careful about using it inside the room. He preferred to spray outdoors if he could find where they were getting into the room. Orange oil is an old organic remedy for fire ants---you add it to Garrett Juice to make a mound drench. It even was in one of the original organic fire ant products back in probably the 1990s---a mound drench called Citrex. It works on all ants, but I don't really worry about ants or use it unless they're coming indoors. We can peacefully coexist with most ants outdoors, but once they try to come into the house, they are not our friends any more. I am too tired to write more. I'll try to be up early to start the Week 4 thread. I feel like the whole month of April has dragged by in a blur of freezing nights and wildfires. At least the rain adds a different twist to it all. Dawn

That's a sucking bug such as a shield bug in the second picture.