Ingrid, I have waited to respond to this post until my roses arrived. I ordered from Vintage and from Roses Unlimited. Both orders were shipped on Monday. RU arrived on Tues and Vintage (all the way from CA arrived today-Tuesday!) I ordered first from Vintage and received: 1. Gruss An Coburg 2. Lemon Spice 3. Cels Multiflora 4. Eminence Here is a pic of the little bands: By the time I decided, they had sold out of Iobelle and Grace Darling that I really wanted. I emailed Pat at RU to ask to be put on the waiting list for Sutter's Gold and she had ONE in stock. Since I was already ordering, I got: 1. Sutter's Gold 2. Grace Darling 3. Iobelle 4. Baronne Edmond de Rothschild Here is a picture of the gallon plants: Both Iobelle and Cels Multiflora came with blooms. I love them. Here is Iobelle: And a picture of Cels Multiflora I think she looks almost like a smaller version of SdlM. I am very excited. They'll go in the ground next week. Jeff

"And I have newfound hope for the garden." Sherry, that says it all. Your post perfectly expresses my own thoughts about gardening and sums up what it can teach us: that we must both struggle and adapt; that life is change; that while there is always loss there is always also renewal; that living organisms struggle mightily to survive, and succeed more often than we might have expected. You've been through hard and frightening times lately, and I wonder if your experiences in gardening turned out to have any meaning when you were so worried about your husband? Applying lessons in philosophy to life is terribly difficult. I don't know whether I would be able to do so, but I do know that, in the garden at least, I've learned to accept the idea of change. Plants grow, and crowd other plants; a tree blows over, and sun bakes a part of the garden it never reached before; I mulch and mulch, the grass grows for years, the earth becomes softer and earthworms arrive; cane girdler shows up and devastates the roses; a wet winter comes and provokes a major slide; I plan a romantic ravine on the site of said slide. And so on and on. Gardening is life, really. I hope I'll never reach the point where I don't want to grow things any more, because I fear it would mean I had spiritually died. About all the plants I talk about that you don't know. North and Central Florida have a soil and climate that don't have many equivalents in other parts of the world, at least, not ones well published in the annals of horticulture. Florida's too hot and humid for many temperate climate plants; too wet in summer for those adapted to Mediterranean conditions; too cold, with its occasional sharp freezes, for tropicals. So the plants belonging to the great gardening traditions of continental Europe, of Great Britain, and of the Mediterranean basin, of the various tropical zones of the world, much of the time don't work. There are nurserymen (and -women), horticulturalists, and gardeners who do a lot of research looking for plants adapted to Florida conditions, and find them, but the plants aren't handed to them on a plate. My sisters' coastal north Florida gardens, with their gingers, cycads, hardy citrus, huge agaves, Sabal palms and live oaks and hickories, contain hardly a plant I could grow here. But their gardens are beautiful. Congratulations on your getting back to your garden, and on finding out that it was still there! And on having a daughter-in-law who helps you. I live next door to dairy farmers. In my experience they rely on lots of big machines, government price supports and subsidies, a reasonable amount of technical expertise, and a great deal of steady, ongoing, hard physical labor. Lavender Lass, I wholeheartedly agree. I wish I could find words to express my delight in gardening in cooperation with Nature, my intelligence spreading its wings as I attempt to read and understand the conditions of my land. Gean, the Hugelkultur sounds interesting--I'd never heard of it--but my heart faints within me at the thought of digging out an entire bed to fill the bottom of it with rotting wood, even if we had much of that material. We don't have anything like enough decomposing organic matter available. We amend our propagating beds with bagged coarse sand and bagged compost, since we NEVER have enough organic matter from our own supplies. As the previous year's crop of plants matures we dig them out and plant them, and then we add the amendments to the beds, dig them in, and start the new cuttings. Last year I left the digging to my husband and suspect he didn't dig deep and thoroughly enough. The exceptionally wet winter may also have made a difference. This year's yield was terrible. I always amend my planting holes abundantly with old hay. Sometimes I have to dig and amend a hole two years running before it can support a rose. You're right that I have a garden: and thanks for saying so in the face of my sometime expressions of discouragement. However, I do wonder if you realize how dead my sunny garden looks in August, with no trees, hardly any large shrubs, after it hasn't rained nor been watered for two months, the sun blazing down the entire time, and nothing growing but the weeds. I don't know how many people dry garden in a dry summer climate as I do (though, unlike much of California, we do have good average annual rainfall). I believe the garden will look far more prosperous in summer once our many infant and young trees and shrubs start to get some size on them. Shade and leafage are precious allies. Jeannie, thanks for saying so. I care about my writing; and I love it when others respond. That's beautiful. Kitty, I want to answer your post but must put it off. My assistant is coming to help in the garden and I need to change. It's supposed to start raining this afternoon; I believe fall, as in gloom and chill, has finally come. The garden has greened up amazingly in the last month and has been a pleasure to see and work in. Melissa

I learned that regular irrigation (rain) and lower temps make a BIG difference in production. I got more of everything- tomatoes, peppers, tomatillos, green beans, cow peas, etc. I learned that throwing a little money at the issue can sometimes make a big difference. Due to gall bladder surgery in Feb, I didn't start a single seedling. Transplants cost a little, but this year it was well worth it. I also hired a few teens to help move the horse manure compost and dig it in. I learned what a big difference one more bed- even a small one can make in spacing. I learned that cattle panels DO work for trellising tomatoes. Just don't wait to long to tie up the new growth. I learned that there will always be a problem (2nd year in a row) with the stove at the height of peach and tomato canning season. I learned a camping stove will work for canning. If you leave the lid on the water will boil, but not if you leave it off. I learned I need to learn more about maintaining a camp stove and how to id problems. I learned it is much easier for me to do canning in small batches. I learned that straining the peach solids out of the peach mash for jam and cooking down the liquids, cooks the jam much faster and tastes AWESOME. My neighbor thinks it is awesome too- which is really good since I really like getting his peaches to can. I learned it takes a daily survey of the harvest, but it is possible to minimize the fruit flies from the produce I haven't had time to process going bad. I learned keeping all my miscellaneous garden items in good organization makes me a lot happier and lot less stressed. I learned to get much better at putting things away. The morning and evening strolls to survey my "queen-dom" (as my DH says) are much more fun. There were some ups and downs this year, and a few crop failures. Overall though it is the best gardening year yet. Andria

I'm so far behind I'll never catch up but I did read everything and I'm keeping my response minimal since it is time to start this week's new thread. Amy, Time off from a garden can be good. We all work too hard at this time of the year. Hazel, The best way to dig is with a special potato fork that has rounded edges on the prongs so they don't stab the potatoes, but I'm too cheap to spend money on a tool I'd only use a handful of days per year, so I used a transplanting spade with a rounded edge. Start further out than you have been and proceed slowly and with patience in order to avoid cutting into potatoes. Just use the cut ones first as sometimes they do not scar over and heal (though sometimes they do) and the ones that don't scar over will not store for long. A tomato knife is essential for someone who grows and processes as many as I do, and I did find one yesterday. I had to buy an entire cutlery set to get it, but it was an inexpensive set so I didn't mind. I wanted that tomato knife. I am going to go online one day and order a couple more. It is just I have tomatoes piling up everywhere now and need to be able to quickly cut them and use them and the tomato knife makes it easier. Melissa, Don't worry about being behind. Some years are just that way. We all have to work with whatever weather conditions we get. I am so sorry about your niece's injuries and will keep her in my thoughts and prayers. What a horrible way for her summer to start. I saw the story on the news and was horrified at the thought of those kids being in that bounce house when that happened. Jerry, That is an amazing corn story. Sometimes plants can be so resilient and I think often that many gardeners are too quick to write them off and either yank them out or plow them under instead of letting them recover on their own. Nancy, In your case, because of all the rain you have received, it is a good thing that the tomatoes are not closer to harvest. If they were, the excess moisture likely would ruin the flavor. Flavor is best if they are kept pretty dry as they approach harvest. So, for me, as much as I lament the lack of rainfall down here, it isn't really a bad thing for the tomatoes as it means their flavor compounds won't be watered down and they won't be suffering from cracking and splitting either. The first time I grew Mexican sunflowers, I wasn't prepared for how big they'd get. I space them much better nowadays so they don't crowd out everything else. Our dear, sweet Mary normally grows a ton of veggies and cans all summer long, both of which are a huge amount of work, of course. She is trying to take off this season in order to recover from what I'd describe as a major cardiac event so hasn't been posting here much. I was so happy to hear from her the other day and to know she is going to have a few plants. I think plants can be great therapy as someone recovers from a medical issue, as long as you have the self-discipline not to overwork yourself while tending those plants. Mary, if you read this, I keep you in my thoughts and prayers and hope you make a full recovery so that next summer you can be back to your usual growing and canning. Amy, It is odd that cabbage refuses to cooperate with you. It is about the easiest thing I grow. I just plant them and forget about them, which is easy to do if you grow your brassicas under netting to exclude the cabbage worms and such, which I do. When they're ready, I harvest. I do plant cabbages with short DTMS in the 60s-low 70s so that they finish up fairly early here. That's more because I want to put a sucession crop in their place before the weather gets too hot than anything else. When I've grown varieties with longer DTMs, they've done fine too and I've almost never had a head of cabbage try to bolt. Rebecca, I'd just cut off all the damaged leaves and let the Brandy Boy put out new growth. It likely would be fine. Nancy, Cucumbers planted late will do fine. I planted my pickling cukes late on purpose (just last week I think, or at the end of the week before), except for 2 early plants I planted in late March, so that I could spread out the canning load. The cucumber plants from the seeds I just sowed will not be producing a harvest until I'm through canning tomatoes, which was my goal. Having too many things that need to be canned all at once can be a real problem, so I try to control the canning workload by using planting dates to spread out the harvest. You even can get a good cucumber harvest from cucumbers planted in July down here, and I expect it is the same up there. My honest opinion is that if you want more sun, get your sweet husband to cut down that tree now. As time goes on, the shade situation just worsens. I speak from experience. Now that you two both are enjoying gardening so much, it will be important to maintain sunny areas for your veggies, fruits and sun-loving flowers. There is a place in each landscape for both sun and shade, and too much shade (though shade is highly desirable in our hot summers) is not a good thing. Okay, it is Monday moring and I'm headed off to start this workweek's new weekly garden talk thread. Dawn