Got mine today! Thanks so much, Tammy, for doing all this and making it so fun...and even for a personalized note! Thanks for all the goodies (especially the Park Seed prize!). Thanks to everyone who participated in the seed swap and a special thanks to Oladon and Midwest Farm Wife for the special packets! Can't wait to start planting soon. ^_^

The swaps have been making their way across the country! I believe we have one more to arrive. The last point of the point game was to be for following the rules for what was sent, but I am not going to wait for that to declare a game winner --- RUTH is the winner! No one getting one more point will be able to beat her and I believe Ruth would be getting that one extra point, too. Congratulations, Ruth! Shirley, please post when you receive your package and February will be wrapped up. What a crazy month it has been with so many places having such bad weather. Jeanne

Jennifer, It is crazy what the wind can do! I hate our windy March weather and always look forward to the calmer weather of April. Let's hope that we get calmer weather in April this year. Jen, There's a dog like that in every crowd, isn't there! I am laughing so hard, and I bet the doggy parents were too. We have had an occasional mud-loving dog too. Larry, I've lost my light shelf in the garage before, so it can be done. Luckily it was just behind and underneath a lot of junk and I dug it out. I hope you can find yours and don't have to build a new one. Nancy, I find zone 7 a bit harder than zone 8 even though we only moved 80 miles north....it is the way the cold nights just keep coming back after a relatively long period of warmer nights. I can look at our temperatures for this week and feel like I could put tomato plants in the ground by the end of the week, and it might work, but then April could arrive and bring back cold nights like it did last year. That's the hardest part for me....the huge inconsistencies in the weather. Then, there's those years we warm up really early and I love, love, love that because I can plant earlier with relative peace of mind, but.....a warm February and warm March usually mean a hot summer, so are they really a good sign after all? Oh, and microclimate is everything. They said we'd be 37 last night, then dropped it to 36....and, because our microclimate doesn't take orders from the NWS, our overnight low was 31 here at the house and 29 at our Mesonet station. So, I've learned I cannot trust the forecast either. It is maddening. I cannot even imagine the adjustments you'd had to make going from zone 3 to zone 7! My tomato plants had 4 hours of sunlight and very light wind yesterday and looked pretty darn happy by the time I brought them inside. So, today we're going to put them out for 5 hours after the chilly air warms up a bit. I keep putting off potting them up again even though I have all the supplies on hand and can do it. I really must do it tomorrow. I must. I'd start potting up today but Tim and I have a day of outdoor chores planned. On the other hand, this week is Spring Break and I'll have both the girls here with me, so I might be too busy playing with baby dolls with the little one and doing crafts and baking with the older one. I am trying to make the most of the time we have together here while they are staying with us because their new house is almost finished and they won't be here much longer. Unless, that is, my son has another day like yesterday.....you can skip the rest if you aren't interested in house mysteries because it isn't gardening-related. Their house is almost done, but you know, once you start poking around in an old house, there is no telling what you'll discover. Their house was redone in the 2005-06 time frame, and I'm not sure what all that involved but suspect it did involved total modernization that include putting up new drywall everywhere, which wouldn't have been easy in a house with 11' ceilings. I know it included a kitchen remodel with a sincere attempt to keep the old charm (successfully too) and new double-paned custom windows in the old Victorian style (very tall windows---about 7'-8' tall and thinner than modern day windows), and this probably also is when the central HVAC system was installed. However, there remains a huge attic fan that I cannot even describe (I'll try to on some boring rainy day) that likely dates back to the early days. While most of the house somewhat makes sense, the closet in the master bedroom has been a odd looking thing all along that I had believed was not always a closet. It does have drywall but had carpet whereas the rest of the house had hardwood except for tile in the kitchen and bathrooms. It also has an oddly-placed strip of border type wallpaper at about chair-rail height but nothing but painted drywall above and below, and the stupid border was a MLB one. In a closet. A closet with a mini-closet built in at the north end. So, with questions about the weird closet (honestly, big enough to have been nursery or a toddler's bedroom) in his mind, Chris went exploring. He pulled up the carpet intending to buy and lay hardwood if he could find a close match to the color of their existing flooring. Instead, he found the home's original hardwood from 1932, albeit covered in what looks like a gray paint. It sands off easily though, so he's going to restore the closet floors. I'm guessing that closet is maybe 5' wide and 12 to 14' long. Intrigued by the hardwood, he began peeling off the wallpaper border, but only drywall was beneath it. So, he then tore out the wall that separated the mini closet at the end of the big closet (after calling Tim and I to consult on whether it was load-bearing----which it was not). Anyhow, eventually he was sending us photos of shiplap walls, with tons of nails---some of which look handmade and likely date back to 1932. He found a beadboard ceiling--you know, the old original beadboard that was put up one skinny board at a time. After he kept sending us photos, we dropped the projects we were working on outdoors, carried in the tomato plants, and drove up there to see the stuff he was uncovering because by then we were just too curious about how it all looked in person. So, once we got there, it got really interesting. To get to the shiplap he had to remove very thick drywall that looks like it is 5/8" thick, and beneath that he found three separate layers of wallpaper---one obviously from the 1960s, one from around the late 1940s or early 1950s and one from the 1930s. There were layers of cheesecloth between each wallpaper layer, and the bottom wallpaper layer wasn't glued down...it was nailed down! My word! I never heard of that before. Would they have wallpapered a closet back then and didn't they have wallpaper paste? The other bedrooms have tiny closets more typical of that time frame, so we think that my original belief from the very first time we saw the house that the closet originally was a dressing room or a nursery probably is accurate, and the tiny closet within the closet was the original closet. In the north wall of that tiny closet, a large section of shiplap didn't match the other shiplap exactly and had been pieced in to fill what probably was an exterior window back in the day. So.....now that they have found the hidden history of that room buried there in the closet, they want to take down the rest of the drywall in the closet, stain it a walnut color, refinish the floors, turn 1/3 of it into a nice, neat closet for them with built-in shelving and clothing racks (they are minimalists and don't hang on to huge amounts of clothing that they don't wear....) and then turn the other half of the closet into a nice little office type nook with a desk and space for a computer and all that. I think this project will only take a week or so extra, but you know I'm laughing....because now they're already talking about 'someday' doing something in the other rooms, maybe exposing the beadboard ceilings or something. Oh, and the closet always had very old, very nice trim around the interior of the closet door, but it was flush with the drywall....so now we know why....they added the drywall and cut it to fit around the old, existing trim around the door. We had puzzled over why there was trim around the door on the interior of the closet. This is like being a house detective--figuring out what was done and when and how and why. That sort of project to uncover more of their home's hidden history will have to wait though because they don't intend to do it before they move in. The longer they work on the house, the more they fall in love with with its history. They had intended to remove and replace an old side door that leads out to the driveway at the back of the house, but when they discovered it was the original front door with the original hardware and huge, thick locks, they decided to keep it. It also has one of those old crystal doorknobs. (A neighboring home still has this exact same door as the front door, so they're guessing it was moved from the front to the side during an earlier remodeling.) Anyhow, another big project like this closet, squeezed in between their work days, gives us at least another week with them here in our house with us so we aren't complaining. I suspect that our house will be much too quiet once they move into theirs, and I think they'll love the little bit of history they've exposed in their oversized closet. See, this is why we are so far behind on everything at our house right now....because we drop our projects to go help with theirs, or just to go see what they're doing. I do know that the employee in the paint department at Lowe's knows Jana by sight now, knows just what colors of paint she keeps buying more of, and was totally thrown for a loop when Jana bought a new color yesterday....lol. While we were there, I did study the yard, which seems mostly dirt and weeds at this point. They wanted to know if they have enough sunshine to grow bermuda grass there, and I think they do, so we discussed the timing of planting it, seed vs. sod, etc. They have liriope on either side of their front walkway, a couple of sweetgum trees in the front yard, and maybe one in the back (but lots of shade from trees on adjacent properties), and one rose bush, so the yard does need some work and some shrubs planted and such. The ten year old spent much of her day raking up tons of autumn leaves, and I intend to go up there today and bring home those leaves for my compost pile if Tim and I finish up all our outdoor projects on time to do so today. Now, I need to go start the new week's garden talk..... Dawn

Jennifer, I would not really describe the smell of a copperhead as being similar to a cucumber. It smells like a.....copperhead. It is sort of a musky smell, not as bad as the odor of a skunk, but not pleasant. Maybe it smells a little like a cucumber to some folks, but not necessarily to me. I have some friends who say it smells like copper to them. It doesn't to me. You won't always smell it. I usually smell it when I have walked by one and startled it. Copperheads don't want to tangle with us and usually will slip away if they can, but if they are startled or surprised and can't slip away because maybe a person is between them and their best escape route so that they feel trapped, they'll release that scent. I try to freeze in place when I smell it, first checking the ground near my feet to make sure I'm not about to step on one. Sometimes I can find them after I smell them, but sometimes I cannot. Brandywines do seem a bit more prone to have fused blossoms (aka megablooms) than many other varieties, especially from blooms formed when the nights still were cool. Usually as the season goes on, the megablooms become more and more rare. The fused blossoms do tend to produce very large fruit, but because of the way the skin of the different fruits fold together as the fruit enlarges, you often end up cutting away and tossing a significant portion of the ripe fruit, so lots of people just toss those flowers before they form fruit. I never do, merely because blossom drop happens so much here once we get hot that I hate to waste a single tomato blossom. Nancy, If you plant milkweed, you're just going to have milkweed pests. Insects cannot afford to be picky---if they have to eat milkweed to survive, they're going to eat any and all milkweed. I've never noticed that any particular type of milkweed is less susceptible to the specific pests than others are. Like everything else, the milkweed plants and their pests are natural parts of our ecosystem. If the pests are doing too much damage, just destroy them. I leave them alone if I can and wait for the birds or beneficial insects to take care of them. I've never had the tussock moth caterpillars here and do believe I'd kill those things in a heartbeat. Whether you appreciate it or not, the ecosystem is functioning properly. While we plant milkweeds for the monarchs, we also have to expect that anything else and everything else that feeds on them might show up too. I usually don't see milkweed pests until the fields turn brown and the milkweeds go to seed and, in dry weather, began to fade and dry and die back to the ground. Guess what? We're already that dry here. The milkweed plants in the fields look sad and pathetic and the pests are moving to the milkweeds in irrigated green gardens. It happens every year---if you are hungry, you go to where the food is found. Pest-free gardening is a myth perpetrated by chemical companies. A healthy garden is full of insects, both good and bad. Milkweeds existed on this land before we bought it. They are still here. They'll be here long after we are gone unless someone scrapes the ground bare and pours concrete on it. (What a horrible thought!) Nothing kills them, though excessively dry weather can make the ones in the fields die back to the ground. They often green up and grow again when rainfall returns in autumn. The milkweed in our flower border never dies back to the ground (I hope I didn't jinx them by saying that) but can look ratty if drought gets too extreme and I stop watering because I cannot water enough to help the plants stay in good shape. Sometimes I just give up in the heat and close the garden gate and tell the plants I'll be back in the fall, or after we get decent rainfall, and the milkweeds survive, so if they can take a couple of drought months with no water, they can handle feeding by most pests. Probably not the tussock moth caterpillars, but pretty much everything else. As for being a Monarch Waystation....don't think of it that way. That's a sort of gimmicky way to make people feel good about growing plants for the monarchs. I want to grow plants for the monarchs to help them, not so I can display a Monarch Waystation sign. (sigh) You aren't trying to have a monarch waystation for its own sake, right? Instead, you are trying to fix a broken (by others) ecosystem by providing habitat. Approach it with the attitude that you are restoring the ecosystem to what it once was and needs to be again and remember that doing so provides a habitat for everything and that will have everything inhabiting it....those insects and creatures we would choose to see and those that we'd rather not see around. It is the way of the world, and they all have their place somewhere in the food chain. Everything in any ecosystem eats something and everything gets eaten by something. Accepting that and not going overboard trying to micromanage the garden 'pests' is so much less stressful, and it is natural. God made the world and everything in it and I trust that he created those darn milkweed pests for some reason that he understands, even if we do not. My goal never has been to have an insect-free garden or landscape, nor is it to have pest-free plants, because such a thing isn't possible unless you use synthetic chemicals strong enough to kill everything. My goal is to have an ecosystem that is healthy, strong and balanced, where I interfere in the food web as little as humanly possible. Make peace with the pests and only destroy those that truly destroy plants, not those that just damage them. Look at it this way: plant asparagus and eventually asparagus beetles show up (and harlequin bugs). Plant brassicas and cabbage loopers, imported cabbage worms and diamondback moth worms will show up. Plant potatoes and Colorado potato beetles will show up. Plant okra and sharpshooters and aphids are likely to show up. Plant squash and you-know =-whos will show up. Plant sweet potatoes and morning glories and tortoise beetles show up. Plant milkweed and milkweed assassin bugs, milkweed leaf beetles, oleander aphids and tussock moth cats show up. It is the way things are. The older I get, the more I have learned to chill, relax and let the garden ecosystem just be an ecosystem. I have learned I can ignore most pests and the plants will outlast them, so I don't worry about anything except the ones experience has taught me do extreme damage to the plants we grow for a food harvest.. Blister beetles are an example of one you can ignore most of the time. After all, blister beetles are beneficial because they devour grasshopper eggs. However, on some plants (cucumbers and sweet autumn clematis, for example) they can eat the foliage down to nothing, so if they're doing that, a gardener really cannot ignore them. What matters the most, though, is how many blister beetles show up. If I see an occasional handful of them in the garden, I just ignore them. However if they show up by the hundreds or thousands, a gardener cannot ignore them. Rebecca, It is just one of those years with the Septoria Leaf Spot. It was really hit and miss in my garden, but definitely more widespread than usual (some years I don't see it at all) and, in a most interesting way, I saw very little Early Blight, which is more common in my garden. It is almost like the Septoria Leaf Spot outcompeted the Early Blight for the right to hit tomato plants randomly. Sorry about the squirrels. I was hoping those squirrel treats would work. I've always found it interesting that most tomato varieties that produce bite-sized fruit just do not seem to suffer from common fungal and bacterial foliar diseases like the varieties that produce larger fruit do. I've never seen this addressed in technical literature, but have observed it in my garden. These diseases may hit the plants, but the plants outgrow them and never stop producing either. I watered twice this week and probably will have to do the same next week. It just depends on how much the soil dries out. Tim is already fretting over the coming July water bill (which will arrive here in the first week of August) because, he says, the water bills haven't been at all bad this year and he dreads getting a high one. I laughingly told him to adjust his attitude and just be grateful that the water bills for January through June were not bad and to remind himself that a high water bill in July and August is normal and expected. lol. I also still don't think the July water bill will be that bad--I certainly am watering the remaining veggies and herbs, and all the flowers, much less than I water when I'm trying to keep a ton of tomato, cucumber and melon plants happy in the heat. I think he just needs something to fret about. It hasn't really felt hot here since that day our heat index hit 116. Of course, the obvious explanation is that after that miserable day, any other day will feel cool by comparison. (grin) Tim wasn't here that day though and was in his air-conditioned office at work, so he missed the worst of it. I think our heat index had dropped into the 70s or 80s by the time he got home because of all the rain storms around us that basically missed us but gave us rain-cooled air. (And, I believe, a measly 4/100s of an inch of rain.) I do think the heat returns at the middle of next week. Since that hot, miserable day, I've felt like our weather has been only warm, not hot, but by mid-week, we'll be hot again. We need to mow and edge everything tomorrow, and especially all the fence lines and such where the fields really are drying out now. Keeping as much vegetation as possible cut short reduces the fire danger, and we are starting to have fires. By the way, while typing this I have heard some fireworks going off in our neighborhood. Really, people? I think that by now people should have all that out of their system. Apparently they don't. Dawn