We don't get snow very often, but occassionally get freezing rain & sleet during the winter. And it can get pretty windy here. Because of the above, I can sometimes have winter problems with damage to my tea roses when they are young. The young, flexible canes can be bent way down or even broken. My tea roses barely go dormant at all, and our long growing season means that lots of new growth has usually been produced by the teas until very late in the year, just before potential ice can occur. But after about 5 years, when the tea roses have built a solid structure, they begin to hold up well to the occassional winter storms that we have. For example, my Mrs. Dudley Cross used to be very scared of winter freezing rain & ice. Now, she's a seasoned, portly lady and doesn't blink an eye. Same for Mr. G. Nabonnand. Randy

Hi Connie, Glad to know theres others out there with the same mind frame. Have fun ordering your other three babies. OK Miss Northern Enabler, a.k.a. TJ, it sounds so adorable doesn't it. I do want to do it bad but I was so trying not to order any more roses and start filling in more with other perennials. waaaaaaaa! If only I had tons of sunny space to work with but I don't. waaaaaaa!!!! Anyways, I was wanting some more english roses so I will probably hold off for a while anyways. Hope you are doing well! Tootles, Judy

Carol: skip anything with bone-meal, multiflora-root can't digest solid stuff, plus multiflora-root branch best, and bloom best with higher phosphorus ratio. Use SOLUBLE phosphorus, as in 4 part chicken manure. Use 1 part SOLUBLE sulfate of potash, but balance that with 1/2 part SLOW-RELEASED rock-dust or dolomitic lime to neutralize acidic rain. In hot summer with alkaline tap water, use 1/2 part gypsum or a layer of acidic alfalfa on top of pots. It's OK for the pH to be over 7.5, but the nutrients HAVE TO BE IN SOLUBLE FORM. COPPER is essential for blooming, only available if chelated to organic, thus chicken manure is a must. It's high in zinc, copper, boron which are less available at higher pH. Keep the soil loamy and fluffy for multiflora-rootstock, so roots can do acid-phosphatase. Since multiflora is a cluster-root, it has a higher demand for SOLUBLE phosphorus. My experience with multiflora-parentage roses, such as own-root Lady of shallot .. that came from Roses Unlimited with zero blooms, but really thick leaves. When high-potassium is used to thicken the leaves, that push down phosphorus, which is VERY ESSENTIAL for branching, as in multiflora's cluster root. Lady of Shalott refused to bloom in my alkaline clay, since phosphorus is less available at higher pH. I gave it acidic SOLUBLE fertilizer NPK 5-3-2, plus sulfate of potash. Phosphorus at 3 isn't high enough. So I STOPPED sulfate of potash, and gave it high-phosphorus chicken manure NPK 2-4-3, plus acidic grass clippings and alfalfa, and I saw branching with buds.

Lots of lady bugs made it into the mudroom Friday, and there's some in the sunroom. A few made it into the house. I told the girls Friday night that I was going to vacuum up the lady bugs and put them back outdoors (I use the shop vac and they survive being vacuumed up, so no harm is done to them) and the 4 year old was very upset. She told me I couldn't vacuum up her favorite 'pets' in the whole world and send them back outdoors to die in the cold, and she said she wanted to play with them and talk to them. (sigh) So, I told her we'd let them stay indoors for at least the weekend, meaning that as soon as she leaves Sunday afternoon, I'll have the shop vac out, searching out every one of those little beetles and returning them to the outdoors. I'm not sure what good it does---on every sunny day they are swarming around all the doors, trying to come in every time a human, dog or cat goes in or out. I don't really want to spray any sort of pesticide to keep them away from the house, so am resigned to them continuing to fight to come in and to me having to vacuum them up and put them back out until it finally gets so cold that they stop swarming. We even had a couple of them in the car yesterday. Oh, and true to her word, the 4 year old will pick one up if she finds it, carry it around and talk to it. She wanted to catch some and have them sleep with her, but we overruled that little plan. I think somehow they are even getting into the mudroom around the exterior door frame, which I thought Tim had re-when we repainted the exterior of the house 2 or 3 years ago.....so, we need to examine that area and see if there is a gap somewhere that isn't filled. I am so happy to see lady bugs of any type outdoors in the growing season, and they surely do eat tons of small pests because I rarely have any issues with things like aphids. However, their garden usefulness still doesn't mean they are welcome to come into our home for the winter. They can overwinter in the garage or greenhouse all they want, but I don't want them indoors. We still have butterflies, despite multiple heavy frosts and nights as low as the mid-teens. At this point, I'm not sure how they're surviving, but the garden does still have dianthus and salvia farinacea in bloom, so at least there's that. I've seen various butterflies flying low over the now-brown pastures searching for something, but I can't imagine what they're finding there, if anything. Even the native autumn asters are frozen and gone, as is the native blue sage, the helenium and all the other late-season fall wildflowers. We have the girls all day today, and then a funeral in Fort Worth tomorrow, so my brain hasn't even thought about Thanksgiving much yet, except the meal is all planned and taken care of. So, really, it is just a matter of cleaning house Tuesday, and then spending Wednesday getting ready. Oh, and squeezing in a trip to the grocery store sometime, perhaps Monday on the way home, before the stores get too crazy. The house has been decorated for Thanksgiving ever since the day after Halloween, so at least that part of it all is done. I know some people have Christmas trees up already and all that (why? why so early?), but I redecorated the mudroom's pencil tree, changing it from a Halloween tree to a Thanksgiving tree on November 1st, and I love that Thanksgiving tree with its Thanksgiving decorations. I think it looks a lot prettier than the somewhat scary Halloween tree did. The girls adore having a holiday tree in the mudroom, and both they and Tim have lobbied for me to keep it up year-round, changing the decorations with each holiday and season, but I am not inclined to do that because I am not crazy, At least I don't think I am crazy. It is one thing to spend a little time decorating an autumn tree for Halloween and Thanksgiving, when the rain is falling almost daily and I cannot be outdoors anyway, but it would be another thing to let decorating a tree seasonally pull me away from gardening time any at all once the gardening season starts, so after Christmas the tree goes back into its box and into the attic. Winter is my least favorite season, unless we have snow on the ground (which we almost never ever do) and it already looks like and mostly feels like winter here. I have tried to learn to appreciate the subtle variations of color in the wheat-colored, brown, and tawny golden fields, but I just cannot. All I do is look at those fields and long for the green plants and flowers of the growing season. When we drive past a field of winter wheat or rye grass and I see the green, that makes my day. Our dog yard does have a nice carpet of winter rye, and it is the best-looking part of our property at this point. It looks awesome, undoubtedly because the dogs fertilize it daily. It is small enough that it is easy to mow in winter, which isn't true of the yard in the years when we overseed it with rye grass, which we didn't do this year because the rain never stopped falling. It is hard to overseed the lawn with free-range chickens because they'll run around and spend days eating all the rye grass seed before it can sprout, and I'm not inclined to keep them cooped up in the chicken run for a couple of weeks until winter rye can become established. After Thanksgiving is over, I'll take down all the autumn decorations and put up the Christmas decorations. That's how I spend Black Friday, as I simply refuse to step foot in the crazy stores. Oh Lordy, I do not want to sound like my mother or grandmother talking about how things were different back in the olden days, but I remember how, way back in the 1980s when Black Friday was a big day, there were truly great sale prices you never could get on any other day of the year---and people still were civilized and didn't fight over the last Christmas Barbie Doll or Cabbage Patch doll or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle toy. We'd run into friends while out shopping the Black Friday sales and would stand and chat and be perfectly relaxed and in no big hurry, trading info on what gifts we had found in which stores, and I miss that sort of thing nowadays, with the way Black Friday has become more like a competitive, winner-takes-all battle of some sort. I refuse to participate in it at all. This year I've noticed a big trend by the retailers to be pushing us all to go out and Christmas shop this weekend for the Pre-Black Friday Day sales in order to beat the Black Friday crowds. Oh, give me a break! The retail world drives me nuts any more. We try really hard to keep the Christmas gifts simple and to focus on Christmas as a time of togetherness and making memories apart from the gifting. I feel like we often lose the spirit of Christmas if we pay too much to the retailers and their endless pushing of the "hot toys" or "hot gifts" of the current year. If the retailers want to get me into their stores at this time of the year, they need to have big displays of potted, growing amaryllis or paperwhites, Christmas cacti, etc......or maybe they could be sneaking the spring-planted bulbs into a corner of the Christmas-oriented garden center madness we have now That, at least, would get me into a store. It is deer gun season now, and even though we don't allow hunting on our acreage, it is a scary time with people firing off guns everywhere. We try to make a point of wearing red or orange every time we step foot outdoors during deer season so that nobody hunting on adjacent property will think we're a deer and shoot us. I had a bullet whistle by my head one day years ago, so close I could hear it go past me and am grateful to God to this day that the bullet, fired by a teenager two properties away from ours, missed me and our next door neighbor both. It was very scary, and our next-door neighbor immediately went next-door and read that family the riot act about irresponsible firing of weapons in such a way that the bullets are a threat to innocent people on their own property. Since that day, we keep the dogs indoors as much as possible because Jersey is the same color as a white-tailed deer, and she runs like the wind and leaps like a deer. Fortunately, gunfire terrifies her so it is easy to keep her indoors in deer season because she doesn't even want to be outdoors. The two smaller dogs probably have learned their gunshot anxiety from her, so they cheerfully trot outdoors to do their doggie business and they run back, pawing at the back door and barking until I let them back in as soon as they hear gunfire, no matter how far away it is. As far as we're all concerned here, deer season cannot end soon enough (the current deer gun season ends December 2nd, if anyone is wondering). The garden still looks pathetic and will for several more months, but at least the rosemary, sage and parsley remain green. Oh, and the onion chives and garlic chives, dianthus, salvia farinacea, autumn sage and malva sylvestris 'Zebrina'. The asparagus still is green too, which is quite vexing. I like to cut it back to the ground after it turns brown, but so far it is refusing to help me out by turning brown so it continues to live on, green and billowy, swaying gently in the wind.