I'm am sooo done! The other evening it started snowing just before I had to go to work, and I was MAD! I was just soooo sick of snow, and especially driving in it, and that's that. I had to laugh at one comment bakemom - it seems to snow/rain/ice every Wednesday, which is my garbage/recycling night, and I am so backed up with my recycling, because I can't always drag it out to the curb with the bad weather. I have about 8 bins to go out, and counting. I think we were spoiled the last few years because the winters have been milder. This year, not only lots more snow, but it started way earlier than the last few years, which is making the winter seem sooooo very long.... :) Dee

I'm so sorry for all who have lost gardens; it's something I think about from time to time as I consider maybe moving ... and yet keep on gardening! Here's another "flip side" story. When we purchased this home 31 years ago in August, there wasn't much growing except a few clumps of "ditch lilies", a pair of poosly azaleas, one sorry boxwood, some leggy mountain laurel, and enormous plain green hostas ringing everything including the many tall old oak trees. No grass to speak of in this sandy soil, not even weeds! As eager as I was to start planting, I insisted to my dear young husband that we wait at least until spring, preferably a full year, so as not to disturb anything dormant that the previous owner might have planted. Well, we waited and were rewarded with ... nothing ... except the aforementioned undernourished specimens. Not even one daffodil. So ... I set about enriching the soil (I'd had a year to get some compost started, after all, and lots of oak leaves to shred), much to the amusement of one of my neighbors who insisted nothing would grow here. Have been amending and planting, failing and succeeding ever since, and the recent front yard re-do is finally the garden I'd always dreamed of, with roses and perennials shoulder-to-shoulder, jostling, embracing and supporting each other and peeking over-under-through the white picket fence. Today, for the first time in my life, I walked under - UNDER! - roses blooming on my own arbor (ok, there were only three up there, but there are more where those came from). That neighbor would never recognize the ol' place [big smile]. Did I say something about moving? There are some beautiful thoughts expressed in this thread to help any of us cope with that eventuality, particularly catsrose comment, "Put your love into your new garden and let it grow" and hoovb's paragraph that begins "The garden really is the gardener." Thank you all. Diane

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

Nancy, I hope your nice weather lasted. I wasn't watching the weather much last week other than trying to keep an eye on our own. Tim said something to me yesterday that reminded me what a tough summer it has been here. He said he couldn't think of any community in our county having two such awful losses of members in such a short time, and after I thought about it a while, I think he is right. We are in a little unincorporated rural to semi-rural area of Love County in between the towns of Marietta and Thackerville, and our neighbor who was the lineman was the second tragic loss of a community member here in the last couple of months. The first was a gentleman who perished in a fire after the gasoline tanker truck he was driving was cut off in traffic, overturned and burned. Two horrible losses suffered by two families in such a short time in such a small community as ours....it is unfathomable. The first was one of those things that your brain refuses to believe when it hears it, and then the second one was exactly the same.....too horrific to be real. I think all of us here are just so done with 2018 and trying to remain positive and look ahead to what hopefully will be a better year in 2019. I wonder if your burnweed will be burnweed? I still think when Jason IDs a plant, you can take his ID as gospel. I don't think I've ever seen it here, but y'all have such different soils and different climate up there in some ways that it is like we are in a whole different country----ha ha, at least you are in the Green Country and we're in the Mostly Brown Country. That would be funnier were it not so true. Larry, In August of any year, I still think it is better to be too wet than to be too dry. We had good rainfall last week, but the dry ground slurped it right up. Well, at least the rain did fall. Since you came back and posted a photo of your little Yorkie (he is so adorable!), I guess you and the tractor survived the mud and are not stuck out there in it. Jennifer, I didn't try Vick's on the feet because we didn't have any and I wasn't going to go anywhere for any reason. I am starting to feel better but it was a rough week, and I think the recovery is going slowly. I am bored, but that's a good sign, because I don't start feeling bored until I start feeling better. It sounds like you had a really fun day babysitting that six year old. I bet she was disappointed to learn she was going somewhere else the next day! There will be time later to catch up on outdoor work. Just take care of yourself. Nancy, Heavy rainfall in August is such a gift that you just have to get over the pouting, you know! My grandmother always admonished us to never look a gift horse in the mouth. If I whine about rain in August I know what will happen----the following August we won't get any rain at all. So, I hope you got the pouting and all out of your system and can appreciate the gift that August rainfall truly is. Sometimes when we say we are bored, I really think that what we mean is that we aren't able, for whatever reason, to do the things we really want to do. Sometimes I'll be whining to myself that I'm bored, but it isn't because there aren't things to do---they just aren't the things I want to do. Because of that, I don't do them and just sit and say that I am bored. Your 90 degrees sounds nice to me (unless the heat index was, like, 99 or 100). We were 97 on Friday and 96 yesterday. I think today is supposed to be closer to your 90, but I guess I haven't looked at the forecast in a couple of days so I'm not sure. Larry, Hercules is so precious. I love Yorkies but we always have medium to big dogs. I'd have a Yorkie in a heartbeat though. It is hard to watch our furbabies get old and sick. We have been down that road with so many dogs over the years, and our black lab mix, Jet, who is now 13, has chronic kidney disease and, according to the vet, is in the final months of his life. He is on medication and a special prescription diet and I try to treasure every day we have left with him because there likely won't be too many more of them. He was never supposed to be ours. Born to a stray dog, Honey, who followed me home when I was walking our other dogs, he was one of a litter of four. Tim's best friend picked out two of them, Jet and Duke, to adopt as his own when they were only two days old. He got the pick of the litter and we promised Ken we'd reserve them for him and not give them away to anyone else once they were big enough to leave their mother. The following week, Ken was diagnosed with a glioblastoma brain tumor. Again, we promised him we'd keep his two puppies with us until his treatments were done and he was ready to bring them home to his ranch. Sadly, his cancer progressed quickly. Diagnosed in late March or early April, he was gone before the end of May. By then, we were too attached to "Ken's dogs" to let them go, so we kept them. His wife didn't want them, as she felt she couldn't cope with two new dogs while coping with his death and trying to keep the ranch running full time while also working full time in Dallas. We understood and were happy to keep Jet and Duke ourselves. Duke left us three years ago and I've been all too aware ever since then that Jet's time is coming too. It is hard. I wish they aged at the same rate as we do, but they don't. As hard as it is to lose our furbabies, I have accepted that we just have to endure the pain of losing them----it is the price we pay for having had such wonderful pet companions to share our lives. Dawn