HURRY! As the climate becomes drier, old plants are dying. We must find them soon, and propagate them, or many will be lost. I observed this rose for years (and yes we did get cuttings) but now, I am told, the mother plant is gone. The culprit here may have been gophers . . . (God, I really hate gophers!) Jeri

I still love the deer, they are so beautiful, especially the babies. We put up a deer fence along the woods and now they leave me alone. It is heartbreaking to go out and find your hostas mowed down, been there. Sometimes they are so smart, they come in through our driveway. What I did notice is they only bothered the old solid green junk hostas. Couldn't figure out why, then I thought maybe because all of my good hostas and roses get the Bayer 2 in 1 applied every 6 weeks or so. Maybe something in that makes them taste bad.

As an update, I am not insane (at least, not about this, maybe in general from all the remodelling!) We were visiting our contractor's office today (after templating our granite, hooray!) and saw the board again which was the sample stain. It definitely does not match! I showed them the picture (posted here on this thread) and everyone in the office agreed that the cabinet maker must have used the wrong stain or somehow gotten them too dark. We're going to check the sample board (that we signed as the stain we wanted) with the cabinets at the house tomorrow to be sure, but pretty sure they're off. Question is what we do about it, and I think the answer is actually nothing. I'm getting used to the look, and I think the darker stain may actually be pretty elegant. I think we could probably make the cabinet guy restain, but at this point I think I'm okay with what we have. DH says it's a happy accident - we had thought about really dark cabinets but were a little nervous about it so went more medium, and now we may be on the darker side anyway.

I have a wild kingdom going..and I would think Crows would make fast work of Mantids. I used to see Jays and Mockingbirds..but once cats started in this neighborhood,rare to see them. Possums would make a snack of them...they eat anything. Even the number of fence lizards has gone down..when they had showed up for a few years out of nowhere. Same for Garter Snakes come to think of it. Could be the wet weather 2 years in a row spread everybody out?