I'm absolutely inundated. They are everywhere, and my roses are in the middle of another flush at the moment. I've had JBs for the last 2 weeks, and they are so thick that they hit me in the head when I'm outside painting or gardening. My neighbors now think I'm the "crazy plant lady with Tourette's" after watching me whack them out of the plants and into the bucket, all the while laughing like a maniac & spewing four-letter-words at the ones that get away. I'm thinking it's only a matter of time before I see a video of myself on youtube. By the way, nothing chemical has worked. Not the grub treatments to the lawn, Sevin, Merit, garlic-water spray, soapy-water spray, zero. The only thing that works is annihilation via thumb and forefinger. It's a lot more satisfying, too!

Hard to nail a favorite "first" since the Hellebores seem to start in December and just keep going all winter! One of my favorites in Hamamelis 'Arnold Promise', not just because of it's early and unexpected bloom, but because I happened to site it right next to an Ilex verticillata, still brimming with bright red berries - so the combination is exhilarating. . . And to the responder who was speculating about crawling about on hands-and-knees to view those downward-facing hellebores: many, many years ago, a very clever little old lady showed me how she dealt with that in her garden - by placing little 6" round mirrors on the ground (even in the snow!) under the blooms. . . Those old-timers really had it all figured out - that little old lady next door had this little tyke completely hooked on gardening at the age of seven ! Carl

See, that's the thing, Lisa.. I didn't see real evidence of a freeze, just those few small flurries for about 10 minutes. I thought I was imagining it until Randy in TLE said he'd seen them. It was certainly cold enough Saturday morning. I was outside building that display of Norfolks... yeah, I know, they should be inside, but our indoor part of the garden center isn't big enough.. for about 2 hours. Everything's still going pretty strong here. My tomatoes bought it in the last temp drops we had, all the foliage shriveled and browned. But I hadn't had time to pull them out.. nor until a few days ago, a left hand to do so (long story, but the short one is that a customer at work tried to flatten my hand with a flat panel TV!)But, no breaks, and after a week in a brace and my left hand completely immobile, I'm finally out of the brace!!Tendons are still really tight, but it's getting better. But back to my toms... DH and I were looking around the back yard the other day and found that though the foliage is dead, the smaller toms that we'd left on were still growing and ripening. So I decided to leave them until either they stopped showing growth and ripening or until it was obvious they were beyond hope. So far I've picked about 8 good sized tomatoes that were continuing to ripen. Several that were golf ball sized at the time of the last low temps are already to baseball size and still green. So I'm gonna see how far they'll go before picking them. Dawn, LOL, Lisa's more "central" than I am, by about what, Lisa? Eight - ten miles or so? From 2nd and Kelly to your place? But the NW part, I'm more NW than she is. I've discovered that in Edmond, it's possible to have a flooding rain on one street, but two over it's bone dry! What an interesting experiment your son did! Just goes to show you that temp forecasts are really broad because they blanket an area, but depending on your elevation, etc, temps will vary greatly. Kathy

Lilykate , no one is more surprised than me . Yes we had some very late cold and bitter rains and frost and some of the daylilies and the alliums leaves evidence their run in with the frost but the weather has been so erratic . We have been really up .......temps in the 3 digit range with the humidex and then plummeting down to the 70's the next day or two and then back up . If I had to guess the daylilies have no idea what part of the season we are in . I can match that as I cannot get a grip on all this fluctuationg weather. Today was unbearaabe.. hot and dry and very very humid.