Hi All, I know I've been MIA for a few weeks. Work has been taking over lately. I just posted my trade list on the FTW Garden swap site. I added my pre-trades as I culled them from this page. Please review to see if I'm still on track. I'm going to try to accommodate everyone's rain lily requests. If I don't have enough of the yellow rain lily seeds to go around, I may be able to entice you with some minima seeds. Minimas are the most adorable tiny pale pink rain lilies. The flowers are less than a half inch in diameter. As a bonus, they go from seed to blooming in one year! I have about a dozen minima seed pods in my pots right now. I'll try to harvest some before the swap. Looking forward to meeting you all, JK

I have a Senna corymbosa that was mislabeled when I got it, so it's much too big for its current spot. I'm considering moving it on the berm to the area where the 'head' of the creek is. I also have a Lindheimer's muhly that I'd like to place next to on that left (east end). The camera makes the whole area all look huge and really long but from the front, what's to the left of it, is the neighbor's driveway/front and what's behind it is my side yard and wooden fence. So there really isn't a field behing it, thought it may appear that way. I also have 2 switch grass 'Prarie Sky' Panicum virgatum that I think I'll put where there is a wedge of grass righ now between the head of the creek and the berm, where the water will funnel in. I think the switch grass will be OK being in the water when it rains hard. DH really likes grass and doesn't want to mulch the berm. For the winter I think I'm going to put a cover crop on it and then next spring we can do the Habiturf. We'll have to edge the front side of the berm to do that to be sure no other grass runs up in there. Then hopefully we can leave the berm unmowed. I am going to plant all of it between the creek and the house and I've already done carboard/mulch over a big portion of it. We've been waiting all this time to get the walk replaced but they finally told us they'll do it next week. So that will help me a lot getting going forward on this. I do have some of the plants that I've picked up on sale, repotted and kept in morning sun only. I'n hoping to have it all prepped and be able to get them in the ground late September/early October. I'll do some more pics after the walk way is finished.

wantonamara---- You qualify for 'hell' strip conditions, think of it as a real big strip with special challenges to boot. Woodstea, if your strip is like mine, you can clean out the leaves but in two or three days it doesn't look any different than it did before you cleaned it a couple days ago. I usually clean mine several times in winter, its a good reason to get outside on warm days. Those oak leaves keep coming all winter. I cleaned mine out yesterday (Thanksgiving) because we celebrated Thanksgiving today. People driving by probably felt sorry for me for spending Thanksgiving Day grubbing out leaves by hand into a bucket but I enjoyed it, it was gorgeous out. There were lots of those styrofoam packing peanut things among the leaves that had blown in, someone must have tossed a package and let them blow everywhere, a beer can and some bits of paper. I thinned out some stuff because it was looking somewhat overgrown and it looks much neater now (for a couple days). I need to get rid of Miss Huff Lantana so I cut it to the ground. It got way too big for the strip.

I haven't updated since the start of April, so here is what has happened so far. 1) I extended my strip by another 25 feet or so. (I'm calling it Curb2.) I dug it out so that the middle of my strip is lower than the edges, creating a mini-rain garden/bioswale. In the other part of the strip (Curb1), the middle is higher than the edges. This means mulch if forever spilling onto the sidewalk. I bought a bag of 65 bare roots and corms from Costco for about $20. The 50 Liatris have since come up. The 5 Echinacea, and 10 Kniphofia did not. Popsicle sticks mark the plantings. I later added a couple of 'Blonde Ambition' blue grama (Bouteloua gracilis), a common milkweed (Asclepias syriaca), two tropical milkweed (Asclepias curassavica) and one 'Silky Gold' tropical milkweed. 2) In Curb1, I added: *two 'Black and Blue' salvia *two Hill Country penstemon *three little bluestem. (I have so bluestem plants, I don't know what to do with them! I potted up a dozen, threw about 20 in the compost pile. It's a little sad, since it took me a whole year to grow them.) *two Gregg's mistflower *one snake herb (Dyschoriste linearis) *two Salvia greggii--one 'Purple', one 'Nuevo Leon' *one creeping red sedum *eight groundcover thymes--one 'Doone Valley', 7 'creeping' I labeled the milkweeds, so I wouldn't accidentally dig them up in the spring, before the leaves emerge (like I did this year). 3) Things I removed: The red yucca that I had planted in Curb1 was not doing well. I dug it out and it now lives in a pot on my patio. It was replaced immediately with bamboo muhly (Muhlenbergia dumosa). The gaura I planted in the spring died in the heat. My Agastache "Blue Boa", that after looking good all spring, suddenly declined, dried up and died. I tried to save it, giving it extra water, drenching with ammonium sulfate (in case it was cotton root rot), but nothing helped. In it's spot, since I was afraid it might have been a soil borne disease that killed the agastache, I dug out all the soil--about 12" wide and 8" deep--and replaced it with compost and expanded shale. I've planted a 'Mystic Spires' salvia, just last week. 4) Things really started to fill out in June I even got some milkweed blooms! (Asclepias viridis) (Asclepias curassavica 'Silky Gold') (Growth in Curb2)(Please excuse the purslane. I thought I'd try it as a living mulch. 5) Today (Late July) Curb 1 has finished for the summer, and it looking tired. (I believe that I'll get another flush from the Walker's Low catmint in the fall.) I'm impressed with how much the Gregg's dalea has grown (the silvery groundcover in the foreground). Last year, in a different spot, it hardly grew at all, and the nurseryman I purchased the plant from told me that it was a slow grower. I guess it just needed to find the 'right place'! Curb 2 is looking great.