Persicaria "Firetail" blooms all season long for me. If it gets ratty looking all you do it whack it back and it comes back in no time. Here is a picture of it amongst other things including a brugmansia that is just now coming into bloom. Down lower right is Salvia 'Hot Lips' that also blooms all season long. Dr. Moy, a hardy ginger for me at least, also blooms late in the season for me. Just yesterday cut a few of the flower stalks and brought them inside and the scent wafts through the house. While not a perennial flower, the male gingko tree also adds its presence in the fall garden. As do witch hazels.

If you want a Âhelicopter view of your property and the area around it, check out your town/city/municipalityÂs website, specifically the tax map section or whatever they call it. I idly checked mine out last year and found that they had taken aerial photographs of the entire city. These have multiple layers that can be turned on and off to show property lines, topography, vegetation types, utilities, roads, buildings, etc. The level of detail is amazing  I can count my bee hives, see the arbor in the back garden and even see a few chickens in their enclosure. I know within a month of when the photo was taken, because of the bare trees and lack of snow cover (early spring) and what is present on the property (probably April 05). Below is an example of the full-size lot, greatly reduced in quality, of course, and a zoomed image to show some detail. I can zoom in even more, but it doesnÂt show well at the low resolution necessary to post the pic. Full lot from city webstite: Enlarged for detail: There are websites that offer aerial shots, but they usually want you to pay for detailed images. From your municipal website you can get them for free - your tax dollars at work. Good luck, narcnh

2010 was great for us. It was one of our wettest years here. I just loved it. The garden did really well and I didn't have to expend much energy watering it in order to keep it happy. I remember that ice storm and all the damage it did in your part of the state. It was stunning to see how long it took to cut down all the trees and get the broken limbs and collapsed trees off the power lines and get the power grid up and running. I know I am going to jinx myself by saying this, but we've been here since 1999 and never have had an ice storm come far enough south to hit us and cause that type of trouble. The closest one damaged trees maybe 3 to 5 miles north of us. We've had several rounds of freezing rain that did coat the power lines and trees, but they didn't bring down the power lines or tree limbs. We've been incredibly fortunate. I know that Marietta was hit by a storm like that about 10 years before we moved here, and our local electric co-op had to replace miles of power lines and tons and tons of poles. Ever since then, they have worked very hard to keep trees trimmed way back from the power lines in order to avoid a repeat of that year. One year Tim and I were at Wal-Mart in Gainesville on the day after a fairly mild snow/sleet storm. Our VFD was paged out to a pasture fire. We were shaking our heads because we've just driven though that area a few minutes earlier and knew that everything was covered with ice and snow. How could anything burn? When our son got to the fire in the brush truck, he found a power line had fallen, and apparently it melted the snow/sleet enough to catch the ice-coated grass on fire. That's sort of our all-time strangest fire. I'd like a nice, calm winter with some pretty snowy days that don't coat the roads with ice and cause problems, but that's asking for a lot here in OK. The good thing about our winters is that there is so much variability in them, so that whatever weather we are having, good or bad, won't last long and next week we'll have different weather from whatever we've had this week. At least we get those occasional warm, pretty, sunny days instead of having months of endless gray skies and gloom. The yard is so depressing today---browned and blackened foliage and limp blooms where we had tons of green foliage and bright flowers in bloom just a couple of days ago. It has been cloudy all day and I am tempted to say that I am "over winter" and ready for spring, but the truth is that winter isn't even here yet. A few years ago, I jinxed us by saying we only had hail an average of 1 time a year, and some years never had hail at all. So, what happened? That year we were hit by hail on 11 different occasions. Now, I guess I should be expecting an ice storm in the winter of 2013-14. The one little bright spot in the garden is a couple of Laura Bush petunia plants that had some freeze damage but which also still have some green leaves and small, barely-damaged flowers. Two plants isn't much to get excited about, but it is better than nothing.

Hey Lisa! I have Dees nesting again this year and I could tell the day before yesterday that they had hatched. The Dees had found my mealworm feeder...well actually they found it last year and remembered...so I watch their behaviour all the time and on Wednesday they just acted differently so I knew. I didn't check until Thursday and mom wouldn't get off the nest but I could see some wiggly little ones under her. My momma blue has four eggs right now..not sure if I will get another one tomorrow or not, I think she may have started incubating. They are in a box on our side yard that isn't easy to see from the house. Also have six pairs of TRES incubating 5-7 eggs each. They are so funny how different each pair is. One pair hates me and divebombs me if I get anywhere near their box, I know it is the same pair from the last two years. Then I have one that just stares at me as I approach. She lets me get so close I can almost reach out and touch her, when she does leave she never dive bombs me, nor does the male. Most of the others all divebomb me but none as bad as the one I mentioned above. They are freaky divebombers. Plus it is just me that they divebomb, my daughter was standing out by their box last evening just trying to get them to divebomb her and they wouldn't, she touched the box and everything...I go anywhere near it and they practically hit me they get so close. I agree....you learn so much from year to year but there is always more to learn. This is my six year offering nestboxes to the Blues/Dees and TRES. Donna