Thanks BDW, we enjoy the porch, too. I always call it the 'porch' and DH corrects me. "It's not a porch... it's a deck!" Funny man.... but he built it so I 'let' him name it, lol. We spend a lot of our time sitting on the porch swing watching the cardinal and hummingbirds. I've attached a pic of our birdie having his breakfast this morning. I found the little chicks at the dollar store, only it's not a true dollar store. These cost me $1.29 for a mama chicken and four baby chicks. This post was edited by sunnysa on Thu, Jul 3, 14 at 9:03

There are N. American pine species naturalizing in the vicinity of South American pine plantations. If these runaway pines are really and truly crowding out some native plant community, then I agree with those throwing their hands up in the air about this tragedy. But if they're simply colonizing land that long ago was cleared for agriculture, probably holds few to no native plants, etc......what's the harm? I don't expect all to agree with me on this-I also don't think it a great tragedy that a few Scots pines or Norway spruce have naturalized somewhere-but in my hierarchy of things to worry about, it's the obvious bad actors-things like common buckthorn, which really can destroy a woods, that i believe we should be concentrating on. Sometimes you'll read some Wild Ones pamphlet or something where somebody's all up in arms because some tawny orange daylilies are growing in the ditch somewhere. I want to grab them by the collar and shake vigorously. Daylilies in the ditch will not be the end of nature as we know it! At the end of the day, it is novel ecosystems that are being created. They're surely not all good, but they're just as surely not all bad. And this is not a new thing. American Indians, for one example, have been moving plants around for millenia. Why that gets a pass, but not some more recent effort to get something growing where it was not previously I don't know.

The thugs are a weedy Erigeron, Dames rocket, and a couple Canadian wild rhy plants. The grasses get too big and shade other plants and they are seeding everywhere and I don't like that. It's messy looking. The Erigerons don't seem too bad this year. I've been trying to kill all the dame's rocket, but new ones appear every spring. The partridge peas and the morning glories are now becoming so numerous they are affecting other plants. The trumpet vine will just plow over everything too.

I was shocked to see garlic mustard flowering that was 1 inch tall. It wouldn't take long for them to choke out these toothworts. I pulled up or tried to pull up every bush honeysuckle and I got all the GM, but a couple broke off at the root, I really that, because you know it will be back!. What evil plants! FOR DOUG!