Very nice! Rich, deep colors. Expresses a lot of strength and intent.. I particularly like the wingtips which have been left undetailed - blurred by motion as it were. (by the way, if it offers any confidence, we clipped our pullets' wings for the first time a few months ago. We just went real, real slow to avoid nervousness and hazardous jerking. Nothing to it!) LF

As a general procedure, I would say, determine when freezes of 28F or so will stop roses from growing and blooming in your area, and make your last fertilizing no later than six weeks before that. If you are using a fertilizer with fast nitrogen, it will be pretty well used up in that interval, so you won't be wasting fertilizer or causing pollution pointlessly. In your climate, there should be no winter damage beyond the soft tips regardless of how fast or slowly the roses are growing. Many growers feel they need to stop fertilizer in late summer. But frankly, we have no evidence that stopping fertilizer early increases winter hardiness in areas where winter damage does occur. Regardless of our attempts to control things, repeat-blooming roses are going to keep growing until the cold or lack of water stops them. So I fertilize in order to maximize fall bloom. I also continue deadheading through the fall. After winter lows of around 5F, I have essentially no cane damage.

Saw everyone's comments on the other forum, glad you enjoyed seeing them. I really enjoy painting--don't know why my projects are so few and far between! Just procrastinate too much I think. Have a couple other Christmas things I want to get done and ready for next year, but I've also been going through my patterns for some Valentine's ideas. I need a couple of signs for outside, I hardly have any Valentines decos. Usually I like to put a little sign on my lamppost in the yard, on my side gate, and on the side door to the garage off my front patio for the holidays. Mostly have things for Halloween and Christmas so need to get busy and make some for these other holidays too. Anyone making any kind of crafts for Valentine's or St. Pat's? Did all of you see Oddie's baggie wreath with the red ribbon and little red hearts on it? And she posted a pic of bunny boxes that are so cute too. You can see them all on the crafts forum. Luvs

Thanks so much for the kind words! It's nice to get nice comments from people outside of my family (who are obligated to say nice things). I'll try to post photos from our better camera later. On top of the hill is a red barn and silo. On the hill are some hay bales. I knew that I wanted to do a farm landscape bc that's the landscape in our area. The sky was the trickiest part, in terms of getitng it to look somewhat realistic; so, I watched a couple fo YouTube videos of "how to paint a sky." I actually re-painted the sky a couple of times to make it look right. Who knew that something that simple looking would be so challenging to paint? Before I tackled the huge painting I did a tiny (8x10) loose mock up, just to make sure that I wouldn't waste my time doing a huge version if the small one looked like hell. The small one looked ok; so, then I did the big one. It was definitely more challenging doing it on a huge scale bc when you blow things up, the lack of detail in the painting is more obvious. Anyway, the whole thing was a learning process bc as I painted and made mistakes, I figured out what didn't work and what worked better. I definitely had moments of frustration while painting it bc things just didn't look right, but I think I eventually fixed them to a point where it looked better. I found myself saying to myself several times during the process, "Why do I think that I can do this?!?" At the end of it though, I am really pleased with how it turned out. Anyway, if you are contemplating anything that seems kind of daunting, I have found that in general, if you break it up into little manageable parts, you can usually accomplish it to a passable degree. The worst that could happen is that the project fails, but in the grand scheme of life, that's not so bad. And on the flip side, you might suprise yourself!