I'm really late with this reply, but maybe it will help you next year. I keep Christmas tree lights in my fruit trees. The kind with the large bulb; the fairy lights won't help. I have the lights on a thermostat, to go on automatically when temps get down to 40 degrees. It's not a huge help, but I figure it gives me a couple of degrees more leeway, and that's often just enough. Blossoms won't normally get damaged until about 29 degrees, so if I can protect them to 26, it covers almost any spring freeze we have. If you only have 1 of each type of fruit, your problem might be lack of pollination rather than frost. 100% probability that the plum problem is lack of a pollinator. I'm supposed to be zone 5, but that's a joke. Weather is much tougher than zone 5. I'm getting fruit, so I can't see why it would be too cold in zone 7. It's May 5th and there is snow and hail going on outside my window right now. I plant cold hardy varieties and get the latest bloomers I can find. Late blooming will make a huge difference in whether or not you get fruit where there are spring freezes. I suspect I lost the crop on my earlier blooming apricot. We had several night with temps in the teens right after it bloomed. But the apricot that blooms 2 weeks later has lots of tiny baby apricots on it right now.

I just finished "Dog On It", one of Mary's recommendations. The premise sounded sort of cheesy, but it was so well written from the point of view of the dog. Chet -- the dog -- will be thinking deep thoughts about the case and suddenly be sidetracked by a cheerio on the floor or the scent of a cat. Very clever. If you like books about cheese making, try "Blessed are the Chessemakers" by Sarah-Kate Lynch. It's fiction with a touch of magic which I'm finding I like in a story. Our book group recently read "Water for Elephants". It was one I would never have picked up on my own and I loved it. The group also picked "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas" which I did not read. Little boys being killed in concentration camps is not my cup of tea. I'm also reading "Night Night Little Pookie" three or four times a day to the year old grandson. He likes it as much as I do!

I absolutely love using the library's online features! With 3 small children, I either have to make an extra trip down to the library after they are put to bed which doesn't give me much time before the library closes or I have to try and keep them quiet in the upstairs adult section which doesn't usually work very well. Imagine VERY loud voices asking questions like "Why do they have so many computers up here?" "Why do we have to be so quiet?" "When is it time to go hoooome? *whine*" Once I realized how easy it is to do things online, I started using it all the time. I can renew our books online so that I don't have huge late fees. I can put things on hold at our library like popular DVDs or new releases. They are always on hold for someone so it's much easier to get my name on the hold list than it is to find it on the shelf. And of course, the interlibrary loan system is great! I've found so many books using that. Besides the ones I was looking for, I've also found some by using the features "nearby items on shelf" and "find more on these topics". They have a pretty nice setup. Our library also has an ongoing used book, magazine, and CD sale near the front desk. I once found a whole stack of gradening magazines like Garden Gate and Organic Gardening for 25 cents each! And you can check out magazines also. In fact, I just quick bumped over there and put the last 4 issues of Garden Gate on hold (from Waterford library). Oh, and Julie, if you do a search using the words "fine gardening" that magazine is available at Burlington library plus a few others so if you need some reading material this winter but don't want to shell out the money for a magazine that you only read part of, it can be transferred to the Racine library for you. There is also a series called "Fine gardening design guides" that seems to have been put out by the magazine along with a few separate books titled "The Best of Fine Gardening: Perennials", "The Best of Fine Gardening: Shrubs and Trees" and a few others. Does Sturtevant have a library or do you use Racine's? If the bookmobile comes out near you, you have the option of choosing where you want to pick up the items and can switch it to Bookmobile. It's funny, most of the libraries only seem to keep the last 2 years of issues but West Bend has copies of Fine Gardening going back to 1997! I wonder why? Perhaps they have more gardeners in that area or just most storage room. There's a new book by Melinda Myers titled "Month-by-month gardening in Wisconsin : what to do each month to have a beautiful garden all year". I'm going to have to put that on hold. I wonder if they have Birds and Bloom magazine. Well, I'm going to quit bouncing back and forth between websites and just send this before it gets any longer. Kimberly P.S. My library's SHARE program covers these areas: Dodge, Jefferson, Racine, Walworth and Washington Counties. But I'm sure there are similar programs for the other parts of...

Speaking of glue, I just love Roxanne's Glue-Baste-It. The glue looks like Elmer's--a thick white liquid, but the applicator is a long thin hollow needle that puts the glue out in tiny beads. No mess. I recently used it to attach 140 batting squares to 6" novelty squares and attach the novelty squares to their places in the center of the circles of a Peek-a-Boo I-Spy, then glue-basted the circle flaps over the squares, and I still have quite a bit of the bottle left.It cost $7+ at Rosie's Calico Cupboard. Worth every penny. I didn't use a single pin in this quilt, except for when I was putting the circles together, and was able to stitch down the flaps without any shifting of the fabric. I didn't wash this quilt before passing it on to the person who ordered it, but I warned him, for the first time he washes it, to put it through the machine twice if he noticed any stickiness after the first wash, in case any glue remains.