Donnann, your Bee Balm garden sounds like heaven! and I am so sorry that naughty Woodchuck literally cleaned up his plate with your garden...I am sending much warm wishes for your Bee balm garden's speedy recovery...Yes, definitely get wire fencing for it. I would have loved to have seen your Bee Balm Garden.I am keeping my fingers crossed that Mr. Woodchuck will chomp on only the wild weeds instead, like crabgrass or nutsedge or those invasive tree shrubs! I recently saw Kristenflower's absolutely gorgeous rose/lavender heaven too at the gallery and was so impressed! Yours and hers are ideal bee gardens just like Celestialrose. I need to grow much more bee balm because I found out that my dwarf bee balm is not as "invasive" as I had hoped, LOL, no thanks to my crappy soil. I actually planted my bee balm away from my roses in a bare 3 by 3 area. My bee-attracting plants are too young, too few to really attract many bees so next time I have to amp the collection and not! deadhead my beebalm, hoping the seeds will scatter My dad on the other hand has 3 crabapple trees, a persimmon tree, a dwarf apple tree, his yard is completely overrun with wild honeysuckle bushes, lilacs, a forest of hollyhocks and sweet peas(which the bumblebees used to love before they died, one flowering redbud tree, winterberry, azaleas, gardenias, jasmine, 3 crazy rosebushes that are like 8' tall because he never prunes them, 1 rootstock Dr. Huey, all these bee and bird attracting plants which I am so jealous about...But! he does not have bee balm... I think he can certainly add this to his collection...Donna, LOL! I think you will be "enabling" him; the neighbors already think he's got enough of a jungle...Also genes run in the family, hahahaha! I tried to keep as tidy of a garden as I could, but my garden still looks like a jungle because I planted like 50! overly tall gladiolus and now I want to grab some of my Dads overly tall hollyhocks as well! Anyway, I cant wait to see your bee balm garden recover and flourish once again. Hugs! Greenhaven alas I have just a handful of those native beesbut am grateful that at least I have those few. Your post reminded me, do you remember that "I am so excited thread" I wrote? The wonderful cute Mr. Bumblebee that used to visit my garden in May did not survive it seemsIn Mid-June it disappeared after my next door neighbor hired a professional pesticide company to spray the foundations of their home. Perhaps it too was Sevin? It was not until an entire month and a half passed that my Dads bees disappeared... (he and I live in completely separate neighborhoods and bees only have that 3 mi. radius anyways) So as you can see I feel why I feel so guilty. Perhaps if I had mentioned this to my Dad, who knows something could have been prevented? Again, you may be right in that the wild bees are hardier in comparison. They have shorter life spans and dont have communal hives, and that is why they have survived You see if you do the research and look up native bees youll discover thisThey dont have the hives and therefore, they dont have the communal death that the honeybees experience when they are exposed to Sevin. Because wild bees have so many tiny individual nests, each is independent of each other ... Not so with honeybees. Once their hive is contaminated, their entire hive is destroyed, thousands are gone. But to be honest I will always love the honeybee and bumblebees more... There's just something so special about their fuzziness that I love!

18 months after converting my patchwork lawn to just about 100% Tall Fescue (cheap/tough K31 at that). I have so few spots of CC I just hand pull it occasionally while mowing my lawn and at that it just seems like finesse. The seed is inexpensive and has gotten the job done with several overseedings after a scorching cutting. My strategy was to think "below ground." Kentucky Bluegrass, for example, has a shallow weak root system. One selling feature is the vigorous surface roots that enable it to spread in to bare spots. This behavior is essential identical to CC at the macro-level. Cheap K-31 grass operates in a different manner. The roots are very deep and the plant prefers to be a bit tall (usually 4" mowings for me) not creepy. I ammended soil pretty deep in areas of poor topsoil. It germinates quickly and establishs to a "bigger" potential much later. But once established -- it is harder to kill then CC. Thats how I eliminated CC. I let the K31 get strong then beat up my lawn pretty badly but with just a few moments of consideration just prior. Mowing it short in heat, mowing at varying heights that "didn't make sense", letting it get tall for some periods. K-31 if you want cheap, extremely durable, weed-free turf --consensus is just overseed it every other year. KGB if you aim to have a prettier but very high maintance lawn requiring extra water, chemicals/organics, and attention with less need to overseed for thick turf. My only question for some of the posts is what kind of grass and what kind of conditions exist and shooting for. Best of luck with whatever grass species!

I can't imagine Rob Lowe in the part. He couldn't possibly be sleazy enough to play the role. I'm also a fan of the show and wish CS had not messed with not only his life and livelihood, but also of all the other cast members and background people. A long-time friend of mine co-wrote the theme song and he's going to lose the residuals from the prime-time run of the show. Though I suspect he'll still see something from the syndicated shows if they stay on the air. Yep, lots of livelihoods on the line here thanks to one player.

What a sweet picture, Shirley. Everything for this swap has now been received. Now I can pass along my "oops moment" about the prizes. A few weeks ago I went to a craft store and saw some Peanuts fabric - it had copies of the comic strips on it. Perfect to make little gifts for the prizes I thought. Guess who couldn't find it a few weeks later? It's a bit of a joke around here about how I put things away and can't find them. Anyway, I thought the gnome fabric turned out really cute and one day I'll find that Peanuts fabric. I guess it's good it didn't have a seasonal print. I hope everyone enjoys Halloween this year. We don't get any trick or treaters out here, but I have my Halloween-Fall decorations out in several rooms so it looks festive for us here at home. Jeanne