Lookin' good! Love the arbor, showing it to hubby as he's in the mood for building something and we have been talking arbor plans all day. Is that painted a deep navy blue or a gray blue?

Very amazing yard Chelle!
Andi - when do you move? Good luck with that!

I move the end of the month! I'll have about a week (from the 23-24 until the 30th) where I can go back and forth between both places - assuming I can get a ride. The new place is about 18 miles away - close, but too far to move things with my wagon.

I am out of pots, boxes and plastic bags. I am heading to Wallywold and the dollar store with my neighbor tomorrow.

I am almost done digging up the plants and concentrating on the inside packing. My other computer is backing up and archiving as I type this. I just got my machines working again I don't want to have to do another config.

I love the Dollar Store. In the days before I could afford to buy anti-gopher cages for my roses, I used to buy wire-mesh wastebaskets for a dollar and plant my roses in those. Lots of little holes that were great for drainage and so small that the gophers couldn't get in.

Zuzu that's a good idea!!
Andi, good luck to you on your move!

Thanks!

Zuzu, the first half of those pictures are the ones that have bounced back the quickest; second half only had deer nibbles, no rabbit shredded bark or lopped-off canes. There are a couple left that are just growing green yet, but none have been lost.
Do you still have to gopher-proof all your roses? That sounds like it would be very difficult in a wonderfully full garden such as yours.



Sue, I have a great paint person at one of our small town Mom-and-Pop hardware stores who mixes colors wonderfully. I just picked out a color sample and said make it darker (deeper?), and make it in a paint that lasts. Best way to describe it is, forest green with a hint of blue-gray. Our house has forest green trim so we didn't want to stray too terribly far from that, but it needed to be bluer.
Have fun with your arbor project!

Zu - that is a GREAT idea about the waste baskets & gopher-proofing a rose! My mom keeps on losing her roses due to gophers (and she digs them up before they wake up from the winter.... patience is not her forte'). I'll have to tell her that!!

Chelle - Isn't it wonderful when you can find someone who listens & doesn't just go "by the book"? I was looking for a perfect purple for my house trim and could NOT find one. I went to 5 different stores looking at paint samples, about 10 different websites... the closest I could find was actually some nail polish! So I took it to my local HD & the paint lady was REALLY super cool about trying to match it! She couldn't get her computer to match it perfectly, so she found a sample that was close & then started to tinker with it manually. Came so close to what I wanted, it wasn't even funny! I loved it!! It took her like 30 minutes to get it just right and she had a smile on her face the entire time! It was awesome!

I saw that Costco has these big beautiful pergolas for $799. Thinking about getting one of those & putting it together. It's redwood, which would last forever & ever & ever here.

Yeah, Toni. It doesn't happen often, but on those rare occasions when it does, it really wows you! I'm glad you found your purple.

Reminds me of the Lowes ad on TV. I want a puuuurple. With purples and greens, just a touch off in the wrong direction and it's totally wrong. The secret is to find a woman working the paint section. Men just don't see the finer shades. Not a slam on men, but a fact. Our local Sherwin Williams has a woman manager. She has been a fabulous resource for me, better than my $$$ decorator.
Chelle, I remember a thread a few years back where you were planting those roses by the pond. What roses are they? Your pics above are incredible. Wow. My hope is to have our pond look as pretty as yours.

Cindi - Isn't that the truth with men not being able to differentiate between coral, strawberry, watermelon, raspberry, or other shades! They think "oh, pink". Uh, no.. HUGE difference thankyouverymuch. When I was testing colors for the house, I tried out 4 different blues for the body, 3 different shades of pink for the trim, and 3 different shades of purple for the accent. With the pink trim, DH couldn't tell the difference between 2 of them. "They're the same". Uh, no, huge difference. But, he's also partially color blind, too (at least that's what he claims.. I just think he's lazy).

Gonna hijack the thread for a second here for a way to waste time. http://www.xrite.com/online-co...

Chelle - Can you identify some of those roses? I love that BRIGHT red one! Wow!

Fun test Toni! I scored 10. How did everyone else do?

I scored an 8

Oooh, wow!

I have to start with a defense of men. I don't know any men who don't have a fine sense of color. Of course, I don't know any men who go nuts over football games on TV either, so I may be dealing with a more specific set of men than most people. They also accept the fact that I want what I want. When I've asked women to mix special colors for me in a paint store, I've often received unwanted advice: "That orange is too dark for a bedroom." "Don't you want more gray in that blue?" "I hope that's a big room because that teal is too bright." I put a lot of thought into my color schemes and I don't need input from some lady who might still have avocado green and harvest gold appliances.

Now for the gopher story. I've never been able to grow any bulbs other than daffodils unless I cage them or grow them in containers. I can't even grow them as annuals uncaged in the ground because the gophers eat them before they can bloom.

The gophers also love roses. I remember I once lost more than 30 roses in a single week years ago. The cages were $5 and most of my roses cost less than that, so I couldn't justify the use of the cages. The wastebaskets worked for a while, but there were no holes in the bottom, so the roses eventually were stunted.

About six years ago, I started planting my new roses in cages. I bought about 200 cages at $5 apiece. Then I found a guy who made them for me for $2.50 apiece and I started digging up my old surviving roses and replanting them in the cages. According to my records, I bought 1200 from him and they're all gone, so you can imagine how much digging and replanting I had to do. I didn't have to do anything for my roses grafted onto multiflora and fortuniana. For some reason, those rootstocks don't appeal to gophers, so I'm glad I bought so many of my roses from Canadian nurseries and the nurseries in the southern states that use Rosa fortuniana for grafting. The gophers only like own-root roses and roses grafted onto Dr. Huey.

About 100 own-root or Dr. Huey-grafted roses in my garden are still uncaged. Some are too big to replant and some aren't appealing enough to be worth the effort. I've lost 4 of those in the last couple of weeks.

The shortage of roses for lunch has made the gophers less discriminating in their tastes. They're suddenly eating the irises that have been untouched here for years.

Well, my mom practically has to cage her roses on all sides.. from the ground down against the gophers & from the ground up from the deer.

Oh look, Toni, your color deficits are in the range of your old house paint!

Thanks, Cindi!

I can't believe those roses way out there, getting nothing from me except a grass trim and a new layer of branches once a year for mulch, do so well. They're better than the ones in the yard!

White and pink roses on the lake walk are Grootendorsts. The other pink out there that's absolutely covered in big wonderfully scented blooms is The Herbalist, and the bright red is Adelaide Hoodless. Any or all of these would likely do smashingly well for you too, Toni.

The arbor rose blooming now is Alchymist.

The white ones in that set I don't actually claim. They're wild roses.


Good grief, Zuzu! Your pesky rodents are worse than anything, aren't they? What's the next step for you and your iris? Any ideas?

Chelle, I'm making note of those roses and they'll be the ones I order next year.
Zuzu your gopher nightmare reminds me of Caddyshack! Don't Dachshunds chase after gophers? Maybe you need another pet?
ok, I did that color test. I scored 8. Pretty good, I thought!

I'm using someone else's computer and I can't figure out how to drag and drop, that tells me I probably won't score very well on that test! haha!
But I am going to try it! Also I know you can train your eye to see color better. I have an artist friend who does these color test things using the gray scale - far harder, because he says it keeps him "trained" Even on that site it says woman have far less deficiency in color than men, I do wonder if its physical/mental or both? I always find this interesting! And I won't be at my own computer until Monday grrrr have to wait, and hope I don't forget to take the dang test I am impressed with all of your scores!! A 4? That's great! Out of curiousity I just hit "score test" and scored 1149 Yahoo!