My daughter is afraid of spiders despite my reassurances. Fortunately we mostly see small ones around here.

Some people are. I'm glad I've not got that particular phobia (if that's what it is!) I actually like spiders.

Today it's sort of rainy but not enough to even register in the rain gauge yet.

A spider got into her clothes once and bit her repeatedly a few years ago. She also has a strong dislike of all bugs. Well, I don't foresee her out in the (buggy) garden helping me, but that's okay--she's 12 and whatever mom does is pretty boring for her right now anyway! :-D

I don't mind spiders. I like that they help me out by catching and eating lots of pests.

Poor kid!

I wasn't much interested in gardening when I was 12 either.

Me either, if truth be told! :-D It is definitely something I've come to at an older age. It's funny, though, because I've always *loved* flowers and gardens, and have such fond memories of one grandmother's garden, and of roaming in the pollinator-filled meadows of the other grandmother. And yet it's just not something I even thought about doing until recently, with DD old enough to entertain herself, and my thoughts turning to larger philosophical questions of what makes life meaningful. I finally decided that supporting the ecosystem while creating beauty was high on the list! It also helped that I moved into a house that had been owned for 50+ years by a gardener who left me beautiful soil in her many beds. Definitely a nice gift to be left by a former owner.

Oh wow, what a delight that must have been! to move in after that gardener.

I really lucked out on that one, Kyla! I hope her spirit settles over the house from time to time, just so she can see how the good soil beds she created continue to give life.

oh no. I almost wish I hadn't found this.

http://www.thegrowers-exchange...

BIG challenge: wanting all the things!



I mean, it's lovely to grow from seed but these plants look wonderful and I don't think the price is too bad..... especially since I have failed to find OR grow chamomile here lately. (I don't think the seeds I have are good. One of the many things on my mental, not-yet-written-down to do list is to test germinate a few of those and see.)

Very nice selection of plants! Many of the prices are excellent! Can't beat $5.95 for yarrow, butterfly weed, coneflower, and so on! For some of the more common herbs, though, I like to purchase these in 4" pots; a lot of nurseries sell these in their 'herb' section during spring and early summer for only $2-$3 each! *Love* that kind of herb! :-D In fact, that's how I found my chamomile! But they are also offering a lot of hard to find herbs, or plants that are usually sold in the perennial section for $8-$10 a pot or more, so the $5.95 looks like a great price to me!

For me, unless a plant grows easily and readily from seed, I often find it works better to look for a small inexpensive starter pot of it somewhere.

I successfully forgot about that link until I came back to this thread. Yay, forgettery!

My challenge right now is, while it isn't raining enough here to be enough rain, exactly, it IS raining enough that whenever I decide to let the compost pile get dry enough it will be easier to harvest, it gets wetter instead.

Challenge: finding the right day to do this most easily. Probably not gonna be today, but if I get bored enough I might dig into it anyway. It's gonna be a chore no matter what.

Also I have to check about sedums. Can I re-root one that's melted from overwatering (not by me) by just changing up the soil and sticking pieces down in? Hope so!

Maybe I'll put stepping stones down in the new bed so I can get to the jungle and do a little clearing and sorting of it.

I think it's worth a try with that sedum Kyla!

I am trying it! I got some pea gravel the other day; I mixed up some potting soil with a handful of vermiculite and some of the gravel and used a fresh container, set the sedum pieces on top and covered their ends with a bit of the mixture....

And then I got into thinking about weeds, and then I decided it was time to start sorting out the jungle but then I realized in order to do that I needed to place some stepping stones.

So I did that.



I've also got a digging board I can stand on, or squat on, to work on areas I can't quite reach from the stones. Works well for now!

Oh, cool! It says here, "Some of the small creeping species can even be crumbled up and cast about like seeds. They will sprout up quickly as a thick groundcover -- "

http://www.northcreeknurseries...

I did that, scattered some of the bits on the ground, in Little Rock. We'll see! Though I doubt I will see a quickly sprouting thick groundcover, not where I scattered them. But if some of it takes at all, that will be sweet!

What a great idea. Let me know if it works before I mash mine all up.

Roses_R_Red said:What a great idea. Let me know if it works before I mash mine all up.

Were you planning to?



Mash half of it up. Join the experiment!

I'll be sure to report back.

Does this count as a challenge? It certainly is feeling like it because this guy is much too friendly and is here every night to visit Charle. Of course Charle barks and wags his tail and this guy just stand here and looks and kills the chickens and chases the little cat, Lucky. I spent the morning on the phone with the Animal control and he and the Wildlife person are going to try and help me get him to go bother someone else. We caught him on the camera that faces the greenhouse last night.

It counts. What is it, a fox?

wow. I hope it can be relocated successfully!

Yep!!!!Big one too. About a year ago my little barncat , Lucky was chewed up pretty bad and I thought it was the old stud cat that came to visit....now I know what it was because I had never seen a male cat bite and chew up the rump of a female cat during copulation and I have had lots of barncats. She was a mess and I could not catch her to give her medication or treat her wounds. Thankfully she had a rabies shot one time, not sure it would have helped, but I was able to spray her with meds when she was eating. Her entire rump was chewed like something grabbed her and she got away. I feel sure this is also the answer to where my other small cats have disappeared to over the years. We have always had fox but they stayed away from the house...this one is in the barn, at the greenhouse, and at night he gets Charle barking and I am loosing sleep.
I do hope we can relocate him or her. You know they don't kill cats usually, they take them back to their young, if they have any and they teach the young how to kill and eat them by letting them loose in the pack. Just the thought of it makes me want to cry. My poor babies went missing one at a time until all six were gone...I kept thinking they just wandered off but now I am pretty sure what happened. I personally would like to take care of this guy myself, but there is a fine for what I would do to it.

Can you catch it in a "have a heart trap" and relocate it?

Kyla, is this the correct time to try to propagate the sedum this way. Is it safer to wait until spring?