Hello fellow gardeners!  It's spring in New England USA and the extra warm weather we had last week has forced most of the spring "flowering" trees and shrubs to bloom a little too early.  It also caused many perennials such as hostas & daylilies & peonies to send up shoots and begin their cycle.  It all looks great but it came so fast I think it's going to be one of those "can't catch up" seasons. Anyway, I thought it might be nice to meet some folks who share my interest in the garden. Kind of like over the fence chats about the various aspects of our hobby. This year I'm going to plant up a new section with herbs.  Looking forward to hearing from others.   Lily

I planted an interesting garden, a little on the late side last year. Because of planning my daughters wedding and remodeling our kitchen, we didn't get to redoing our backyard until the first week of August. I put in flowers that bloomed thru Sept. and now are blooming again. I thought I lost 4 plants to the frost, but three came back to my surprise. I live in Calif. about an hour drive from San Francisco in a town called San Jose. We are seeing things blooming pretty fast here and we may have to go on mandatory water rantioning. We are waiting to hear on that.

Yes, I was born and raised here. By the way, I have a cousin who lives in Washington state who like you was having trouble with the deer. She found the only way to keep them from eating her plants was to put up a fence around her back yard so they couldn't eat her plants. She didn't want to put up a wooden one as she said she has a wonderful view of mountains etc. so she put up some sort of wire fence. Also, my mom and dad had retired to a cute place where they lived out away from the town. They to had deer problems. I seem to remember my parents putting salt lick out to keep the deer from eating their plants that were behind their house.

I have most of my plants on a drip system. That helps quite a bit. I will have to check out the plants you have recommended. I don't think I am familiar with those.  I try to make sure I use native plants for our area and ones that can handle drout conditions then sometimes, they can't handle the frost we get.

I'm talking more native plants for California. We are in zone 8 & 9. I start planting around the first of May. I should be putting in my veg. garden now but my husband is being lazy right now. lol. The garden is full of weeds and he doesn't want to have any thing to do with it.  When I do my veg. garden we grow enough to eat and give away 1/3 and freeze the other 2/3's. Thanks for the link to get the news letter. I also get many gardening magaziines. I may have bought that one. I will have to check. I like some of them for the way people have done their yards. I just redid my yard with a yellow brick road and a tinman, and Dorthy, and a Lion and scarecrow. I still have to paint the brick road, and finish the lion and dorthy. This is what we started last August, but didn't get all finnished. We got the plants in, and the brick road in and part of the characters in but with my daughters wedding, and such I couldn't finish the rest.

Taurscorpiomoon...hope I got that right...the herbs I have started indoors are lavender, parsley, basil, sage, and hyssop.  I already have oregano...its a perennial.  And I plan to buy rosemary plants.  I'm told they do not germinate very well from seed.  So I'll buy plants made from cuttings.  It's not hardy so it will have to come indoors for the winter.  I also have some spearmint and peppermint that I'm always cutting back because it gets invasive.  Oh, I have chives too!  There are lots more but I don't want to bite off more than I can chew. 

You said gardens...what else are you going to plant?  

  Lily