Welcome Mark! I love Louisville. Although I live and work in Nashville,I had a friend who lived there. I was just thinking about the last time I was there. It was cold, rainy and we stayed wet all day long. And it was the best time. We dodged the cold by ducking into restaurants and having coffee and/or desserts. The day ended with, you guessed it!, the Thunder fireworks. So how many derby pins do you have? We also liked to head over the border there. Huber winery and The Falls of the Ohio. Great place Kentucky. I know why the call it the blue grass state, but golly, it's just so lush and green there.

Thank you CoyoteMoss! I rescued this one from WM last year. Very sad shape but the lone sickly flower bud looked like it might have been red, and the caudex is kind of different so I saved it. Not "red" blooms but not the average common pink either. Not that there is anything wrong with the pink. My oldest and favorite adenium is the pink and it's beautiful too :)

Hey! Welcome to the forum. I wish too that there was more activity on this forum. The far north forum seems to have many current members who post but there doesn't seem to be anything regular used by the rest of the country. I go on their's every once and a while but am not sure if I should. I know we have such different climatic conditions in this country but I think we could all benefit from some exchange of information. Your garden is lovely. I too have given up on fancy roses. I have planted some hardy ones in what I call the wild side of my front yard. It is along a field on our farm and I have tried to plant it with flowering shrubs. This is the first year many of the roses have actually done something and they all seem to be the same pink colour for some reason! I am busy right now with all of my daylilies. I hybridize and have hundreds of seedlings blooming that I am trying to get photos of. It rained all spring and the weeds in a couple of them are horrendous. I just couldn't keep up. Now it is dry -I still can't quite believe that - and I am starting to water all of the huge lush plants that grew with all of the rain! Good luck with your soil-it looks like you are making headway. Keep posting to show us how it is going! Debbie

Hi Rick, very small garden here ... less than 150 sq. ft. A third of that is flowers and herbs, so there's not much room for tomatoes and peppers. Still have chard and dill from the fall garden, but I'll need to pull more of that to squeeze in a few more tomatoes. We started the garden about 20 years ago using the square foot method. After that first year abandoned some of Mel's guidelines and set our own. You quickly learn what works and what doesn't. Hope to completely redo the garden next year. Make it a little bigger with wider paths and different shaped beds. Al, sounds like you have a nice variety. I start my tomatoes & peppers on top of the fridge then move them to the cold frame. In the past week the tomatoes outgrew it, so I started transplanting. cold frame in February: the garden today: Harper