No, I love Canada, and in particular the city in which I live, which has four distinct seasons. Well, okay–three (spring is just a couple of weeks of rain). But for some reason I never really thought of Florida as _that_ hot for an entire season. Don’t know why. Thanks for the illumination!

How cold does it get where you are? Are you tropical all the time, or do you have something approaching winter?

Right now, it’s about 78-80 degrees, and in the “winter” freezes are very rare. Since we live between two rivers, the water factor makes it even more rare. There are probably about three days each year where it gets in the 30’s at night.

Now before you pack your bags, remember we can’t grow food items in the summer! (There are a couple wierd things that I read about, but nothing we eat.) It’s too hot, and basically everyone hides indoors and prays about their AC bill. Kind of the same thing northerners do in the winter.

In this part of Canada–as opposed to, say, the south of this province (Ontario), which always seems to me like the Garden of Eden, as everything grows there–we have similar challenges to you in terms of what we can grow when, and what we can grow, period. My little postage-stamp of a front lawn has some hardy wild roses that were originally my great-grandmother’s, some lavendar, and a blackberry bush that grew up as a weed from under my parents’ tool shed several years ago! But we definitely have a short growing season. Can you really grow things all year ’round?

Last time I planted, I put in 100 plants and only paid like $10 for all of them. They are CHEAP through the mail. The problem is, however, every seed catalog place won’t ship them until spring. If you can find a source that will, be sure to let me know about it.

If I had got these in earlier, you could’ve had my runners, as I cut the early ones off to get the plant’s energy to concentrate on leaves and flowers, not creating new plants. We’ll have to coordinate this better next year.

Lisa, Yes, the one in Oviedo. Pics (of not much) coming soon.

Tiffany, You faithful reader!

I bought a $2 rosebush at Kmart 5 years ago and it still performs beautifully despite my ignorance regarding roses. It has 5 or 6 buds that will open this week. Sometimes God blesses the efforts of the ignorant.

I seem to have been bitten by the gardening bug. It’s been quite gratifying watching seeds sprout and grow. My husband jokes about me massaging the seed packets. I just enjoy looking at them and planning better ways to organize my garden.

How did Adam do it?