Hi, Rox!
I'm in East San Diego County, where we're currently going through what passes for "winter," which is rain.
On the .gov site, the plant of the week is the sunflower, which I have in two pots now. Tiny seedlings still, but grown from seeds, and I couldn't be more proud. They went from the bucket they were started in to two bigger pots so that they can arch their little elementary school backs for that surge towards adult hood.
Thanks for the advice on the ground cover. I told my husband what I planned to do with it and he gave me one of those blank looks. I couldn't tell whether or not it was the "I can't visualize that" blank look or the "I thought we'd do something else" blank look. (It may have been the "you're going to make ME do that, aren't you?" blank look...I get that one a lot.)
The only thing I knew for sure about roses was an interesting little thing I learned in a decades ago science class: "nice" rose bushes are frequently grafted to "scrub" rose bush roots for survival purposes, and when one prunes one should take care not to prune down past the graft or you'll find scrub roses growing where your formally nice roses were. (I don't know what a "scrub" rose is or what constitutes a "nice" rose, as I think all flowers are pretty cool. Most weeds, too, come to think of it.) Anyhoo, the only bush I was really worried about was the schizo one on the end that has two different roses growing off the same bush. Kind of a metaphor for me, I thought.
