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A vibrant annual for the garden

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Celosia or Cockscomb is a vibrant annual that you can use in your garden borders or do as I do and plant them in your mixed planters.

They look lovely beside hostas, impatiens, dianthus (Sweet William), geranium and other plants that are traditionally grown in planters, flower baskets and in the garden border.

They come in many colors but I particularly love the orange reds and yellows as they seem to fit well with my planter arrangements.

spear like flower

Cockscomb or feathery amaranth as it’s known, has plume-like flowers ranging in color from dark crimson to orange and golden yellow. Tall varieties grow to 30 inches and dwarf forms grow to about a foot. I tend to grow the dwarf varieties.

Do you grow Celosia in your garden?





Getting extra exercise this week

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I can’t believe all the snow we’re getting. Apparently, we’re getting enough snow this week to equal half the amount we normally get all winter. Last year we had a lot more snow than we normally get in Toronto too. It kind of makes it hard to believe we’re experiencing Global Warming when our city, that normally has a light snow fall that melts within a day or two of falling, is now getting snow that lasts the whole winter. In large quantities.

Well at least this week there’s no need to take diet pills or even go to work out in a gym as we’re getting enough exercise shoveling and pushing snow around. Even walking in the stuff must burn extra calories as it’s much harder to walk over an un-shoveled sidewalk than it is to walk over a snow free one!

It’s also been terribly cold here this week. -20 Celsius (-4 F) with the windchill! I’m sure that’s bound to increase the metabolism as we struggle to stay warm when we’re taking our dog for a walk or shoveling, shoveling, shoveling.

How’s your first day of winter going?

Are all Labrador Retrievers hyper until their three?

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We are approaching the year and a half mark with our Labrador Retriever puppy Midnight. Ok well she’s 16 months old, but that’s close enough. Every time we run into another Lab owner, especially those with older dogs they keep telling us that she’ll calm down when she’s three.

Is it true?

Please tell me it is? Please???

Midnight is an attention hog. She’ll play on her own with her toys, but she much prefers to be with us. As in, in our faces!

We’re finally getting her to take walks a little nicer. We tried harnesses and a comfort lead and they didn’t stop her from pulling us off our feet on walks so now we’re using a prong collar on her and it’s working wonderfully.

She’s still hyper outdoors though. She gets so excited when she sees new people or other dogs. It’s nuts and well … downright embarrassing at times. None of the other dogs we run into seem to be quite as hyper as she is.

She is well behaved. She does listen. It’s just that she has so much energy building up inside of her that she’s a handful to manage.

How do other Lab owners cope during those first three or so years?

Our Hibiscus is blooming indoors

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In early November I finally got around to bringing our small Hibiscus shrub indoors for the winter. I usually bring it, and my other tropical plants and vines indoors sometime in October but I was a little late this year.

Being late didn’t seem to do my plants any harm. In fact, my hibiscus is very happy if it’s abundant blooms mean anything at all!

IMG_1138

I have the small hibiscus in my kitchen and I almost think it’s blooming more indoors than it did when it was outside during the summer.

One bonus to growing hibiscus is that we can use the flowers as food for our box turtles. Yes, the turtles occasionally get to snack on a coral colored hibiscus blooms that’s almost as large as they are. They love them!

Even my Labrador Retriever puppy seems to like the flowers. One dead flower fell to the floor a few days ago and as I was picking it up to put it in the trash I noticed Midnight looking at it with interest and I thought, well the turtles eat the flowers and they are perfectly safe to eat so why not see if she’ll eat it? She promptly took off with the flower to her doggy bed – her special place to eat treats and stolen treasures (dads socks, tissue boxes and so on) and munched on the flower.

If the hibiscus keeps blooming through the winter I guess I have three pets that can enjoy the occasional flower treat. Well … after we’ve enjoyed the visual treat of seeing such lovely flowers indoors, I mean.

What are your favorite Firefox Addons?

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I was just writing on my main blog about my quest to find an addon for Firefox 3 that will let me open multiple links in new tabs. You know, when you want to visit several sites on a blogroll … it’s nice to be able to open 10 or 20 links in new tabs at once.

I used to have an addon called Linky but that doesn’t work with Firefox 3 so I’m looking for a replacement.

My quest also made me wonder what your favorite Firefox addons are?

I don’t like to use too many addons as I find it slows down my browser, but there are a few that I really like to use:

Twitterfox – allows you to see new tweets in a browser popup.

Stumbleupon – the Stumbleupon toolbar. I only enable it when I want to stumble.

SEO for firefox

SearchStatus – displays the Google pagerank, Alexa and Compete ranks of sites being viewed.

Google toolbar

Google Gears – helps pages load faster

Entrecard toolbar- makes it much easier to view Entrecard sites

Adsense notifier – allows you to see your Adsense totals in the status area or top of your browser.

So what Firefox addons do you like to use?

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