Patch of Coneflowers

Patch of Coneflowers
Echinacea purpurea
(ek-in-AY-shee-a) (pur-PUR-ee-uh)

Pink and White Coneflower go together nicely. When we plant something like this I usually select one kind (pink or white) of a standard cultivar (one that grows and flowers strong) with one of the weaker and showier cultivars. There are a lot of Coneflower photos on this site. They are easy to grow and add a lot to the summer garden. If you are faithful about cutting them back after they have their initial bloom you can extend the flowering time by several weeks.

The DVD writer in my computer has not been working well for a couple of months so it has been very frustrating backing up files. Finally I ordered a external DVD/CD burner and it arrived yesterday. I went from 4x to 24x speed and have been burning a whole new set of back up disks. It is hard to describe the feeling of relief that is. The software that came with it is pretty nice. Full copies of ProSoft Data Backup3 and NTI’s Dragon Burn for free. I was literally burning a disk five minutes after opening the box. Last night I backed up the main hard disk (with the system and software files) and made a bootable back up copy of everything.

Among the great stuff for Christmas that Santa left me was a lot of new music. Some CDs and a couple of nice size download cards. So far my favorite has been Chet Atkins, Picks on the Beatles. Of course Chet is probably my all time favorite guitar player and it is interesting to hear how he interpreted the Beatles songs. Not to knock George Harrison but it made me wonder what it would have been like if the Beatles had a guitar player like Chet.

The Coneflower pictures are a little series that moves away for each shot. That is pretty much how I approach a stand of flowers. I tried to force myself to take more group shots last year and it is something I am going to keep after this year.