Penny, in future, you can spray straight commercial strength (in the grocery store it is usually 3%) hydrogen peroxide on the plants with powdery mildew. It does a great job of getting rid of it. I've also used a dried potassium carbonate or sodium bicarbonate (baking soda) to get rid of it. You might want to spray one week, wait, and go spray again, see if it helps. Also of you soak cornmeal in water and then spray the water, that's a great anti-fungal. You can also sprinkle corn meal on the ground - it acts both like an antifungal and a fertilizer.

Mildew and bugs mean the plant is in distress, it is stressed by something in the environment. Is the drainage wrong or the sunlight wrong where you've planted things? Look to the conditions and you might find why the pests have come in to clear out the dying plant.

Daughter was down for our belated mother's day lunch. We're negotiating the swapping out of devices this week - my son used my mp3 player when I was driving (his died last fall), but I ended up giving mine to my daughter this weekend. I use it for the radio, mostly, and hers (same model, smaller capacity) has been in use for at least 3 years and small and almost kaput. Her brother in the meantime has used and killed 3 of them, and wants something different next time (he's careful, but he uses them so much they wear out). Meanwhile, my son has a small 10mpx camera graduation gift that he never uses. He's giving that to his sister - we can't afford to have these things around and not use them, and she uses a camera a lot. And I have a small LCD television that he took for his dorm room but never used. It's in my kitchen.

A long dog walk is in order this evening. The girls got their annual immunizations today and were good girls for that (a shot clinic held in the village one day a year).

I'm caught up now - I'll try to keep my posts more readable.

SRS