OK, y'all, this thread is so active I can hardy keep up, but I am going to try. Melissa, We are so glad you stumbled across this forum too. Containers are a great way to garden but they do require very careful attention to watering. Also, the soilless mix to fill them is expensive (often, when filling up my containers, I mix up my own soilless mix for far less than I'd spend buying a name brand soil-less mix/potting soil). The size/productivity of your plants is limited by the size of your container so for most things, the larger the container, the better. Also, during periods of hotter weather, containers may need to be watered daily and in the hottest 100-degree-plus weather, perhaps twice a day. The easiest way is to hook up a drip irrigation system and put it on a timer, especially if you are away from home a lot. Container gardening could be a whole thread in itself. I'll start a container gardening thread today or tomorrow and try to lay out some of the basics. Containers do not have to be fancy containers though....I use Tidy Cat litter buckets, which I have saved and used the whole decade-plus that we've lived here, and I spray paint them dark green using Fusion paint made especially for painting plastics. I also use Sunleaves grow bags. With clay soil, it takes years of constant amending to get it into really good shape. In the past I have only expanded my garden a little at a time....by adding an area maybe 40 to 60 feet long by 5 to 6 feet wide. Gumbo clay needs all the help it can get but it can be turned into great soil over a period of time. Our formerly red clay in the garden area is now a nice brown clayey loam because we've added organic matter to it for ten years, so I finally feel ready to start another garden spot....in three different places. However, they all will get fairly minimal improvement this winter (because I'm going to be working on 3 fairly large areas at once) and then every year I'll improve them more until they finally have pretty good soil. With clay the issue is that the particles of soil stick together and the prevents water from soaking in as well as it should, it also ensures that when the soil dries it is as hard and impenetrable as concrete so water just rolls off the surface and doesn't soak in, and it makes it hard for plant roots to grow. Technically, plant roots do not grow in soil. Rather, they grow in the air spaces between soil particles. Clay soil particles clump together so tightly that there are no air spaces for roots to grow in, and that's why we have to add tons of organic matter....to break up the particles of gumbo clay. The reason raised beds work so well with clay is that they put your plant roots in improved soil above the regular grade of the surrounding area. That allows water to drain down out of the beds to a certain extent. When 12.4 inches of rain fell here at our house in one day last year, I expected to lose my entire garden. You cannot expect ANY vegetable plant to survive that kind of flooding rainfall in clay soil. What did I lose? Only some onions and potatoes and a few corn plants that were not in a raised bed. Had I not had raised beds, I would have lost everything. George, We get more of the bermuda grass out by hand tools too, but in certain areas the ground is so clayey that we have to break it first with a tiller. When we do that, I rake out/remove by hand all the grass runners and stolons I can afterward, but it is hard to get a lot of it because it has been chopped into tiny pieces. Eventually, over several years time, I mostly win the bermuda war. Melissa, For hand tools, buy the absolute highest quality tools you can find and you'll never regret it. A high quality hand tool is a thing of beauty! Jay, I have bindweed in two places here and despite everything I do, it seems impossible to erradicate. Some years it isn't as bad, and this was one of those years....or maybe I am gradually winning the war. I hate bindweed as much as I hate bermuda grass and Johnson grass. Carol, I love containers and have found them to be lifesavers in very wet years like 2007. None of the plants I have in containers come close to approaching the size/productivity those same varieties achieve in the ground, but they do well enough to satisfy me. This year, there were several tomatoes that produced exceptionally well in feed tubs....including Chocolate Stripes, Momotaro and Scarlet Red. I wish I had 100 more feed tubs (I only have six). Y'all, I have to agree that no one looks the way I pictured them but.....I am going to stay on everybody's good side by saying that every person I met at the swap that I had not met before was younger, thinner and prettier than I had imagined. The one thing I already knew though was that every one one of them had a big heart of gold beating there in their chest and that was confirmed when I met them. Dawn

Moderators: Now there are three (3) reported Whoops! threads. The one on Home Decorating is six (6) months old. This is the latest: http://forums.gardenweb.com/forums/load/cottage/con060921427610.html

Hmmm...it should have appeared on the first page at the top....below the unanswered threads.....I did a search and found it and then bumped it too...still no dice! It's always worked before?????? Oh, to insert a link in a thread, there are two ways: If you only have one, the easiest way is to use the "Optional Link URL" and "Name of Link" boxes. If you look below the "Post a Follow-up" Message box you will see the boxes. Note: If you are starting a NEW thread, those boxes don't show up until you "Preview" the message...you can then fill them in. If you have more than one or you want to embed it in your message, use the following BUT replace the square brackets ([ and ]) with angle brackets (): [a href= http://www.XXX]Description[/a] Replace the http://www.XXX with the URL you want to link to Replace Description with the text you want displayed To produce this link to Lands' End, I inserted the following where the words "Land's End" appear: [a href= http://www.landsend.com/]Lands' End[/a] Remembering to replace the [ with HTH!

I've told about this on another forum....so forgive me if I mentioned here as well. I had a friend in the town where I used to live. After I moved away, I called or went to see him once in awhile. But I hadn't seen him in about three months, and I called him and his phone was shut off. He had emphysema and after the diagnosis, he wouldn't go to the doctor any more. He was a heavy smoker and his doctor had been his family doctor and he chastised him so severely, Ken just quit going. After I moved away, he went down hill. I truly was his only friend. He had others when he used to work, but he had retired at 55 and no friends close by and he became more of a loner. Anyway, I thought he had died and no one told me. As odd a person as he was.....his family was more so, and even though they knew I was his closest friend, I knew they wouldn't bother to tell me if he had passed. So, I rushed over there. He came to the door in his underwear...long beard and hair. He had never been like that. One of the neatest people I had ever known...always shaved and kept his hair trimmed. He had no food in the house. Wine bottles stacked like cordwood in all of his cabinets. Hadn't been to the post office or paid any bills. Didn't know his phone had been cut off. I was sure he was going to die any minute. He wouldn't go to the doctor or let me call any of his family...His sister lived next door on one side, also a niece, and a nephew on the corner and his ex wife on the other side and one of his son's lived with his ex. I cleaned his house. Bought food for him, Went to the liquor store and bought his wine...he didn't need to be driving and he wasn't going to quit drinking,..or smoking. Paid his bills and talked to him and promised him I would stay with him....or at least check on him every day. How long could he live? A couple of weeks? A month? How about eight years! Went to see him every day and up to four times a day at the end. Slept on the floor many times to be with him. Arranged for someone to cut his hair and shave him and mow the grass. The last four years of his life, he never left the house. He refused to go to the doctor or let me call his family. I abided by his wishes in every way. He kept a loaded 45 revolver under his pillow. I never tried to take it from him. He said he would shoot himself if he felt he had to. I felt like that was his option. I didn't think he would, but I knew having the gun there was a comfort to him, as odd as that may sound to some people. He was always independent and had to be in control of something, and at this point, that was about the only thing he could control. We had talked about many things, all the years I had known him. Being there every day, we talked much more. He didn't believe in life after death. I asked him to please give me a sign after he passed. He reluctantly said he would...mostly to mollify me. After he died, I had a dream about him. In the dream, I was in a hospital bed and I was dying. People were standing around the foot of the bed and Ken was at the foot of the bed, but he walked out of the room. My dream shifted then, and I was walking down my driveway. He had given me his truck, and folded up between the side mirror and the body of the truck, was three pages of notebook paper, and on it, writing in pencil. Ken used to write to me when he couldn't see me, and it would be about many subjects...history, investing, football, song writing and writers, songs he had written, and on and on. Always in pencil and always on notebook paper. I started reading it and he said he was sorry he had left the room when I was "dying". He thought I was very brave but he couldn't stand to see me die. (When his cat needed to be put down, I did it....he couldn't, so that is just like him). Before I could read the rest of it, I woke up. I had several other brief dreams about him, but one day, he called me on the phone, and he said, "Why don't you come see me anymore?" I didn't want to tell him he had died and his niece that he didn't like was living in his house, so I said, "You don't live where you used to." He said, "What?!" So, I told him, "Ken, you died." And this is so typical of him......he said, "Are you sure about that?" That is exactly like him. If I told him something he wasn't aware of....he always said, "Are you sure about that?" End of dream. And yes, that could be all my doing....dreams like that, but not long ago, I dreamed about him again. We were talking, and in my dreams, when I dream about him, it is always just like he is really here....so much like him. But, I woke up and I couldn't remember what we were talking about. I wished I could go back to sleep and dream about him again, and know what it was he was telling me. But, I didn't, and when I got up, later that morning, and walked around to the foot of my bed, there was a letter K, in handwriting, at the foot of my bed. It was formed by many little drops of water. No water in the room. No one here but me. One cat....still asleep on the *water. I didn't take a picture of it at first and it started to fade, but I did take a picture, and it is on my phone. I will post it later. *Edited: Cat still asleep on the bed....not on the water...