If he's stumbling into vegetable gardening, "Commonsense Vegetable Gardening for the South" is my Bible for veggie gardening. Having grown up in Illinois and spending 10 years in Alaska, the timing of when to plant here in Texas was my biggest obstacle. You can grow various things year-round, you just need to know when to plant, and what varieties do well here. This book is great for that. When he gets good, then he can experiment! This book is out of print, but you can generally find them used on Amazon. The authors have a new one out called "The Southern Kitchen Garden," but I really like the old one better. Here is a link that might be useful: Commonsense Vegetable Gardening Book

Sounds like you are keeping busy--and out of trouble! Years ago we went thru London but I imagine things have changed. Seemed to remember it was a nice little town. Hope your winter is warmer than ours, but since Canada shared, guess we have to take what we get. Do enjoy your comments and have a great day. Marie

I also had taken a Time Magazine offer from The Company Store when I ordered some bedding (nice products). Forgot all about it and never received the magazines. Later I noticed it on my cc bill and found they had charged me something like $70/yr for something like three years. I don't like the automatic renewals, either. I just don't want to have to babysit all that stuff. And make sure I get/find the little reminder postcard in the mail ... I did start putting it on my pc calendar alerts though and finally just cancelled everything. I've noticed recently, when making purchases in brick & mortar stores, that I'm finding frequent mistakes. Like I buy something that says there's a sale, get home, and see they actually charged the full price. Or that I was charged a different price. Something else happened recently but I can't recall, but I was being charged too much again. Starting to feel intentional, say, with all the high gas prices or something.

Mtn: Oh, gosh, that is embarrassing. It looks like I read your post, got the idea, and then forgot WHERE I got the idea. Ooh, boy, creeping senescence... I am not concerned that slate used as a floor tile would not be food safe. I suppose your concern is not the slate, but a chemical sealer? My understanding is that slate is usually not pre-sealed. Moreover, I really doubt that they pre-seal the stuff at this price point; it certainly did not seem sealed, as water did not bead on it and it soaked the oil right up. And sealer, which is meant to bind chemically tightly to stone, seems unlikely to be transferred to cheese anyway. I did run it through the dishwasher before gluing on the backing foam. Yes, the square shape of the cheeseboard looks a little off. I had been sort of intending to cut mine to something like 7.5" x 12" (golden mean), but I didn't feel like filling the water tray of the wet saw. So, instead, I googled for images of slate cheeseboards, and saw enough square ones to decide to just go with it. The other "flaw" is that the edges are square. Most of the cheeseboards you see commercially have more rustic edges. I figured I would just whack the edges of my tile with a margin trowel or tack hammer, and spall the edges nicely. Well, it wasn't happening; I was just making small chips in the edge, rather than causing any of the lamellae to delaminate. I then decided that square edges were acceptable in a cheeseboard :-)