Uninterested Grandparents
Jensor04
18 years ago
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daisyinga
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A cry for Help for my Bird of Paradise (Pics)
Comments (29)Toni: Luke is just a 'mutt', as they say. The best guess is part border collie and part blue-tick hound. We adopted him about 3 years ago from the elderly neighbor lady. She'd been walking him and fell and was hurt. She asked us to just watch him for awhile, but my then 8 y.o. DD really fell for him, and we ended up keeping him (her adult kids advised her to give him up, and she obliged.) It has worked out nicely, as she still gets to visit him, and occasionally he'll wander over there (we live in the country) and she'll have him spend the night....lol...funny! He was probably at least 2-3 years old when we got him, so he'd be 5 or 6 now, but still has a lot of 'puppy' left in him. He weighs about 75 pounds, so not exactly a 'lap dog'! It has been made clear to Luke that he is NOT the alpha-dog...and we humans aren't the ones who clarified the point, if you know what I mean! Harley (the 11 y.o. small dog)tries hard to keep up with Luke..it keeps him 'spry'! Our dogs chew on grass outdoors, but they have never bothered any of the indoor plants in that way - Harley will occasionally bury a treat in a large potted plant (grr) but that's the only way they've ever really bothered my plants. The cats chewed the ends of the leaves of my Beaucarnea but never any other plants. Maybe the dogs just know better than to mess w/Mama's plants?! (I like to think so)(Ã) jasdip...I'm still thinking 'previous cold-damage', but just my opinion....keep us posted!...See MoreHelp push me in a direction
Comments (18)Matt, Is the soil sandy? If it is, be very careful with raised beds because raised beds of very sandy soil/sandy loam in our climate can dry out very quickly. I am south of you between Marietta and Thackerville but have mostly dense red clay, so we have built raised beds that sit between 4 and 8" above grade in our main garden. Even those will dry out faster than I like in summer, but we have to have them raised somewhat in order to have good enough drainage when we have the occasional flooding rainfall. At the end of the garden where we have a band of sandy soil on the west end, the beds aren't really raised above grade level. It is just that the slope of the land drops so quickly that they look raised. This year we are adding another growing plot in a different location from our big garden. It has very sandy soil in much of it and just one area with dense clay. When I improve the sandy soil, I will add clay soil to it (dug from other places on our rural property) in order to help it hold water. Otherwise, I think my sandy area will drain too quickly in summer, even with organic matter added to it. You have to consider the slope of your land and the way water drains from the land when you put in your garden. You want for your raised beds to run crosswise--across the slope, not with the slope. If you make the beds run across the slope, each raised bed with catch and hold rainfall and generally will keep most of the soil in the raised bed. If you run you beds up and down with the slope, soil will run downhill with the rain and you'll have constant erosion issues. If your soil is very sandy, you'll need to enrich it with organic matter that will help it hold moisture and that also will improve its fertility. If you have dense clay, amending it with organic matter is just as important. An irrigation system, whether you use some form of drip irrigation like T-tape or whether you use soaker hoses will help keep the garden well-watered and moist. Mulching helps conserve moisture and keeps the soil cool as well. Avoid overhead watering because moisture on the plant foliage can contribute to all sorts of diseases. There are lots of ways to garden with children and make it fun. Planting a pizza garden is a popular activity and if you Google, you'll likely find all kinds of plans for pizza gardens. Many school gardens plant a pizza garden to help get first-time gardeners interested in the process. Giving each child their own small raised bed and letting them plant it and tend it can turn kids into little gardeners. When our son and nieces and nephews were young I loved planting a superized bean teepee not just with beans but also with mini pumpkins, small decorative gourds, cucumbers and/or sugar snap peas in spring or pole type southern peas in the summer. I made the TP big enough that 2 or 3 kids or a kid and a dog could sit inside the TP and play. I just left one pole out of the teepee in order to have a 'doorway'. I also made sunflower houses for the girls or sunflower forts for the boys by planting the sunflowers in a cube shape to form 4 walls. Then, once the sunflowers were a couple of feet tall, I sowed morning glory or other vining plant seeds at the base of each sunflower. The vines climbed the sunflowers to fill in the walls. For a 'roof' I ran garden twine back and forth between the sun flower walls about 6' above the ground and the morning glories grew across the twine and made a roof. You also could use some sort of edible crop instead of morning glories if you want. Be sure to leave an open space for the doorway. You also can create a bean or cherry tomato arch or tunnel where the kids can play beneath the arch or tunnel once it is shady while harvesting tomatoes or beans from it. Different kids get interested in different things. DH's best friend's grandson wasn't that crazy about the garden except for the watermelons. We grew mini refrigerator melons and he loved to search through the vines to find a melon or two to take home and eat. He also liked the cantaloupes, cherry tomatoes and eggs gathered fresh from our chicken coop. Because we had a lily pond in the backyard, we always had frogs, toads and turtles and he enjoyed the water garden as much as the vegetable, herb, flower and fruit garden. Another young child who often visited our garden really just wanted to play in the dirt, though she did like picking and eating fresh strawberries too. She was pretty young so was more interested in the flowers than in the edible crops the first year. Even kids who don't like veggies in general often will develop a taste for their own veggies as grown in their own gardens. If your pizza-eating son doesn't develop a fondness for veggies, you still could encourage him to grow things that are fun.....like a "zoo garden" full of plants named after animals, or a decorative garden full of gourds, pumpkins and red stalker corn for fall decorations, or an herb garden from which y'all could harvest Italian herbs to flavor home-made pizzas. Sometimes kids who don't get all excited about veggies will get real excited about homegrown peaches, plums strawberries, blackberries, blueberries, grapes, etc. However, fruit plants are more of a long-term thing that may not return much of a harvest for the first couple of years. (It is a great way to teach kids to work towards a long-term goal though.) I'm going to link a great book that is very helpful for beginning gardeners. It has actual layouts of beds, including showing you how you can plant them not only the first year, but in subsequent seasons and years. Then, Google and find the books about gardening with kids by Sharon Lovejoy, like 'Sunflower Houses', 'Roots, Shoots, Buckets and Boots' and the later one that has something about Toad Cottages and Shooting Stars in the title. It is always better to start smaller the first year and add to the garden each year so that you are not biting off more than you can chew that first year. Enact weed control measures very early and keep after the weeds and grass religiously because once you get way behind on the weeds, it is easy to get discouraged and just walk away from it all. Pulling weeds isn't a fun chore for anyone and can really discourage young gardeners from enjoying gardening if they have to spend all the free time pulling weeds. It is better to mulch well early in the season and keep the weeds from establishing in the first place. You success or lack of success hinges on the soil more than anything else, so improve it first. Even when we built raised beds above the grade, we still improved the soil as deeply as we would beneath the raised bed areas before we built them. At first, because we had dense clay, we could only dig or rototill to a depth of 6 to 8" because the ground was so compacted. We enriched that soil and built raised beds above it, and now we can dig down a couple of feet after 14 years of gardening in those beds. Every year the soil gets better and better, but in order for that to happen you have to keep adding organic matter to feed the soil as it breaks down. In our climate, heat eats compost, and eats it up quickly, so amending the soil is a constant job, not a one-time thing. Good luck and keep us posted on how it is going. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: Starter Vegetable Gardens...See MoreUninterested Grandparents
Comments (19)Iarsk, I hope you can manage to not take this personally. It is true, some people are just not interested in children. I'm one of them. We had 5 children in a less than 4 year span. For 20 years our life was completely devoted to them, the farm, the family. Truth is, we're just plain tired and want to do things ourselves now. Yes, we see all the 6 (so far) grandchildren. But we both breathe a sigh of relief when they are gone, and usually just fall into bed. I'm not much of a 'hands-on' grandma. I don't want to babysit, I don't offer advise, (but will give my best guess when asked.) Well, 2 of the grandchildren are just tiny, not old enough to 'play' with yet. The other 4 are like whirling dirvishes, never slow down for a moment. Their mother doesn't seem to mind that, but it's hard on us. I doubt your parents, neither dad nor his wife, are trying to be hurtful. Not all of us are meant to be caregivers for our entire lifespans. Some of us do the very best we can with utter attention and devotion to raise our own families, then we feel like we're done, and want to move on to other things in life. Just enjoy your babies. Appreciate every age and every stage. Maybe some day you, too, will want to be more removed from childrearing. You never know. j...See Morehow to decide what 'heirlooms' to keep for your kids
Comments (24)I found this old thread while searching. I plan to make a shadow box type thing (glass covered) that covers a wall at the bottom of the stairs going to the basement. I want to make a section for each member of my family and each set of grandparents as far back as I have room or keepsakes to complete it. On the topic of what to save for your children, I thought of what I have planned to use for my keepsake wall. I am choosing items that tell "who" that person was. (When I get past the grandparents, I have to take what I can get:)). For my paternal grandma, I have her old Kerr canning guide, the beat up old aluminum canning funnel and a dipper. She was an amateur prospector so I have her gold panning pan and a little digging tool. She was a quilter and I have a couple of quilt tops that she never got to finish. And so it goes for the other grandparents. Just little things that would not be valuable in themselves. My point is, what I think my children would want, they may not want and might wish I had saved something else. I'm sure my grandmother would never have dreamed I would want that old canning funnel, but it tells who she was. She canned thousands of jars of food in her lifetime and was generous in sharing it with those who needed it. Thankfully, my mom is going through all hers and Daddy's stuff now. She said she didn't want me to have to do it after they died. But she boxes everything up in categories, has me and my kids look through it to see if there is anything we want, then sends the rest to Goodwill or whatever. That's how I got my grandma's canning stuff. Anyway, items telling who a person is and what they stood for is my idea for saving heirlooms....See MoreSketcher25
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