Uninterested Grandparents
Jensor04
18 years ago
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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 MoreAnother wedding question(s)
Comments (54)Ah, weddings. My son is getting married in June and they've planned it as a late afternoon ceremony on the beach next to a lighthouse on the Eastern Shore, followed by a reception in a maritime museum on the same property. It's very appropriate for the couple; she is a Coast Guard academy grad who recently left the military for a job at a major cruise line and he is a federal law enforcement agent at a maritime national park. Her family is local to the MD area although the couple lives here in SoFla. Hopefully the weather will cooperate but if not she's going to move everyone into the assembly space. Very fond of my future DIL but it's an interesting experience being the grooms' parents; we've not been consulted or informed much about plans other than told if we ask. No wedding attendants, and evidently no desire for any variant of rehearsal dinner--I offered to host extended family for a nice private dinner or even do a cocktail reception the night before the wedding for all the guests but the kids haven't taken me up on it so I"m following the MIL 3-S mantra: show up, sit down and shut up :). I keep telling my (only) daughter that she better let me organize a big fat wedding someday LOL. And ardent feminist that she is, she keeps telling me not to count on it!...See MoreSaving Roses for your Family
Comments (20)Rosefolly - that needlework workstand is a treasure. So glad that it will be in an appropriate museum. I have a friend whose family (on all sides that they know of) is/was Pennsylvania Dutch (which is really, of course, German). Their ancestors arrived mostly in the late 17th century. They have even found about 8 generations of graves! Anyway, most of them were of course, farmers. I get the idea that the German culture involves saving/keeping things (that is how my DH and I ended up with so many antique family heirlooms - his father's family were German immigrants in the late 19th century). My friend and her mother have houses full of wonderful things - all from previous generations who lived on farms: many 100+ year old hand made quilts, dower chests hand painted with PA Dutch decorations, elaborate hand made Christmas and Easter decorations, elaborate hand painted frockters (don't know how to spell it - it is papers recording births, deaths, etc), etc. Some stuff has gone to museums, as they did not want them, but knew what they were. My two favorite of these were: dozens and dozens of hand made cookie cutters (they did keep out some for the younger generations) - in every shape you can imagine, and a small metal can about 3 feet tall (which looks just like a garbage can) decorated with candle soot in a fashion that the curator at the local museum said was typical of the 18th century - he was drooling over it. My friend's mother lives in a split level modern house. It has one large wall of brick in the living room. On it are hanging old pitch forks, a plow horse harness, tools, and all sorts of other interesting farm stuff. So, for families to have lovely family heirlooms, ancestors do not have to be wealthy, they just have to save things and care about passing them down. Jackie P.S. This family did loose one thing for the same reason you mentioned, garden nut. Only 3 generations back my friend's great grandparents had owned a real Tiffany lamp - they have photos of it. You got it - it was given away because it was "old fashioned". The family is still mourning it, and believe me, THAT will never happen again!...See MoreSketcher25
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