Uninterested Grandparents
Jensor04
18 years ago
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daisyinga
10 years agolast modified: 9 years agoelisa_z5
10 years agolast modified: 9 years agoRelated Discussions
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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 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 MoreIs it just me or does everyone look to have a magazine home?
Comments (151)"Let's face it, the "magazine homes" are occupied by the wealthy, it's hard to compete if that's your inclination." Hmmmmm...I'd say that may have been true before but in this day and age of blogging and sites like Apartment Therapy, there seem to be (to me, at least) lot of homes that are truly photogenic that are tiny or well appointed or very cleverly decorated utilizing a relatively small budget. My mom has always had a talent for decorating--I would say her home is pretty much always "photo ready" and much of it is from garage sales, refurbished, or even recycled curbside throwaways. Her sisters have equally beautifully decorated homes. I also enjoy the challenge of creating an asthetically pleasing home while staying within a budget. I would say the shared common denominator is a talent for finding objects that mesh well to form a kind of cohesive theme as opposed to simply having an unlimited budget to purchase the latest trends. Some of it is the ability to see and replicate patterns that tie rooms together. I can look at my mom's home and see how she uses what she has to tie in the view of her gardens (that my dad has worked so hard on) that we can all see from her living room windows and bring that into her home. It can be a kind of "tuning into your environment" in a kind of unconscious way (did I use that word correctly? Lol) that a lot of people lack. That being said, decorating is simply the ability to arrange objects in a pleasing manner. There are many talents I would kill to have; the trick is to enjoy the ones you are blessed with....See MoreIs formal dining room dead?
Comments (150)Well this thread has almost reached its end. I think that dianalo and lax have so many good points. Lots of others also but I can't go back again and make note of all of them. For the most part the parents are trying so hard and are doing the best they know how. I don't know how anyone can ask or want more. I made a point of saying we ate dinner together every night. We did. And that it didn't matter where you ate together ...in a tent or where ever. We talked and laughed and cried and sometimes I yelled and stormed at the kids too. It was not all perfect and rose colored. My DH and I did the best we knew how given the patterns we grew up with .I think we did a great job. Our kids are well into adult-hood now. They have a range of behaviors that are full spectrum from in/out of jail and mental illness to productive well-adjusted employed to alcoholic to sweetest and kindest to most self-centered impossible out of control anger...this is the same person...all in this one family...it is also parts of the other 2 children. We all ate at the same table and loved and learned together. All of the children have told us in recent weeks how much we mean to them and how much they love us...while one or another was exhibiting the above behaviors in the past months . As parents there is simply no job that is harder or more heartbreaking or more rewarding. Most of us try to do our best. We ate together and I am the first to admit that sometimes we would have been better off being in separate rooms. So be it. We did the best we could and the kids know this. I know this...I still feel guilty every day for the times that I made big mistakes. I am trying to let that guilt go. But when the phone rings in the middle of the night...it all comes back. This started as a conversation about the DR. Yes we have had one since 1979. Has it made a difference in my life or DH's or our children's ? No. Has the time we have spent with them reading stories in their room ? Yes...more than any other time ever ever spent they still all talk about the books that we read them. Time spent and the love generated in that time... still none of it is a guarantee . c...See MoreSketcher25
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