Merry Christmas !! I had just ordered Smart-pot in 10 gallon, only $9.97 from Amazon (free shipping). I'll buy 3 blueberry bushes this spring (Walmart sells them), put 2 in SmartPot, and 1 in the ground. Didn't know that I need 2 or more blueberry bushes to pollinate each other. Info. from About.com: " Fertilizing blueberries - Blueberries don’t like too much fertilizer. Twice a year in the early spring works well. For organic fertilizer try blood or cottonseed meal, or a fertilizer designed for acid loving plants. Blueberries need friends – To get your blueberries to fruit, you will need at least two blueberry plants for pollination, three plants is even better and they need to be placed relatively close together. Also it’s a good idea to grow a couple of different varieties of blueberries, because they will produce fruit at different times and extending your blueberry season. Protect your blueberries – While growing blueberries you’ll have few pests to worry about other than birds. To protect your fruit from feathered poachers, you can cover your bushes with a light sheet or netting, a few weeks before the berries are ripe." Sam: Do you protect your blueberries from birds? If I put Smart-pot right next to the patio, hopefully there's less pests. I re-post the info. that Bluegirl wrote on pine-fines to buy from Lowe's. I would need 1/4 pine fines with 3/4 potting soil to create the acidic soil for blueberries. Bluegirl in Texas wrote: "I think Amazon has the sulfate of potash for ~ $11 still. See if your Lowes carries the mix ours does. It's "HapiGro Landscape Mix", sold in a big clear bag for about four dollars. Almost pure pine fines to look at it. Here are some photos, the bag is kind of faded, it's a mostly clear bag with white on front. dry stuff inside--looks to be mostly fine pine bark with a nugget or two of perlite. THis is some moist stuff from inside a bucket--finger for size. Pictures & info. above are from Bluegirl in Texas. THANK YOU, Bluegirl, for allowing me to post your info.

See below link in Organic Rose forum .. everyone is welcomed there to post on organic gardening & healthy eating & losing weight. I will post my daily progress in the below link, and I hope you'll join me so we can motivate & inspire one another to take better care of ourselves ... that's more important than gardening or roses. http://forums.gardenweb.com/discussions/3579603/12-29-15-foods-to-lose-weight-daily-journal-toward-health-and-joy

Hi aztcqn: Agree that corn-fed, zero-sun, and hormone & antibiotics injections mess up milk. Same with soy: we eat tons of soy in Vietnam: soy milk, tofu everyday, and the skinny Buddhist monks there eat soy daily since they are vegetarians. No one ever have a thyroid problem in Vietnam, and the soy back then WAS NOT GENETICALLY MODIFIED, nor doused with pesticides like the soy in America. I did a thread on the problem with soy in Organic Rose, where I dug up research on carrageenan additive in soy which irritate the body, that's the same stuff they add in ice-cream & coffee creamer. Carrageenan is inflammatory to the thyroid. Also the aluminum equipment they use to press soy in making tofu. raise the aluminum levels to brain-damaging level. I stopped eating tofu after I posted that in Organic Rose. My Mom's tofu in Vietnam tasted yummier, because she used Organic, non-genetically modified soy, plus she used stones to press tofu, rather than aluminum. I use soy products for my entire life, but stopped for a few years 2013, 2014, & most of 2015 when genetically-modified soy-milk with added carrageenan upset my stomach greatly. I came back to soy late 2015, after they take out carrageenan, and the SILK Organic soy is certified 100% non-genetically modified. I get my thyroid tested yearly for decades: zero problems. My kid's friend who drinks 3 glasses of cow-milk per day is tested hypo-thyroid, and is on thyroid medication. My kid had the WORST time ever on cow-milk. She was a happy kid, being fed with soy-milk after 3-year-old (I breast-fed her before then). When she reached puberty (11 year) .. that's when we took her off soy, and put her on cow-milk, plus plenty of ice-cream. Her hormones went out of whack with the many hormones added to cow-milk. She got depressed, she grew body hair & acne, her period was heavy, diarrhea & stinky gas, horrible mood-swings with crying, her blood test showed high-testosterone. We put her back on soy-milk late in 2015: big improvement, body hair & acne reduced, less mood-swings & crying. She's happy & energetic, her grades shot up. we use non-genetically modified, no carrageenan ORGANIC silk soy. Her thyroid is always normal. What I like about soy-milk is IT'S CLEAN, I can rinse the glass off, and it's not stinky like cow-milk. Soy milk doesn't have added hormones, antibiotics, or pain-killers nor contaminated with feces and pus (from mastitis, UP with Monsanto hormone). With cow milk, I have to wash with serious-soap twice to get rid of the stinky smell, very much like chicken or eggs. Cow-milk is allowed by the FDA to contain added hormones, plus a % of feces and pus. The safest milk is coconut milk ... my kid used it before with zero harm on her hormones, but coconut milk has no protein to fill her up for breakfast like soy milk. We need protein & fat in our cold zone 5a, when it gets down below zero in the morning. Sometimes I mix 1/2 coconut milk and 1/2 soy milk, to get both fat and protein. Some cow-milk also contain antibiotics, see excerpt from Time Magazine, March 2015: http://time.com/3738069/fda-dairy-farmers-antibiotics-milk/ "Milk intended for commercial sale is tested for six commonly used antibiotics, NPR reports, and any shipment that tests positive for drug residue is barred from ever making it to the supermarket. Because of that, farmers only use antibiotics on the dairy cows when the cows’ health requires it, and they put those cows’ milk production on hold. The FDA has learned, however, that some farmers use antibiotics that aren’t even intended for cows because the drugs go undetected by these tests. The agency studied milk from close to 2,000 dairy farms, roughly half of which were under suspicion, and half of which were random samples. More than 1% of the under-suspicion group, and .4% of the other samples, tested positive for six antibiotics not FDA-approved for use on dairy cows."

I think at some point I will perhaps get into this "kefir-ing" but not right yet. I am just super busy. Don't know if I will be any more successful than I was at "sourdough-ing" which I tried at the beginning of the pandemic. The problem with that was, we just don't eat enough baked goods to make it worthwhile expending the time and energy maintaining a starter. Even the lowest maintenance options. We just don't eat a lot of baked goods. I'd love to eat more, but it just can't happen for a whole lot of reasons. On the flip side, kefir sounds like something we would consume on a daily basis, either water or milk. I can get good dairy kefir with live cultures at my local grocery, but it is something like 4-5 dollars a pint so I don't normally buy it. But I will take you all up on the offers of help at some point if I can. Kefir water sounds great because I actually don't like plain water. Practically have to force it down. For whatever reason plain water does not sit well with me. I often drink flavored soda water but that's not the cheapest way to stay hydrated. Am slowly recovering the use of my digestive tract. Ironically, I don't eat many of the fodmap foods anyway, not a fan of onions and garlic, although I do eat them in small amounts, and I rarely eat fresh pears or apples. Hubs eats and apple a day, but not me. That's because of the aforementioned dislike of drinking water, so I often dilute water with fruit juice, and that's how I have tended to consume my fruit calories a lot of the time. I drink a lot of cider and apple juice, don't know if that contributes to digestive issues, I think not but I can certainly cut down on the apple juice . . . the other fodmap no-no that I eat regularly though, is beans. But I've been eating beans my whole adult vegetarian life. I think with them the issue is being well-soaked ahead of time, and cooked, and the skins broken down or sieved out. Also the time of day you eat them, earlier is much better since stuff moves through your digestive tract (when it is functioning properly) faster during the day when you are up and moving. I have been limiting my bean intake and also pureeing the beans, which takes some of the digestive issues off the table . . .