I didn't used to Facebook, but now I do. I got sucked into FB this Fall by relatives. Certain of my close relatives stopped keeping in touch with me and said that if I wanted to know what they were up to i needed to just join FB. So, I reluctantly joined. Just like Nikki, I sometimes 'lurk' without posting on GW, for months on end... Mainly this happens when I get hit by one or more life crises. Crises that will put my GardenWebbing on hold include: *Family getting military orders to move overseas, which caused me to lose garden space...We were all packed & had sold our home and were in the airport when the orders got cancelled at the last minute and we had to suddenly find another place to live in the same city we thought we were exiting. None of the affordable places to live had any garden space! :P *Looking for a job in a state 2000 miles from where I was raised, to increase family income so we could afford a place with a garden-- This search was hampered by culture shock and racial discrimination. Racism isnt supposed to happen here, but it happens anyway. * Finding job after 5 months then losing said very hard to find job 2 months later, due to global recession. * My husband's surgery to repair an injury * My own severe illnesses and surgeries--I had more than one health emergency last year, possibly due to all the stress. *Grieving loss of family member (includes loss of pregnancy). * Going back to college, then having to drop back out due to economic and health factors. Last year (2009) was insanely stressful for me because I had all of the above crises occur within one year! They say God never gives us more than we can handle. And I handled it alright. But sometimes I wish God didn't trust me to get through so very much, LOL ;) These are the sorts of situations that can easily throw my life out of wack and require me to take a break from GW. It just happened this past year that I needed a really LONG break because my life had just gotten too harsh for me to even keep a garden. Well, I'm glad to finally be back and to have a garden again. :)

Good for you Kathleen. I play the games still but don't really spend a lot of time on them like some of my FB friends do. My brother has been keeping my Farm Town going for me since with my old computer I was unable to play it any more. I have been back lately now I have this laptop but only to plant crops and send my brother fuel. I have joined some of the games because my friends needed neighbours but I don't play them. I'm almost ready to give up Farmville because of the glitches and the same for the new Treasure Isle. I don't know why I started it to begin with. I do like Treasure Madness though because you don't have to put too much time into it. If I am on the computer I spend my time researching genealogy for myself and do look ups for my friends. Even if I am on the computer I don't sit. I am up and down doing the things around the house that need doing. I don't usually turn my computer on until after 7 pm, then turn it off and then back on after 11 pm. Sometimes I will check in during the day and then forget to shut FB down until I noticed the computer shut down because the battery needed charging. I guess I should keep it plugged in. Most of my friends that play the games like Farmville and Farmtown are at a much higher game level than I am because I just don't spend that kind of time playing. LOL With my old computer that was slow it would take me much longer to do anything compared to how fast my friends got things done. LOL Accepting gift requests on FB was very time consuming and took a long time so when I got this laptop I started to go through all of the gifts and accepted some and got rid of the others and most had expired. Every time I got rid of 100 there was another 100 that had been stored and when I got rid of them there was another 100. There was over 1000 gifts that had been sent to me for the games. I couldn't believe it. LOL That is the reason I don't send out very many game gifts to my friends unless they ask for them. Anne

absolutely not.... especially if she wont even have the common decency to talk to you and attempt to be an adult. You have the kids, you take the kids. If she wants to find out how to get to the game she can look it up or if DH so chooses he can give her directions. Bm of my kids tried to do that all of the time.. the whole not talking to me thing.. it is ridiculous and childish... I refused to accept it any more. If she cant talk to me than I cant do the things she wants ...too bad so sad..... the kids will be taken care of always do always will...but I am not playing her games. BM goes on and on with the public show as well... Oh my babies... I understand... I suck it up on that one.. if only for the moment it makes the kids feel good. Ironically enough, right now its football... she rarely shows up for practices and then its oh I am super mom those are my babies blah blah blah... Not that she was the person who paid for a single dime of equipment or anything else, went out found the info, got them signed up, takes them to every practice, weigh in, etc... yeah umm that was me... that is me...but she is super mom... sure right. Same for school I do the homework and hard stuff she shows up for open house all into it like oh my baby needs this or does that so on and so on... it works my very last nerve.. trust I know.

Robert, With 30 bunches of onions, I'd say you could spare one (or more) for the sake of experimentation. To get the really big ones, Dixondale says 21" of water during its growing period and high nitrogen, but with little of that water the last couple of weeks as it nears maturity. I am not sure if you'd need more water than that for onions in containers. I think it would depend on how fast the growing medium drains and, if it drains really quickly, you might need more than 21" since some inevitably will drain out through the container's drainage holes. I've grown onions (and garlic, chives and ornamental alliums) in molasses feed tubs just to have some spiky foliage in containerized plantings of mixed veggies, herbs and flowers. They grew just fine but didn't necessarily get really huge because they were packed in tightly with tons of other stuff. In this instance, I was growing them just to get a certain look in that container, not to produce big bulbs. They do sell Calgon, and we need a special Gardener's Calgon......one that takes us away to a bright sunny garden with soil that's only a tiny bit moist instead of sopping wet and icy. Oh, and the weather would have to be in the 60s so we could be comfortable while planting but not too hot as the cool-season veggies don't need to be too hot too early in the year. Shelley, I'm planning to put my sugar snaps in the ground this weekend too, and nothing is going to stop me. Mine are sprouted in paper cups and starting to get some height to them, so I'll likely have a tangled mess if I cannot get them in the ground soon. I'm moving them out to the greenhouse today to slow them down. It shouldn't get cold enough the next couple of nights to hurt them. Beginning today, I'll be giving them an hour of sunlight per day (if we have an hour of sun) or an hour of cloudy-light, I guess, because they aren't at all hardened off since they've sprouted indoors. The same is true of everything I've got growing indoors. Normally by now it all is hardened off, but those plants are sitting up there on the light shelf upstairs all fat, happy and warm with no hardening off, since it didn't seem smart to try to harden them off while freezing rain, sleet and snow are falling. If we go from 0 to 100 in a very short time frame, and I don't think we will, I'll yank out all the cool-season plants except onions, taters and snap peas and just will rush the warm-season stuff into the ground. Oh, and we'll have the lettuce that has overwintered in the greenhouse, but how well new lettuce would perform would just depend on when we go from cold to hot. I'm not going to mess around with trying to pamper a ton of cool-season crops if heat arrives extra early to stay---it doesn't seem to pay off. My gut feeling is we'll have a long, cool spring that is slow to heat up, but that is not based on anything scientific at all--it is just what I feel in my bones. By Easter, I think we'll have a pretty firm idea of what sort of spring we'll have. If we still are pretty cool by Easter, we'll likely have great yields from spring crops because the cool weather will be persisting long enough to keep them happy. In the years that we have the fabled Easter Freeze (generally sleet or snow around Easter week), I get frustrated because warm season crops cannot go into the ground as early as I like but have wonderful harvests of cool-season crops. In the years we get hot before Easter and stay hot, it is the opposite. I actually haven't started a whole lot of stuff indoors because I didn't want to be stuck holding it indoors for too long in persistently cool, cloudy weather. I've just now started cabbage, broccoli, cilantro, chives, dill, borage and nasturtiums this morning. Oh, and peppers. Mostly all I have on the light shelf upstairs is artichokes, a ton of tomato seedlings, sugar snap peas, and 8 or 10 types of cool-season flowers. I'll be spending the rest of today potting up Exserta petunias and the last round of tomato seedlings, and starting seeds of some warm season flowers. I'm putting the newly-planted flats on top of the deep freeze today and then, in a couple of days when I move all the upstairs flats out to the greenhouse, I'll move the freezertop flats to the light shelves, and then I also can pot up more small flowers that are crammed into little paper cups and need to be divided and potted up to larger cups with fewer flowers per cup. All this cold, wet, freezing weather in late Feb and early Mar has my usual routine slowed down to a crawl. A really slow craw. I've been to two Wal-Marts this week. At the one in Gainesville, heavyweight row cover was over all the outdoor plants, but I'm not sure if it was enough to save the plants that were out there (they already had tomato, pepper, eggplant, squash and some warm-season herbs on the shelves as of 3 weeks ago). It will be interesting to see what, if anything, survived out there as the row covers can only do so much for plants up on shelves with cold air coming up from below the shelves. At the one in Ardmore yesterday, while I was searching for finch seed to refill the feeders, I saw flats of limp, obviously freeze-damaged cool-season plants on rolling carts lining a back aisle of the store. They did not look like they'd recover very well, if at all, and if any of those poor plants were brassicas, they'll bolt when it warms up. I've been a little concerned I waited too late to start my seeds, but after looking at those frozen plants and at our forecast, I think mine will be ready to go into the ground at about three or four weeks of age at the end of March and will be fine. I could have planted all the cool-season crops in the greenhouse in containers and they likely would be fine right now, but I prefer growing crops outdoors and mostly in the ground. I just use the greenhouse as a place to overwinter a few tender plants and to shelter seedlings after I move them outdoors from the light shelf. It doesn't look like March yet and it doesn't feel like March, but then, March always is a really erratic transitional month with lots of weather ups and downs about 8 or 9 years out of 10. The last good warm March here in my county was 2012 and I wouldn't expect a great March for another couple of years at the earliest.