emmie9999, try corn if you want to and have some extra room (particularly if you expand your beds). I live in the country in PA, with lots of corn around. There's a farmstand a half-mile up the road that always has great corn, but I still grow some of my own, just becauase it feels good to look out and see a little patch of corn in my garden. (But I've got a pretty big garden, so I'm not so worried about the space.) This year I'm increasing the fun factor by experimenting with a couple of open-pollinated heirloom varieties along with a regular supersweet hybrid type. You can plant a small patch of corn, but then it helps to hand-pollinate it to get good ears. When the silks show up, cut off some bits of the tassles from the top and dust it over the silks. CAVEAT: I haven't tried that yet, but I read somewhere here that it works well. I'm going to try it this year. Last year I had one very small patch of late summer corn that didn't pollinate well -- I didn't know about hand-pollinating then. A lot of my gardening is just aimed at getting fresh veggies, but a lot of it is also just for fun. I grow some dried beans, for instance. From the perspective of food, it doesn't make any sense, since you can buy a pound of dried beans in the market for about 80 cents. But I grow old heirloom varieties, like Steuben and Amish Knuttle, which you can't get in the market. I don't have room to plant enough to get more than about 1-2 pounds of dried beans per variety, but the beans are pretty and it's just fun. With green beans, you might consider pole beans. You get a much larger harvest from a small amount of garden space. You also can harvest a lot of it standing up. And the teepees look lovely -- I make mine out of 7- or 8-foot lengths of bamboo. One of the downsides is that you can't use row covers (at least not easily), if you're planning on using covers. You also have to make sure the teepees don't shade something else in the garden. One last downside to teepees is that occasionally a good wind will make them start leaning, especially in the early summer before the beans are strong enough to anchor them. Have fun and good luck with your garden.

I've tried a variety of composting methods over the years. My first was a 3' circle of chicken wire (all I could afford). The side aeartion was nice, but I kept getting the pitchfork tines stuck in the chicken wire. After that, I made a compost garden. That was an 8' octogon raised frame bed with a 2'diameter chicken wire in the middle. I dumped compostable stuff in the chicken wire, never turned it, and let nurients leach into the surrounding soil to feed cucumbers up the chicken wire, tomotos outside that and bell peppers and flowers and the outer ring. Worked well actually. More interesting, I happened to drive past the old house and, 20 years later, the octogon is still there (but with roses)! When I moved, I tried a plastic cylander that you filled up, waited a few weeks, lifted up and moved to the side and refilled from the old pile and with new material. It actually worked OK, but it was a pain to move. I finally build a real double compost bin. 4x4x3'H. I got tired of turning the compost from 1 bin to another and they both ended up being filled. That meant I had to fork everything out of one bin onto the ground, move the 2nd bin into the 1st, and move all the outside stuff into the 2nd. And the rich supply of melon rinds, carrot and potato peels, etc from the kitchen waste was attracting critters. Well, if they were eating the best stuff, it wasn't doing me any good. I decided to re-think the whole process... I started to leave my grass clippings on the lawn (free fertilizer). And I decided that the trees needed the nutrients from the decomposing leaves, so I merely shredded them with the mower and left them in place. That way, they wouldn't blow away, and any blown-in leaves would add to the nutrient pile. But I still had kitchen waste and weeds to compost. So I got an aerated closed tumbler to use for the rich critter-tempting stuff. The built compost bins get all the weeds and old flower stems and such. With an occasional shovel of fertile garden soil, that stuff breaks down eventually. The compost tumbler doesn't make compost worth a darn, but it does hold the kitchen waste nicely until it is too far gone to attract critters. So then it goes onto the old compost bins (turning it in once a month isn't much trouble). The other half of my new system is to get free mulch from the County recycling Center. It is lousy mulch, but only becuase it is way too decomposed for mulch. It does however make great compost after it sits for a year. It is as good as the leaf compost available commercially. I even let all my chicken bones dry out in the basement, pound them into pieces, and toss them in the kitchen waste tumbler to break down (free bonemeal) So the lawn keeps its clippings, the trees keep the fallen leaves, the critters can't get at the tempting kitchen waste, the old compost bins slowly provide some compost with little effort, and the year-old "mulch" is good as soil. I'm actually accumulating more than I can use. Guess where it is going? On the lawn! I have one of those pushable mesh barrels to sprinkle compost over the lawn. Anything that doesn't fall out through the mesh goes back onto the compost bin. :)

The series about the soldier was "Poldark"! I did a Google search and found this list of Masterpiece Theater series. Scroll clear down for the older ones - remember "The Irish RM?" Oh, I loved that one! I even named my dog, "Flueri" or "Flora" after the name of that rascal groundskeeper(?) in that series. It had a wonderful theme song, "Haste to the Wedding", which years later I played on my fiddle when I played with a English Contra dance band. Nice memories as I look through this list. Here is a link that might be useful: Masterpiece Theater

I watched the first episode, and will definitely be watching tonite also! I'm 'suspecting' some sort of 'alien intervention', and that kind of stuff always interests me. I just hope it doesn't loose it's momentum as the episodes progress like some series have a tendency to do. The very best of luck to your uncle! Just an FYI, but my very best friend of 45+ years has a son who is the writer and sometimes producer of One Tree Hill on the WB. He also wrote the screenplay for Coach Carter. Just a little plug for Mark cause I know he's worked very hard to get where he is. ;o)