A Friend, those are the days! You two are going to have the most wonderous, wonderful year in the garden together! Everything will just be so new and exciting to your son! My friends got their kids hooked on gardening at about that age. They are both 5-6 years old now and just love it!

Mary and Brandon, I have to agree with both of you. Mary, I can understand your love of gardening, and don't want to take the love out of it to make it science. I am a gardener too, but I used to be a scientist, but then I guess there's never a "used to be" - I always will be a scientist whether or not that's what I do for a living. When I was working at it I was a botanist and worked in several different labs, both at universities for scientists on faculty and at medical centers for doctors/medical school professors. I used to be the one doing those studies, and like Brandon, I firmly believe in them. The journals where my work was published are very careful and have other scientists review the papers before they are accepted for publication. I remember one time when I observed something and repeated the experiment over and over always with the same result- like you said, Mary, - seeing is believing. I spent mind-boggling hours and hours, days and days, on the microscope counting and measuring to get sufficient numbers to be able to run statistics on. We called in the professor who taught the university Biometry course (biometry = the science of using statistics in life sciences). She worked on the numbers for a couple of weeks then told us she couldn't back up our findings. There was some missing data we had no way of obtaining. We were so disappointed, and that study was never published. I suppose we could have bent the rules as Mary said she observed, but we were ethical and just kept of working trying to fill in the blanks so we could eventually report our findings. Yes, there are disreputable people who publish studies that are questionable. Some have actually "padded their data" and reported findings that were false. Some of those people have been caught too and have lost their jobs and reputations! I still believe what I observed is true, but nobody in the scientific community will ever hear about it because my boss and I had more integrity than the people Mary described. A few posts back I mentioned a guy in Memphis who did an experiment with coffee grounds in his garden. If I had said he did a study that included statistics, Mary, would you have believed what he observed? Scientists actually DO garden and get dirt under their nails and mud on their gloves.Alan Armitage and Michael Dirr (you are probably familiar with those names) established studies at the University of Georgia on garden plants. Those studies find varieties that are best suited for our Southeastern US hot, humid, climate. Please check the link below that describes that they started and how it effects our gardening. You have to believe those "studies". Your gardens probably include some of those plants Drs. Armitage and Dirr found to be ideal for us to grow. I know I check the The Gardens at UGA to learn about new plants that can be counted on to grow well for me because they're suited for out climate and the UGA studies prove it. Looking at the results of those studies saves me a lot of money and time too. Time I can be enjoying my garden instead of worrying about this and that plant that I never should have planted in the first place. I hope to still be digging in the dirt when I'm in my 80's and 90's. Maybe by then some scientist will have come up with a foolproof way to eradicate slugs from our gardens.

The newspaper, or cardboard, will be digested by the soil bacteria but how long that does take depends on how healthy to soil is and how thick the paper is. In my garden 6 to 8 pages of a newspaper, covered with a mulch, will be digested in 6 months, but other people with soil that has a less active Soil Food Web find the same amount of paper takes over a year to be digested. The major advantage of newspaper, or cardboard, is that it will keep any plant it covers from getting the light that plant needs to grow and therefore that plant will die, but organic matter to the soil.

dDance me to the end is more like a pizza and shopping in a box store, the dance comes in when DH has to almost lift me out of a chair and help me stand. And the music goes on after some 57 years of marriage. I hope the dance lasts.