Hi ESH! You made my Christmas. Hope you had a very Merry Christmas and got all the things you had wished for. Hope that your son, Alex, had a Happy Birthday. I am still kicking... just not a high as I once did. If I could just get my appetite back. I am down to 151 pounds. We had a Merry Christmas and got the things we needed and wanted. We had the grandkids home, so it was nerve wracking. Thankfully they all had left by yesterday and then the company started coming. I finally got my nap... For the New Years I think the wife and I will stay home. That is suppose to be our next chance of rain. What am I talking about... I couldn't go out anyway. So what are you guys doing for New Years? Shot

I didn't have a house I could garden at until my son was 2 1/2 (hes 4 1/2 now). He loves helping me out. He's always been a really observant child, and I show him what plants are weeds and what aren't, and he helps me pull them...the right ones too. When I'm planting new plants and flowers, he has his own tool set, even a kneeling pad, and I show him where I need a hole and he digs it for me. He also has this John Deere powerwheels dump truck thing, and he likes hauling stuff around the yard for me. I have a big pile of rocks, and we go get loads of them in his truck and my wheel barrow when I'm setting up a new flowerbed, or a load of mulch or compost to use wherever we need it, or I put the trash weeds and rocks I find when I'm clenaing up a spot into his truck and we take them to where they need to go. I'm starting a vegetable garden next year, and he's really looking forward to that. I'm sure he'll really get a kick out of the tomato hornworms, since he likes picking bugs where I'm working too. He keeps the snails and pillbugs for whatever reason and puts the worms we find back into the flowers or in the compost pile if we find some elsewhere. He has a pet toad now, so he gives it the bugs he finds now. Just today we were picking leaf-rolling caterpillars off my cannas and feeding them to the toad. I would suggest really not worrying about trying to include your kids in REAL gardening work until they are 3 or so...then they have a better understanding of whats going on. ANy younger than that and they're just going to keep pulling up what you just planted. I'm going to have a hard time with that once my 2-month-old is outside with us when he's older. Maybe just set up a "pretend" garden area for them. This would be easy for me since I use raised-bed gardening, I can just make an extra section. They could even plant the seeds from watermelon you buy at the store (or if you grew one and ate it)...I'm always finding watermelon and cantaloupe vines popping up in my flwoerbeds from seeds that got into the compost pile. They sprout really fast, but I doubt they will make anything. Potatoes too. Cut up a potato and have them plant it. It will make a big plant. And I disagree with WPalm033 about the cactus. A lot of cactus spines are difficult and painful to remove, especially from a screaming squirming child ("NOOOOOOOO!") I've had my share of splinter-removal ordeals. Plus some kinds of cacti have a poison or something in their spines and hurt for a long time afterward. ALso many cactus spines "disappear" against the color of your skin. Most of the prickly pear we have around here look like they dont have spines at all, just little fuzzy bumps, but they are really tiny spines and are really hard to get out. The ones with the great big long spines also have those tiny ones at the base. A safer alternative to actual cactus would be aloe vera. They are spiny, but dont have the needles like cacti that will get stuck in your skin. Plus you can use their gel for burns. You cant teach a child that way anyway...that by touching the cactus he wont touch any other plants. Then he just wont touch the cactus again.

No - nothing wrong, but the top could stand some thinning. To grow benjamina well, the top needs to be restrained - even if the plant is still much shorter than the ht at which you'd like to maintain the tree. This is because the plant is very apically dominant and tends to allot about 2/3 of it's energy to the top 1/3 of the tree. If you view the tree looking for verification of the tendency, you'll see what I mean. The counter measure is to regularly reduce the top, which serves 2 purposes. It keeps the top branches from getting conspicuously heavy, and it lets more light through to stimulate back-budding nearer the center of the foliage mass. Your tree is already getting some rather heavy branching at the top of the tree where things should be light & airy - twiggy. To fix that, you would first sort of bring the branch extension back inside of an imaginary ball shape by pruning back the longer top branches. Then, open up the top by concentrating on the heavy branches. Cut those back so you're leaving a pair of fine branches pointing in favorable directions, or to a single fine branch pointing in a favorable direction. The branches in the lower 2/3 of the tree would just get minimal pruning. It already appears to have a rather nice shape (good job!), but could do with that extra measure of refinement if you're up for it. Al

Robo, it sounds like you had fun! I missed this post so I'm glad you gave an update. Mayflowers, thank you so much for the colored salt jar idea. That can be one of the crafts I do with my grandsons next time we do a sleepover. My DGSs spent the night last night. I got out my markers, colored pencils, oil pastels, graphite pencils and an assortment of papers. While they were working on their drawings I was playing music. My oldest DGS asked if it was Beethoven. As soon as they were finished with their project they had out their iPads and were listening to Whip NaeNae. I videoed the oldest DGS doing the dance and we sent it and pictures of their artwork to Mom. Bedtime is still a problem with the boys, they are only fifteen months apart and they pick on each other unmercifully at bedtime. I'm going to order a cot bunk bed for them as the second queen size inflatable mattress bit the dust.