I use the gritty for slow growing woody plants (japanese maples, japanese red pine, etc) and the 5-1-1 for fast growing annuals (Lantana, Cuphea, etc) and a modified 5-1-1 (for Salvia) which is 3-1-1 with the "1" pearlite replaced by Diatomaceous earth (OptiSorb from FastenAll) for increased water holding capacity. Although this year I'm going to do a pot with 3-1-1 and one with straight Miracle Grow for the Salvia. They are on my deck in full sun, I mean dawn to dusk FULL sun! and there is a bit of a wind tunnel effect. I have to water 2x a day in 90+ weather or they will start to wilt. They are dark green and lose a lot of water perspiring, and I like to put 2 plants in a 4 gallon (ish) pot so there are a ton of blooms for the hummingbirds!

Another thing that this thread keeps bringing back to the surface of my memory is that as a student (both in my early 20s and again in my mid 30s) it was surprising how many concepts were really difficult to understand. Many of these were those that seemed like the teacher was wading in nonsense until finally something broke through after much of the semester passed and the "Aha moment" finally hit. That is after several weeks of the same subject for six hours a week with direct interaction with both teachers and other students while working on excercises directly designed to get you to that "aha moment". That just points out the difficulty in teaching landscape design in short courses and especially in all in one comprehensive classes. You brush the surface of many subjects, but you can not expect to instill a great deal of knowledge in any of them. Classes like botany, geology, dendrology, soils, sociology, psychology, biology, and such were all taught in the usuaul 1 hour lecture hall twice or thrice a week format with some classes having a two hour lab. Design studio was three hours long three times a week with on going projects that kept students busy well into the night for their sophomore,junior, and senior years. Plant design, drafting & graphics, grading & drainage, and site engineering all met six hours a week with on going projects. There was a studio for each class year because we all had these on going projects that required the teaching and critiques to be done where we were working. This stuff was all taught through multiple projects that made us work through concepts and develop understanding. They were not taught in lecture halls because you could not get the same understanding from that format. It is not rocket science and it is not a gift. But it is a lot more conceptual than informational. While classes like geology and soil science are largely based on information which you can absorb through reading and lectures, design is not that way. You never get THE answer because there is no single answer. There are so many ways to get to a suitable conclusion that it takes having to go through a whole lot of excercises in doing things the way that you would not do them based solely on your own instincts in order to learn new things or potential pitfalls that you would not learn from going with your own way. In the end, you've done so many things in so many different ways that you can't help but to have learned to recognise situations and have learned a number of ways to address them. Those ways to address things are not off of a list, but based on experience and what you have developed as methods that you have become comfortable with and work well for you. It is still your own creativity and and style that drives everything, but you have more ways that you are comfortable with applying that creativity and more knowledge to go with it. The problem that most self taught people have is that they work within their own comfort zone. There is nothing inherently wrong with that, but it has a high limitation on it. That limitation is that there is very little outside influences in either recognizing unfamiliar situations or in getting comfortable with other ways of dealing with things. One of my teachers, Professor Toru Otawa, would constantly say "you could do a master's thesis on that subject" when someone asked a question. Of course, he would answer the question, but we also could see what he meant by saying that. Most of us stay within our comfort zone once we get out and do this after school and after interning. The difference is that we were forced into situations that made us develop a wider comfort zone. I don't know how much sense this makes to a lot of people who have not gone through this. I expect that those who have will agree with this and those that have not will find a pile of reasons why this is not as good as the way they learned (I think that was standard rule #1 of messageboard posters that I mentioned very early in this thread).

I am so far behind that I don't think I can catch up. Amy, I know I need a break, but am unlikely to get one. It isn't just the fires themselves, it is all the time I spend preparing for them, cooking for them, etc. and shopping just to have the food available and stuff. It takes enormous amounts of time and energy, and as I age, I find that I have less extra time and extra energy to spare. I'd gladly completely retire from the VFD today if Tim would do the same (but he never will.....). We aren't even to the peak of fire season yet and there's another couple of months to go, at the very least, and longer if the drought persists, so I've got to address the tiredness issue or I won't survive the fire season. The Governor's Burn Ban is due to expire at the end of the week if she doesn't renew it/extend it (I sure hope she does because the conditions that led to it being implemented in the first place have not improved at all) and I dread that. If she lets it expire, our lives instantly go very downhill very quickly. I hit a level of exhaustion late last week (really, I think it had persisted all week or maybe for several weeks) and over the weekend that I could not stand, so I've really begun addressing all the things that ruin my sleep at night because I cannot keep running on 2 or 3 hours of sleep per night. As far as I'm concerned, the phones and fire radios get turned off at bedtime from now on, period, and I don't care what we miss. If the entire town burns down while we are sleeping, oh well.....that's life. Technically Tim cannot turn off his phone in case there is a police crisis at night, but he can (and has) shut down all his notifications for text messages and emails. The quiet little beeps and buzzes his phone makes for each text and email don't even wake him up (so what's the point of having them?) but they wake me up....somethings every few minutes or at least a couple of times per hour overnight. Now, they are silenced at night, but his phone still would ring if someone actually makes a phone call. Since he was promoted last year, he literally gets emails and text messages from folks at work 24/7---every few minutes some days/nights, and 99% of it is routine stuff/CYA type stuff that really isn't important, but you don't want to miss the 1% that matters. And, I am going to mention this only because it irritates the heck out of me.....he goes into his office, closes the door, turns on his computer and TV and LEAVES his cell phone and fire radio on the console table in the front entryway....right next to the living room, outside his office's closed door. The end result? He doesn't hear his phone at all, and may or may not hear the fire radio pager depending on how loud the TV is turned up---but I hear them both nonstop if I am in the living room, breakfast room, kitchen or laundry room. That stops now too. His devices are going to be in the room he is in and he can deal with their noise level however he chooses, because I am done with it. Whew. I feel better. I slept all night last night. I know I awakened briefly a couple of times, but fell right back asleep (which is rare for me) so the effort to keep things quieter is helping already. I can tell I have a lot more energy this morning, because unlike some recent mornings, my first thought upon getting out of bed was not about how I possibly could just take care of all the animals and then go right back to bed and back to sleep for a few hours. That's a useless pipe dream anyway because I cannot sleep during the daytime. So, if my first waking thought isn't about how I can sleep during the day, it must mean I slept enough during the night. Jen, I simply hate this year's weather pattern, and it is back this week for us. After starting out extra cold this morning, every day warms up nicely and we're forecast to hit 78 degrees on Thursday (snakes will be out, no doubt, if that happens) before the weather crashes again and cold rain/snow makes a reappearance in the forecast for Fri/Sat. Really? How many weeks can this same old same old pattern drag on and on. I am so tired of it. You'd think I could be out in the garden planting on the warm days (and I intend to try) but warm days usually bring us grass fires and wild fires so they aren't the big treat I think they will be. Kim, The greenhouse looks great and the puppies are so cute. I do wish they had set up the greenhouse to run in the proper direction, but I am sure you'll stop them from making that mistake the next time. In our climate, it probably isn't a critical error since there's plentiful sunlight most of the time anyway... I hope the garage sale went well and you made some cash to give you spending money at the MENF. Jacob, You mentioned needing to vent your tunnel. Yes! The heat builds up incredibly quickly. The same thing is true with cold frames and greenhouses. I think people underestimate how hot such growing areas get during the daytime and how cold they get at night, and there is a learning curve for sure. Even with breathable, air-permeable floating row covers, I can kill foot-high tomato plants by leaving the heaviest frost blankets (those that give 10 degrees or more of cold protection) on them on a winter morning---if I don't uncover those tomato plants by 9 a.m. on a sunny winter morning, they can roast under the heaviest row cover....and it is essential to have those heavy duty row covers suspended some distance above the tomato plants by hoops...you can let ultra light-weight row covers float directly on top of the plants, but not the heavier weights, and I learned that one the hard way too, and barely saved my plants from cooking to death. Jacob, The short answer is that alfalfa is a broadleaf legume, not a grain/grass family crop and that's the key. The specific class of broadleaf weed killers that persist as toxic residue in compost, composted manure, animal bedding and the like can persist in grass/grain type crops, most often on/in hay or the manure from animals fed that hay. Those specific herbicides would kill alfalfa crops if used on them, so alfalfa remains clean from those particular herbicide residues. I still am very careful with chicken manure because we do use commercial chicken feed and some of those herbicide residues persisted in bagged, name-brand (I believe it was Purina) horse feed, survived the horses' intestinal tract, survived the professional, commercial composting of the horse manure, and made it into a commercial, bagged compost product sold and used in some northeastern states a few years back. It was horrifying for 100% organic gardeners to find their gardens dying of herbicide residue when they had purchased/used a brand of organic compost they'd used for many previous years with no problem. It took quite a while for the state's ag investigators to trace back the issue to the horse feed, and then they did tests to verify they had found the correct source of the problem. Meanwhile, organic gardeners and farmers there had to do tons of remediation work to restore their soil so they could use it again, and the commercial compost company had a PR nightmare on its hands. I figure if it happened with horse feed, it could happen as well with chicken feed, but as far as I know, that's never been documented. I use compost that included our chicken bedding/manure only in beds where I don't raise veggies. It would hurt to lose flowers, but not as much as it would hurt to lose veggies/herbs, and so far it hasn't happened anyway. I feel it is easier to be more pro-active up front and avoid the issue than to be scrambling later on to do a couple of years of remediation to fix the problem I allowed to occur. We live surrounded by ranchers and constantly are offered all the horse and cow manure we want and decline 100% of those offers. To me, it isn't worth the risk as I do know that many of these people use pre-emergent or post-emergent herbicides (or both) and I don't want/need/will not allow those residues in my garden ever. It is bad enough that some of my plants get killed every year from aerial herbicide drift from somebody else's use of herbicides. Some of these newer herbicides volatize so easily that even very careful applicators cause unexpected problems with herbicide drift. I'm certainly not going to willingly bring herbicide-infested hay or manure onto our property on purpose, not ever, ever, ever. Well, that's all the catching up I can do. I hope I didn't miss anything vital. I know I'm still hopelessly behind on everything. Dawn

Raee, the Chicago area has been working to address these issues here in our city. Just last night, I saw an area college that was opening its now-empty dorms for hospital staff and first responders so they don't have to commute home to their families. The last I heard, the city is also working to make hotel rooms available to the homeless. I'm particularly worried about domestic abuse victims, and children who are cooped up with parents who may not have healthy coping skills during these stressful times.