sandy - This is just my 4th year gardening, so a lot of what I know is just from what I've read. And not necessarily from experience. But I'll tell you what I'm doing, and maybe it'll help. I'm planning to do a lot of tomatoes this year, and I was going to use a florida weave. But then I figured out how many posts I'd need. And it didn't fit my budget. So I'm going to try a method I read about last year. The guy who developed it posts as dcarch, and I'm adding a link to a discussion where he describes it. He uses 2 posts per 35 foot row. And he packs in a lot of large indeterminate heirlooms. He uses metal posts. But I'm probably going to use wood, since they're cheaper. And I'm modifying his design a bit, to work better for my situation. Last year, to keep animals out, I used a 4 foot chicken wire fence, with a floppy top and 2 foot apron. The floppy top is supposed to keep raccoons and woodchucks from climbing over. The idea is, they don't like climbing a flimsy fence. I also kept the chicken wire fairly loose, to make it feel even flimsier. The apron is supposed to stop most animals from digging under. Although tunnelers can still get in, since I didn't bury the fence. And for deer, I read that they can jump high. Or they can jump far. But they can't jump hi AND far. So inside the fence I have a lot lines from my trellising system that hopefully confuse them enough, so they'll be afraid to try jumping in. The way I understand it, their eyes are on the sides of there heads, so they can see predators in all directions. But it gives them bad depth perception. Try covering one eye, and that's probably how well a deer sees. So if they can't see an easy way over. And a good solid place to land. They'll be much less likely to jump. They know if they break a leg, they're in big trouble. So they'll probably try to find food that's safer to get at, unless they're really desperate. I regularly see a herd of deer grazing around my garden. But so far I haven't found any hoof prints inside. But I've only had this garden for 1 year. And slugs ate most of my tomatoes last year. So there wasn't an awful lot for the deer to eat anyway. I've also read that some people string monofilament fishing line around the perimeter. Deer can't see it, so when they bump into it, it spooks them, and they run away. In theory at least. So if you only have time to try something really cheap and simple, that might work. Here is a link that might be useful: link to discussion about dcarch's tomato supports

Finedreams said: "I am so with TOS on this. CPs do not have any excuses: oh I am not going to feed my children today because I don't make enough. they go and get second jobs, borrow money or go into debt. Nobody cares if CPs make enough money. NCPs have a great excuse: oops, can't pay, have no money. I guess they knows CPs would still feed the children. How convenient." I have to agree whole-heartedly on this. My X got laid off in February. He's made a few sporatic CS payments since, but is almost up to $3000 behind in payments. I work full-time and DS and I live with FDH. FDH has had to be the one to make up the differences in my finances. Granted, I feel blessed to have been getting anything at all when he could've just as well decided to not send a dime (he's done that before, too). But it's still a hardship we have been facing and has put FDH in a bind as well. One day X came over to deal with a situation regarding DS. After that was over, we were talking out in the front yard as X was about to leave. DS was inside playing video games so it was just FDH, X and I. X actually had the nerve to say, in front of FDH, "well I haven't been able to send any money because I've had to make sure my bills get paid first". If I was FDH, I would've decked him. Here is the bio-father telling the future step-father that he can't support his own son because he has to make sure his bills are paid, even though FDH is the one taking up the slack. To me, it was a slap in the face to FDH. But when I asked FDH about it later, he said it didn't bother him because he knows how X is. That situatuion just proves the above statement that NCPs have an excuse; no money, no CS. When am I or FDH ever able to make that excuse???? Never. I'd like to see him treat his credit card bill or his motorcycle payment with the same regard as his CS. He'd have them banging down his door. But FDH and I are expected to take it in stride and never ask about it lest we seem "greedy" or "money-hungry". There is a flip side to this also. When the Attorney General called us to mediation because it had been 4 years since the CS had been set and it was time for a modification, X had a fit and picked one fight after another with me. For 3 of the 4 years we had been divorced, he was making at least double the amount he was making when the divorce was finalized. I had no choice but to accept it and go on because, in our state, CS only gets modified every 3 years. So after the new CS amount was set, X told DS that he wasn't going to be able to be involved in DS's sports because he was going to have to have 3 jobs just to be able to make ends meet. Oh puuulease! He never even got a second one. As a matter of fact, he hadn't even been paying the new amount for 6 months before he lost his only job.

Update:buyer's agent called to let me know that Becky had put in an offer on a smaller condo in her price range. She wanted to let me know as there would not be a counter thru my agent~she may be my 'new' agent because of her consideration! *I'm* sad, but happy Becky has found a place within her means. She just couldn't afford to ante up as she needs to 'have a life' also, smart girl. After deliberating on a new listing price for quite awhile, I decided on $424,500, not $422,500. I went back and forth between the two, and the higher amount will give me just a tad more flexibility. In one of my posts I said I would be happy if I could get an offer between $415-$419, but now i'm thinking $410 would be a killer 'deal'! Rorelvr, am I watching my competitors? Like a hawk! Not one of them has dropped their price in the time i've listed~should that be telling me something? My agent figured out price-per sq ft, and i'm way below the others, including upgrades. And yes, I *am* shopping! You should have an email from me. Jrldh, where i'm looking, there are *no* scramblers. Every spec home has sold, and the builder is continuing to build more, with a slight price increase, other builders in the same area, also. This particukiar developer is building in several areas in Austin, as well as Dallas, San Antonio, etc. The season also has something to do with the slowing of the market. Lyfia, what agent would *buy that*? This last buyer's agent was asking for 3%, but it never got far enough along to come up for duscussion. When signing with my agent, it was agreed to be a split, so I don't know how that works if one agent is asking for more. My comps are low compared to other units~many of the others don't even have central air. I've got numerous upgrades, but don't feel I went over-the-top for the market~granite, but not new cabs, just updated with paint and trim. Buyme, i'm sure that happens more than we realize. If I do decide to take mine off the market for awhile, it will be relisted in the spring. It's Austin or bust!!!LOL Bethesdamadman, it's not that cut and dried where a buyer *has* to accept if the asking has been offered, but I haven't a *clue* why. Roselvr, terri, and roselvr, are the experts where technical questions are concerned. If one doesn't have the answer, the other two certainly will. You sound like you 'know your stuff' also. Is the area of law your speciality? Calliope, so true about the emotions involved, but I 'took them off' when I went to bed last night.LOL I don't want to 'play' price games either, but when listing initially, that was the choice(dual pricing)I allowed my agent to make~hey, he's the pro, not me. I'm below the comps also, but that doesn't seem to matter since it's all about the price and what people can afford. I thought when I first listed I was being fair, and still do. Although i'll still be making money when I sell, I don't think of myself as being greedy. it's what the market is or isn't. Sure I could sell at $200K and buyers would be beating down the door, but that isn't realistic. I'm just trying to stay in the market range for my area, even slightly below. There's one condo that has been on the market 65 days and the price hasn't been adjusted once. I don't know the story behind it, but my agent said it isn't a short sale. The best of luck to you, but don't waste the time or effort on open houses. In the long run, it's the agent representing you who comes out ahead. Thanks again for being here everyone! ;o)

okmulgeeboy, My dad loved wild greens and always had at least one poke plant and one lambs quarters plant in the back corner of the yard right by his compost pile in the 1960s in our little Fort Worth suburb. No one ever really ate the wild greens except him. My father-in-law, who lived in Pennsylvania, was that way with dandelion greens in late winter/early spring and my husband still talks endlessly about dandelion greens. I tell him they are out there in the yard if he wants to collect them, clean them, eat them, etc. but he doesn't do it, so I think they probably weren't all that great---but they remind him of his dad who's been gone for 16 years now. I tried to grow dandelion greens for him in my garden and never could make it happen, but I got credit for trying. It always struck me as funny that I failed at growing dandelions from purchased seed and giving it a serious effort, but they reseed themselves all over the place naturally and grow in the yard and pastures with no help from me. Jennifer, I love The Worst Hard Time. I re-read it every summer when the droughts get tough here to remind myself how easy I have it compared to the folks back then. My dad would tell you that they made stuff grow even in the worst years because failure was not an option---they had to grow their own food or die of starvation. The few remaining photos from those years so people I barely recognize---my dad and his siblings looking so horrifically thin, but they survived. They lived across the Red River in Spanish Fort TX just SW of the southwestern corner of the county where I live now, and they were so close to the river that the kids would walk to the river, fill up a bucket with water, and walk back to the garden to water one plant...over and over again. With 9 kids (there were several more, but they didn't survive the first year of life), there always was someone fresh to haul water, but it was a never-ending task. They mostly raised what would tolerate drought and heat, so field corn and pinto beans, and they ate them for three meals a day....cornmeal mush for breakfast, cornbread for lunch, and beans and cornbread for dinner. In spring they had greens...turnip greens, collard greens, whatever was green and edible. For my dad's entire life, he ate red beans, greens and cornbread for dinner every Wednesday because he loved it and because it reminded him of his childhood. It wasn't much food compared to how we eat nowadays, but it kept them alive, and they supplemented the meals with milk from their cow, eggs from their hens, occasional meat from a hog they had slaughtered, etc. All the kids quit school to go to work around 3rd or 4th grade because the dollar a day they each earned from, for example, picking cotton from sunrise to sunset, was the only cash income the family had to buy shoes, sewing needles or salt or whatever they needed from the little general store. I admire my grandmother for being able to feed her family on almost new money and erratic crops. Even when she had cream and butter from their cow, they almost never got to enjoy it...she took it to the general store to barter for something they needed more desperately. My grandfather worked so hard to raise their animals, the few that they had because those animals put protein in their bellies and milk in the babies' bellies, and to farm, but it never paid off for him financially. I didn't understand until I was an adult that my grandparents were poor white sharecroppers their whole lives. For their entire lives, until the day they died (and my grandparents died young before my dad even had grown up), it was just a daily struggle to survive that I find hard to imagine. I think they were a million times tougher than we are. When World War II broke out, it saved my dad and his brothers...they couldn't leave the farm fast enough to join the military. They were patriotic, their nation needed them, and they wanted to serve. They had no idea when they left the farm that they'd be eating three square meals a day and it was all kinds of wonderful food that they'd never had growing up....plenty of meat, potatoes, a very wide assortment of veggies, fruit, etc. They all gained a lot of weight in the military, they said, and they still were skinny when they came home after the war. For the rest of his life, my dad spoke in glowing terms of how wonderful the food on his navy ship was, and he was still in awe that they always got three meals a day, three "good meals", as he put it, while in the navy. He never had three guaranteed meals per day until then. As children the only fruit they ate was basically one orange per year, which they each received as a Christmas gift--their only Christmas gift. Imagine those poor children growing up and then being on a navy ship and then having fruit of some sort available most days. It must have seemed like Heaven to them. I wonder how many of us would thrive under those conditions and struggle nowadays? I love your memories of the farm, even the spiders! Those country women were strong and tough, and I guess it is because they had to be in order to survive. My dad's family survived a tornado by running from the house and into their tornado shelter/roof cellar during dinner one night. Dad would tell us that the tornado picked up the house with the food on the table and the kerosene lantern lit and sitting on the table, and sat it down about 50 feet away (no foundation, just a tiny wood frame house sitting on four cornerstones, and the tornado didn't move the cornerstones) and nothing on the table spilled. They came out of the cellar and finished dinner. This story both fascinated me and horrified me when I was a kid. For them, the worst part of it was that the house was moved so much farther away from the cellar and the water pump than it had been before. I am sure there was an outhouse when they were kids, but by the time Dad took me to see the old house in the early 1970s, the cellar had collapsed, the outhouse was gone and the guy who owned the place was storing bales of hay in what remained of the house. That little house where they all lived would fit into my living room/dining room now, and it is hard to comprehend their living conditions in that tiny little shack. Nancy, I think everyone has some sort of pressure canner horror story. I don't remember my dad's canner ever exploding, but remember it locking up, pressurized, and he couldn't get it unlocked to remove the lid. I guess, as a kid, I stopped paying attention to what he was doing with it but he must have gotten the lid off of it at some point and that batch of jars removed because we continued using that canner for years. My mom hated canning and wanted nothing to do with it (all her life she described herself as inherently lazy, and she was being truthful), but my dad made her can with him when he was canning stuff. Her "I am lazy" excuse just didn't fly with him. lol. I never would have learned to garden, can or sew as a kid if my dad hadn't taught me because she wasn't going to. Without realizing it at the time, my dad was teaching me to be self-sufficient in ways that mattered to him, even if they didn't matter to my mom. I'm grateful to him for that and so much more. okmulgeeboy, That jiggling of the weight is, to me, the sound of summer in the kitchen. Well, that and the sound of the jars as the lids ping and seal---a favorite sound. I remember the old canners that had the petcocks on them, and don't miss those. The canners we have nowadays seem so much safer. I do still wear a water-proof oilcloth apron when canning---and if you ever knew anyone who had some sort of steam burn or spill burn on their body from a canning accident (I never did have such an injury like that myself but knew plenty of older relatives who did at some point in their lives), you know why I think it is important to wear that oilcloth apron. Larry, I love your memories! My mom's parents farmed and ranched but not successfully and never had two nickels to rub together, not even long after they gave up farming and ranching, moved to the city, and took paying jobs. So, they qualified for some sort of government food assistance program in the 1960s and the 1970s and they gratefully accepted the food, though it really hurt their pride to take it. What I remember from all that is that we kids thought the government cheese was the best cheese on earth and we loved eating it at my grandparents' house when we went to visit them. One of our neighbors when we first moved here in the late 1990s used to tell me stories of coming to Oklahoma in a covered wagon when he was three years old. He was in his late 80s when we met him, I guess, and I loved his tales of Oklahoma's early days. His uncle came here first and lived in a dugout on the banks of the Red River, not far at all from where we live now, and one by one all the other brothers moved here and brought their families so they all lived pretty close to one another here on separate little farms. He remembered that dugout of his uncle's (and didn't have much good to say about it either), but his family built an unpainted house from lumber when they moved here and he was grateful they didn't have to live in a dugout like his uncle's...even though they were too poor to paint that house after they built it. One cool thing about this part of the country is that those days are not so far behind us....we still have a couple of really old folks here (older than 100) who are like walking history books of our county. Fred's house was built by his uncle in the early 1900s, and that uncle must have been pretty prosperous because there was a second structure, located maybe 70 feet from the house, that had a nice hip roof and lots of windows, and it was their summer kitchen. It was still standing when we moved here and I believe it is still standing to this day. How cool is that? I'd love to have a summer kitchen so our house wouldn't heat up on canning days too. Also, that house had a front staircase and it had a back staircase that came right down into the kitchen. At first, I thought the back staircase was just for convenience, but then I came to realize it really was a safety feature because if the house caught fire when everyone was upstairs sleeping, there were two routes to come down to escape the fire instead of just one. I've always loved that house and hope Fred's family keeps it in the family now that he is gone. There's just such a long family history in that house that I'm afraid a new purchaser wouldn't appreciate. My dad's family did all those outside chores under a tree, no roof, but were grateful for the shade of the tree. They did have a smokehouse to smoke the meat after they butchered a hog, but the smokehouse was no longer standing by the time I got to see their childhood home once I was a older child (I think I was about 11 or 12 the one time my dad and his brother took my cousin and I to see it, and we were the only kids from our families who ever got to see it). My dad used to joke about them being sharecroppers. The man they rented the farm from had given up on farming and moved back to Tennessee. They were, of course, supposed to farm on shares and send him his share of the profit from the farm in lieu of rent every year after they sold the cash crop. Of course, they never made a cash crop and never sent him any money, so once a year my grandfather had to write that letter to explain about the heat and drought and lack of a cash crop and that there was no money to send him, but surely next year would be better. Then, they lived in fear of being evicted off the farm until they heard back from their landlord that he understood---he couldn't make a living on that land either, so he didn't expect my grandfather could as well. When my dad would talk about the pigs and the chickens and the milk cow and all the crops when I was a kid, I thought it meant they had plentiful food if nothing else, but later on I realized that despite their hard work they barely had enough to survive. Yet, all their memories really were happy ones. My dad got a stick (like a twig from a tree) and a piece of string for Christmas one year, and he thought that was the best thing ever---it was really the only toy he ever had, just a stick and a string, but he was a little boy and entertained himself with it. Another year there must have been more money and they each got an orange and one piece of hard candy, and they remembered that as their best Christmas ever. It wasn't until my great-uncle Charlie died in the 1970s that I learned he was the source of one pair of new shoes a year for my dad and his siblings, and the oranges and hard candy at Christmas. He must have been a more prosperous farmer than my grandfather was. For all that we fuss over our gardens and work in them and enjoy eating the harvest and preserving the excess, we still don't have the struggle they had to raise edible crops. If I had to walk a quarter-mile to the Red River to haul home water one bucket at a time to water the garden, well then, I wouldn't have a garden! The weather here was nice on Saturday and will be insanely hot (upper 70s) today, and then we turn drastically colder Tuesday and have a chance of snow. I hate the Oklahoma weather roller coaster that we have every winter, and you'd think I'd be used to it by now. I haven't ordered onions either. I haven't started seeds, although today is the day I usually do that, and I might manage to find time to do that late today. If not today, then tomorrow. I do have wildflower seeds stratifying in the extra fridge out in the garage, so at least there's that. I'm hoping today's sunshine and heat dry up the mud in the yard, and then maybe I'll get a couple of days where I won't have to mop up doggie and kitty pawprints off the floor when they come indoors. I swear, it is like the dogs, especially, stomp around in the mud and puddles just to see how much mud they can track in on their paws every time they come inside. Signs of spring really are appearing now, but I'm looking at the February forecast and weather outlooks and thinking spring still remains a long way off. Dawn