Why do we love Bromeliads?
malleeaustralia
14 years ago
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sdandy
14 years agolast modified: 9 years agoRelated Discussions
Why Do We Do It? Musings From A Heartbroken Hostaholic
Comments (36)This is just what I needed tonight. Thank you to everyone for the caring and for the 'reasons why'. I want to extend huge blessings to Babka for her and her families loss. All of the photos are just beautiful and I find myself more and more obsessed with gardening and hostas. For me it's the peace I find after the termoil of every day life and the healing of past pain. I lost a daughter at a young age 20 years ago and we never expect to bury our children...then several years ago was hit by a drunk driver who nearly killed me. I spent 6 months in rehab learning to walk again and was told I shouldn't have made it. I hurt each and every day but somehow I manage to plant and build gardens and LOVE it. Every minute I'm out there in the soil, dirty (I'm a very dirty gardener) at times barefoot and totally happy. There is where I find the most peace. I had to smile at so many of the comments because several times my family will come to the back door at dark and say, are you coming in or what's for dinner and I have forgotten about everyone else but the love of being in the garden. I've waited 18 years to build beds around my back yard and I started this year and am about 1/3 of the way. TOTALLY HAPPY!!! What a wonderful thread. More peace!!! Sunny...See MoreWhy don't we do the things we should?
Comments (26)Me? A procrastinator? Just because I put off until now reading this? I started to read it on Thursday, but after just a few words I saw a bad word! EXERCISE! So I didn't read any more. So here I am. So far today I have: read the paper, had my oatmeal and tea, made the bed, fussed at the cat for getting on the new chair, checked on Eagle Cam, Africam, Gorilla Cam, and lucked out on Djuma Cam and spent a lot of time there, had a banana and more tea, watched a few minutes of 20/20 that I taped last night (will finish that later) played around on photoshop, started a letter to a friend (I'll finish that later) and now here I am back at the KT. And it is time to fix some dinner, or I could do that later. Oh, well, guilty as charged. Think I'll watch the news. Sue...See MoreWhy do we need smaller kitchens?
Comments (27)Plus a million to justmakeit's post above. The "kitchen cure" at the Apartment Therapy site kick-started a series of improvements that have changed my cooking forever, by making me much happier with the kitchen I have. Moving out the equipment and utensils I never used and re-organizing so that the things I do use are close at hand made the kitchen feel more spacious and more intimate at the same time. That paved the way for further improvements in work flow inspired by reading this forum. [One example: reversing the hinges on the fridge, so that it opens toward a worktable/landing area. Who knew?] The effect was to concentrate the prep and cooking areas into a smaller area of the room and open up the non-cooking end of the room -- once again, more intimate and more spacious at the same time. Discovering that I didn't really need more storage or workspace helped me see that the most serious productivity bottleneck of the kitchen was the sink. The Kitchen forum opened my eyes to the many possibilities in that sector, but even more crucially provided discussion of members' real-life experiences that enabled me to decide which choices made the most sense for me. Only four years ago the kitchen felt cramped and unwieldy despite its size (14 x 17). Now it's a more comfortable and functional space in every way -- without any structural changes....See MoreWhy Do We Have The Strangest Weather In The World?
Comments (24)Leava, Yes, of course we are lunatics. A person would have to be a lunatic to try to garden here amidst the constant droughts, interspersed with flooding, and then not to mention hailstones constantly falling in Spring and early summer, tornadoes, severe T-storms, microbursts, blue northers, strong straightline winds, raging wildfires, ice storms, etc. So, lunatics we are. Gardening lunatics. Let's wear the title proudly! When we moved here, if someone had told me we'd see 90 days with no rainfall to speak of, or at the other end of the spectrum over 12" of rainfall in one day (more than once, in fact), would it have deterred me from moving here with the intention of having a big garden? Not at all. Gardeners just have to garden no matter where they are. TexasRanger, I bet they thought you were a troll at first. Gardening here is a whole different world. Let's use Fine Gardening magazine as an example. They always have such lovely photo spreads, but I look at them and mostly sigh and say "that would never look like that here, even if it would grow here, which it won't". (I will say they feature natives more frequently now than they did 10 or more years ago.) It is hard to accept that we cannot just grow whatever we want to grow here, but I've learned some hard lessons and have shifted to plants that tolerate the conditions we have here. I don't have time or resources to expend on plants that need lots of extra attention in order to have even a chance of surviving here. Amy, I agree. I just didn't want for anyone to think that you meant their seeds wouldn't grow here. Instructions? There's instructions? Heck, I ignore those instructions, always assuming they are geared to a climate that's not ours. I freely admit I do not read seed packet instructions. That's doubly true with cool-season seeds that have to be planted in winter here, and that is not always clear because for some of those northern seed companies, the cool-season flower grow and bloom all summer. Ha! As if that would happen here. In the 1980s I quickly learned not to trust gardening magazines or seed catalogs because they would show lovely things like delphiniums and snapdragons as summer plants. Well, maybe they are summer plants somewhere, but not here. That's one reason I try to avoid most nurseries early in Spring. They often have beautiful perennials in full bloom for sale, but once you get them home here and plant them, they're already peaking and going to decline quickly as we heat up. Mother Nature in Oklahoma is a hard taskmaster. dbarron, My closest local gardening friend, Fred, gardens a little less than a mile from me, but we are in a creek hollow that's much more low-lying than his place up on a ridge. He can easily plant 2-4 weeks before we can and give no thought to protecting his plants from cold nights, and he likes to give me hell (in a friendly way) because I haven't planted yet. If I planted when he planted, it all most likely would freeze. Sometimes I cannot believe the difference between his place and ours. Along the same line of thinking, we have gardening friends 2 or 3 miles north of us and they can not and will not plant warm-season crops as early as I do. In their case, they are more exposed to cold winter wind and haven't found any upside (and many downsides) to planting as early as I do. So, we all have our own routines that work for us in our specific spots, even though we're all not very far apart at all. I also know someone who used to garden in 3 different spots within a few miles of each other, and he had different planting times for each place. I cannot imagine how great the differences would be 20 miles away considering how great they are in a much smaller distance. Microclimate is everything, and I don't think I truly realized that when we first moved here in 1999, but Mother Nature taught me quickly. Dawn...See MoreLisaCLV
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