I agree with the others, don't give up before you even get started. I was in a very similar situation when I first started growing fruit. I bought a bunch of fruit trees, berry bushes, and grapes without knowing too much. I did know that some spraying was required to protect the fruit, so I went to the local "garden" store to ask for advice. They tried to sell me all these different chems and told me I had to spray weekly to get fruit. They also tried to sell me books and videos on pruning and training. I got overwhelmed and walked out (luckily) without buying anything and almost gave up the idea of growing my own fruit. I decided to plant the trees and see what happened. I also found this site and the wealth of knowledge from experienced growers. I've had a lot of success and a few failures / learning experiences, but it has been very rewarding. I'm learning that I can get good fruit with minimal sprays - we are lucky to be growing in the dry western climate. Beware of what garden centers tell you - most of them do not grow fruit themselves and the only knowledge they have came from reading a book / training manual. It is usually pointless to even ask. Many of them are looking to sell product. Give it a try and get those boys involved - my daughter is my sidekick and hopefully a life long fruit grower as well. The other day she came home with a story about how she explained fruit growing to her kindergarten teacher... gotta love that!

Annual poppies? Sure...they work great and are easy to sow from seed. You can also grow the perennial P. orientale, but in my experience, it's hardly worth it. You have to be careful where you place them because they need sufficient winter chill. If you place them next to a concrete walk that holds heat, they won't get cold enough during the winter and will bloom on short squatty stems. I grew them for a number of years and yes, the blooms are simply gorgeous, but for only about a week (if a storm didn't trash them). I decided eventually that there were better plants for the South.

Thank you so much for that information - especially setting me straight about the "lucky bamboo"! The reason I am interested in having few leaves near the bottom is that I have a very silly cat who chews on ANY houseplant and even though i am careful to choose nontoxic-to-cats plants, he swallows bit of leaves and then throws them up. So I am trying to satisfy my desire for green in the house without harming our cat or at the very least having kitty puke everywhere... and I have a husband who finds many indoor plants "creepy" - anything fleshy-leaved like an American rubber plant, which would probably at least be safe from my cat and if nontoxic, cleans the air etc, my husband does not like. From what you describe it sounds like bamboo would be difficult for a novice like me to maintain indoors, though we have tons of light in the loft which has 2 story windows. We have been living in a small cottage which didn't have enough light to support most indoor plants and we had a backyard where I could garden, not I only have a balcony but all this light and space indoors! Maybe I'll just have to get some dried bamboo stalks and put them in nice floor vases to fill in that vertical space, then get some smaller house plants - if I can find ones that satisfy all the household residents (sigh).

Had them reseeding here for many years. Ones coming up in better soil grew big, soft and floppy. If your whole garden is shaded you may see effects of that, definitely not a shade plant. Speaking of rocky slopes, probably the one place I have most often seen these growing wild here in recent years is a steep barren slope along I-5 in Seattle, where there was a scattering of them for some time. Here these have a pansy-like cycle, with germination and growth occurring fall-winter and bloom starting in spring or early summer - and attractive presentation, with compact display of closely spaced flowers not necessarily lasting through the hot time of the year - dry season conditions may even bring on foliage mildew. Nevertheless, some individuals may hang on for more than one year.