I'll make sure everything is ready just in case. Not sure how I'll afford to feed another set. But I'll manage if they can. We had a storm last night but things are calm this morning. The parents gobbled up everything I offered and took it straight to the box. There don't seem to be as many robins, jays and mockingbirds around which is good. I'll probably check on the little ones again tomorrow and try to get some better shots. It won't be long til I can't peek in anymore. That's when it's really hard. I'd go swimming to if I was the birds. In fact, I do go swimming - almost every day. tara

Cleaning house this week. Not that anyone could tell but I have been... Single people should not be allowed larger homes. It rained this morning so I'm safe from having to mow the lawn. Just got back from the grocery store. Bread, bacon, chip dip, and some tenderloin. Going to a nascar party tomorrow so I need to make some sort of junk food for the guys. I have some leftover lamburger and venison so I might have to make some chili. I know diddly about nascar other then they are loud and drive in circles. Mostly PO'ed with my job. New boss does not like "college boys", informs me that I'm over paid, and spouts his lust for the old days when he could just fire people for no reason. One of us is going to change or someone won't have a job for long... and I ain't about to change. Ack... so anyways I have half a case of beer left from last weekend, a dirty house, and two cats that love me. Off to check out my garden and see what is left... probably some tomatos for that chili. : ) michael

I feel your pain. We have a small house and are doing a kitchen / dining room remodel. We are four weeks in and the drywall just went up. I'm starting to lose my mind over the dirt. We are managing surprisingly well with the makeshift kitchen in the office and with more than half of our living space ( not counting our bedrooms) gone. But the dirt! They hung sheeting and it's working great in the dining room where they hung it and no one bothers it, but the one in the hallway isn't as lucky. We have to go through it sometimes so it's not doing as great of a job. And the basement! We have a finished basement and my brand new laundry room is right under the kitchen. They had to take down some of the ceiling tiles to get to the electric, so now dirt from the ceiling is all over my new washer and dryer. THEN my daughter was home from school on Friday as working in the art room, adjacent to the laundry room, and a big chunk of ceiling fell rough next to her! Luckily not on her, but it did fall on my drying rack that was covered with my nice sweaters that I baby. I am dying to go clean up but it seems pointless since more dirt will just keep falling until they put the ceiling back. As for the rest of the house, I've been keeping up mostly, but this weekend I thought, why bother dusting and mopping because they are going to be sanding drywall Monday. So I'm just trying to ignore it, which isn't easy. I figure when they finish the sanding I'll clean, even if it's a weeknight. Sorry, that was long, but I needed to vent too! ;) And yes the sweaters thing was kinda my own fault, I should have put them in another room.

I know people (some are members of this forum) who routinely drive around the neighborhood and pick up bags of leaves set out on the curb for trash collection. I don't think there's any danger in doing that, in terms of the leaves being contaminated with anything worrisome. Some members of this forum just have agreements in place where the neighbors give them all their autumn leaves for the compost pile or for mulch and the gardener gives them produce in return in the summer months. There's more than one way to skin a cat. (Don't tell my cats I said that.) Even though we have 10+ acres of woodland, the only leaves we routinely collect are the ones that fall on the lawn. We just run over them with the mower and chop them up, catching them in the grass catcher and dumping them right from the grass catcher to the garden pathways. I could go into the woodland and rake up and collect a lot more, but I remain mindful of the fact that the leaves in the woodland will decompose and feed the woodland soil and then the woodland soil will feed the plants. For a few years, I did collect leaf mold and autumn leaves from the woodland, but always feel guilty when I take stuff out of the woods, so I try to only collect from the yard. Luckily we have planted tons of trees in the yard since moving here and they are big enough now that they drop lots and lots of leaves. Nancy, Once you get yourself in the mindset that it is better to be safe than sorry, then letting municipal compost age before you use it becomes second nature as does testing stuff before you add it to the garden. The price of being complacent and not testing is that you risk losing at least a year's worth of garden. Even if you find that compost or hay fails the bioassay test done with peas or beans, that doesn't necessarily mean you cannot use the compost or hay right away. You just have to use it with a crop that is not bothered by the herbicide residue---and that would be corn---any corn---sweet corn, field corn, flour corn, popcorn, etc. or sorghum or something similar. The persistent herbicides that are causing us so much trouble are the ones that are sprayed on hayfields/grassy type crops to kill broadleaved weeds. Those persistent herbicides won't kill your grassy type crops. Just something to keep in mind. Oh, and that's the exact reason that alfalfa hay remains safe to use---alfalfa is a legume, so the problem (problem from a gardener's point of view) herbicides cannot be sprayed on it or it would kill the alfalfa plants and there would be no alfalfa hay. I'd use alfalfa hay a lot except it is very expensive to buy. No one is responsible for the health and safety of our own gardens except for us. Just us. To steal from the title of my favorite TV show, this is us. No one cares about our gardens like we do. So, we have to shoulder that responsibility ourselves, because the rest of the chemical-using world is going to keep spraying their herbicides and they really don't care if it affects us. At least nowadays the persistent herbicides are labeled as persistent and the users are warned that plants sprayed with them can contaminate manure and compost. In the early days of the persistent herbicide crisis, the farmers using the herbicides was as shocked by their persistence in composted manure, compost, hay and even cattle feed as the gardeners were. Nowadays there is no excuse for a farmer or rancher passing on contaminated manure or hay and claiming they didn't know about the persistence of the herbicide. There's no way they don't know, unless they aren't reading the labels of products applied to their own property. I am grateful we live surrounded by ranches and not by farms. Anyone who lives close enough to a farm to have herbicide drift from that farm is going to have problems from time to time with herbicide drift a lot more often than those of us who generally only get hit in spring when everyone is either spraying their pastures with those persistent herbicides or spraying their fencelines with either glypohosate, 2-4-D or a combination product containing both. Well, unless someone lucks out and lives by an organic farm, but that would be an incredible stroke of luck. As hard as it can be to grow organically and in the safest and most sustainable way possible, it really is easier now that it ever has been before. There's a much wider range of organic products available, especially organic fertilizers, than what we had 20 or 30 or more years ago. There's more organic pesticides, though I still use them only minimally. There's barrier methods like micromesh or Biothrips proteknet, and summerweight floating row covers. We just have to stay on top of all the latest developments and perhaps work a bit harder to keep our gardens as happy and as healthy as possible. There were organic remedies I wouldn't touch with a 10-foot-pole decades ago (like rotenone and sabadilla) and there's still current organic remedies I prefer not to use, though they aren't as dangerous as the ones I mentioned. Remember that just because a product label says it is organic, that doesn't mean it is safe. It only means it is derived from a natural, not synthetic, active ingredient. Even more frustratingly, sometimes manufacturers add a non-safe extra ingredient to an organic product, and I won't use that product because of the added ingredient. Coming from a natural versus synthetic origin does not automatically make a product safe, and that is probably the single most misunderstood thing about organic gardening. For example, take diatomaceous earth--a longtime natural remedy. At one point, a specific manufacturer began adding a chemical pesticide to the bags of DE it produced. So, an unsuspecting person might think they were buying food-grade DE but they were buying a chemical pesticide "enhanced" DE. You always have to read the labels and know what you're getting! Organics are safer in general, but not all meet my own safety standards and not many of them end up in my garden. Remember that this is YOUR garden. You practically live in it in the summer, and (depending on your circumstances) so do your pets, your native garden helper wildlife like bees and toads, your children, grandchildren, spouses and some pets. It is your environment. Keep it safe. With my garden, except for obvious outside issues like herbicide drift that I cannot control, the buck stops with me. Nothing unsafe is going to make it into my garden unless I allow it to so do, and I don't. Because we all like to strive to grow in the healthiest way possible, we have to be the person who says no sometimes to products that can harm as much as they can help. I know plenty of people who use all sorts of synthetic chemicals in their gardens on a regular basis and that's their choice. My choice generally is not to use those in mine. You have to decide what matters to you. Some people use synthetic fertilizers and fungicides and are okay with that, but never would use a synthetic herbicide or pesticide. Some use nothing but organics. Some use nothing but synthetics. Some people who never, ever, ever would use a synthetic product of any sort in their garden still refuse to acknowledge the risk involved in bringing in outside manure, compost or hay and that's a sort of Russian roulette they're playing with their otherwise organic garden. They're playing the odds. Sometimes it is an accident---like a rancher who also is a gardener forgets they bought a lot of hay one summer in drought and they forget that the manure in the cattle barn might have herbicide residue in it from that purchased hay and they use that manure in their garden, thereby poisoning their own soil with a product that they don't even use on their own property. It happens. People are human and make mistakes. Some of us strive to be as organic as possible, but will use a synthetic pesticide, for example, in a worse-case-scenario where organic pesticides repeatedly have failed to halt the pest damage and we are stepping up to the next strongest pesticide, which happens to be synthetic. Never say never but instead focus on using integrated pest management wisely and in a way that fits with your own standards. You never know what a huge invasion by something like blister beetles or grasshoppers might push you into doing. Some day you may have to use a product one time that you normally never would use. Allow yourself to do that if it is the only way to save your garden. I think there's worse things in the world than spraying a synthetic pesticide one time, though I'd never routinely spray one. While it always is my choice to be as organic as possible, I did spray a broad-spectrum pesticide one time (yep, as in one time in my entire life) and the world didn't end. I hated doing it, but it saved my garden. I still hope I never have to do it again. In the end, we all do what we have to do to feed our gardening addiction. I just hope we all try to be the kind of gardeners who create a garden that is a beautiful, healthy and productive ecosystem, and never forget how many other little living creatures share the garden ecosystem with us. It's not only about the plants. While I don't want to do things that harm the plants, I also don't want to harm everyone else who lives in or passes through the garden---and that includes the birds, lizards, toads, frogs, turtles, skinks, butterflies, hummingbirds, green lacewings, beneficial wasps, earthworms, ground beetles, assassin bugs, etc. Dawn