Credit to everyone who is trying to recycle their ink cartridges, but I still have concerns about these printers and their consumables. Ink jet printers are just plain hard on the budget and the environment, and the cartridges can't be refilled indefinitely, many only once and very few more than two or three times. Many applications don't really need an ink jet, I see lots of these printers being used in places where a laser or dot matrix would be much better suited to the job. Often people buy them because the initial printer cost is very low, frequently because it's heavily subsided by the expensive cartridges, sometimes the printer is sold for less than a full set of cartridges. However, when you consider the price of ink and special paper, it's multiple times cheaper to take your digital photographs or images to a shop and have them use their state of the art printer worth thousands to print them for you. No need to clutter up your house with another printer, no need to change cartridges or anything. Best of all it's not more work, you can either go out to the store to buy cartridges or you can go to the store to have your pictures printed. The only major difference is price and quality, both of which are better. Some places do it mail order or over the internet now, so you could have your prints sent to you. Of course some people do need a colour printer at home or in their office, there are genuine needs, but then it's fair to point out that the price of colour laser printers has dropped a lot now, and they're much better suited to high volume applications, but also don't dry up if not used for a while. They also work out much cheaper in the long term. Anyone who can justify their need for a high quality colour printer, for example a high volume of prints being made, can probably justify the initial expense of a colour laser as it will save them so much money in the long term.

Dawn That was a touching and quite amazing story about your dad's family raising themselves. It really brought a lot of mental pictures to mind about survival in hard times. What would most folks do now in similar situations we wonder who've never been taught any gardening skills, and lived in apts in the cities, how in the world could they survive?? I think many of us here on the Okie garden web are becoming more aware all the time of not only how fickle the weather can be, but life as "we've known it", and maybe the good times aren't going to roll forever, as some, including myself, Carol, and others have mentioned. It's good to notice the weather and seasonal patterns, but it's also very, very important to be watchful about the signs of the times. Some of this "putting up" that we've been doing may be instinctual as we sense a coming need, and not only the fact that's it's something we do during the harvest season. I have maybe a scant 1/4 acre, but I keep putting more and more of it into garden. I'm not interested in having a show place flower garden anymore, and most of my plants and flowers from now on are going to be geared to eco-system, and attracting beneficals, even though to me, it still looks pretty. I'm just glad that although I live in a semi-rural area, I can still garden the way I want without so-called "protective covenants". My DS just build me a new large compost pile I have in the back corner under the shade of a pecan tree, and I even think it looks good, lol! I am very grateful to this forum and you Dawn for your work here, which is not only informative, but entertaining and very typically salt of the earth. Something I found very rare while living in the Denver sprawl. I appreciate the simple life, and it has brought me back to my own roots here in Oklahoma. The folks here on GW remind me so much of the people I knew in my childhood. And the gardening that came so naturally to my own folks and their friends. I can remember going to Missouri with my parents to visit my dad's brother and family on their farm, and all the wonderful foods that came out of the kitchen, homemade sausages, bacon or ham from the smokehouse, fresh country eggs, milk and butter from the dairy, homemade blackberry jam, hot biscuits with cream gravy. And that was just breakfast! After eating, my cousins and I would go play by the creek where the watercress grew prolifically, and then if we got hungry between meals would run in and get a salt shaker and head to the garden and pick tomatos off the vines, salt and eat them like they were candy, getting the juice all over our faces, of course. My own mom was quite a gardener herself, but not all that much of a cook, because she always worked, and didn't really have the time. But that woman could fry a chicken like no one else in the world. I've never been able to duplicate her method even though I'd grown up watching her. The one thing I remember is that she would always choose the smallest, most tender chickens, and maybe that was part of her secret. Whatever, she had a magic touch, just like your aunt's. And her cherry pies were a family treasure, thick with cherries and not just sweet filling. Well, I got waaaay off topic there, but I don't think the forum police are going to come after me. Anyways, thanks for that post......it really brought back some wonderful memories, and lots of nostalgia for by gone days. It was so sweet of you to make that special Spanish Fort Cream Pecan Pie in honor of your aunt. There has to be a special place in heaven for folks like that who've devoted themselves to raising their younger siblings and keeping the family pulled together during hard times. As for you, you may have to pull out that recipe for your special Skillet browned sugar cream pecan pie come Thanksgiving time, (or sooner)for the rest of us here. You never know when that "old school" cooking may become a necessary luxury again. Someone recently told me their daughter was studying the Depression in school, and had to make a "Depression Cake" using the most bare bones ingredients. We really have been both blessed and spoiled at times in the abundance of things, but we should never forget the lessons learned by those who went before us who learned survival skills and it would be good if we could learn these same skills ourselves in order to pass them on to our own children and the next generation. Not everything comes out of a carton, can, box or wrapper,..... or should! Barbara

Thank you so much Margo and Shirley for the cards :) I didn't sign up for this swap as I was too busy and didn't really pay attention to what was goin on around this time period and rarely even got on the computer...but it was a nice surprise to receive the cards :))thanks so much Shirley for the card with the magnet...the magnet went straight to my fridge!! ..thanks Margo for the card with the winnie pooh stickers (I'm a kid at heart and love Disney) and the echinacea paradoxa seeds! ...ladies you made my day when i got these in the mail and knew ya'll were thinking about me even tho I haven't been too active and talkative here...thanks so much for your friendship I so love this group!, Dianne

Hi Rina/Ewwmayo, Here's Al's latest re-telling of the pudding/perlite concept from last month... ( http://forums2.gardenweb.com/discussions/2842847/container-soils-water-movement-and-retention-xxii?n=822 ) "Imagine a jar full of pudding or fine sand. In your mind's eye, start adding perlite to either. Does 1 perlite particle make a difference in drainage or aeration, the properties you would be seeking to improve with the addition of perlite? Of course not. 100 pieces? No. 1,000? No. There is a level at which perlite starts to make a notable difference in the properties mentioned (aeration/drainage). It's called the threshold level and it's established at the point when there is no longer enough sand or pudding to fill all the air spaces between the perlite particles. Even in the mind's eye you can see that it takes a very large fraction of coarse material and a small fraction of fine material to make a notable difference in drainage/aeration in most cases. That's why you can't effectively amend soils based on fine particles by adding even a pretty healthy measure of pine bark or perlite.If you end up having 75% pine bark and the rest of the 25% fraction comprised of equal measures of peat or potting soil + perlite, you're not amending the peat or potting soil with bark - you're amending the fraction that's larger by far with the ingredients that in combination make up the lesser volume of 25% If you start with a gallon of Miracle-Gro potting soil and add 1 gallon of pine bark and/or perlite to it, have we created notably better aeration or drainage? No. Even at 2 gallons of bark and perlite there is still enough potting soil to fill all the large air spaces between the coarse material - so little gain. At 3 gallons of bark and/or perlite, when there is not enough fine material in the gallon of potting soil to fill the spaces between the large particles, we start to make notable headway. This is why you can use 3 ingredients that when mixed together CAN make an extremely productive, root-friendly medium, and mix them in such a way that the end product is almost unusable." - Al The takeaway for me is that if perlite is roughly the same size as the other particles in your medium it will function well, but adding it to a fine medium like potting soil or peat is ineffective. Am I interpreting correctly?