Once hired a student out the Jr. college that had a course in horticulture and they gave one credit if a student worked inside the industry during the summer break. I thought it might be a win-win situation where I would get a worker who was actually interested in plants and the business and they would get better pay than one of the big box stores were paying and some college credit also. Went to career day at the college and found a 22 year old man who seem qualified. First day he comes in thirty five minuets late. One of my pet peeves. At the time all of our plants were in pots grown in fir bark. The main task that day was repotting. All you had to do was take a plant in a 4" pot and dump the old bark out, wash off the plant and repot it into a 6" pot. Seems simple enough and all the material was light weight that a child could do it. So I could get to know him a little bit I decided to do the same job next to him figuring that the learning curve here for a college kid was in the first five minuets and then just repeated for the rest of the day. It was obvious that I --- the very elderly man --- was producing much more results than he was. I encouraged him to keep up. After lunch he wanted to learn something new. He had had enough potting up. But while I said we would do many different tasks within the plant industry... today all these young plants needed to be repotted so we could get them ready to be sold. Next morning he didn't show up for work but came around in the afternoon to pick up his paycheck for one day's work. Quote "This is too much like work!" Obviously he thought that a job was getting a paycheck but without any effort. Most of my employees are pretty good overall. But sometimes you come across a situation that you just cannot guard against because you didn't think anyone could survive without one iota of commonsense. Like the time a thirty year old was water the pots and the water was coming out with such force that it was forcing the fir bark along with the plant out of the pot. Had over 100' x 6' of empty pots and suddenly bare root plants. I feel there is not much you can do with someone this to the bone stupid and it will only get worse in time. This guy has the record for the shortest employment, I doubt I could of been able to help him become better in time. Of course when these two first showed up looking for a job they said all of the right stuff... They are pretty good at interviewing for a job. ... but not keeping one. One reason why they are good at interviewing is that they have had so much practice at it !

Yes! I was really freaked out when I first noticed it! My heart just sunk. I had worked for weeks getting the bottom on this pool perfect, just perfect. I wanted those expensive ColorLogicLEDs to look perfect when reflecting across this glassy smooth pool bottom (OK, maybe it wasn't glassy smooth, but those lights were all I could think about when I was troweling it on!) This pool bottom was really really smooth. But unfortunately I couldn't drop the liner in immediately due to the irregular pool shape. The liner had to be custom measured (using point-to-point) and custom made. It was supposed to take 2 weeks to get here, but the manufacturer ended up taking nearly 2 months!! By then the weather had turned cold. We left standing water in the pool bottom and around the pool itself. The water was freezing and thawing (both on top of, and underneath the surface) which cracked the pool bottom. We never even realized it until it was too late. However just before we drop in the liner, we are going to COMPLETELY remove those "cracked" sections with a sledge hammer, and totally replace it with a new bottom in those places. Can anyone think of anything better to do? (short of demolishing the whole thing) What would you do if this was a liner replacement? My biggest concern with the moving sections was not just to repair them, but to determine what caused them in the first place. The "Good News" was that I'm fairly certain that it was the standing water/freeze/thaw conditions that created the problem. By knowing that, I can redirect the water, let the soil dry out, and then feel confident that repairing the section will work. I'm just a simple DIYer, so I may be missing something here. That's one of the reasons that I'm posting it. Can anyone think of a better way to handle it? Would it be helpful to add rebar in those sections? (I wouldn't think so, as the rest of the pool doesn't have it.) This pool bottom seems really fragile. The directions for the installation say to only walk on it with soft bottomed shoes, don't spray water from a hose directly on it, etc. When I work with the portland cement/sand mix, I feel like I'm building a giant sandcastle! It's not at all strong like cement or even mortar. My personal feeling is that the sooner the liner is on it the better. My mistake seems to be letting Old Man Winter get here in between finishing the bottom, and dropping in that liner! Please keep the suggestions comin'!! -Renee

Larry, That is a beautiful and awesomely tall example of variegated reed grass! Maybe yours is going to get head high to the Jolly Green Giant? Jacob, If I didn't have the 8' tall deer fence all around both garden plots, the deer and I would not be friends. I think Bambi lost her mother, perhaps to a hunter. We have tons and tons of fawns this year---it seems that most does had at least twins this year and one that comes regularly has triplets. I love seeing them. If only the fawns could stay little, cute and adorable forever. People who hunt the property due west of us (it is the buffer that sits between us and the river, so they get a ton of wildlife) are getting pretty large bucks every year....say they sit on their property and wait for the bucks to come off our property. I rarely see the bucks because they feed at night, but I know they are there because every now and then late at night when we are out late, we spot them as we are arriving home. I tried for the first 8 or 10 years to have nice landscaping around the house/yard, which my husband stubbornly refuses to fence off with an 8' fence. The deer ate every single thing I planted, so I finally gave up. Now we just have trees, shrubs, trumpet creeper vines (because apparently the deer don't eat those), grass and some four o'clocks. Everything else? Hostas, hydrangeas, roses, perennial salvias, any annual flowers I planted for color, day lilies, etc......all deer chow. They even would eat the tough, prickly leaves of the hollies in drought periods, but finally the hollies are so big and old and tough that they don't bother those any more. If I ever convince Tim to surround our house and yard with a big ugly fence to keep the deer out, I will plant everything I've ever wanted around the house. I think his desire to not have a fence is much stronger than my longing for one. Where he grew up in Pennsylvania surrounded by woodland, nobody had fences so you could look out and feel like you owned hundreds of acres of forest as all the back yards and farms just sort of flowed together. So, he remains anti-fencing based on fond childhood memories from the 1960s and 1970s.....even though, if you go back there to his childhood neighborhood now, everybody has fencing and the farms and woodlands mostly are housing subdivisions with lots of fencing. I still think that someday I'll at least have a fenced back yard I can landscape. We'll see! Nancy, I am so sorry about your mom's passing. I know I don't "have to" comment, but I want to. Tim and I send you and your family our deepest and most sincere condolences. What an incredible, long life she lived, and you did everything you could to move her to the place that was best for her to live out her final stage of her life. You were a great daughter and I suspect it is because you were reared by an amazing mom. When y'all do travel to Buffalo in a few weeks, I wish you a safe journey. I do think Tiny Dude needs to travel with you so he can enchant and delight your friends and family who see his photos on Facebook and undoubtedly want to meet him in real life. Many cats travel well in a cat crate. Do they microchip cats like they do dogs? If they do, I'd get him microchipped in case he escapes from the vehicle, or at least get him a collar with a tag so you could put your cell phone number on the tag. Being close to the interstate where wrecks are frequent, we get lots of requests to watch for/search for pets that escape from a vehicle (not necessarily a wrecked vehicle---pets can bolt from a broken down vehicle when someone gets out to check and see why the engine is acting up or to change a tire or just when their owners stop at a gas station or fast food place). Sometimes you can find the pet, even weeks later, but it is hard by then to figure out which traveler passing through was searching for that pet if they aren't tagged. In my meager 20 years of living here, an early winter almost always equates to a bad winter. Or, for snow-starved southern OK, a really good winter. But, we don't get the ice storms that folks further north get in bad winters so what a lot of you might view as a bad winter, I might think of as a delightfully cold and snowy winter....if we get snow. If we don't get snow, then who cares? All winter without snow means is that we are cold and wet. I don't like being cold and wet, but I love snow. Not that I've had much snow to love. Our county does sometimes get the ice storms that bring down trees and power lines, but so far, that sort of weather never has come as far south as our house---it has made it down to maybe 3 or 4 miles north of us though. The bad thing is that if we get cold enough for ice and snow, then we get cold enough to lose Zone 8 plants that I planted here in order to see if they would survive here. They will survive here for a few years until we get an extra cold winter and snow. So, I sort of hope for snow, and sort of don't. I rarely plant Zone 8 plants here any more, although I planted a couple this past year.....which pretty much guarantees a cold winter is coming so it can wipe them out. I haven't seen a hummingbird since a week ago Thursday, but left the feeders up in case any were going to ride down on the big cold fronts. I haven't seen any, but will leave the feeders up until Monday or Tuesday, just in case, and then take them down. We ended up with the oldest granddaughter coming to stay with us for the weekend after her plans to spend the weekend with her dad fell through at the absolute last minute. We are always excited to have her come visit for a weekend, even if it wasn't planned. So, we ate dinner out with her, her mom and Chris last night, and then they headed home to get sleep before the busy work weekend with long shifts scheduled at work. We went to Wal-mart after dinner and bought everything we needed to stay home indoors and out of the rain today. We're going to carve pumpkins, which she has been dying to do....but I wanted to wait for cooler weather so the heat wouldn't ruin the Jack-o-lanterns. I think the heat isn't an issue any more. We're going to decorate Halloween Jack-o-lantern cookies (pre-baked and sold with a decorating kit). She has a long list of Halloween crafts she wants to make, including the Halloween version of a gingerbread house (we'll see about that one), so we'll work out way through that list as much as we can. I awakened at six and saw on the radar that the rain was almost here so rushed to get the dogs outdoors ahead of the rain's arrival. Whew! That was close but we made it. We're supposed to have rain all morning. How deeply into the afternoon the rain lasts is the unknown. I wish it would blow through faster, but it might be a long, rainy day here. We're ready for it and aren't planning on going out in it. I have some amaranth in the garden with huge flowering seed heads I'd hoped to have harvested and drying by now, but the relentless rain has kept me from cutting them. I keep hoping for a warm, sunny, windy day without rain so they can dry out some and then I'll cut them. I think if I cut them while they are so wet, they'll just mildew and look awful. I want the flower heads for autumn flower arrangements, but the rain may ruin that idea. When I planted the amaranth seeds in July, I wasn't expecting record rainfall in September and October. Have a lovely Saturday everyone. I hope those of you that the rain keeps missing will get some of this moisture plume left over from Sergio. The unfortunate thing is that it seems largely to be traveling over areas that already have had too much rain recently, so flash flooding and flooding likely will occur in those areas. The Red River is up and running fast and looked ugly last night, so this rain will just make that worse. I am thinking the winter wheat crop here likely is ruined. Too, too much rain even for seeds to sprout and grow, so it is more likely that if the seeds sprout, then the young plants rot. That's so unfortunate, but that is how life goes here on the southern plains. Dawn

Sara Ann, your border of multiple kinds of roses is so pretty. I love the colors all together. Aloha is just scrumptious. I've wanted to grow that one (no room) for years. You are so lucky to have it. My son in law's family lives in Rupert, Burley, and Twin Falls, Idaho (all close together), about 3 or so hours away from here by freeway. You go through a lot of ugly country (a mini Nullarbor Plain) to get to those towns, which are surrounded by outstanding farm country. Oh darn, Flowers. We could have been fellow Idahoans, but I think you got the better end of the deal. And guess what? I'm a native Washingtonian, born in Vancouver, across the river from Portland in the first Kaiser Permanente Hospital just months after the end of WWII. My parents worked in the Kaiser shipyards during WWll, and they still had hospital benefits. Portland was my very first home. Sorry for all the history. Why did you chose Washington over Idaho--just curious? I've got some Orlaya seed that Lisa generously sent me, and I missed sowing in fall. So I guess I'll wait til spring. I'm a little worried about invasiveness, along with that Dara wild carrot, which is definitely overabundant. Jim, we ended with more snow that I thought we'd get. It's still all over the grass and plants, but the roads are totally clear, and things are melting again. Thanks for your comment, and send us some snow photos when you get the stuff. Hope all is OK, under the circumstances, with you. Trish, somehow I missed your wonderful post. I hope Rosie is doing well, and eats no more bees, or whatever it was, that caused the problem. I guess your mixed bag of roses is better than no roses at all, and it sounds like there is hope for some of them. You have made such an effort for those ingrate plants. How did your daughter's trip across the Nullarbor Plain turn out? Is she safe and sound? Or am I all mixed up again about her plans. Yesterday, the pigout continued with me, so I'm trying to restrain myself, as the leftovers start to lose their appeal--ha. Diane