That reminds me of a time when we used to have "rainy days". Rainy days start out by waking up late because the cloudy skies outside your bedroom window and cooler temps inside do not entice one to wake up or venture beyond the covers. There is a soft and soothing sound of rain drops landing on the roof or window. By lunch time, under the cloudy skies and steady rain everything looks so lush and beautiful that despite the rain you want to go outside anyway to take it all in. The temperature outside is just right. Not too hot, not too cold. Everyone's outdoor activiites for the day have been canceled so there is a large crowd at the movie theatres. Haven't had a rainy day in quite some time.

Just a little bit of information as a consumer. I am very familiar with the naturopathy schools, & there are some good schools affiliated with some of the large universities. Without mentioning names, there are many ND schools that have curriculum with very, very, very sparse content. A person without any medical or scientific background can easily get a ND degree. They wonÂt say it is easy, but if you compare the two curricula, there is no comparison. Both provide the ND degree, but one has a foundation based on science &/or medicine. The MA Health Practitioner is probably a degree out of a naturopathic program  not a form of medical license. I believe CA was the last state to license ND practitioners, and that program has stopped; although there are some grandfathered in. Herbs are drugs, and although any knowledge is helpful, in depth studies need to be done for safety. Without looking at studies as to how an herb is absorbed, metabolized, eliminated in the body - & its medical and/or disease interactions, the depth is limited and the safety is questionable. There are some good studies coming out of Germany & some of the larger universities, and it is an area coming of age. I am very much for the use of herbs  in the proper hands and with the proper studies. The last time I looked, it cost a drug companies 80 million dollars to get a single drug through. This is after the scientific studies, & they still have problems. Herbs should not be exempt.

Please do not succumb to the misinformation/misleading media fatalism surrounding S. divinorum (that particular clip was virtually all emotion and virtually devoid of fact). The news report indicated that Brett used S. divinorum immediately preceding his suicide, however, there is no evidence that he actually did, and it failed to mention that Brett told his parents he had long since stopped using S. divinorum. The news report also failed to mention that Brett abused alcohol (which CERTAINLY increases the risk of depression and suicide. no question.). To blame Brett's depression and suicide on S. divinorum is counterproductive, as doing so enables people to avoid addressing the true causes of depression and suicide. It should be noted that there is not a single report of death or injury resulting directly from consuming excessive amounts of S. divinorum. It should also be noted that the active component of S. divinorum (salvinorin A) is completely unlike any other drug. It is structurally unique and has a completely different mechanism of action from any other substance. Salvinorin A is NOT, I repeat NOT "just like LSD" as some would have you believe. Aside from it's uniqueness, the following should be noted: 1. S. divinorum/salvinorin A does not appear to be addictive in any manner (physiologically OR psychologically). In fact, by all accounts, the "trip" is somewhat unsettling and typically an individual has no desire to repeat the experience. (N.B. This tends to support Brett's truthfulness in telling his parents he had stopped using S. divinorum.) 2. The "trip" typically lasts fewer than 30 minutes, as opposed to the non-similar effects of LSD, which last 10-12 hours. 3. S. divinorum is primarily of interest to spiritualistic (i.e., "shamanistic") types. S. divinorum is used by the Mazatecs indians in various religious healing rituals. 4. If S. divinorum is banned, huffing glue/paint/whatever will still be available. S. divinorum is DEFINITELY less harmful than that. 5. On the other hand, if S. divinorum is banned, it WILL disappear from the US: from nurseries, from gardens, from discussion boards, and research into its properties will take a severe hit (schedule I = a fiat that it has "no medicinal value"). Yes, it will also disappear from teenager's bongs, but only because marijuana and other drugs are cheaper, easier to produce, and reportedly more enjoyable. Full disclosure: Aside from alcohol, S. divinorum is the only psychoactive substance I have ever used, and that only once. I have somewhere in some box an envelope of "5x Standardized Salvinorin A-enhanced leaf" that I swept from my desk when cleaning. I will likely toss it when I get around to sorting that box. However, the plant has captured my fascination, and I plan to begin growing it. I will be thoroughly irritated if I have to rip it up simply because of misinformed, reactionary voters and overzealous, misguided politicians. Thank you for your time and attention. Please let me know if I can answer any questions regarding S. divinorum. Additional information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvia_divinorum http://www.sagewisdom.org/salviahistory.html Google will turn up more information. Here is a link that might be useful: Salvia divinorum from Wikipedia

Carol, You know, all the oxhearts I've ever grown have the wilty gene and look like crap half the time. I'm forever looking at them and thinking "what in the world is wrong with you?" and then I realize it is an oxheart and wilty looking, wimpy looking foliage is normal for it. If that's the kind of wilty look it has to it, that's normal. Maybe this plant is just slower than the others and will shape up soon. My Kim's Civil War Oxheart plants looked worse than anything else in the garden until one day they just shaped up and got over it. I don't know if they had a root issue or whatever, but finally they look about as good as anything else. I planted too much cabbage this year (specifically because I wanted to make a lot of sauerkraut) and I finally have harvested the last of the cabbage and my long cabbage shredding/sauerkraut making nightmare is going to end today. I'm glad I have made it, and I've used several recipes so we have sauerkraut flavor options, but I'll be happy to not look at another head of cabbage for a few months after I finish making sauerkraut today. I love cabbage, but too much of it is still too much. My front garden is in really great shape, other than the diseases that accompany constant wetness, but the back garden is way behind. It has been too wet to plant for virtually all of May and now, with yesterday's deluge, I don't know when I'll get it planted. I suppose it will be pretty much a fall garden, other than the sweet corn that is tasseling back there now, because by the time I get it planted, nothing in it is going to produce much of anything until late summer or early autumn. I suspect this always will be an issue in the back garden in wet years until we finally get raised, vole-proof beds built back there. I do not have all my summer things in either, and I blame it on the rain. I only have watermelons planted in the front garden because I had a lot of Sugar Baby volunteers sprouting in one bed where I grew them last year, so I dug them up and transplanted them to another bed at the low north end of the garden. Hopefully they'll survive the rain and runoff from yesterday. I still have 5 or 6 more icebox melon varieties to get planted somewhere, somehow. The okra I had planted died so I have to replant it, and I'm way behind on planting melons and winter squash. I did notice that a commercial farm near Thackerville that always grows southern peas and muskmelons doesn't have theirs in yet either, undoubtedly due to the excessively wet May and now June weather, so at least I'm not any further behind than they are. As soon as this infernal rain stops (we had light to very light rain most of the night), which might be tomorrow, I am going to plant a lot of melon, okra and winter squash seeds in beds where onions have been harvested (I already have lima beans and southern peas in some of that space) and where I just yanked out bush beans on Wednesday as they were nearing the end of their productive period and had developed a major spider mite infestation. I probably could have left the bush beans a couple more weeks if it were not for the spider mites, but the pole beans are blooming now, which made it easier to let go of the old bush bean plans. I've been harvesting from them for 6 or 7 weeks, so they were looking pretty tired and worn out too. Oh, and since I just harvested the last dozen or so cabbage plants, there's all that space to fill up too. In wet years, I stay so behind on planting that it seems like the line between planting the spring and fall garden has become really blurred and I feel like I plant nonstop all spring and summer long as the wet spots finally dry out. I like having rainfall, of course, and never really am hoping for drought, but it sure is easier to get the planting done when the garden isn't ankle deep in water. Yesterday the garden was more like knee deep in runoff at the worst point and I dread seeing it this morning. Our usually quiet little tame 3-season creek usually is about 6 to 8' wide in a good year and has water maybe 2-4' deep in the summer months, except in drought years when it completely dries up. Late yesterday afternoon when I went out in light rain to check it after the heavier rain had fallen, it was a good 10-12' deep, almost out of its banks, and 30-40' wide with heavy runoff. It was crazy. If a person had fallen in that creek, I believe they would have been swept away and unlikely to survive. It is not often our creek looks like a river, but it did yesterday. Our neighbor's huge, steel water gap fencing that goes across the creek on their side of the road to allow water to flow out at times like this but to keep the cattle in was lifted up horizontally by the heavy runoff, and an elephant likely could have walked under it if not for the flooding. I don't think they had any cattle or horses in that field yesterday (great planning on their part) and I was glad to see that because livestock on the wrong side of the creek would have been trapped and unable to go anywhere else. In a lot of ways, yesterday's runoff was worse, with only 3-4" of rain falling in a couple of hours, than last year's 12" that fell over a longer period of time in one day in May and that did horrific flooding. At least it was out here in the country. I don't know if they had damage in town like we have here. Very close friends of ours who live a couple of miles north of us on the same road have a real mess today. Tim was talking to one of them on the phone yesterday, telling him "your driveway is gone, I don't know if Amber will even be able to get her vehicle out of your driveway, which is gone". He repeated the phrase "driveway is just gone" several times. After he got off the phone, I asked how gone it was, and he said 'it is all gone'. I cannot imagine this, as the county road guys had worked with them this spring to try to correct some long-standing drainage issues on the country right-of-way where our friends' driveway repeatedly gets washed out by heavy runoff in the bar ditches. I watched the friend of ours who worked on the bar ditches and driveway and did a lot of work to fix the problem this spring, and was really impressed with all the work he did in that area to try to fix the problem. He was out there with a road grader and other equipment when Fran and I were going to fires, I guess it was, and the driveway and bar ditches looked great after a couple of days' work. It looked so great that I thought the problem finally had been solved. Apparently not. There's a long strip of homes there that have a constant issue of that sort and no matter what anyone does to repair the mess after a very heavy rainfall, it seems like the problem recurs over and over again. There's still roadway problems here with areas not fully repaired and functioning from last year's floods, and here we are with new flooding and new damage. And, by the way, their house was struck by lighting during the early morning storms yesterday, (but at least it didn't catch fire) so it was a bad day all around at their place. I suspect all of us will be out this weekend trying to fix the damage to all our gravel (and, for some folks, dirt and no gravel) driveways. Runoff carved gullies in our driveway and washed gravel down into the road and bar ditch, but with a couple of hours of work once the rain stops, we ought to be able to fix it pretty quickly. For some folks, the damage is so severe it might take longer to get it repaired. It seems like rainfall here just refuses to fall in amounts that are just right. It always is feast or famine, flood or drought. If it rains again today, I hope the heavy bands miss us. We've had more than enough. At our house, we pretty much got our average June rainfall all in a couple of days time. Dawn