I'm fairly new to the fruit forum, but have grown small fruits/berries for a number of years and picked strawberries since I was a tot. Yummmm. A couple of things to consider: 1) Are these recommendations for getting started, or for production? B/c strawberries and raspberries will runner and propagate themselves given a few years. Blackberries are easy to layer, and if you damage a root, you'll get plenty of starts in places you may not want. Bottom line, some will spread/propagate off of what you buy. It's a matter of how long you want to wait to get your berry garden up to the size you want. If you want a 100' bed of berries, don't just buy 50 plants, etc. 2) You allude to a good point, and one I wish I had paid more attention to when buying fruit trees: timing different fruits for a successive harvest. It does two things for you: keeps you in supply of fresh fruits througout the summer (or at least extends the season), and spreads out the work, so you don't have to harvest and store (and eat) everything all at once. While it may not be possible to have fresh fruit always in production for every day, and some overlap is inevitable, it is something to aim for. Scott & Denn, I cannot imagine 40' of blackberries. I have about 15'-20', and it is wayyy more than our family of 6 can handle. (But the children did well with them at the local farmer's market). But we don't eat them fresh as well as the raspberries, which we cannot even harvest a cup of for a dessert, as the children eat them faster than they can produce! Guess each family has to look at what they like and go from there! Best wishes! Mark

Wow, I was searching for something else and came across this old thread. Since I have had some experience I thought I'd drop in with my own particular solution... I think it will work for most people though. Drink "green juice"... its simply concentrated fresh veggies. Mainly greens like lettuce, spinach, dandelions, beet greens, etc stuff like that run through a juicer... NOT a Blender, blenders leave all the roughage in, which dilutes the flavors and bulks up and is just plain too much extra to drink. Root veggies are okay to add as well, especially carrots and beets. Cabbage related veggies are too strong flavor-wise and will render the juice very unpleasant to drink, mushroom will make it taste like the forest floor. Fruits will make it more palatable but do add a lot of sugar in the form of fructose its so best to limit that. Drink just a cup of green juice at least once a day and within a week or two, no more acid attacks, ever! If I fall off the wagon (stop drinking it daily) in about a month the night-time acid issues resume. I've been doing this for almost twenty years now, the pattern/connection is un-mistakeable. Additional benefits from drinking green juice... sleep more soundly, blood pressure normalized after the first several months, bowle movements are quite regular within 20 minutes after having my morning green juice. And I'm not the only one... my wife and several friends also drink green juice with similar results. My conclusion is we (meaning everyone) just aren't getting enough of what freshly consumed vegetables supply (likely high concentrations of minerals in highly absorbable forms) into our diets... so fix the diet and you'll likely fix a number of physical health issues. Its not a magic potion, its not a drug to instantly treat symptoms.... Rather green juice is real nutrition and so it will take time to work, it needs to be a lifestyle change, if you treat it as a fad it will have no lasting results. Peace, I'm outta here...

Wanda - I am glad that you found the solution for your daughter. My grandson does not seem to have a milk allergy. That was the first thing the docs checked. Carla - They do keep him upright, in fact, a lot of time is spent holding him that way. If he's down (on his back only) or reclining, they keep his body straight. They have the Bjorn carrier, which braces him pretty well. I'll mention the notion of not burping him, which is amazing! He is not constipated, lol (I know that that is not really an lol, especially for you). His stools are pretty much what is expected when breastfeeding. I think that they are going with the growing out of it expectation. I would like them to press harder, but it is very difficult for me to make suggestions. They are sensitive; they are using all their energy to hold things together. Interesting that you mentioned their marriage. I've thought about that, but things seem to be okay. My DIL is a very calm and patient person, and my son is a very earnest and sincere guy about all this, so I think that they'll be all right. My now ex-husband and I took our elder son through ten years of catastrophic asthma. It was a tremendously difficult, awful ordeal. At around year seven of that battle, we divorced. I know that the illness played a big role; it eventually drove us apart. Even though my husband was a superior dad in terms of being there when the asthma struck and our son was hospitalized, too many times to count, nevertheless he spent more and more time away from home. He needed adventure and excitement and we had a boy who needed all kinds of meds and a breathing machine if we were more than twenty minutes from a hospital, not to mention our home life, which was very quiet. Mainly because my son and I would use the non-crisis times to recover and get normal again. Then it would start all over again. My now DH's love of hominess and just generally being around all the time is one of the things that drew me to him. He was and is always "here". I have also thought that my younger DS, the baby's dad, was deeply influenced by his brother's long illness - in his child's mind he observed that no doctors, meds or many hospitalizations, even surgeries, could make the asthma go away. His brother had to grow out of it, which he didn't do until he was in college. So they may feel that as we were alone, so are they. I have noticed on the reflux boards that many parents are just holding on, even with a battery of doctors and various treatments. Some of their situations remind me of my mind-set with my son's asthma. IOW, hang on, try whatever, there is no cure, only coping, forget about the house, just "hold it together." Thanks for your attentiveness!

They probably only make one, but this is the bag my vet started Savannah on. Apparently, it's also available on Chewy. Purina Pro Allergy at Chewy In our case, since we are really trying to determine whether S has food allergies, my vet stressed that S can't have ANYTHING else -no table scraps, no treats, etc. She normally gets a pill every morning, which I bury in a Pill Pocket. I didn't think about that during the visit, but emailed my vet the next day, asking if it was okay to just coat the pill in the smallest amount of Pill Pocket, but she told me to put the pill in cream cheese instead. I can only guess that cream cheese is a more pure substance than a Pill Pocket. Poor Vanny is completely befuddled as to why she suddenly isn't getting the salmon skin, etc. after dinner! I think the key word is "hydrolyzed" which you can see in Purina Pro's product name. If I remember correctly, my vet said I could use treats with that in the name, but I think for now anyway, we will just continue to forego treats.