Believe me, those maples are nothing compared to birch. My next door neighbor's maple is blowing whirlybirds all over my back yard now. Don't know what kind of maple it is but it's more upright (taller and skinnier) than my sugar maple and it's whirlybirds are red. I mulch with about 3 inches of wood bark mulch in spring or early summer. By the next spring, it's gone, consumed. In fall I apply about 2 to 3 inches of shredded leaves (but with the leaves come more volunteer trees). Much (most) of that is blown away during winter. The leaves are shredded and I wet them as soon as I put them down, a little sprinkle of soil on top. Still, they blow away. My neighborhood sits on top of a BIG hill right on the Ohio River. (I can't tell you how many roof repairs/replacements we've had in 26 years.) Karen

JG-- The cuttings you show above that you put into your mix are normal, in my opinion. The roots you had previously are too mangled and stuck together to do much more growing in gritty mix, in my opinion. I've had some like this coming out of peat mix soils and for those, whereas others, I was able to cleanly pull apart, prune and plant as is. For yours, I'd have snipped off the roots, pulled off the leaves below the new roots and stood them in gritty mix. As you can see, forming roots in GM is not an issue, as shown by the new roots you have. A month or two like this and you have a fully established cutting. I have not used anything but Turface with GM since reading Al's posts, but it seems a lot of people claim the Napa product works just as well. Screening Turface, in my opinion, is THE most important step as those small bits can really make for a mess. The gritty mix will hold water, and despite how gritty it is, you still need to control watering. I don't think I can overwater to the point of drowning a plant to death like I could in regular potting mixes but I am certain I could overwater some succulents still, to the point of them not being at their best. Case in point: these were from two different small pots I bought where these particular cuttings were really hopeless as far as roots go. Just one small blob that I couldn't separate, so I chopped them off and put them into gritty mix with a couple other cuttings I took. I must water these once a week indoors or so and they look happy, as happy as plants can look anyway. Lol. FWIW, the mix is fir bark, screened Turface and small pebbles as I could not find chicken grit to save my life. Apparently, raising chicken is not popular in SF, haha. :-) I did find crushed granite but it was way too much dust for my liking. Good luck and I wouldn't toss the Napa stuff just yet! :-) Grace

About a month or so ago, I came home from work to be pounced on my 14-y-o DD (8th grade) who said, "Mom, can we NEVER borrow money to buy a TV or anything?" I'm thinking, WHAT? They'd done an exercise in math class in which this guy goes to buy a big-screen TV for $1,400. The store talks him into buying it on credit, in order to get a $50 discount, and he pays the minimum, nothing more, for 5 years. When he's done, he has paid something like $3,000 for the TV (I don't remember all the numbers, but it was really dramatic). It made a HUGE impact on her; she still brings it up now and then. So we talked a bit about borrowing money, and when to do it, and how to pay it off, etc. *** They also taught them about compounding interest, but I think they used a way-dramatic and unrealistic interest rate (like, 12% or something). But it got her thinking. ***** And when he was about 4, my son told me "When I grow up, I'm afraid I'm going to have to sleep on the street." Again, WHAT?! (how many times don't kids make you say that!) "You told me that you and daddy have to pay money to live in our apartment" (we own our apt, but we'd recently explained maintenance and mortgages to them) "And I don't have any money." So I had to explain a JOB to him. AND I told him that, should he lose his job, or have trouble getting his first job, that he could probably live with me & dad for a little while, and maybe he could stay with another family member, but just for a little while. (trying to strike a balance between making a 4-y-o feel safe, and setting the stage for him to think other people have to take care of him)

One more question: DH and I are disagreeing over the windowsill! Would it be better for him to build a wood ledge for the windowsill and tile over it, or should we buy a wooden windowsill more like this (http://www.onewomanslife.com/home/uploaded_images/kitwindowduring-749696.jpg), paint it white, and tile around it? I think he is thinking he will tile the windowsill and keep it going all the way up around the window. I'm having a hard time imagining this and think it might be better to texture and paint around the window, put an actual windowsill in, paint it the same color as the cabs, and tile just the backsplash, keeping a straight line across. I don't know...maybe we'd have to decide on what we're doing with the tile before we make this decision. This is crazy! LOL