Melissa, Have you read Square Foot Gardening? I can't remember the author's last name for sure right now, but I think he's Mel Bartholomew or something like that. Very nice way to look at space and spacing issues. I'm thinking on my cuke wall I'm going to have two rows, staggered, with a foot spacing in between each plant. On a fifteen foot "row" that'll be 30 plants! MIGHT be too much weight for the netting, but I'm going to give it a shot. Worst case scenario, I can pull plants if needed. That netting has got me thinking of other spots I can go vertically too... for pole beans. My breaded okra is still a work in progress... LOL! When I first did it, I just breaded it like regular and froze it on a sheet of wax paper in the freezer. Worked, but the okra was fairly hard when cooked. Last summer I blanched the okra, THEN breaded it and froze it. This turned out better, but still not what I'm looking for. (I figured out it's better to thaw the okra a little bit before frying it on both ways.) NEXT YEAR, I'm going to pre-fry it in a tempura type batter, cool completely THEN freeze. I like cooking projects... LOL! NOW, on the loofah/loufa/dishcloth/vining okra gourd thing... LOL! Honestly, I have no idea what the "real" name is for these dang things I've been growing. A friend gave me the seed and I just love growing them. When they're young, you cook them like regular ol' okra. Mid size to a bit bigger, I took a steak knife and cut it straight down the length of it and pulled the outer "husk" from the inner fibers. Then I de-seeded it and laid the fiborous part out to dry, and LOW AND BEHOLD, a loofah! This is what I'm calling "dishcloth". I did try to use half as a body scrubber, but it's way too scratchy for me. Works great on dishes tho! It becomes soft when wet, but still scratchy to a point... then dries out nicely and rebounds to it's shape! I loved it, next year I will have many more. I also let a couple get as large as possible and dry out on the vine, with seeds still in them. My little boy uses them as musical "shakers"! I'll try to take a pic of them here today and post it so you can see what I mean. All that from just one plant, I LOVE it. I had them planted along the edge of my carport in a "wall", and the beautiful yellow flowers were a joy to see everyday! The vines were so healthy, they grew all up on the top of the carport. I had a few dried gourds on the top of the carport at the end of the season. THIS will be a regular plant for me, it's just easy and fun to grow! Dawn, I honestly do not think I've run into a cucumber beetle... YET. Watch this year be the year for them... LOL! My wall of cukes might just be too inviting for them not to show up. Yes, I hear of most people around here having either hybrid or wild blackberries growing, so I thought that'd be the way to go for me. Of course, strawberries are also very big around here too, but I don't have the space to devote to a huge bed of just ONE thing (in my mind). If I did, I'd do asparagus first, then strawberries. MIGHT try one of those hanging strawberry bags, but that's another project. :) The trees around my area are pecan and cedar... LOL! I've never heard of ANYONE having luck with apple trees around here. Well, we're having a rainy day here. The St. Francis river is up and we're under flash flood warnings too. I live in a higher part of town, so I'm not too worried about us. The farmers that farm along the river might have problems tho. Just been a wet, sloggy year for Northeastern Arkansas! Planting was late due to the wet spring, and harvesting was hard due to a wet fall! I really need to see what our rainfall averages are for the year, I'm betting we've set a record. But, of course, snow would be nice... but rain is better than ice! LOL! We're off to spend the rest of the day at my parent's house... ya'll stay safe, warm and dry! :) Beth p.s. My DARLING husband gave me an early Christmas present! It's a Veggie Tales t-shirt! On the front, it's got Bob the Tomato and it says "If you like to talk to tomatoes..."! LOL! I laughed so hard! I love that show... the theme song goes like this. If you like to talk to tomatoes... If a squash can make you smile... If you like to waltz with potatoes, up and down the produce aisle... have we got a show for you! Too cute, huh?

Bon, It just depends on the type of sunflower. With the gigantic monsters that get 8 to 12' tall or taller, I like using green metal t-posts. I have some that are 6' tall and some that are 8'. I am not tall, so I have to stand on a ladder to hammer the t-posts into the ground, but once they are in place, I leave them there for the season. Much depends on how exposed your garden area is. Someone who has a good windbreak around their property might not stake the really tall sunflowers at all, but someone in an area with a lot of wind exposure and no windbreaks around might need to stake the tall ones. Since we raised the garden fence to 8' in height a few years ago, I just tie my sunflower stalks to the fence more often than not. If I do things right, the fence is covered in vining plants like moonflower vine, morning glories, black-eyed susan vines (as cute and as cheery as sunflowers), hyacinth bean vines, cypress vines, cardinal climber, half-runner beans, pole beans, mini pumpkins, cucumbers, Armenian cucumbers, winter squash and gourds. Somewhere in the midst of all those vining plants, there will be some tall zinnias and some sunflowers that the vines climb and help attach to the fence. It is a sort of crazy, madcap garden madness and likely wouldn't appeal to someone who wants a neat, tidy garden, but my garden is a full-blown jungle every year, and I wouldn't have it any other way. If you grow some of the more recently developed ornamental sunflowers that top out at only 5' or 6' in height, you likely won't even have to stake them. It is only the ones that go above 6' in height that seem to start leaning over and leaning and leaning once they are tall and heavy. You also can avoid staking if you plant them thick enough that they hold each other up....you don't see any staked sunflowers in the fields of sunflowers grown by sunflower farmers! If you feel like your area is exposed enough that even 6' tall sunflowers would need to be staked, I imagine even 3 to 4' tall grade stakes would work. I use that size stakes for lots of garden tasks because a bundle of grade stakes is relatively inexpensive compared to metal fence posts. I also use 3' tall green metal t-posts in the garden a lot. Often a tomato cage that is supporting a tall indeterminate plant will stay upright just fine as long as the cage is staked with a couple of 3' tall t-posts. Some of the larger tomato varieties that carries huge loads of fruit do need a 6' or 8' tall post most years, but a lot of the more average-sized ones do fine with smaller posts. I haven't grown as many sunflowers in recent years because of ongoing drought that just won't end. Last year I planted tons of heat- and drought-tolerant flowers in the new back garden, which has a highly sandy loam content than the front clayey garden, so this year I am going to plant a lot of sunflowers back there. And if, in fact, we never make it out of drought conditions here and are headed into spring planting season already in drought, I likely will plant all the veggies in the front garden and only put flowers in the back garden. It is easier for me to stop watering flowers in severe drought than to stop watering veggies. (It isn't easy for me to ever just give up on the garden and stop watering anything, but the recent summer conditions have made it easier because you cannot even water enough to help.) Sunflowers are about the happiest-looking flowers around, and wherever the native sunflowers spring up, I just leave them there. It doesn't matter if they are in the dog yard and we have to mow around them, or if they are in the path between the greenhouse and potting shed....I leave them and walk around them. Eventually a hungry deer will eat them, thereby removing them for me, but the birds, bees, butterflies and I will enjoy them every summer until the deer take them out. Once you have even a single native sunflower that has gone to seed, you'll have them forever because the birds spread their seed around the natural way. I planted seeds of Maximilian sunflowers in out of the way places that we don't mow, like on the edge of the woodland, because they are very drought-tolerant and are one of the few plants that can be in full bloom and looking beautiful in the worst of the late summer heat and drought conditions. In the worst drought years they are much shorter than normal and have fewer flowers, but they still are there and they still have some flowers. We used to have about a half-acre full of black-eyed susans along our southern fence line that bloomed a large portion of the summer, but the persistent summer droughts since 2011 have wiped them out. I might try mowing that pasture low in late winter and sowing black-eyed susan seeds there in an effort to reestablish those flowers there. It looked really sad and bare the last couple of summers with nothing but prairie grasses. Black-eyed susans and clasping conflowers used to pop up all over our property back when we had more summer rainfall, but lately they have been scarce. To me, they are as cheerful and happy-looking as sunflowers, but at a shorter height and with smaller flowers obviously. I like to have them mixed in with sunflowers or at least growing close together because they are so pretty together. When the garden fence was shorter, the deer sometimes would jump the fence and eat every part of the sunflower plant except the hard woody part of the stalk. They'd eat entire flowers before they even bloomed, but also while they were in bloom and after they had bloomed and were full of maturing seeds. Staking the plants gave the plants a little protection from the deer because they didn't devour the staked ones as much as the unstaked ones. I imagine it was a pain in the neck to work their way around the garden twine and stakes. You shouldn't have as much of a deer problem there as I have here. The only way to figure out if sunflowers will need to be staked, to some degree, will be by growing them and seeing how they handle the winds. some years, they'll be fine with no staking, but in other years, they (and you) will be happier if they are staked. I really didn't start staking sunflowers until I made my first sunflower house. A sunflower house is, essentially, a children's playhouse made by planting sunflowers in a square (leave an opening for a door) to simulate walls. Then, once the sunflowers are several feet tall, you sow the seed of fast-growing vines between the sunflower plants. As the vining plants (I use morning glories, generally 'Heavenly Blue' the most often, but any vine will work) climb the sunflowers, they put a lot of extra weight on the sunflower stalks, so that's why it is good to stake each sunflower in the sunflower house. Once the sunflower stalks and vines are taller than the tallest person who will be in the house, you run garden twine back and forth between the flower stalks/stakes at head height. Then your vines grow horizontally along the twice to form the room of the sunflower house. It is simply the cutest thing you'll ever have in your garden! I almost planted a sunflower house just for myself last year in the back garden, and I think I might go ahead and do it this year. When we had little kids around, the sunflower houses were so much fun for them to play house in. Girls might drag little plastic chairs and teddy bears and dolls into a sunflower house, but boys will bring water guns, rubber band guns, nerf guns, etc. into the sunflower houses and use them as sunflower forts. Dawn

Good Morning and Thank Goodness its raining again! The game was like sitting in the middle of the Artic - 28 degrees with a slight wind and 1 snow flurry that lasted all of about 5 minutes. Did we win you ask? 68 to 0, everyone was rooting for the other team by the end of the game. And the coach had his 2nd string in from the 2nd quart on. The cheerleaders were doing jumping jacks for each touchdown by jumping the number on the score board. 61 times was a tough one but then after the next play they had to do 68. By the time they were done they were no longer together and a couple were laughing so hard they couldn't jump at all. Our DGS stayed over and just went home to get ready for church. We watched movies last night, had pop corn and root beer floats. Hard to believe he is almost 18... Joan...I live in S. W. WA., and this is really early for snow here! The ski resorts don't usually open until after T'day..rarely before, they are now up and running. We live at about the 700' level and are just high enough to be hotter in the summer and colder in the winter. Luvs...My DS and his wife gave me lots of books last year for Christmas. They hit every TS between here and Tacoma to find them, but, and I won't let them know, most are not my style or nothing caught my attention or well you know! And as I don't have a lot of storage space, something moves in something else moves out and I have forgotten the "out" part. Ah! Birthdays for pets...I remember my DD baking mud cakes for our dogs...used twigs for candles and pebbles for M&M's. It was fun reading about your DGD! Such precious times! Anj.....your kindness shows through all the time but after reading your post....you are super! Too many times when people know that someone is dying they "back away," afraid of I don't know what or just not knowing what to say. When my DMIL was in her last weeks, she told us that she was tired of everyone "walking on egg" whenever the subject of her dying had to be addressed. She helped me understand that being forthright was much easier and helped her cope much better. The closeness we shared during her last weeks is something I will never loose and I now think of her fondly which wasn't always the case for as she said "She was the Mother-In-Law from Hell" And yes we to have Gift Tree's, stores and malls won't use the word Christmas... and our fraternal order always gathers food and toys each year. And this year the need is greater than ever. The unemployment rate in our area is at about 15% and rising. Punk....glad you are safe! My DH is so worried about the tires on the van. He calls them city tread so I know that by Friday he will make a trip to town and get some Country Tread. Ah! Well! Better safe than sorry! Today is pretty free so I just might do a canvas type painting of Halloween. Been putting if off because it will be a real challenge but right about know I think I am up to it and can't find anything else I want to paint, sounds like we all have the painting blues! Must be the light deprivations thing! So I'm off to make a cup of mint tea, light my Apple Cinnamon candle and paint! Happy Painting! Belle

50 Odd Things about you! If you opened this, FILL IT OUT! Learn 50 things about your friends, and let them learn 50 things about you! Do you like blue cheese? Yes 2. Have you ever smoked heroin? Never 3. Do you own a gun? No 4. Your favorite song? theme from "a Summer Place" and the Animals "House of the Rising Sun" 5. Do you get nervous before doctor appointments? No, over the past 10 years I have been to so many appointments I just take all in stride. I think "positive" and so far...all has been something I can/will survive. My motto: "this too shall pass" and my family/friends support has helped me over the hurdles 6. What do you think of hot dogs? Great food at the baseball park 7. Favorite Christmas Song? Traditional..."Silver Bells" Religious..."Silent Night" Fun.."I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa" 8. What do you prefer to drink in the morning? Coffee 9. Can you do 10 push ups? I doubt it 10. What's your favorite piece of jewelry? I have several pieces that are my favorite 11. Favorite hobby? Reading 12. Secret weapon to get the opposite sex? SPORTS...however; KNOW what you are talking about...Grand Slams and Touchdowns are NOT the same sport 13. Do you have A.D.D? Not that I am aware off 14. What one trait do you hate about yourself? My height 4'11" 15. Middle name? Kay 16. Name 3 thoughts at this exact moment? 1) Concern for my sister/family in Texas 2.) How I am going to pay the past due bills my DH neglected 3.) How my soldier, Jon is going to handle Iraq 17. Name 3 things you bought yesterday? 1) Groceries, Gas and toilet paper 18. Name 3 drinks you regularly drink? 1) Water, 2) Coffee, 3.) Miller Lite 19. Current worry right now? Sister/family in Texas 20. Favorite place to be? My bedroom in total QUIET 21. How did you bring in the New Year? LOUDLY with family 22. Where would you like to go? Cancun, Mexico or Italy 23. Name three people who will complete this: ???? 24. Do you own slippers? Yes, a pair with a Breast Cancer Ribbon on them 25. What color shirt are you wearing? Blue 26. Do you like sleeping on satin sheets? No, prefer flannel SATIN SHEETS ARE FOR CRYING ON 27. Can you whistle? Yes, the regular way and using my fingers 28. Favorite color? Blue 29. Would you be a pirate? No 30. What songs do you sing in the shower? I don't sing in the shower. 31. Favorite girl's name? Adeline (grandbaby's name...but I have always loved Paige Nicole) 32. Favorite boy's name? Philip and Jonathan (my sons names) 33. What's in your pocket right now? Lint probably 34. Last thing that made you laugh? My life is in such turmoil I don't know 35. Best bed sheets as a child? Growing up in the 60's and 70's no such thing as "themed bedding" 36. Worst injury you've ever had? A broken left foot that I walked on for 3 weeks before I had an MRI (x-ray didn't show a break/fracture)revealing 2 broken bones under all the "top" bones in your foot. I was in hard cast for 8 weeks, air cast for 4 and a walking boot for 2 37. Do you love where you live? I LOVE the Nevada desert. I can't stand to be cold....give me heat, I can always undress 38. How many TVs do you have in your house? 3 too many 39. Who is your loudest friend? Everyone would probably agree it's ME 40. Do you have a dog? Yes, Cheebah....Bull Mastif/Pit Bull mix...gentle and most loving dog...nothing like her breeds 41. Does someone have a crush on you? heck if I know 42. Favorite cartoons? Anything Disney 43. Who is your favorite author? I have 3....Sidney Sheldon, Danielle Steele or Nicholas Sparks 44. What is your favorite candy? Snickers or Baby Ruth 45. Your favorite Sports Team? Football: Dallas Cowboys Basball: Atlanta Braves 46. What song do you want played at your funeral? My wishes are...NO FUNERAL...take that $$$$ and have a good time remembering ME and all our good times 47. What were you doing 12 AM last night? Sleeping 48. What was the first thing you thought of when you woke up? Coffee, I need/want coffee...thank goodness I have an automatic timer 49. If you could work any kind of a job what would you? What I am doing now.....Party Rentals...I help "spend" other peoples $$$$ so they can have a great time and look good in their guests eyes 50.) Trait about yourself if you could you would change? ummmmmmmmmmm Maybe NOT to be soooooo forgiving Next?