Hi Tracy, I had a large veggie garden at the back that this year is going to be turned into a flower garden. We just didn't use much of the stuff that was in the veggie garden so I don't see a reason for it. I do have a greenhouse where I will plant a few things like tomatoes, cucumbers, beans and who knows what else. But I am cutting way back this year. I also plan to plant lettuce somewhere. For fruit, I have 2 kinds of red raspberries and 1 yellow variety. I had everbearing and Kent strawberries....but pulled out all the everbearing ones. I have a huge saskatoon bush....it is a wild one that grows naturally here. And I have 4 blueberry bushes.....if they don't do something wonderful this year...they will meet the shovel. I also planted 2 nanking cherries last year. Well I had one for a few years but the voles got to it last year....so it had to be replaced. I have never seen fruit from the nanking that was here for a few years...it was small when I planted it and I expected to see fruit last year....but.. The new ones were also small, so I will give them a couple of years to see if they will actually fruit here. Sierra

Hello Rock Oak and Ianna, I wish everyone was just nice and left everyone else alone unless they were really doing harm. Unfortunately, in my opinion, humans, for whatever reason, although they can be kind, they also can be predatory and cruel, among other nasty traits. I love gardening for so many reasons, not the least is that plants offer me back more than I give them with my tender loving care. In a way, I understand why you both may be thinking that complaining about selectively applied laws is like complaining about the weather... it just happens. From my perspective I don't see this thread as complaining about it but rather about helping me become more aware that this happens all the time, so that maybe I or my family or my friends or my neighbors won't be caught out in a lightning storm as this poor women has been who they decided to pick on with the initial excuse that she was growing a front yard vegetable garden. What happeded to this women could happen to you or your adult children in a much worse fashion. I read about a lady who had her life time home taken from her becasue she owed almost ten thousand dollars in back taxes. She was unemployed. There were over two hundrd and fifty properties in town with the same issue that were not bothered about the back taxes. The feeling is that whe the property was sold or when the person died hey would get their money. What person wants to put another person out on th estreet for society to take care of. But the town officals, at that time, didn't like her. So they took her house and sold it, making her homeless. Plus they took away her only source of income since it was a three family home. The sale paid off the ten thousand dollar tax issue but it also brought the town over eighty thousand dollars in profit. They did not give the poverty stricten woman her eighty thousand dollars, the town kept it. That is morally wrong if not legally wrong. That was really bad weather. But I think human nature can sometimes be controlling to feed the egos of those in power and they will push people around to show who is boss. And yet those in power say they are "public servants". There is a saying, I forget who said it but it goes like this, " bad things happen when good people do nothing" Well I am not very powerful, or connected but at least I can particpate in a discussion that talks about this type of political weather power. I think most people think it won't happen to them or a member of their family. But when it does, they suddenly become an activist about this type of weather. I guess I want my community to be preppers against this type of political weather than seems to just happen. Well tornados just happen and hurricanes just happen, and Nor'easters just happen. Isn't it nice to be aware that that weather can just happen and be prepared for it so one doen't lose what they worked so hard for all their lives or even worse their life or the life of a loved one. Political weather just happens, in my opinion, when good people just gossip about it as entertainment releived that its not happening to them. My personal opinion is that if we all talked about it, then maybe it won't happen as much, becasue it is unconsititional and it does not support the American fundamental legal and moral philosophy of freedom. Sadly, where ever we go in America, our lost of freedom is in our face. When I read about local law officials harassing someone for collecting their own rainwater off their roofs to water their gardens, that makes me understand how vulnerable we all are, especially when an offical will say" well its on the books but we don't enforce it". This is hard to face. Who wants to talk about political weather when we could be laughing and exchanging war stories about what we are going to be doing with all our zuccini. The reality is, soon, if we all don't pay attention to these selective laws, and what personalities have been put in power to decide who these laws are goin gto apply to and who they won't, few of us will have gardens to share zuccini war stores with. The farmers are hurting but since the farmers feed us, if they loose , we loose. It is my opinion that we all need to be at least more aware of this. I just don't see this as complaining. I see this as helping us all pay attention more to what is going on around this country that will soon affect all of us if we all don't start talking about it on a grass root level. My aplogizes in advance if I offended anyone with this post. Deanna, I guess we were actually talking about the same thing. I just misinterpreted your point. I wholly agree with you. Blake

I must admit that most of my gardens start out from weedy lawn (if you can call what I have lawn just because we mow it occasionally.) I get cardboard slip sheets from Costco or sams club. We don't get a paper so the slip sheets are easier than steeling papers out of the neighbor's recycling bins. Anyway, I cover over an area of yard with the cardboard, making sure to overlap so the weeds don't get through so fast (they will still eventually get though.) Then I dump some heavy mulch on it to keep it weighted down until we can unload mushroom compost onto it. I watch for tree services working in the neighborhood and tell them if they need to dump a load of wood chips, I have a location they can do it nearby (this way I get lots of wood chip mulch for free.) Wood chip mulch might not be perfect for gardening but it is free and usually pretty green when chipped and the leaves mixed in help it compost a bit over time. The mushroom compost is cheap from the farm near here and I've grown some great crops in piles of the stuff on top of cardboard/wood chip mulch. After a season or two of growing stuff in the compost on top of cardboard/mulch, it may be time to either dig a bit to get rid of weeds or re-do the cardboard/mulch/compost. I can say the character of the soil where I've been doing this kind of gardening has greatly improved. The native soil here is fine sand with some coarser sand below. After a season of being kept moist with mulch and compost over it, it has gotten darker and the hummus is starting to mix down and if I wish to dig in ammendments for the next season, it all starts to look more like nice dark garden soil rather than fine beach sand. Just remember to keep adding organic mater to your soil each season since fertilizer alone will not keep your soil alive. Here is a link that might be useful: TCLynx

We may have just had two more inches of snow, and three feet on the ground, but it's spring and summer indoors. I haven't named it yet, but this is a baby pomegranate tree, about six weeks old. It's in a 2 1/2 pot, receiving sunlight at the window and artificial light from sunset to bedtime and my wakeup time until the sun strikes it. It's just sprouted from a pomegranate seed from a pomegranate from the grocery store for sheer fun and I have no expectations for it. The Ageratum That Will Not Die. Fed organically (20%) and synthetically, it just keeps blooming more nicely as the winter wears on. A "struggling" tropical hibiscus started in...November, I think? Named "Brandy." That's her individual name, not the cultivar. She was struggling a bit, but has recovered recently with keeping the soil moist (there's some cyanobacteria mats on the soil right now), and feeding a lot more than I normally would in February since she's under lights 18 hours a day.