Michael, coming from Irish stock, the potato is close to my heart (and stomach) and has been a staple carbohydrate on these shores for over 300 years.....and yet, for the past decade, it is impossible to buy a potato which can be made into crispy chips. Yep, we grow many varieties, both floury and waxy so why this should be an issue, I honestly don't know. I suspect the supermarket (and public) fetish for clean spuds is behind this travesty because the days of buying a brown paper sack of unwashed potatoes seems like a distant dream. Varieties such as King Edward, Maris Piper etc, have always been grown (and still are) yet they are either kept in cold stores or somehow kept for mass consumption throughout the year and now make for miserable soggy, tasteless chips. Why? Are we all so used to microwave, reconstituted 'fries'? I couldn't say but here, digging the first Kestrel second earlies has something of a treasure hunt about it. Kestrels are lovely potatoes, often seen on the show bench, but never in the shops (yields are not massive) but the taste is like no other - a straight down trip to childhood, where we all ate plain boiled 'tatties' with a knob of butter.....or sauteed them, or made layer bakes, or potato cakes....but best of all, chips. And then, to compound the nutritional sin, we often doubled our carbs by filling non-nutritious soft white bread with as many chips as we could hold (doused with salt and vinegar obvs) and dipped the fatty but delicious treat in ketchup (and those of us who had been 'on the continent' might even add mayo). Of course, growing veg is a battle from start to finish - my allotment is an obstacle course of old timber, various netting, fleeces, mesh, wires, strings and other critter deterrents (the hateful pigeons are my bete noir) and, if left alone, we would have nothing - certainly not a single fruit (but the blackbirds would be fat) or green leaf to be seen. As for sweetcorn - a short-lived but delicious treat (although the much lauded 3 sisters method is a bit of a joke) - we tend to grow a shorter variety and eat the fresh ears rather than tall maize ground for cornmeal. Also, I never bother with ridiculous crops (for the UK) such as okra (vile anyway), sweet potatoes, tomatillos, goji berries, or bitter oriental greens, nor do I crave mangoes, pineapples and avocados (when we grow the best apples, plums and cherries in the world).....but I have fought a bitter (losing) battle against the horrible peach leaf curl and do without peaches, nectarines or apricots.....but my son and I are grafting vines next year and planting mulberries (although I probably won't be around to eat them, my grand-daughter might). And then there are almonds, filberts, walnuts...........

Fredrick Mystral- Give Freddie lots of room, he likes to spread out. He is late to start blooming, but once he gets going, he's almost constant. If you have a thrip problem,they will find Freddy... Yves Piaget- Yves was a fun flower to smell, but a little bugger to grow on his own root. Maybe a grafted one would be better I don't know. Comtesse De Provence- A polarizing scent. Either you love it or hate it. I love it. Easy in my Chicagoland garden. A dependable plant. Rouge Royal- I love it, I hate it, I love it I hate it. Mine are own root and lot very vigorous. I'd like to try a grafted specimen. I'm not sure why others have a hard time cutting it. I find it to be perfect for cutting, if you cut it before it is open. If you let the flowers open on the bush, many of them look bad. Better to cut most of them and bring inside. They open slowly, last a long time and the scent is absolutely unbelievable. I don't think it would be a problem near William Shakespear, they are very similiar color in my garden. Peter Mayle- Is a rose everyone should grow. The scent is unbeatable, the cut flowers last a long time, and it doesn't take much space. This rose grows tall and narrow. Not super winter hardy, but I live in Chicago and mine has lived for about 10 years now. Bolero- A great, dependable grower. Kind of a subtle scent, but it is there in quantity. This is a very easy rose to grow in my garden and grows less like a hybrid tea and more like a small rounded shrub, very much like julia child, only white and a little bigger.

Oh, Zach you will burn your roots! First, I think there needs to be a large enough volume of unfinished compost in order to create heat. When the compost is spread in your garden and I don't think you will get heat. Second, if you use fresh manure in your compost you will burn your roots. Visit the soil/composting forum for more reading on the subject. Come to think of it - visit the forum anyway because it is really good reading :). As per direct sowing cukes, melons, pumpkins, or squash if you are going to put seeds in the ground in two weeks you might as well put them in now. If you put the seeds in the ground now and they will come up when the soil is right for them. If we get a hard frost throw something over them. If the die - so what you plant some more on two weeks when you were going to plant them anyway. Nothing has been lost. Lisa

This is a great thread. I'm a teacher (though I only do long-term sub jobs right now), and also GT certified and trained. I've also raised two children, one of whom passed all the GT tests as a kindergartner and is now in college. My other child passed a few of the GT tests as a third-grader, but honestly I don't see her as 'gifted.' Part of the problem is that this school district includes achievement tests in the battery of GT tests, which is completely inappropriate, but there it is. And she is an extremely hard-working kid. Anyway, I've always been hugely interested in GT education and absolutely LOVE working with these students. But I'd like to let you in on a couple of dirty little secrets.... The first secret is that there are many teachers, even GT-certified who don't LOVE teaching these kids. In fact, they often appear (to me) to be defensive and ready to shoot down these kids at every opportunity. I think it is difficult for a parent to truly realize this because they aren't in the classroom. But I have witnessed it over and over again.... It's heartbreaking, and I try to intercede when I can, but that isn't always possible. The second 'secret' is about teachers being expected to differentiate instruction for all the levels in the room. It's a joke. Not because the teacher doesn't try. It's just a ludicrous system. It is politically incorrect to group students by ability, and no longer allowed anywhere that I've found. So a typical classroom has students with IQs below 70 and students with IQs above 125, occasionally very far above. Imagine you are trying to teach 25 children something -let's say .... how to knit. Some of your students have been knitting for four years, and some could not tell you what a knitting needle looks like. While you are trying to figure out how to group them, four boys have grabbed needles and are trying to stab each other, two more have grabbed your balls of yarn and tossed them to each other, which has caused them to unravel of course. The girls are yelling at the boys to stop it. Some are crying because they really, really want to learn how to knit. So you finally bring order to the chaos, and figure you can divide them into three groups, which does not truly correlate to the levels in the room, but is the best you can do. You truly need the entire time with each one of the groups. But you only have 1/3 of the time with each of course. And what do you suppose the other two groups are doing while you are working with one? You have given them some books about knitting to keep them occupied, but they are old and have only black and white photos so that isn't terribly successful. So you start with the least experienced group because they need the most time. After you spend ten minutes with the first group, you will barely have begun your session with the second group before a few students from the first group come running over with problems. And then that happens again. So the second group's instruction takes twice as long as it should because of the interruptions. And since the third group's time was used for the second group, suddenly, there's the bell! Guess which group didn't get attended to AGAIN?!?!? You may remember that I was fairly strong-minded in the original post on this subject -and felt you needed to think about removing your daughter from a toxic environment. If she wants to be at this school and the good outweighs the bad, okay. But from the sounds of it, her educational needs are not being met. Which might be okay if you or she are supplementing them at home. The way I see it, there are two types of needs for these kids. The first set of needs is what she needs to get into a college where she will hopefully truly have her abilities matched to her environment. And the second set of needs is what she needs to feed her hungry brain. The first set of needs could be covered in one year rather than four for most of these kids. When the information is drawn out over four years, boredom and frustration set in, and many GT kids simply begin to tune out. Some lose all of their enthusiasm and interest in learning and begin to fail. And then they can't get into the colleges where they might truly flourish for the first time. As I used to tell my son, don't kid yourself -there are some extremely bright people who never made it to college. There is a whole group of gifted dropouts, mostly boys, who didn't get the first set of needs met. And Anele -it sounds to me as if your daughter IS gifted. The sheer fact that she is interested in reading what you describe is a give away. I hope I haven't offended any one here -I am passionate about the short shrift these very top students are getting in the K-12 system, all over the nation. It is a huge loss to them, and a huge loss to our country. It's mind-boggling to me that we put forth so much time, money and energy to the first-string on the football team, but not to the academic team. Okay, stepping down off the soapbox now....