My gut reaction was the same as raven's....awwwww! I hope the cookies were a huge success.

I just talked to my DIL, who has worked for a vet for years about it - she said you should definitely have a vet look at it. She said cuts in the pad are sometimes hard to get to heal (esp. those between the pads, which yours doesn't appear to be.) Yes, she says it should be bandaged but how it is bandaged is just as important - guess it has to do with the circulation. She says you do not want the dog licking it as their mouths are a home for germs. So try to get her in ASAP.

Firstly, about that episode where your bio father suggested sex: you had no way to know to anticipate it, & you had no way to control or stop it. Although it *is* obnoxious, offensive, & disgusting to you & to me, it sometimes happens when bio family members meet for the first time as adults, so much so that counsellors now warn adult children who are meeting their birth parent(s) for the first time to be prepared. & your bio father's family troubles belong to him & to them, not to you. If anything, it sounds like your father brought you into the family to be used as leverage. Dispicable, but the responsibility & the shame belong to your bio father & not to you. Cut yourself free from that particular chain & don't look back. Today is what matters, & you & your children are living under unbearable stress, in a hostile environment, & you're all paying a terrible price. "He thinks I'm evil" is *not* the description of someone you can afford to turn your back on, let alone trust, let alone spend your life with. (note: He doesn't think you're "evil"; he knows that saying that will shatter you, & that's why he does it.) He's been lying to you & manipulating you since before you were married, his family sounds like a co-dependent, disfunctional mess, & sending copies of the facebook pages to all of them sounds like that you've been caught in the same web, going to everybody else for vindication or action instead of dealing with the one person who's actually accountable. If your husband doesn't have any consequences for continuing to behave as he always has behaved, *nothing will change*. He's entirely comfortable, even happy, with his life, he doesn't care that you're unhappy, & he controls you by striking at your most vulnerable points; why would he change anything? It's like raising a child; if you say, "do that one more time & you're losing computer priveleges for a week", & the child does it again, you *have* to take away computer priveleges for a week, or you're just teaching the child that (s)he doesn't have to pay attention to anything you say/threaten, that you're powerless, that (s)he can do *anything* & the worst that will happen is that you'll yell. If you tell your husband that he has to treat you with the respect to which anyone is entitled or you & the children are leaving, & then he says something obnoxious or betrays you by talking to his family about you or does any single obnoxious thing, you *have* to take those kids & leave. (In fact, at this point, I think you have to take the kids & leave anyway; your life & their lives are being corroded every day that you spend in the environment controlled by your husband & his family.) Although it isn't your fault, although you've been manipulated to think you "can't" do anything because you somehow bear the responsibility for his behavior, so far, you've been like the parent who threatens but does not act. Even if your husband never hits you, he's abusing you: A person who controls another person by manipulation, who calls her "evil", who blames her for his own behavior...is an abuser. Get some professional legal help, get some psychological help (abusers *never* go to counselling; they don't want any interference), investigate what kind of help is available for abused wives, & get your kids & get out of there. I wish you the very best.

Yes, many herbs are amazingly simple to grow. The ones that come to us from the Mediterranean appreciate rainfall but don't need tons of it, like well-drained soil (just plant on ridges created by one of your plowing attachments/furrowers that you pull behind the tractor), and actually benefit from being sheared back occasionally. You cut them back, distribute the harvest at your food distribution points, wait a week or two or three (depends more on available soil moisture and temperature than anything else), harvest them again. Every time you harvest, you only remove some of the plant, and the rest of the plant kicks back into a highly vegetative cycle and quickly regrows tons of new growth. The easiest herbs to grow, in my opinion, are basil, parsley (but it is cool season and a biennial so keep that in mind), rosemary (as long as there is good drainage), and chives (cool season, grow like crazy and are perennial if you don't plow them up---you can divide a one year old plant into a million babies to replant). Sage also is easy but I have found that people generally only use it around the Christmas and Thanksgiving holidays so it might not be worth growing for a harvest that only would be appreciated for a briefer period. I have mixed luck with oregano and thyme---they seem to need better drainage than I can give them. There also are herbs you can grow for tea----just the leaves themselves steeped in hot water provide a nice herbal tea or, in the case of chamomile, the flowers are steeped to give you the tea. I like lemon balm and lemon verbena for tea, and catnip and chamomile. Many people appreciate mint, but be advised mint can be very invasive. Now, I don't mind invasive plants that want to run wild and grow everywhere because I have the dense red clay that tends to discourage invasiveness by causing plants to rot in wet weather. So, there's not much that truly is invasive in my garden. If it will survive the hot dry cracking clay soil in summer, it tends to die in winter's wet, soggy clay....and vice versa, but mint? Oh, mint has survived everything I've thrown at it here except for the summer of 2011. Mint can be used in tea or to flavor certain adult beverages (mojitos) or to add a nice little bit of flavor to sweet southern iced tea or as a garnish for fruit or melons. You could try a handful of different herbs every year to see which ones are appreciated and enjoyed by your clients, and which ones are duds. Most are easy from seed. Another great thing about the mints is that some of them flower and their flowers tend to be little tiny ones that are not particularly noteworthy but which do attract pollinators and other beneficial insects to your garden plot. I grow basil (one plant for every 3 or 4 tomato plants) with my tomato plants to repel tomato hornworms. I won't say it is 100% effective, but I grow about 100 tomato plants each spring, and in a bad year I'll see maybe a grand total of 6 or 8 hornworms all year long.....even though I see more tobacco hornworms than tomato hornworms (both feed on tomatoes) and maybe that's because I grow flowering tobacco (Nicotiana alata and others). I know lots of people who will see 6 or 8 hornworms on one plant, so I feel justified in believing my basil plants repel the hornworms, mostly, from my tomato plants. Cilantro is problematic. It is a cool-season herb that bolts in spring as soon as the weather warms up a bit. That is unfortunate because it is used in many recipes that use tomatoes (salsa pico de gallo, chicken tortilla soup, etc.), which are warm-season plants. So, I don't think it would be a good herb for your use. When dried, it turns bitter, so I don't bother drying it. I usually stop harvesting mine when it begins to bolt, and then I let the flowers go to seed and drop where they may. The following year I have cilantro here and there. That's not an issue in the home garden, but wouldn't really fit in with your rotation plan as it would be in the way of equipment needed to plow, plant or harvest. I think asparagus would be an awesome thing to grow, but it is perennial so wouldn't fit into a crop rotation scheme, and also would tie up its own growing area for 2-3 years before it could provide the first harvest. Or, you can take a page out of my dad's book. A child of the Great Depression, he developed a fondness for lambs quarters and poke salad that never left him. I have an enduring image, burned into my memory, of his lambs quarters plants that always grew out in the back corner of the yard right beside his compost pile. It can be hard to get people to try things like lambs quarters, poke salad or dandelion greens, but often they like them once they try them. Red Malabar Spinach or Green Malabar Spinach both are vining plants that need to be trellised, but provide a "green" for eating fresh or cooked in the summertime when it is too hot for most greens. With something like that, you might not want to introduce it for a couple more years-----wait until you get people hooked on eating and enjoying the regular veggies before you introduce some of the less common ones. You might want to consider some of the less well-known beans like favas or chickpeas.