That's right Pardak. Maybe in some old arboretum or where the original specimen is it could be 40 feet tall but I mean come on, it's the perfect plant for this situation. You and I will be dead (hell I'm 35 if and even it needs removing, which I doubt. A careful pruning job 35 or 50 years down the road and it's ready to continue to occupy that space. Coenosium Gardens doesn't propagate the same plants every year as a general rule, but this one he does. At least for the last eight years or so. It's a great conifer. Enjoy indeed. Dax

What a good mommy you are! The new bedroom sounds dreamy enough for any little princess. How to stay motivated? It helps me to have some excitement about the final outcome. Do you have any inspiration pics to put up on the fridge to keep your spirits up and your motor running? There are a number of them in the Gallery in the post on kids rooms. There are also some in the bedrooms post, and even more in the Cottage Decor post. Close this thread and you'll find a link to the Gallery at the bottom of the page that lists all the threads. Also another link at the top right just above the list of posts. I second Dian's brilliant suggestion about audio books. I get audio book CDs from the library and listen to them in the kitchen, or wherever I have mindless work to do. I love them. I'll bet if you snoop the web you can order a ready-made slipcover for that chair for not too much money. You might start with eBay and amazon.com. On the sewing, all you're talking about is sewing straight lines. That isn't difficult. Seems to me you must have a gf who would be happy to come over and supervise you until your "rust" is off. That would be a lot less daunting than a class, to me at least. Your mom or mom-in-law might like to help. When our kids are grown and gone, we suddenly feel unwanted, useless. We are thrilled if we're asked to help. We feel valued, and if we're retired we have the time. Well, most of us, anyway. If yours don't live close they could at least sew a pillow or something. Just a thought that could improve family relations and lighten your load. Make a family party out of it. You supply the steaks, hot dogs, the barbee, and the paint, and invite them all. They can bring salad, dessert, etc, and extra paint brushes or whatever. I'm looking forward to helping with my granddaughter's bedroom makeover somewhere in the next few months. I'm really excited about it and I'm collecting ideas. One idea I ran across is these giant tissue paper flowers. They would be so darling hung from a little girl's ceiling. Do you like those? This URL shows you how to make them -- very easily and cheaply. It would be a good project to do with kids, depending on the age of the child. Here is a link that might be useful: How Make Tissue Paper Pom-Poms (scroll down)

Yep - there's a bunch of truth there! I used to teach with a woman (I started to say a lady...) that I thought I liked. Then I found out that every kid in every drivethrough window in town had been a sacrifical lamb to this woman. She was a real terror with people in restaurants, fastfood places, etc. Totally lost any respect that I had had for her. Part of it was because all three of our kids had worked fastfood and I KNEW how hard they worked. Man! Did I get off on a tangent!!? LOL

Barrie & Dave, I would gladly pay $1.00 per seed to get super disease resisting plants if I could trust any of the marketing hype, but I don't. Someone in my position with enough expenses and tomato luxuries taken might not want to add another random one each time. But personally I'd be willing and interested to do a trial though since that makes more sense to me. In the sense that Dave emphasizes real grower feedback, and not the typical marketing hype: It would be nice to figure out how we can do a swap to basically order together so that for a few bucks of freshly purchased seed, we get, say, 5 acclaimed hybrid varieties that we'd all like to check out. Since they can cost over $1 per seed even when not in the smallest pack, a gardener can end up paying $20 including postage for just 10 or 15 seeds, and shipping is going to be part of that. Now for five varieties, I would want to grow them side by side so I got a better comparison and not waiting for years doing one at a time and moving the baseline and memories. I am non-commercial and I am not going to spend $70 for five varieties averaging 12-14 seeds per pack which are extra costly in the smallest packs at Johnny's for example. It would be great if people with 5 of these newer varieties could agree to do a round robin of sorts. Does anyone know where I can do that or can we figure out something together if there is enough interest? This is different from trading saved seed so I have no idea how whether it would fly but it makes a lot of sense to me... and the nice thing about it is we could even share out experiences with them giving another level of comparison, if we could agree on the ones to get. PC