"My neighbors idea of gardening is going to Target while the landscaping guys come to cut the grass." --LOL, Doris! This is my first year WSing. And really, it makes a lot of sense when you think about it. Most seed winters over and then you get "volunteer plants". Every year, I have "volunteers" -- hollyhock, sunflower, cherry tomato, marigold, basil, and even last summer, I got about ten very nice cantaloupe from vines that came up out of composted soil that I had just moved into a new raised bed. I didn't even have much for it to grow in yet at that spot, and at first I thought the plant was cucumber so I trained it onto a trellis. Imagine how well it would've grown with better conditions! Thanks to several generous folks, I have WS'd a lot of really interesting-sounding plants that I never tried before. I do not have good luck with seeds I plant in the ground in spring. Some of them never come up. They dry out just at the wrong time. Or the cat digs them up. Or the dog walks on them. Or the birds eat the seed! And worse yet, I've even been known to forget what I planted where and have PULLED THEM UP thinking they're weeds! Whoever coined the term "Golden Years" must not have been old. When you think about it, it's just really nature's way, what we're doing, except that we are protecting the seed from drying out and from all the other things that happen to it. The "volunteer" plants seem to "know" when it's time to come up. So this is going to be really interesting to me to see how the milk bottle makes the difference. With my milk bottles clearly marked (with grease pencil), that alone will keep me from destroying seedlings thinking they're weeds! I live on the back of a small town park. People use the sidewalk that runs about ten feet from my back chain link and I see them sometimes just standing there looking over my garden in the summer. If I'm out there they always make comments and ask questions. I always grow tomatoes in my raised beds and people around here seem to be really interested in tomatoes. Those who don't have space for anything else, will grow that. I plant mammoth sunflowers and hollyhock just outside my fence, they get a lot of attention; so much so that somebody actually cut off one of the sunflower heads last year and made off with it. And they love to look over the grapevines just inside my fence that grow on an "arbor" DH made me out of iron pipe, pipe elbows and stock panels. Those same people walk the park all year 'round and now they've started to ask questions about what all those milk jugs are in the corner of one of my raised beds. I mean, these folks truly get involved in my garden. In the hottest part of the summer, when I'm not very good about getting out there and pulling weeds, they let me know about that, too! So thanks everybody for taking the time to post advice and especially to those who've sent seed to me, and in fact sent seed to the person who sent seed. I got really excited about some of the seed I got after I Googled and saw what some of the plants look like! I keep a "gardening journal" on my computer and I like to copy the pictures of what the things I plant are supposed to look like from the Internet, along with any other information I can get: height, growing conditions,culinary or medicinal uses, etc., and paste them into my journal. So I was really busy doing that for awhile. I still have planted my tomatoes and peppers inside this year. I know the tomatoes would probably be fine WSing but I'm not sure about the peppers. They seem to need to be warm all the time and I've been told that if their roots get cold it affects production for the life of the plant. DH is a tomato lover and I like to can whatever excess I have so having good tomato plants is important. If things do as well as I think they will this spring, I will WS tomato seed next year. I too am having trouble collecting enough milk jugs, but I will save all year now and be better prepared next year. I just can't take things out of people's trash. I work for an agency that provides jobs to people with disabilities, and one of the businesses we run is a recycling center. But taking things out of the bins is a big no-no for us. The mess in the parking lot people make when digging around in our bins means we have to spend a lot of time cleaning up after them. Things blow across into other people's property and they have the police come out and tell us to clean up. If we don't do it fast enough we are fined. When there are lots of people taking recycling materials, it really reduces the amount of stuff we ship out and affects our income. So if you live near a recycling center, please ask them first if it's OK for you to take things. They might have things they can't recycle and have to throw away that you can have all you want of. In our case, that would be anything made of styrofoam. And any time any of you dumpster dive, please clean up after yourself. Don't climb in. There are sharp metal objects, broken glass, and sometimes even 'poo' in there. Although the mess that's made is always a problem, what most businesses fear about dumpster divers is that they will get hurt and sue.

The article kathy-ny linked above was interesting...but I found this tidbit incredible: The luxury home furnishings retailer is also upping its game on the merchandising front by expanding assortments in categories such as leather, raising the page count of the Source Book catalogs that it mails and adding catalogs in new categories such as rugs. What? In this day and age of paperless electronics, if you can't get your point across in 3,300 pages, 17 lbs. of catalogs, do you really think adding more pages is going to be helpful?!?! Even War and Peace is only 1,400 pages. And the size of the stores they're building is unbelievable. 70,000 sq ft? That's over 1 1/2 acres! Just imagine what they're going to have to do to prices to support that footprint! Yikes!

Lazypup thank you so much for sharing your story. So many people misunderstand what mental illness can do to people and those that live with them. My DH was diagnosed with BPD in the last decade. If only he had been diagnosed earlier how different our life might have been, especially financially. He has always been high functioning and a hard worker blah blah blah so it was easy to dismiss the erratic behavior. I can relate to the job walk-offs. One year he had nine different 1099s. He is stablized with a couple drugs that are pretty side effect free for him also. One of the "lucky" ones who hasn't needed lithium. It will never be perfect but it is so much better than before. I also agree with you on the over diagnosing that goes on with children. It is the boys that have it worse since the feminization of our society expects them to have the same behavioral characteristics that girls do. Our children's childhoods are being stolen. They are expected to learn more at an earlier age,have a lengthened school day with less recess,not given opportunity to blow off steam and burn off that excess energy and have every minute of their waking hours micro-managed. Yet at the same time many are still drinking out of those stupid sippy cups and being pushed around in strollers at age 5.

He gets six and 3/4 days and I get 1/4. I am watching Milk Street even as I type- I intensely dislike this Chris guy. Outside of his serial marrying, affair divorce thing he has going (what women?) he is snide and abrasive. Why are all his co-cooks so short? He tastes a dish somewhere-fabulous! Marvelous! takes it back and makes some sort of bizarre not the same dish. His thing. I neglected to say I am not a Hallmark channel fan but I don't have much opportunity to object to it. PBS, oh mercy. What has gone wrong there? All we get is athon-ing. They are telling us that we are going to get TWO Whole Weeks of no fundraising. Oh GEE. If I send money I get to watch them beg for money. Do they feed it to chickens? We get rerun shows when we get shows and the occasional spate of new stuff shown back to back as late as midnight(?) like glutting on it and don't tell me they don't have ads. They show many of the same ads as mainstream TV plus the special ones for kitchen equipment etc for the cooking shows. Hmmmm. Add a couple more and call it good. Seems like a death spiral as they compete with streaming. Sorry for the diversion. Back to Hallmark-it is the visual version of romance novels so popular with so many. soothing I suppose.