All are good, Buddha is always opening my eyes to a different perspective and gives me many "aha" moments. Mumford takes it further And one is best prepared for the unexpected, for better or worse, it is a challenge Thank you, Don

Bre, The only way to get into the club is via hard work, pain, misery, total dejection, mind-numbingly repetitive chores like digging out Johnson grass and bermuda grass, etc. You can't just dip your finger in green paint and join the Green Thumb Club. You have to earn it, woman, earn it! (giggle) About the time the garden has driven you to either drinking, overindulging in chocolate (as a painkiller, of course) or tears, you'l l have earned your way into the club. You could be there right now. In return, you will experience glorious moments of joy, peace and happiness when your faith in a tiny seed is repaid in spades, or at least in oodles of fresh produce, the incredible fragrance of delightful flowers, and even the sight of tiny dew drops resting on a delicate flower petal. One day, and probably sooner than you think, you will grumpily find yourself standing in the kitchen surrounded by mounds of produce you cannot possibly deal with in the time available to you, and you'll realize that something went bizarrely wrong and somehow you got a great harvest....even the OK winds, thunderstorms, hail, tornadoes, high winds, neighbor's dogs, gophers, grasshoppers, cottontail rabbits, deer and flash floods pouring through your garden did not deny you your harvest. As you wearily try to decide "what am I going to do with all this stuff?", a smile will dance across your face because you'll know right then that you truly belong to the club and you earned your membership in the club. And, by the way, everyone who tries, who pours their heart and soul and very being into creating their garden is an automatic member of the club from the first day they start, even if they feel like it is a club that they don't yet belong to. This is a club where we all earn our membership in the club each and every day. As for the mushrooms, try to view them as a positive thing. To get mushrooms, you need soil with some good biological activity occurring in it, so congratulate yourself on that. When the soil has adequate organic matter and you have enough moisture and sometimes excess fertility or not enough wind flow, mushrooms just happen. Gardens with soil low in organic matter don't grow mushrooms as often as those with adequate organic matter. Remember that the first time you encounter slime mold (google it!) in your garden. Sometimes Ma Nature just sends us all kinds of surprises. I never get hail when I expect it. Baseball sized hail will not fall when you are at home and have covered up all your plants with every available bucket, trash can, deer netting, cardboard boxes, quilts etc. Baseball sized hail will fall when you head off to the store or the park or out of town with a "nothing will happen here" attitude in your head and leave the garden naked and exposed to the elements. For what it is worth, we've lived here 15 years and had hail in our forecast about 3,000 times and only once have we had severe damage. Even then, since it occurred in May, all the plants regrew from the ground and produced. They produced late, but they still produced. (Well, corn won't, but most everything else will.) Last year we had hail 11 times, but never larger than nickles and damage was minimal. I wish I had a nickle for every day I worried endlessly about big hail that never came. My dad's garden was destroyed once by baseball to softball sized hail when I was about 19 or 20 years old, and he never said a word about it, but that likely was because he was too busy getting the house and cars fixed. If your place ever gets hit by baseball-sized hail, I can guarantee you that your garden won't even rate high on the list of things you have to think about and deal with. Luvabasil, I hate gophers. Usually the cats keep them under control, but sometimes they cannot because the gophers (and voles, which we have here more so than gophers) are more active at night when the cats are inside for their own safety since our property is full of predators that prowl at night. I've had good luck spraying the garden with a mole/gopher repellent that contains castor oil. It coats everything in the soil and makes the plant roots and soil-borne insects unpalatable to the rodents that like them. We only had moles the first year, and the cats wiped them out, but the voles and gophers try to move back into the garden every year and the cats and I have to work at removing them for a while. Both of y'all already belong to the club, by the way, or you wouldn't be posting on this forum. Dawn

lol What a surprise someone would get if they looked in your freezer! That's a very smart idea though and your chickens could use the extra protein in the winter. Who knows - maybe feed stores will sell frozen Japanese Beetles someday. I've never grown Chinese Cabbage. Can you give a review on that? What did you make with them? Wal-Mart sells eggroll wraps in a package and I bought some of those once to make my own eggrolls but I used regular cabbage. I thought they were good but I'm the only one in my family that likes them so I haven't made them again.

1. All my friends, family, and neighbors are really sick and tired of listening to my kitchen babble (which faucet? the drainpipe from h*ll! pulls v. knobs? so tired of living with the dust! Shaw's label showing or not?) but you all actually get it! 2. The phenomenal amount of knowledge out there -- I only wish I'd discovered this forum while still in the design phase. 3. The ability to drool over theresab's and cloudswift's granite and realize that mine may, someday, I hope, look as nice and that I may not be crazy for wanting blue granite! 4. Widgets, i-chic, my alter ego nomoreblue (or am I the evil twin?), and many other people and posts that brighten my day while I can't possibly get any work done over the dreadful racket! 5. The lack of commercialism -- so often websites feel like someone is just trying to sell you something.