another reason why i check the box, is because half the dang time i forget where the heck i left a message, so when i started posting and then i found that precious little box, OMGoodness!! that was so awesome!! Hee Hee!! i was glad, because i used to go all over the place just to see how big this place is, and well its just huge, then i'd forget where iwas. and of course where i posted something, or i'd see something that would catch my attention. i still do that and forget. LOL but ya know. LOL ~Medo p.s. who is that familiar face up there????? **big grinn**

"i wanted to try to grow larger leaves on my epipremnum aureum." In nature, the plants remain juvenile while sprawling on the ground until they begin climbing up a tree and then the successive increases in leaf size are large. When mature, the leaves are up to 39 in long and 18 in wide with slits similar to the slits of monstera deliciosa but fewer. I have tried to find scientific papers about the mechanism of transformation but could find none. If there is a hormonal signal between the climbing process and the terminal bud, it should be possible to cause maturation without climbing by exogenous application of some chemical plant growth regulator (PGR) while the vine is relatively short. People have been able to slightly increase leaf size with the (PGR) uniconazole: http://hortsci.ashspublications.org/content/27/3/222.full.pdf

My Okie father, who was born in 1910, composted his whole life, as had both his dustbowl farmer parents before him, so I figure that my family has been composting continually for well over a century. (When someone was in college or in WWII, some other family member was running a pile somewhere.) In almost 56 years, I have only lived in one home that didn't have a compost pile---during a nine month stint I spent in Boston once. In the summer when we went to our camp, we put our compostables into a bottom-less trash can that my father sank into the ground. That was in operation for fifty years until an overenthusiastic snowplow guy plowed well into our back yard and drove it out of the ground. The lid was unscathed and I still have it. For some reason, my father or someone stamped a neat "1945" into it. The bin in our backyard at home was a three-sided, wooden box about 5 feet x 10. We dropped our household debris into the bin from the garden crib above it. When my father (the gardener) died, my brother, mother and I continued to add to what my family called the "mulch pile", but we never harvested from it. It was just the way we managed waste. For years and years. I moved out and began to compost at my new apartment. When my mother moved in the 80s I moved the contents of the bin along with her other household items. I planted a garden with some of my father's plants---Blue Flag and Solomon's Seal and bluebells---and used all of the compost in the new garden. Someone gave me a huge wooden box from Lockheed and I set it up at the new place for my mother's new bin. My stepfather later built another bin 5' x 8. Over time we added three mobile, wire bins. I have five bins going now here at our former cottage, plus an area about 7'x 20' that is under three feet of packed leaves and grass clippings, an area that will be planted someday. I covered an area about 15'x20 last year under about 50 bags of leaves, about, I can't really remember, I think over 50 pumpkins, six contractor's bag of seaweed, four bales of rotten hay, and a few bags of pine needles. It's shocking how much that shrank by summer's end. It's good looking stuff, though, so I thought that I should head to another area. I'm going to heavily mulch that area with chicken house litter this spring and plant something there.

I liked the first drapes you posted in gold and red, plus they didn't look as heavy as these do, did you decide against those?