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**

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.

ltilton wrote: "I'd say its the Sunsweet product that isn't really a true prune. It's an artificial prune." Well, you're probably right in that Sunsweet prunes probably bear as much resemblance to sun-cured, orchard ripened prunes produced in Italy as Taco Bell carry out does to the authentic cuisine of Mexico, but it's what I'm used to and was looking for.

Nana your quilt is beautiful and I love the pink. Calliope that's hilarious, but have to agree people do go getting pregnant without asking permission. And just when I think I have made all the baby quilts another cousin goes and gets married. I feel guilty making a quilt just for me as that means putting off making gifts for members of my family and I am the only one quilting in my family currently. I have 2 queen-size quilts currently in progress and have started buying fabric for 2 other queen-size quilts - all for family members. I worry that if I do start a quilt just for me I'll enjoy it so much that everything else will become UFO's. And I love pink, so I know the quilts I want to make for myself will be girly colors and hubby is not too thrilled about that and I also think of who am I going to pass "my" quilts onto that I keep for me and I only have a boy so I think he is going to want "guy" colors in a quilt. I want to know that if I make a quilt that it will be loved and used in the future. Once I get Grandma's queen-size quilt finished though, I think I will feel less guilty about starting blocks for me a quilt - though ssssshhhhh! don't tell hubby, he is wanting a paper-pieced "5 year" lighthouse quilt first. Well off to cut fabric for my Lotto block the only short-term project I am working on currently but it helps break up the monotony of other quilt projects and I keep thinking that if I do enough Lottos that one of these years I will have enough blocks to make a sampler quilt - and yes for me to keep, who am I kidding though it will probably turn into one of my family member's gift. :-) Best to you, Sandra