Hello to all you quilt-o-holics! I am a newbie to the forum, having joined only a few days ago. My RL name is Marilyn but online in am agoldencomet - aka goldie or comet. I came up with this web name as something original - a golden comet is a breed of chicken with feathers the same colour as my red hair! LOL Now you know (from that spelling of colour) that I am Canadian - from Nova Scotia. I am 62-year-old retired school teacher snowbird, spending 5 1/2 months of the year in Ft Myers beach in Florida. I have been married to my best friend for only three years, after living together for twenty. Ours was one of the first weddings when same gender marriage was made legal in Nova Scotia. Regretfully, we have no children and thus no grandchildren to quilt for. So I have begun making charity quilts for preemies and also for abused moms and their children. Our only baby was Rudy, our sweet cat, who died last summer at age sixteen from cancer. We miss him desperately and will soon adopt one or more kittens. I have been quilting for only about three years and am keen to try any style and/or technique I see. My love is stained glass and I have completed ("almost") a queen size SG quilt. All others so far have been lap quilts, children's or UFO's. I am working at building my stash which travels with me north to south in the fall and vice versa in teh spring LOL. I am so glad to have found your forum and look forward to having lots of fun with you! goldie xoxo

Well, the decision has been made - Mom is not coming with us. Bummer! She doesn't want to leave DH that often in a short period of time, & he can't travel any distance at all. A 40 mi day trip doesn't even happen but rarely anymore. So, maybe next year. I'm loving the tree idea more & more as I read about all the ideas. This will be so cool! Am teaching one of my daycare little girls to sew. She has ADHD but when it comes to sewing, she could go forever. We may have hit upon a wonderful thing! At the moment she is at my side, bugging me to finish so we can get back to the sewing room. I shouldn't thwart such enthusiasm! Hope everyone is having a great week! And accomplishing more than I am - which wouldn't be hard, I can't seem to do anything that 'I' want to do :( ~Cindy

When I look back at how hard it was to improve this clay, I cannot believe we didn't just give up and quit. I'm stubborn though, so quitting was not in my vocabulary at the time. Being older and (hopefully) wiser now, I do things somewhat differently as a concession to the encroaching years. I largely have gotten away from using a rototiller, and only very rarely now even use my Mantis cultivator to work something into the soil. It is so much better to improve the soil from the top down in terms of not disturbing the soil structure, so in the established garden, I'm either very low till or almost entirely no-till. However, I don't think we would have gotten the soil into the great condition it is now without rototilling tons of organic matter into it over the year, and here's why. When we dug up our tiny oak saplings out of the woodland to transplant them into the yard, I only wanted tiny trees no taller than 12-18" and I wanted to move them with a 12-18" root ball so that we were moving saplings that had below-ground root systems equal to the above-ground top growth. Because the soil in the woodland was dark brown, crumbly, rich and humusy, I assumed all the woodland soil was that way. It wasn't. After the shovel went 8 or 9" deep into the woodland soil, that soil changed to dense red clay. I was, in one sense, shocked. I had expected the woodland with its gigantic trees had naturally better soil that what we had in the grassland areas. It really didn't. It had the same soil, only that the top 8 or 9" was much improved from having decades of organic matter fall to the ground and decompose in place. It also amazed me that the trees grew so well despite that fact that a large portion of their deeper roots were in the red clay. Based on that experience, I changed my approach to soil building and started just layering on the mulch and compost in the garden on top of the soil surface and letting it break down naturally and build the soil similar to how soil is built in the woods. It took a huge leap of faith for me to stop all the heavy digging, rototilling and cultivating of the soil, and I think it has paid off remarkably well. So, when we begin the work to move the garden eastward to make up for the shade encroaching from the west, I just want to build raised beds, fill them with hugelkultur type materials, and let the soil build and develop from there. It likely will be much slower than rototilling and working in organic matter right away, but it won't be backbreaking work and it won't be the kind of work that really disturbs the soil. I do have a lot of trouble with rodents and snakes moving into hugelkultur beds when they are new, so that will be an issue to work around.....but it isn't like the standard garden beds are entirely snake-free or vole-free either. If money was no object and I could spend any amount I choose on gardening, I'd just buy big containers (20 gallons or larger), fill them with a quality, purchased soil-less mix and only grow in containers, eliminating the whole issue of dealing with red clay. But, we live and garden here in the real world and have a budget and it isn't one that allows for endless spending of huge amounts of money on many containers and the growing medium to fill them up. I have slowly accumulated a lot of containers over the years and I love growing plants in them, but in general I add them at a much slower rate now because the growing medium needs to be renewed in them annually, and that requires adding a lot of organic matter to a lot of containers. With rocky soil that drains well, blue pimpernel might work well for you. You'll never know until you try. I love garden experimentation. Since I am in an area that generally is very drought prone, most of my experimentation has been to find what grows here without a lot of supplemental irrigation. Dawn

Came in with a good 4/10ths of an inch of thunder/rain this morning. I had just watered all the trees in the last day or two so it was very helpful. I figured out the formula for diameter of my mulch circles, and how high a gallon of water will fill that circle. 10 gallons on a 4 ft mulch circle is the equates to approx. 1.3" deep of water. So by using my 2 gal. watering cans, or 5 gallon pails, I can know exactly how many gallons I put on each tree and how many 'inches of rain' it's equivalent to. I think that makes my watering more efficient so I don't waste water and I know exactly how much each tree is getting. We need about an inch of rain here weekly to keep plants happy. Some trees like a little more. Even though 4/10th won't last long, at least I can keep track of what gets the right amount of water and how often.