Soultan -- Like you, I end up with excess produce, and am not interested in dragging it around to sell to a variety of places, so I take it all to our local "food bank". Do you have any food banks nearby? We have one called Second Harvest, and it's for poor people who are struggling to feed their families. Most people donate canned and dry goods. When I walk in with a load of fresh vegetables, they LOVE me, and they take everything I have. The people who run Second Harvest say that my produce is always gone in less than a day, and that makes me feel good, because I know it is going to people who otherwise would not be able to afford fresh produce. Anyway, that one thought. Also, before I moved here, I used to give all of my excess produce to a Women's shelter, and again, they always took everything and were very grateful. Maybe there's a place near you that gives away food or prepares food for the poor that would benefit from your excess produce, and you could drop it off at your convenience, and only make one stop. Jodik -- I would ADORE having more animals! You are one LUCKY LADY! We only have two puppies at the moment, and even though I love them, I was thinking more along the lines of some chickens, and perhaps a few goats or sheep. We have plenty of land for it -- 20 acres smack in the middle of farm country, so no one would lift an eyebrow if I did get more animals. Unfortunately, my work requires me to travel a fair bit, and while it is simple to board a dog or two, it's not easy to get someone to take care of farm animals. (My husband also travels, and sometimes we travel together because we own a business together.) Sigh! Well, maybe when we retire? On the other hand, with all of these farmers around, all I have to do is pick up the phone and I can get all of the manure, straw, topsoil -- you name it! -- that I want. The farmer next door "hays" our big field which keeps the thistles and unwanted trees under control (and he keeps the hay for his trouble, so it's a win-win). We raised chickens, ducks and goats on a "farm-ette" all the while I was growing up, which is why I know so much about using natural fertilizer (manure), and growing things --we had a HUGE garden -- grew enough potatoes and carrots to feed a family of 6 for an entire winter -- and we stored them in the "root cellar". Most young people today don't even know what a root cellar is! Or how to bury winter squash and other things in a mound in the ground to keep them until you want them in the winter. Or how to can tomatoes, for that matter. Or most of the truly wonderful things you can learn while growing up on a farm. Which is why we bought this land. I was so "hungry" to get back to the land. Our last house was on 5 acres, and I thought I had big gardens there -- and did -- but also had loud complaints from my suburban neighbors. ("It looks like a farm over there!" Well, duh, I'm planting a ton of vegetables in the back yard -- but vegetable weren't welcome, because they weren't "decorative enough" and besides that, my vegetable bed was "too big" -- the landscaping committee told me I had to make it smaller so it would "fit in" -- which is one of the main reasons we moved -- not because I had to make the bed smaller, but to escape things like "landscaping committees". We've been here 4 years now, and they'll be taking me out of here feet first, and that's the truth (hopefully when I'm in my 90's like the rest of my family!) Anyway, nice talking with both of you. All the Best! MacThayer

Faerybutterflye, Please pay careful attention to Dorothy's words. Placing layers of cardboard and newspaper and mulch on top of bermuda grass will not eliminate it. In fact, as the newspaper and cardboard decompose (which occurs VERY quickly in a rainy spring), they will in fact turn into compost and FEED the bermuda grass which then will grow up through the cardboard, newspaper and mulch. I cannot emphasize strongly enough that it is exceptionally hard to build lasagna beds on top of bermuda sod in our climate especially if the bermuda roots are in hard, compacted clay-ey or rocky soil. In very hard clay soil, or soil dense with rocks, it is hard to get the bermuda roots out....I've been working on it for 11 years now with success only in limited areas. I've had much more luck with shading it out and will use George's thickly-planted corn method on new ground I'm breaking this year for a larger vegetable garden. If your soil is not too dense or rocky for a sod cutter, that's the best way to remove bermuda sod...rent a sod cutter, take it out and get it removed completely and totally from your property. If you leave a 1/4" piece of bermuda stolon every square yard, the bermuda grass will spread and take back your beds in a matter of weeks. I have heard Neil Sperry tell people that for many years (oops, decades!) now on his gardening show and folks just never seem to get it. Bermuda comes back and comes back and comes back. Years ago my brother thought he'd eliminate bermuda grass from his future flower beds around his new house. He rototiled, raked out the large pieces of bermuda, added manure to the soil, put down very thick and heavy black plastic (6 mm), cut holes, planted his shrubs and vines, and put a heavy layer of white rock on top of the black plastic. The grass sprouted in every hole where he'd planted and he had to dig it out by hand repeatedly. Five years later he declared the rocks and plastic a failure. He shoveled up all the rocks, lifted the black plastic and found very thick and sturdy bermuda stolons all over the place under that black plastic. He had to either dig it out by hand--very difficult in his thick caliche-clay/white limestone soil near Granbury,Texas, or let the bermuda reclaim the area. He gave up and let the bermuda win. So, my point is that if bermuda can survive for 5 years under heavy black plastic, you aren't going to smother it out with cardboard and paper and mulch. IF you get rid of every possible bit of the bermuda by digging it out or removing it with a sodcutter, you add organic matter to the soil, you plant, and then you put down cardboard and paper around the new plants and then add 3 or 4" of mulch, then you'll be able to mostly prevent the bermuda from infiltrating from grassy areas outside the bed and from stolon pieces you missed, but it will take constant vigilance. I'm not telling you all this to frighten you, but just to make you understand that we've been through this many times with many people. Lasagna gardening is great, and it works well with clumping grasses but not with running grasses like bermuda and St. Augustine grass in our climate. Every year, I watch people here in my county (LOL, and with some of them they do it year after year after year as if they seemingly learn NOTHING from their repeated experience) rototill up a nice big patch of bermuda grass, rake out the large pieces of grass and stolons, plant veggies and water it well. Four to six weeks later they have a garden full of young veggie plants with bermuda grass already reappearing "here and there". By the time their garden is 8 to 12 weeks old, there is more bermuda than veggies. By the time the garden is 4 months old both bermuda grass and Johnson grass have "taken it back", the would-be gardeners have abandoned it, and another unsuccessful veggie harvest of little to no veggies and lots of grass has ruint someone's hopes. I watch this happen year in and year out and don't understand why they fail to figure out that they have to get ALL the grass out first and then work to KEEP it out if they want to grow a garden. So, with your flower beds and veggie beds, get all the bermuda out first, then remain vigilant on a daily, or at least a weekly basis, to keep it out. That is the ONLY way to grow anything here in an area that formerly was bermuda grass. If you go away on vacation for a couple of weeks, you'll likely come back and find the bermuda is winning the war. There is nothing harder in southern OK than fighting the bermuda grass and winning. Since our main rainy months here are April, May and June, the mud and the rapid regrowth of grass stolons/runners make bermuda grass removal difficult during that time frame, and by the time the rainy season is over, the bermuda is stronger than ever. Last year's very heavy spring rains left many gardens here in Love County with grasses and weeds 6' tall by June. If you can't get into the garden to keep the stuff out, it wins. I weed and dig out grass every single day in the spring and still struggle to keep the bermuda grass and Johnson grass out of my veggie and flower gardens. Like George, I find it 'infiltrates' and spreads into places where I had removed it.....that usually happens when I am struggling just to keep up with the veggie harvest from mid-summer on because when the veggie are ready you have to harvest them, and then cook and eat what you can and spend the rest of your time dehydrating, canning, freezing, pickling and jellying the rest. That's when my bermuda grass starts marching back into the garden....it sneaks under the fence and starts spreading through the mulch when I'm spending all those long days in the kitchen putting food by for the non-gardening season. My best success with removing bermuda has been in areas where we have planted oodles and oodles of trees and shrubs. As they grow and get larger, they shade it out (hooray!) and then I can plant shade-loving ground covers and perennials. Unfortunately, trees grow slowly so after 11 years here, I'm just starting to see significant shading out of bermuda. I had black gumbo clay in Fort Worth and I only thought it was hard to garden in it. I've give my left arm to have that black gumbo now because the dense red Oklahoma clay I have now is 1,000 times worse. I miss my St. Augustine grass too. To prepare for your bermuda battles, buy one of those little garden kneeling pads in the spring when they show up in stores. I have three of them, all well-used. Buy a good strong sturdy trowel. With bermuda grass, you don't really pull it out....pulling it out only removes the uppermost part of it and the underground part regrows quickly. You have to dig it out, and be sure you put it into trash bags and dispose of it properly. NEVER put bermuda grass or Johnson grass on the compost pile because if you do, you won't have a compost pile but you will have a lovely new bermuda and Johnson grass garden. We're not trying to scare you....but George, Dorothy and I all have fought and fought and fought bermuda and Johnson grass and we know exactly how hard it is to win each battle with it. For your flower bed under the tree, spread everything you can on the ground under the tree.....those cedar needles, grass clippings, old hay or straw, fine bark mulch, compost, etc. It is even better if you can work those into the soil, but that is hard with compacted soil and tree roots. You can improve the soil from the surface down because the mulch feeds the soil and plants as it decomposes and the earthworms and other critters carry the decomposing matter down into the soil, but it takes years, not months or weeks. Since last year was your first year, I have to warn you that last year's weather was not typical....we tend to have many more dry drought-type years and not many wet, rainy years. For example, here in Love County, we had anout 53" of rain here at our house (including 12.84" of rain in one day in April) in 2009. That is NOT normal. In 2008, we had 23" of rain, which was below-average but much more typical of what we have here most years. I'm going to find and link the Carter County climate page from the Oklahoma Climatological Society for you below. Click on the link to read the data in it and you'll learn a lot about Carter County's climate, including average rainfall, snowfall, average last frost dates in spring, average first freeze dates in fall, etc. Remember, though, that they give 30-year averages and I have found in our 11 years here that we tend to have spring freezes far beyond the 'average' dates. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: Carter County Climate Pages

kodiakbear: "I've got a box of biokleen on the way from amazon just to try after reading some good information on that soap. Because of how little you need to use it should last long enough to justify ordering online and we have prime through amazon so there were no shipping charges. I'll follow the advice of try different ones to see which works best with our water." We have had front-loading washing machines (exclusively) since the late 1930s, which was well before top-loading automatic washers were invented, and we have never been anal-retentive about adopting any routines to avoid musty or moldy smells -- and yet we never have experienced musty or moldy smells. However: (1) it never occurred to us to close the door until it latched after we removed the wet clothes from the washer, so ours always has remained slightly ajar between washes; and (2) it has been our practice to use a scoop (about 1/3 cup) of borax in every load. Borax is a mild disinfectant as well as a strategy to reduce the quantity of soap or detergent that we need to use; it typically rinses better than detergent alone does, too. Our current washing machine, like yours, is a recent model Samsung (ours is a WF419aaw), and the operator's manual, not to mention stickers on the inside of the detergent dispensing drawer itself, are quite clear and unambiguous that the only detergents that you should use in it must be rated or labeled HE. Your choice of Biokleen is an excellent one; several years back, after experimentation with the available options, we settled on the All Temperature liquid version of Biokleen (which is concentrated "HE 3X") as the best solution for us, and -- using our one scoop of borax per load -- need only one-half capful of detergent per load. So we get at least one hundred -- probably more -- loads out of the 64-oz/"64 load" bottle. (The All Temperature Biokleen liquid differs from the Cold Water Biokleen liquid only in that the latter contains enzymes; we prefer to add our enzymes, in the form of Biokleen Bac-Out, only as needed, rather than in every load). When you are getting low on the Biokleen powder that is on the way to you now, you may want to try the Biokleen liquid next, seeing as your Amazon Prime subscription makes the shipping cost irrelevant. As dadoes rightly points out, the specific nature of your water will have a lot to do with what laundry detergent works best for you, so keep experimenting until you are satisfied; the perfect match is Out There somewhere. Here is a link that might be useful: More about Biokleen liquid all-temperature

Dojey - don't be embarrassed, I think sometimes that we can become so accustomed to having our homes in a state of disruption and dysfunction that we forget how we used to cook and have real food in the house. I think that happened to us last time. We still have not reverted back to getting into cooking everyday, and it has been two and a half years since we got the kitchen back functioning. Sometimes renovation just sits and we do other things instead. I still have one kitchen cabinet door to sand and stain. Out of 30 doors and 20 drawer fronts, I missed one. Turns out it was sitting at my carpenter's shop. Two summers I have not gotten it done. THIS summer, I am going to do it. And I will sand and re-stain old trim and install it, too. I used a re-used kitchen in my remodel. I like your plan. The work area is big enough to not feel cramped. You have the island to "defend" your space from interlopers, you have extra space on the right side of the stove, and you have LOTS of storage. The horizontal upper cabs are nice and modern. In my first kitchen remodel, in 2003, I had 6 running feet of 8 ft. tall pantry cabinets. They were just cabinets with shelves, no pull-outs. We only had room for 12 inch deep cabs, and they worked fine. I did have room at the end for a utility cab, and it was 2 ft deep. It held the vacuum cleaner and other cleaning supplies. In my experience, a 2 ft deep cabinet that is just shelving is TOO deep for storing foodstuffs. Cans and boxes will get lost. Your cabs by the garage look like they might be that deep, so I wanted to warn you. If you use pull-outs for food, that deep is good. Deep cabs are good for appliances, but not for food. My current home had a horrendous 40" deep by 30" wide pantry cab. I had to stack foodstuffs on stair-step shelves along the sidewalls, put anything in the middle in baskets, and use a grabber to pull baskets to the front to get things. It was one of the reasons we remodeled. They should make the builders who create such stupid designs live in them before they sell them to an unsuspecting public! Welcome back. Are you feeling excited to get working on your new kitchen?