I totally understand your question. I am gardening at 66. I would keep the mowing lawn small. Decide what you like and want from a vegetable garden....do you plan to can or freeze. Make a list of those veggies, figure how much space is required. I would start the garden small if you have never gardened before. You can get great info from your state extension people about how to raise anything for your area. If you can bend and squat without difficulty, I would certainly have some strawberries. Blackberries and other brambles are a bit of trouble, but delicious. Be sure you understand their growing and pruning requirements. As for fruit trees, most require 7 to 10 sprays a season to have good quality fruit. The one fruit that comes to mind requiring no sprays is pears and I don't spray my sour cherry tree. If you want to cultivate this as a semi-hobby thing for retirement. I would plant trees soon, most take 3-5 years to produce. Ornamentals.......I am trying to get more shrubs and grasses and ornamental trees so that I won't have so much to maintain as you do with perennials. Bulbs are great, once you get them in the ground, they just require feeding now and again; likewise clematis. At your age, I sure wouldn't hesitate to plant whatever I wanted. Think of the wasted years between now and whenever (if ever) when you can't garden. My neighbor who is 85 moved to her present home about 15 years ago and planted trees. They are now lovely shade trees. If she thought she was too old at 70, they wouldn't be there now for her to enjoy. As to layout, that is a personal preference thing once you are sure you have the right amount of sun and drainage required for things to thrive. Of course, you need the garden to be close to a water source. My biggest problem here is too much shade for my veggie garden. The trees were here when we moved in 1991. Be sure you don't plant anything that will shade your garden on the south side. Wow, I think I have covered everything. Good luck, don't let indecision bog you down. I wish I had planted my fruit trees the first thing; just did some last fall.

Ginger is just adorable!! If you have a cat that is a good mouser, they most definitely help keep the population of small rodents under control. That is what they were domesticated to do! Both houses I've owned were infested with mice when I moved in. Fortunately, both times I had a good mouser that took care of that problem. They have great patience, stealth, and determination; I watched a former cat wait for hours for a mouse to appear from under the refrigerator. This past winter was brutal - 7 feet of snow in 6 weeks - and the voles were having a field day under all that snow. There was an unusual amount of vole damage to my perennials. Also, the chipmunks are out of control this Spring. They are (or were) running around EVERYWHERE. My "good hunter girl" is taking care of this problem, catching them daily. I am conflicted about the fact that my cat occasionally kills birds too, and have taken great pains to locate the feeders and bird baths so that they are safe from the cat. However, cats are not the biggest killer of birds; by far, it is human destruction of their habitat, followed by collisions with buildings and other structures, windows, and cars. Cats are estimated to kill 200-300 million birds per year in the US; collisions kill up to 1 billion.

Bart, CB is Coryneum Blight. It is not often a bad disease in the east but I got a very bad case of it from a tree I purchased out of a California nursery. It is nearly gone now, but not quite. I would ignore that line. Well, in general its not a bad idea to use dormant copper every now and then on stone fruit due to its good activity on both CB and bacterial spot. Copper can build up in the soil over many years so on the other hand L/S should be used most of the time. L/S is indeed lime sulphur and any good garden center should have it pre-mixed. It is possible to brew your own but for small amounts it is cheap enough to buy the pre-mixed version. Scott

Hi I had a problem much like yours a few years ago, including two legged critters, What I did was to was to start by building several raised beds of various sizes then surrounding it with cattle panels supported by steel stakes. I Wired the first two feet of the panels with chicken wire and heavy plastic tarp. I wired the pannels to the stakes so that they were over 8ft. tall and even put a pannel top over half of it. I put in two gates that I kept locked and ran several electric wires to it so that most of it so it would keep almost everything out. That worked real well. I paid about $20 for each pannel and bought 10 of them and the stakes were about $8 for each stake. Lots of times you can get them at yard sales for half the price, the pannels will last for ever. I think that the chicken wire was $10 for a role of it. you can even add lights and noise makers or alarms. I found that it will keep just about everything out except Bears and sometimes even them. George W. Z5-6 MO.