I enjoyed this. and Don, I remember that song. My DS never went off to camp, but we had a huge extra wooded lot which was the neighborhood hangout when young, a nearby creek to explore runniing thru undeveloped lots to build on when older. Bike trails and jumping ramps were favorites...never did regain my garden rakes and shovels and DH fussed about the plywood and tools hauled off and never returned...fun memories. josh

...I feel downright idiotic nowadays! I can relate! The Great Indoors (a large home decor store) called a few weeks ago to tell us they found a Daytimer notebook with my name in it. We were last there several months ago and I didn't even realize it was missing, must less that I took it there!!!! I've talked to women who are very intelligent, clear-headed thinkers and they are experiencing the same thing. I've read about women leaving their careers at this point because they just couldn't keep things straight anymore and they felt awful a lot of the time. Whenever I hear about a woman our age who others describe as forgetful or doesn't follow directions, I immediately know why. %-O

Bon, I understand that gardening feeds your soul just as much as it feeds your body. I am the same way. Be kind to yourself and plant a few tomato plants to feed your soul (and body) and just let the others go. Letting go is hard, but you're super-stressed with the move and the need to fix up the new place, so be sure to be kind to Bon. I do hate it that you're having to leave a place where you've made such progress on the soil, but life is a series of new beginnings and I hope you can look at the old place as a form of preparation for the new beginning in the new place. Did I hate leaving my old gardens behind in Fort Worth? Of course I did, but I was all fired up about the challenge of starting over in a new place as well. Remember that you can plant new tomato plants (perhaps a couple of varieties chosen expressly because they were bred to grow in containers) in late June or early July for a fall harvest if you want to. That might make it easier to let go of your bountiful selection of spring seedlings that may not be able to go into the ground now due to the move. I am sorry y'all got involved with those fraudulent people. That is a terrible, terrible shame and it certainly happened through no fault of your own. Con artists are clever and can fool anyone. You're doing a good job of dusting yourself off and moving on. I applaud you for that. The new place sounds like it has wonderful potential and y'all will have fun making it your own. I do lament the loss of your potatoes----all those potato plants! That's a shame. I also hate you've lost the progress on the permaculture areas you've been building, but any improvement you've done to Mother Earth remains, even if you are not there to benefit from it. It seems to me like that achievement should earn you some good karma. On the bright side, neither your or Bill will have to spend a significant part of June and/or July digging potatoes in the heat. (Always gotta look for the bright side!) Remember with the new garden to start small and make it bigger each year so you don't exhaust yourself trying to do too much breaking of the ground and improving of the soil all at once. My original garden here was just two small raised beds built in what I roughly imagined as our back yard, and I planted it a year before the builder started building the house. I tended it on weekends when we came up here to work on clearing the forest enough to be able to put up a barbed wire fence to keep the neighbors' cattle off our land. It was an adventure---the only time I ever had to have a barbed wire fence to keep the cows out of my garden! For a few months, we had cow surprises every weekend since it took us a long time to clear enough old, dense, overgrown woodland to put up the fence to keep the cows out---we'd stumble upon cows in the oddest places, and just laugh and shake our heads. We didn't mind the cows being there, but we didn't want to have permanent grazing cattle that weren't ours, so once the fence went up, they had to stay on their place, not ours. Once the cows were gone, the house was built and we were moving here, we put time into building our first "real" garden, but even that was tiny compared to what we have now. After I would get one section fairly well improved and workable, we'd add a new section. We added something new almost every year, except in the worst of drought years, which are not a time to be trying to break up hard, clay ground. (See, I've learned something from living here.) My tiny little garden was jam-packed with flowers, herbs and veggies, and I used it for two or three years before we got the big garden built and ready to use. I learned a lot from those small beds even if they didn't produce gigantic yields. They did produce adequate ones considering how small they were. I learned about our soil, our rainfall, pests, etc., just on a smaller scale with a smaller garden. It was just important to me to have something---even just a couple of small raised beds. I hope you find a way to have something for yourself this year---whether it is a small raised bed, containers, or whatever. If all you have is one big container with 2 tomato plants and a marigold or something in it for color, so be it. At least you'll have that, and you'll know that next year you can grow more. Sending you hugs and best wishes on the new adventure upon which your family is embarking! Dawn

'Melissacovell'....do you have any more of that Christmas cactus, now growing? Or does your mother have a big plant if it, that maybe she would take some cuttings off of it? I lost mine a few years ago, over 150 yrs old, gone. Between the post office knocking it over and killing half of it, (when we use to get phonebooks delivered to our homes...they just threw them on the porch, and hit the cactus and it fell and snapped it in half,) and only the other half rooted. The half that lived, but never really got over the shock i guess. It slowly died year after year, it slowly died, stem at a time. Till it was gone. I got through Hurricane Irma, but it killed my garden/yard, and my cactus collection, my huernia/orbea collection. My hoya collection, everything was destroyed. All my plants. I now have a bare yard, with tree stumps and a huge mountain of dead tree limbs/plants. I would LOVE to get some of that 'old fashion' Christmas Cactus....if you happen to see this, leave me a note. I miss that plant so much. Its lovely pink/lavender bloom at Christmas time. Your 'message option' is not working in your profile, so I couldnt make this plea for cuttings in private. Thank you.