They are hinges and there are slide bolts on the other side of the bin so the whole front can be swung open. Honestly, as often as I am inclined to open it, it is not very useful. Those bins are made out of shipping pallets with the bottom rails removed. This is their third year in the weather and the wood is splitting and the hinges and bolts have mostly come unscrewed. I think the next incarnation will involve a front panel that is fixed, but hinged horizontally in the middle so either the top or bottom half can be opened.

Hi, Pat, Here is what I own and use: The Crossley Guides are really desk guides because they are so big and heavy. I like Sibley as a field guide, even though I rarely take it outside. Over the years as a bird watcher and photographer, with technology changing from film to digital, my pattern of inquiry has changed. Now, I shoot (with my camera) everything in sight and ask questions later. That way I don't have to carry a book. I like the Sibley. I bought the Crossley guides because I wanted a guide specifically for raptors and got a $ break on Amazon for buying both guides together. Crossley Sibley The layout and info given in the Sibley appealed to me more than the other guides when I was searching for a new one. My first guide is an Audubon, copyright 1977. Jane (My best canine buddy was half Samoyed, half Malamute named Holly. God, I loved that dog!)

Too late for that, Bill. I cleared a whole lot more of the pine branches and tried to raise up the holly but it was too heavy and there were branches in the way. The fallen holly was blocking the path so I then cut off about 4 or 5 feet of the top of the fallen holly but left 4 or 5 feet of the broken section. That gave me enough room to pass by. After more clearing of pine branches and huffing and puffing, I had my path open again. I was emboldened to try to raise the holly again now that it was lighter and not blocked, and I managed to raise it up straight and lash it to a major piece of the broken pine. I have no idea if the holly can heal that splinted portion but at least it has a chance, and maybe the intact leaves will be able to feed the roots for long enough to help root sprouting. It's a good thing I'm not a neat and tidy gardener. I have pieces of pine trees lying all over the place - maybe I can pass them off as decorative elements? Claire

farmgardener, Yay! Congrats on the okra. I am glad it is producing. Desperate times, like this year, sometimes all for desperate measures. It sure has been a weird year. Jacob, Your garden looks great as always and it is so good to hear everything has recovered so well from the hail. The drought news from your area is not good, but in the next seven days I expect you'll get some drought relief, and so will we. I'm keeping my fingers crossed for all of us. We're in Severe Drought here now with increasing fire activity that is keeping me away from home and away from my garden---poor, pitiful, heat-roasted and drought-dehydrated mess that it is. I'm just hoping rain falls soon before we can advance to Extreme Drought. At this point, though, in our area we only want rain if it is going to bring hard downpours of rain---those half-hearted thunderstorms we keep getting that are mostly dry storms with lots of lightning (which starts fires) and very little rain just make things worse at this point since the lightning striking in dry fields can start fires so easily. Here's the 7-day Qualitative Precipitation Forecast, offering us a glimmer of hope. Now, y'all, don't take this thing too seriously because it updates multiple times daily and can be all over the place with regards to amounts. Still, as we watch it evolve over the next few days, we should have some clue about how much rain to expect. 7-day QPF Larry, I loved Little Lucy and was so unhappy when the seed company that carried it dropped it from production. It was so pretty and so productive. Rebecca, Hmmm. Baby Bubba usually produces a lot. Know what I'd do? I'd hit that sucker with Bloom Booster type fertilizer to push it into flowering. I don't know why it is being lazy this year. It isn't like we are cool and cloudy, so it ought to be happy with the weather. I am so happy that Seeds of India worked out well for your co-worker. Please tell her how thrilled I am to hear that their garden is doing so well. I was only able to work in the garden yesterday for a little while. I deadheaded flowers, dodging all the bees who take it personally when I start snipping off blooms. I did a little weeding, but there's not many weeds at this point since I've worked so hard to mulch heavily and remove each weed when first noticed. I have one path that gets a bit weedy because I never have gotten it mulched. Mulching that path is on my To Do list but I never seem to get around to getting it done. I harvested okra. I talked to the tree frog who was sitting on top of my sun umbrella. I scared the deer to death by walking out of my garden while they were trying to sneak into the driveway to steal the doves' cracked corn. We had four fire calls yesterday. I didn't go on the first two as they were relatively small and minor, but the third was a big one and we were out there for 7 hours in horrific heat. The thermometer on our fire dept. vehicle showed 121 degrees at one point, and that was because we were being heated up by residual heat from the adjacent fire, which was just a 100' or so from us at that point (but not moving towards us). It was so hot out there, and so dry. When we finally made it home, we rushed off to town to grab a quick hamburger. Wqe'f fed the firefighters cold cut sandwiches and chips, but we still were starving when the fire was extinguished anyhow. On our way back from town, wolfing down our hamburgers as we traveled down the highway, I saw a familiar orange glow in the night sky and told Tim that our fire had rekindled. He didn't want to believe it and thought it was somebody else's fire---maybe across the river. (This is what I call magical thinking....wanting something to be true so you just believe it is......). We went to investigate and, of course, it was our fire. So, we sounded the alarm and then spent the next two hours back out there again. Having a wildfire rekindle is not unusual because when hundreds of acres burn, there's inevitably smoldering trees and logs and such that will flare back up----there's not enough water in this county to soak down hundreds of acres, so you just do the best you can with what you've got. Now, as I am typing this on Saturday morning, Tim is back there on a very small rekindle. It probably is going to be a rough day here again today since it started out with a fire call around 7 a.m. So, I guess we are having the August I expected and dreaded----a drought-decimated garden full of grasshoppers, and fires daily, and with the fires seeming to increase in number and severity daily. I'm hoping we'll start getting rain soon and that conditions will improve. Even in 2011 when it was hotter, drier and we were much deeper in drought than we are now, we got our first hint of drought relief on August 11th, so that gives me hope for this coming week---that maybe we'll be getting some real drought relief within the next 7 to 10 days. The forecast looks kinda good right now, but then you really cannot trust a forecast 7 days out, so we'll see. I hope you all have a good day today. Dawn