Luckyladyd -- plants may recover from some nibbling as long as the main growing point is not injured. flowers4U -- I've always found the longest-lasting stage is to cut when the petals are expanded and cone still isn't showing much pollen. (That's common to many other flowers, too." Stem length depends on what's available. The first blooms often have nice long stems - over 12 inches. As secondary buds come along, the stems get shorter. Those that wilted "right away" possibly weren't conditioned properly for some reason.

I don't know that 'blame' applies to the freedom that younger people have now compared to what people had in the 1960's. I tried to watch "Giant" the other night. couldn't get my teeth unclinched, & when I thought the top would blow off my head, I stopped watching. The way the women, *grown women*, were treated was appalling ("Leslie, you're tired, go to bed", when Leslie wanted to talk with the men after dinner, & her husband said it in front of all the couple's guests). I'll take pink hair & tattoos any day over that kind of oppressive, restrictive lifestyle any day. My mother used to laugh about how her future mother-in-law frowned when she (my mother) sat on my future father's lap. My mother said, "Mama Texas went into the kitchen & brought a chair for me to sit in." My parents were of the WWII generation, not free-love hippie freaks by any means (had that term been available at the time). They were both Texas farm kids who had worn feedsack clothes & carried dinner buckets (syrup or sorghum molasses buckets) to school for their midday meal of syrup & biscuits. & they still managed to bring Granny out of the kitchen with a chair to correct their scandalous behavior! Things change, & each generation has its own expressions & rites of passage & so forth, its own row to hoe as my grandmother would have said. I don't blame myself or my generation or anybody else for a young person having the freedom to have tattoos or a ponytail; if I were going to claim responsibility, 'credit' would be a more accurate word than 'blame'. & I've seen tattoos & ponytails on young people who have good jobs, managers & techies. better than the IBM or FBI 'clone' looks that we saw in the past. edited to add: I was typing while OP was posting, & she said, 'Don't they realize they all look alike?' Back in my mini-skirt, long straight blonde hair days, I would have turned up my nose & argued, but I think the answer is yes, they do realize they all look alike; all the peers look alike, so they can identify with each other. They look different from everybody else. which is fine, because they're going to spend their lives with each other & their offspring, not with us, sad to say. Dang, what a waste! Just as I'm getting old enough to be any good at all, I'm obsolete! also, I think that the corporate & military powers-that-be will relax their attitudes about tattoos; they'll have to. It seems like every other healthy young person I see has at least a little butterfly or a purple rose or a cross. This post was edited by sylviatexas on Wed, Jul 30, 14 at 13:43

He gets six and 3/4 days and I get 1/4. I am watching Milk Street even as I type- I intensely dislike this Chris guy. Outside of his serial marrying, affair divorce thing he has going (what women?) he is snide and abrasive. Why are all his co-cooks so short? He tastes a dish somewhere-fabulous! Marvelous! takes it back and makes some sort of bizarre not the same dish. His thing. I neglected to say I am not a Hallmark channel fan but I don't have much opportunity to object to it. PBS, oh mercy. What has gone wrong there? All we get is athon-ing. They are telling us that we are going to get TWO Whole Weeks of no fundraising. Oh GEE. If I send money I get to watch them beg for money. Do they feed it to chickens? We get rerun shows when we get shows and the occasional spate of new stuff shown back to back as late as midnight(?) like glutting on it and don't tell me they don't have ads. They show many of the same ads as mainstream TV plus the special ones for kitchen equipment etc for the cooking shows. Hmmmm. Add a couple more and call it good. Seems like a death spiral as they compete with streaming. Sorry for the diversion. Back to Hallmark-it is the visual version of romance novels so popular with so many. soothing I suppose.

Also, house gets a lot of sun, especially afternoon. Snowy, cold in winter. Dusty area and in a clearing above a river in the woods = mildew prone.