Personally, I just can't think of the cost...because if I do, it defeats the purpose. I get enough harvest to share with everyone in the neighborhood, but if I kept it all, I'd be WAY ahead of the game. But I'm not, because I like to share. Fencing- Might have been around $60 last year. Black Plastic- around $80 (gag!) for a 100 x 20 roll. I realize this year that I can get at least 2 years out of it by reusing last year's and doubling some to eliminate the holes (because I dig diff't pattern beds every year) Seeds- don't ask. I'm a sucker for a pretty package. Potting soil for a winter-sower: about $40 annually between flowers & veggies. Onion starts: $30 I think this time For what I spend to DIY, I could easily save more/spend less by going the grocery-store route with the amount that I actually keep for my own use. I need to learn to can & freeze. Maybe I need that Food Saver they were just advertising on QVC yesterday...($90) It's a hobby. And I like it. The only ones getting any 'savings' from my venture are the people at work that take the offerings in the kitchen. Sigh.

I got a question for ya, Seed Givers - I got a lot of those tiny ziplocks and my fat, calloused fingers just cannot open them. So I am transferring the seeds into other packaging until I can sow them. Some seeds I will have to give away as those plants won't grow in Florida, and I have a lot that will have to wait until September to sow for winter. So I need to know what will be the best replacement packaging to use to keep my seeds healthy and viable....especially those that will be waiting until fall and Christmas swaps and times to sow. I sometimes have terribly low germination rate and wonder if it's the way the seeds have been stored. What do you guys do?

We used a car jack to lift the roots of a huge eucalyptus tree. - after they were cut of course. lol We then used the upturned roots to plant a succulent garden. When we moved to Washington one of the first road trips to a garden was a stumpery. Very popular in England and upturned tree roots planted with ferns and shallow rooted shade loving plants. It did take two very strong men to finish the job and turn them all the way over cutting any that were too far under the stump and were holding the stump in the ground. Creating a big stumpery might require a back hoe. Here is a link for a DIY https://extension.psu.edu/creating-a-stumpery

Larry, I am so sorry about your garden and about Madge's pots. Most of your plants should recover. In our worst ever hailstorm we've had here in OK, my tomato plants were between knee-high and waist-high and loaded with fruit when hail that was about the size of ping pong balls busted everything down to the ground. It probably was very late May when this happened. I literally had to cut every plant off an inch or two above the ground and start over, just hoping that at least the broad-leaf plants would come back from their roots. I raked up endless busted fruit and demolished plants and my garden was pretty bare by the time I got all the destroyed stuff out. The compost pile got fed huge, endless amounts of plant matter that week. Cutting back the plants to remove all the damaged parts clinging by a thread worked for tomatoes and peppers, and most of the flowering plants. It did not, of course, work for onions and corn and much of anything else that has a central growing point. I salvaged the onions, though, harvesting all of them early and only half-sized, but chopped and froze them because the bulbs were bruised from the hail and likely would have spoiled quickly. Our tomato and pepper plants made a full recovery and we had a great harvest that year, albeit a late one. I replanted all I could so we'd have more than just tomatoes and peppers. I was so grateful for the garden's recovery. Still, if you had looked at our garden in May with all that damage, you'd never have dreamed how good it would look maybe 4-6 weeks later. This was very early in our years here in OK, maybe around 2004 or 2005. We've never had such bad hail since, for which I've been exceedingly grateful. We had experienced baseball to softball sized hail in Fort Worth a couple of times and, needless to say, garden plants just did not recover from that but, honestly, we had so much damage to the house and vehicles that the garden was the least of our worries. I'm always so impressed with Loren's skills and her willingness to tackle whatever job must be done. She is learning to be so self-sufficient and such a great handywoman, and she is learning that from you! You should be proud, and you should brag. Your daughter was so lucky to have you and Lauren then repairing whatever you could. I hope her house is going to be alright. You know what, I am glad you hugged your daughter. We did all the proper social distancing for 5 or 6 weeks, but once the kids started bringing the grandkids over again, we all started hugging again and it just felt so right. I have noticed that our neighbor (stage 4 pancreatic cancer) has been surrounded by his kids and grandkids, and now nieces and nephews and their kids, this past week....and why not? If they cannot be with him now and hug him now, then when? While everyone is praying so hard for a miracle for him, the unspoken thought in my mind in his case is that sometimes God doesn't give us the answer to our prayers that we were hoping for. Our preacher used to say "sometimes the answer from God when you pray is no or not now" when I was a kid and I've never forgotten that, so why can't our friend's family just be with him now while he still is here? Who knows how long he has, especially since complicating factors have prevented them from starting chemo as planned. None of us are guaranteed tomorrow on this earth. Sometimes families may have to choose love and togetherness over social distancing and I believe that is okay. We cannot let this pandemic turn us into robots who stay six feet away from everybody we love forever. The government asked us all to be careful and to self-quarantine in order to slow the spread of the virus and we all did that, but even they do not expect us all to self-isolate forever. We slowed the spread. So far our hospital systems have not been overwhelmed, but we also have to go on living. I can tell you from going shopping on Thursday that most people up here in OK are completely over social distancing, and few are wearing masks. People down in Texas don't seem to be doing much social distancing, at least not when we were in the DFW metro last week, but they were much more likely to be wearing masks. And, of course, they should be taking it very seriously down there because just the DFW metro area has well over 15,000 cases and that case load alone makes me think they'll keep wearing masks down there for the foreseeable future. I think everyone is trying to do what they can, within reason, while getting on with living their lives. It seems to be a rather delicate balancing act. Nancy, I want to dig out my annual veggie raised beds next year in the off-season and fill the bottoms of them with hügelkultur materials and then pile the dirt back on top. Of course, heavy rainfall could ruin those plans too, but we have tons of wood to use if only we can do that. We don't need more beds, but we need to feed the beds we have and I want to feed them with hügelkultur materials that will keep them happy for years. Ever since we moved here, I have focused on improving the soil first and foremost. Maybe no one but me ever will understand how much it has improved, but at least I will know that I left the soil here much better than I found it. We also have tried to heal the land. Our property is essentially 14.4 acres of creek hollow, with three creeks and numerous ponds and a swamp. It was so badly eroded when we moved here because almost every bit of it slopes downhill. Only the part where we have our house and detached garage is flat and fairly level. So, for years, we have healed eroded gullies by filling them with hügelkultur materials and letting all those materials sit and decompose in place. It is amazing how such a simple thing pays off. The gullies stopped eroding and the native plants returned to them, filling in the bare denuded soil and covering it with grasses and forbs that have reclaimed those eroded places. Because so much of our hügelkultur material was tree limbs and such, the wildlife flocked to the gullies to nest in the piles of brush we placed there. It was a win-win situation. We'll always have sloped land. We'll always have heavy rainfall flowing downhill from surrounding places that are on higher ground than ours. We'll always have some erosion, but that doesn't mean we can't work to minimize the erosion, to fix the land and to control the flow of water and to improve the soil. We just do what we can. All we really have to do is stop the erosion and keep the soil from washing away, and the native plants come back on their own and take over. To me, that's a huge improvement we can see that pays off in terms of the native floral and fauna. It rained overnight and again this morning, so we remain lakefront property at this point. What can you do? God is sending us rain and we shall have rain. Tim, being type A and OCD was going to lose his mind yesterday over (a) the HVAC not working and (b) our HVAC guy being on vacation. So, he spent his whole day (and my whole day) obsessed with fixing it himself. He couldn't even think of anything else. Couldn't talk about anything else. Didn't want to do anything else. Guess what? All the parts places are closed on the holiday weekend too. He went everywhere, he called everywhere, he was relentless. He finally found a guy in Muenster, TX, who had the two parts he thought he needed to fix the HVAC, so off we went to Muenster to this very nice man's house, because he runs his HVAC repair business out of his shop building on his property. He was such an angel because, you know, it is his holiday weekend too, and he found the parts, pulled them and had them waiting for us when we arrived. Once we were home, Tim fixed the AC, with a little telephone guidance from the gentleman in Muenster. Now, I want to be a fly on the wall when Tim explains to our usual HVAC repair guy that, um, never mind and forget the discussion we had on Saturday morning---I fixed it myself. lol. Most of those guys aren't overjoyed if you tell them you need them and then turn around and tell them "never mind". It isn't even that hot this weekend, only the mid to upper 80s, but my husband acted like we were going to die if he didn't get the AC working this weekend. On the other hand, it was too muddy to do any of the other 99 things on his To Do list, so at least he had something to work on. Amy, I'm glad you got your goulash! Did you find the refrigerator? Jennifer, Fire ants are not the same as red ants. If you have red ants, those probably are very beneficial in the garden. We have giant harvester ant mounds outside our garden and those ants have worn pathways through the grass and into the garden. I see them in there all the time, carrying out whatever food they find (seems like they like seeds a lot, and the bodies of dead insects) and working quite diligently. I like them. Most all ants are beneficial in the garden, but fire ants are not, and the damaged they do just to the gardener is bad enough to make you work hard to keep them out of your garden. Red imported fire ants are tiny compared to harvester ants, except for the queens which are much larger than the rest of the fire ants, and they sting like crazy. I will tolerate all ants in the garden, except for fire ants. Here's some info on Red Imported Fire Ants. I think they probably were what you were seeing in 2015 because all that rain was hard on them. Red imported fire ants Congrats on being able to enjoy a strawberry pie from your own strawberries and I hope your lunch with your friend was nice. Larry, My sweet sister recently was hanging a new shower curtain, and she was standing on the edge of the tub to hang it on the rod when she slipped, fell, and broke her foot. It is impossible to get up out of a slippery tub with a broken foot. Thankfully someone was home when she fell. I cannot imagine what it would have been like if she'd had to lie there for hours waiting for someone to come home and find her. I hope Madge heals speedily. I always take my cell phone into the bathroom with me so I can call someone to come rescue me if I fall in the tub. Tim's gone to work for so many hours per day and I'm usually home alone, so I have to be super careful. My friend, Jo (Fred's wife), fell once at the mailbox at the end of their driveway and broke her pelvis and couldn't get up. She didn't have her cell phone with her, and their private road, with just their house and one neighbor's house, gets very low traffic when everyone is gone to work, so she laid out there for several hours waiting for someone to come driving along and find her. I learned from her ordeal and had made a habit ever since of taking my phone with me everywhere, even if I am just going to the garage, garden, chicken coop or whatever, just because I want to be able to summon help for me if I've fallen and can't get up. Heck, if you fall here, the fire ants right now are going to come over and start building a mound right on top of you. I haven't been having to use the water hose, and the fire ants have built numerous mounds right on top of it. One of our friends was thrown off a horse last year and laid on the ground with a broken hip for several hours. By the time someone found her, she had fire ants all over her, just adding insult to injury. I had started making aging adjustments at a fairly young age---around 54 or 55. When Jo fell and laid out there on the hot ground in the sun for so long, it made me more serious about carrying my phone if I am home, or letting people know where I am going if I am not at home, because I realized what happened to her could happen to any of us at any age. I'd rather be smart and proactive and face the fact that every year my body finds it a little harder to do all the things I used to do, than to live in denial, like the man I'm married to, and pretend I am not getting older. There is nothing wrong with getting older---it is, indeed, a blessing, but we have to be smarter as we age and we have to have a plan in place to help ourselves if we fall or otherwise get injured in some way. So very many of our older friends here remained in excellent health well into their 70s and 80s (and some of them, their 90s) and drove their adult kids insane by always being out on the tractor, on the horse, etc., until they fell off the tractor or the horse and laid on the ground for hours waiting to be found. I've tried to learn from them (and all of them did have to learn to always have that phone on their person just in case). I also learned that a stubborn person who is insistent that they will heal and return to the tractor and/or horse tends to do so. For all of them, a broken hip, tail bone or pelvis was just a temporary impediment to living their life normally. One injury does not keep a good person down, and for many of them, the motivation to do all the physical rehab after breaking bones was that they wanted to get back on the tractor or back on the horse. I guess for me it would be that I wanted to get back into the garden since I don't have a tractor or a horse. If this rain keeps up, my whole garden is going to drown again, and all I'll have left is what is in the containers. I'm so grateful for the container plants because there's a ton of rain in our 10-day forecast. Dawn