First, let me say that I like to read your stories and to get a small glimpse of your lives in a very different world. But I also like when you share your art here. How wonderful that you take your creative gift so seriously but also that you will trade your stuff for pies! Your life sounds as if you have found a community to which you contribute in an important way. Good for you.

I grow loads of different sunflowers every summer, and am always open and interested in hearing about new varieties that I don't have yet. This is not the way to do it though! Besides I'd much rather hear about personal experiences with the flowers than a standard commercial blurb that one could get off just about any website. That's not why most of us come to this forum! Also I'd like to point out that "Indian Blanket" is a sunflower I grow, but GardenWeb informs me that it is not in their database because it is not a "recognized" cultivar, or something like that. They responded to me and said: "We cannot find any record of this cultivar having been registered anywhere. With all due respect, there are far too many nurseries that make up names and market them with no formal registration/patent...If you can locate the name of the person/nursery that registered/patented it and the year, we will be glad to include it. The information will have to come from a university.edu, or society or botanical garden.org, or something similar, not a commercial enterprise." Just FYI.

Sally, I think your dad's term 'bully beef' is a historical one; that term is what the British soldiers used to refer to canned corned beef. (That's what I get for reading too many British war novels. I can recite most of that un-PC poem 'Gunga Din', as well.) I've never had S-O-S. Can anyone post a reasonably authentic version of the legendary glop, like what you would have gotten in an Army mess tent? Waldorf salad, ambrosia...don't care if I ever see any of those again. Likewise divinity fudge. Hated that stuff. (As I type this, though, I'm eating a slice of Red Velvet Cake.) Here is a link that might be useful: British rations 1880s to 1918

Here's a pic of our new display without tops yet. These are the MDF standard construction. Anglophilia is right...they are very heavy! Really only person who benefits from the plywood upgrade is your installer...his back will thank you. :-) Photos below show MDF and also a couple of the drawer options: standard wood or laminate in a laminate gray metal finish.