First, you didn't flunk Lawn 101. You got a B in 2006, a C in 2007 (for late seeding) and an A so far in 2008. Nothing you did was wrong, but the timing for seeding was off a bit. 1) Round Up. We hesitate to mention specific chemical names for companies. The generic glyphosate works just fine and it's essentially the same stuff. Also, so many of us are organic and the R word stuff isn't. 2) Compost and peat moss will both decay away in about five years, so the soil is going to settle. Certainly you can mix either lightly (say, an inch or so every ten inches of soil), or skip it and use organic feeding methods. If your soil is really bad, I'd mix it. You can usually get compost from your local garden store, big box store, or delivered bulk from a supplier. The other option is to use 1/4" as a topdress for your seeding. Over time, the decay products work into the soil and enrichen it, plus you kill two birds with one stone and don't need to otherwise mulch the seed. Plus, the worms like it. :-) 3) Go right ahead and use it. If it was stored in a cold garage, it's completely fine. If stored in a warm house, you lose some germination but it's not that significant over six months. You can't wait too much longer for a spring seeding (and might want to consider using Siduron or Tupersan as a pre-emergent when seeding). So you probably don't have time to wait for the soil results. That's OK, you can work on correcting those issues afterward. Right now, get it sprouted--the seed has all the resources it needs for the first few weeks of its life. Once you get that test back you'll know what to add.

It might have more to do with your husband's, uh, neediness?, devotion?, obsession?, than with something being wrong with you. You dated in college, got engaged, *broke up*. One thought that occurs is that, since he "followed" you, you equated it with true love. so you got married. didn't work, so you *divorced*. but he was still around, & after all he was your child's father, so you re-married, & now you have another child. & now you're thinking about *divorce*. Maybe you're together now because he's persistent & you (like so many of us) find it hard to say no. Maybe you need some time alone, maybe some counselling alone, to see your own direction more clearly. I wish you the best.

It might not be the cold so much as it is that we are wetter going into the cold season than you were in Texas. The result -- for Teas and relatives -- is that they are more actively growing when the cold finally comes, and get hit hard. Teas (and relations) seem to regulate their growth by water availability more than temperature, so if the slide down to cold happens while we're getting our normal Autumn rains, that means more unripened growth by Winter. In my experience, so long as Teas get full-sun, and ample water and nutrients during the growing season, they can take being cut back hard from Winter and still grow large by the end of the growing season. So, for East Coast zones 7-8, rather than looking for more cold-hardy Teas, you should be looking for more vigorous Teas. By that, I don't mean bigger eventual size, but faster rate of growth, because you'll likely still find yourself cutting back quite a bit of dead cane in Spring. What you want is something that will quickly recover from this treatment every year. :-) ~Christopher

My mother was an awful cook. She fried almost everything, yet she was slender as were my sister and I. She had a 5-6 dish rotation: smothered steak (fried round steak cooked in brown gravy until tender-ish); fried pork chops; fried chicken; fried frozen shrimp on Friday nights (we are Protestant but she served fish on Friday); over-cooked, shoe-leather tough roast on Sunday; and at some point every couple of weeks, the worst spaghetti you’ve ever tasted. There was no such thing as a casserole. Green salads were rare to non-existent. I never could understand the penchant people had for mac and cheese when I was growing up. Here is Mother’s recipe: Cook elbow macaroni until it is flabby. Drain and put in a rectangular baking dish. Beat 2 eggs. Add milk. Pour over macaroni. Top with a few slices of very mild cheddar cheese. Bake until the macaroni is hard again. We had an abundance of vegetables because we had a huge garden (couple of acres) that we shared with the people who worked for Daddy. Mother did not can food, but she froze a lot of vegetables. I ate a lot of fresh tomatoes growing up. We had them for every meal, including breakfast, when they were in season. I would sneak into the garden, find a good one and eat it like an apple! Then there was fried okra; fried field corn (corn cut off the cob and cooked in a skillet with butter or bacon drippings); pole beans; yellow squash; cucumbers, butter beans (harvested when they were tiny) and crowder peas. For such a lousy cook, Mother had very high standards. Vegetables had to be small and tender. Tomatoes had to be vine-ripened unless they were being used for fried green tomatoes, in which case they had to be truly green and hard. Fruit had to be unblemished. We had no processed foods ever. I didn’t know what American cheese was until I was 23. It wasn’t that Mother was purposefully a healthy eater. She just didn’t like the taste processed foods. Mother never baked a cake from scratch, except a coconut cake at Christmas. The coconut had to be fresh (as in ”first you buy a coconut…”) and finely grated by her own hand. Her pie crusts were always from scratch and always flaky and tender. She had 2 pies she made, lemon meringue and chocolate. Biscuits and cornbread were made without a recipe and were always perfect. Mother’s best dishes were her potato salad and her cornbread dressing. I can’t make either one to save my soul. My sister comes really close on the cornbread dressing. Mother was over 90 when she died. She was living by herself in her own home, doing her own housework and cooking her own meals (still nothing processed). She did the light portions of her own yardwork but hired a really good-looking, very buff young man to do the heavy lifting and mowing. We teased her that she found things that needed doing just to get him to come to the house! I suppose my ”rebellion” is not cooking like Mother did. But I wouldn’t mind having her yard man mow my grass. 😉 ETA: My sister just sent me these pictures of Mom. She may have been a lousy cook, but she went some interesting places!