A Dericho storm passed through our city, and according to the tree experts that have come to price cleaning up our damage, we received the brunt of it. We sit on a small mountain, but tucked in a "hollow". About 3 dozen poplars, pines, oaks, and locus were either damaged, topped, or downed. The evening that it hit, we had to tow two trees off our road to get my kids home. My son's treehouse that he built with his dad 2 years ago was attached to three uprooted trees and was destroyed. But not a twig on our home! Unbelievable.

Oak and hickory all the way, we have enough to last for years on our property. We have a log splitter for those pesky hardwoods.

lanleeseyom makes a great point about the weird things we feed animals......one thing about factory farming that most people do not realize--especially in China, but also here in the US--is that we have made all of our food animals into cannibals. This is a VERY new thing in the food chain that never existed before the past 30-40 years. We feed farm animals that are naturally only vegetarians--grazing animals and grain eaters--processed body parts from dead animals of their own species. We do this with pigs, cows, chickens, etc. This is how the mad cow disease spread through Europe a few years ago. But do we know what other effects it might be having on the food chain? Then we eat the animals who have eaten like this, and have children.......Also, factory farmed fish, which largely comes from China now, is typically fed farm animal waste. And none of this even gets into the broad use of pesticides and herbicides on plants that we (and food animals) eat.

I am growing roses but also trying my luck with a beefsteak tomato plant and a cherry one. I also brought back some rhubarb from the house where I used to live and planted it here. Also chives. I have never seen chives get this big!!! The ones we used to grow were almost half the size of the ones we had at the house. For the rhubarb I read somewhere where one could not pick any when it is in its first year. Is this because it needs to get established?? I left it too late to actually dig up the roots as two thirds of it already had big leaves on it. So I went to the end of the row where the leaves were smaller and dug up about 4 or 5 of them. Two of them are going like gangbusters. But the ones our apartment hired to do the gardens we all swear they don't know a flower from a weed. In fact people have planted stuff and then they come along and pull them out. I think they did that with one of the rhubarb plants. Then there was an iris growing there and it got the stalk with this big bud on it ready to open and then they come along and cut the stalk with the bud on it off when I imagine using the whipper thing. I always check my roses every day and so far none of them have suffered the same fate. I guess they know what roses are. I would love to have a garden and grow zucchini, leaf lettuce but there is no room for me to put them. There are gardens other people are using to grow their vegetables in and this one woman I asked regarding hers last year but she said she needed it to plant herbs in and whatnot but not flowers. Well this year she had to give it up as she was too busy working at the PO to look after it. I had no idea it was available and the payoff was the husband and wife that just moved into the apartment this year they up and used it to grow their vegetables in.