Big and small, long and short, skinny and fat, fruits and vegetables come in all sizes. There are so many cultivars on the market that your head will spin just reading the labels. Which ones do you want or need? Want is certainly different than need. If you have a couple acres of rich soil, lots of time on your hands to tend to this acreage and the desire to impress your friends and neighbors, you can pick anything you want. But if you only have a small raised bed or even a patio where you can set containers to grow a few cherished lovelies to honor your dinner plate, then you need to keep reading. There are so many “dwarf” varieties of vegetables or fruits that you don’t need to be limited in what you put in your garden or containers.

While I was at the Madison Fest – what a gala event that was by the way – giving a talk on container gardening, folks asked me what vegetables they could grow in containers. They wanted to experience the great taste of fresh squash, eggplant, cucumbers, tomatoes or even potatoes, but they only had a small plot of soil or several containers to devote to this desire. My friends, there are many options – you will just have to spend a little time seeking out these plants or their seeds.

What is at the top of your wish list? To be sure tomatoes will be there. I know a couple folks who can’t eat a tomato but we will understand their dilemma and lovingly wish them well in life. Is there anything better than a fresh tomato on white bread smothered in mayonnaise? I can hear my doctor cringing at two of those options, but let’s get back to the healthy part – the tomatoes.

One surefire way to get your name in – or at least near – the news is to something stupid while stoned.
...or while mentally disturbed.
It really doesn’t matter to me.
As far as getting high goes, however, an apparently very normal thing to do while the brain is ridin’ high is to go back to our hunter-and-gatherer roots, scavenging for a bite of whatever can be found in the vicinity.
For Jeffrey Wagner, 50-year-old resident of Louisville, Ky., the nearest nourishment turned out to be carpet lint.
Wagner – admittedly – smoked up his meth before entering a Burlington Coat Factory, where he proceeded to the shoe section (because everyone knows that’s where the best lint lives), and went to town on the dust bunnies’ leftovers.
According to WHAS 11, Wagner claimed that he was “eating sparkles.”
In St. Petersburg, Fla., a short 900 miles away from Wagner, Jarvis Sutton was having similar difficulties but wasn’t lucky enough to find himself in a retail store.
Stranded at home, Sutton decided to call up his local emergency dispatch to request a delivery of “Kool-Aid, burgers, and weed.”
Yeah, that plan worked.
Instead, the officers made a delivery out of Sutton, taking him to the Pinellas County Jail.
Fortunately, however, Sutton was able to get a snack on the way to the lock-up by gnawing on the foam padding attached to the metal cage in the back of the cop car.
Drugs: your one-way ticket to Nunnsense.

Printed in the May 9, 2013 edition.

The look of this week's newspaper – and future issues of the Morgan County Citizen – is a direct result of what happens when Patrick sends Katie Walker and I to attend a design seminar.
I call it the "If You Give a Mouse a Cookie" effect. (Of course the daughter of a reading teacher coins the "If You Give a Mouse a Cookie" effect. If you haven't read this children's book, you should.)
Last month the brilliantly talented designer Katie – she's also the art director of our sister publication, Lake Oconee Living magazine – and I hauled ourselves to Columbus one morning to attend a Georgia Press Association-sponsored seminar by the god of newspaper design, Tim Harrower.
(To show you how much of a geek I am and how influential Mr. Harrower is in the newspaper world, I took my J-school text – purchased years ago for my Grady College design class at UGA – and had the man sign it. Yeah, I'm that girl.)
I woke at 4 a.m. to be at Katie's house by 6 a.m. so we could make it to Columbus around 9 a.m. A few coffee stops and one very sketchy bathroom break later, we found ourselves across the state, years from our days in the design lab at Grady, in a huge conference room at the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer listening, in awe, to the man that literally wrote the book on everything we know about design. (He's responsible for the look of The Oregonian; for more about him, if you're interested, see timharrower.com.)
We had to get over being star-struck real quick. The man that publications hire for design overhauls, Harrower was imparting some serious knowledge about not only print design, but also web design and applications.
We soaked it up and came back with way too many ideas. This week, though, we got to put the first of our ideas into action with a complete overhaul of the way our newspaper looks.

Gun Control Advocate: “We need more/better gun laws to eliminate gun violence.”
Gun Rights Advocate: “Gun laws do not decrease gun violence because criminals do not follow the law.”
Gun Control Advocate: “So we should just get rid of all laws because they fail to stop all crime?”
And that’s where this little exchange usually ends. The gun right’s advocate typically stutters through some non-sequitur argument that doesn’t at all address the apparent “gotcha” from the now smug gun control advocate. Sadly courses on logic are no longer taught in our schools, because if they were, we would easily spot logical fallacies such as this one. This is an example of a false analogy or comparison, that is, assuming two things are equivalent and inferring they must share the same properties. Not all laws are the same.
Laws against violations of person or property (murder, rape, theft, etc.) are primary laws. Their sole function is punitive. They prescribe the consequences for violation of the law. If the consequences are severe enough there may be a small preventive tendency but overall people breaking these laws really aren’t concerned with the fact that somewhere there are words on a piece of paper saying they shouldn’t do such and such. In short, these laws can only affect criminals (i.e. those who broke the law).

Every year, I write a column summarizing the past school year. This year (like our last) our superintendent made a point to visit classrooms of all our schools with as many board members that could attend.
What I saw impressed me. I saw parents giving up their time to revamp children’s gardens. I saw eager, engaged children using SmartBoards just as well as their teachers. I saw our best teachers working in Early Intervention programs, catching-up kids in small, inclusive environments. Reading was mixed with everything, including math and science. Manipulatives (physical models) were everywhere, making sense of math in a way that explains the “why” of the many equations we ask our kids to solve. I saw kids creating their own math problems, as teachers cleverly engage them to make learning more fun. I saw kids in every school taking tests on computers, making standardized tests much less painful than those idiotic bubbles.
I saw newly designed door stops that keep our children safe. To change locks would have cost about $400 a door. Instead, administrators spent an entire weekend sewing patterns that does the job just as well. (I know this sounds odd. Trust me, it works.) I saw incredible use of technology, using personal devices (like iPads) to do classroom work. I saw teachers using freeware and their own personal websites to assign homework. No more “the dog ate my homework” excuses for this generation. Teachers can see exactly how much time students spent on their lessons. I saw technology that allowed teachers to focus on each individual’s needs. Differentiation – the teaching of different levels to different kids within the same classroom – is a viable reality via the use of expanding technology.

There are so many yummy looking plants with “delicious” names available this year that it was hard to decide which ones to use in the city containers this summer. I like to bring back some of the tried-and-true winners so I can be assured of something thriving in the pots, but it wouldn’t be any fun for me or you if I didn’t bring in plants that are new and exciting.
This plant isn’t technically new since I used this it several years ago, but it is always draws attention. Centaurea ‘Colchester White’ has striking silvery gray foliage and puts out a lavender, thistle-like bloom in summer. It makes a great center plant for a container, growing from 1 to 3 feet tall. You’re going to have to ask your independent nursery to order it for next year because it is not readily available – but it should be. Where did I get the three I’m using in the containers? I had to beg my wholesale supplier to save them for me since he only had a small crop. Not sure, but I think I may have even promised him my first born child.
Oh, the array of coleus is awesome this year. I’m a bit of a coleus snob – you gotta be grand to impress me anymore and some managed to do just that. How about Coleus ‘Chocolate Covered Cherry’ – Doesn’t just the name make you want to buy it? This is a shade coleus with a large, bright red center, banded with a dark chocolate brown and then edged with lime green. The ‘Under the Sea’ collection of coleus is back this year but with a couple new varieties. All of them have catchy, fish-related names and leaf margins that remind you of fish fins or anemone arms. My favorites are ‘Bone Fish’ – bright fuchsia center with chartreuse margins; ‘King Crab’ – huge red leaves that resemble pinchers; ‘Gold Anemone’ – bright green center with deep purple margins.