Rose of Sharon

"And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these." 

Matthew 6:28-29

The Rose of Sharon bushes by the highway.

This is a double bloom..

Some are pale pink or lavender blue.

Pale pink Rose of Sharon.

The Rose of Sharon's always bloom by the 4th of July.

This one looks almost white.

The Rose of Sharon bushes make an attractive buffer.

I love all my Rose of Sharon's. I rooted and grew every one from cuttings from some bushes my parents have had at their house for as long as I can remember. I grew about eighty bushes in the back yard. I gave some of them away but I planted a lot of bushes beside our fence along the neighbors driveway and these bushes by the highway. We wanted to block the noise as traffic flies by. We planted another row of evergreen bushes parallel to the Rose of Sharon's. Our front yard looks like a hidden garden in the summer. It is cool and shady all day long out there. Well, it is as cool as it can get in Georgia's 90 degrees-plus-temperatures. I like sitting on the little park bench and watching the cars go by. It is a nice place to sit outside sipping a sweet tea or some lemonade in the shade.  

Hibiscus syriacus is the true name of the Rose of Sharon.

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Hibiscus syriacus is a widely cultivated ornamental shrub in the genus Hibiscus. Common names include Rose of Sharon (especially in North America), Shrub Althea and Rose Althea. (from Wikipedia)

Scientific classification
Kingdom:	Plantae
(unranked):	Angiosperms
(unranked):	Eudicots
(unranked):	Rosids
Order:	Malvales
Family:	Malvaceae
Genus:	Hibiscus
Species:	H. syriacus
Binomial name
H. syriacus L.
Synonyms
Althaea frutex Hort. ex Mill.

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As Always
PIO

Gardens Reward

All of this came from our backyard garden.

That is a pretty big basket of squash and peppers.

Crookneck and straight-neck squash.

Two cookie pans of squash ready to be heated in the oven.

Looking good.

Time to cool down the squash before freezing.

Five containers of squash.

Ready to be frozen.

What a beautiful head of cabbage. We should have planted more.  The first head was so crisp and tasty.

I love having a small garden in the backyard. The way we plant it and cover the ground with newspapers and straw make gardening very easy. Our only problem is gathering the food before the snails and bugs eat it up. I had several snails trying to destroy my cabbages when I picked them but I cut them out of the heads and washed the cabbage real good. After eating one I can understand why we are battling the snails for them. They are delicious; much better than store bought. I don't know how many people grow a garden in this day and age but it is one of the most primal feelings of connect with life. Every year we get to see the miracle of life as seeds burst open and stretch out to reach the sky and their roots bury into the ground, giving them nourishment.

I've been freezing food from our garden outback for several years and I am beginning to really enjoy it. I plan for the foods that I want to add to my stockpile for the winter. We always like to eat lots of tomatoes and squash and okra. I also gladly take anything my mother gives me from their garden. They have enough space to plant corn and beans. For some reason we never grow green beans. Everybody buys the plants they want and we never get around to growing beans. I can tell Don really wanted lots of squash this year because he bought a bunch of plants and then bought a dozen more. It's a good think I like yellow squash, too. 

Our garden has grown and evolved over time. This year we fenced in an area to keep the animals out. No telling what we might do next year. I intend to post updates as the summer progresses.

As Always

PIO

In My Opinion

I've been watching the mystery of Caylee Anthony for three years now and the trial has finally come around. Like everything else in the media age, it is being broadcast daily. I admit I become a bit obsessed with stories in the news and this case has been interesting to follow from the start. Everything that could be said was said by Cindy Anthony when she made the 911 call to report her granddaughter missing. 
 
Cindy said that her daughter had been missing for a month and when she found her daughter's car it smelt like there had been a 'dead body in the damn car'. She went on to say she found her daughter and she admitted that Caylee had been kidnapped by her babysitter thirty-one days before. Cindy sounded practically hysterical in the recorded phone call and truly desperate. That was probably the only honest moment in the whole case. After that there were so many twists and turns in the case, it was hard to keep up. Until the meter-reader found Caylee's remains, Casey was only suspected of foul play. She was immediately indicted on murder charges and held for trial.


Interest in the case didn't lessen as time went by and more and more details of the evidence was produced. Now we are in the middle of the trial. The prosecution has rested and now the defense is dancing around trying to divert sentiment away from the death penalty. They have reason to fear the death penalty because Florida is strong on execution, and being a woman doesn't automatically exclude you from the death penalty. I have no idea how the jury will judge this case and the actions of Casey Anthony but I wait anxiously for their verdict.  


I do have a theory about Casey Anthony and the death of Caylee Anthony after watching this drama play out for three long years. Casey was a party girl who got pregnant when she was only nineteen years old and forced to keep her baby after Cindy found out about the pregnancy. That had to drive a wedge between Cindy and Casey. Caylee became a pawn in their emotional struggle. George must have been the peacemaker. He seems to want to pacify Cindy and Casey.


The news media has mentioned that Cindy and Casey had a huge fight before Casey left home with Caylee in tow. Cindy supposedly strangled Casey during the confrontation. I don't know if they were fighting about Caylee or whether they were arguing about the money Casey had been stealing from her family and friends but the fight was probably the catalyst of the whole mystery. 


When Casey stormed from the house with her baby she lost her convenient means of a live-in babysitter. She had to figure out how to take care of Caylee while she partied. Her boyfriend had introduced her to the use of chloroform or  drugs to induce sleep. She used various drugs to knock Caylee out and when she didn't have access to those she would use chloroform. She could have practiced using chloroform on her mother's dogs and that is why the dog was lethargic. 


Casey either misjudged the amount of chloroform she used on Caylee or she murdered her intentionally out of spite to hurt her mother. Either way she is one twisted bitch partying and having a gay old time until her mother found her. She would have gone for months without reporting Caylee missing if her mother hadn't tracked her down. She didn't want Caylee to be found until she was completely decomposed and there was no more evidence. Fortunately, they have found evidence of different drugs used to sedate her in her hair. That proves to me that Casey had a reckless disregard for Caylee's safety and a total lack of maternal attachment.  


Caylee may have been curled up in the trunk of Casey's car many nights as Casey partied and drank with her friends. There are plenty of pictures of Casey dancing and carrying on during the period she claimed the child had been kidnapped. When her own defense admitted in their opening statements that Caylee had died and Casey had been hiding that it made her look even more callous as we remembered the surveillance film of her buying groceries and a huge case of beer with the stolen checks she had lifted from a friend. She was perfectly happy with her life after the secret death of her child Caylee. That doesn't evoke the signs of grieving. 


I lean towards the assumption that she killed Caylee in a fit of rage that she wanted to assuage in the baby's demise and to spite her family, especially her mother. She may have used too much chloroform while she was high and killed Caylee accidentally, too. Either way it was homicide. She had no training to use chloroform and knew she was playing Russian roulette with her child's life and health.


Caylee could have died somewhere else and Casey put her in the car to bring her home to hide. She may have laid her in the backyard until she set up a place to hide her in the playhouse until Casey could get rid of her. There were a couple of hits in the yard by the cadaver dogs. She put Caylee in the 'pet cemetery' or she had someone help dump Caylee's body there for her. They still haven't explained how Caylee's body was found in a wooded area close to the Anthony house.


The media has kept an eye on Cindy and George Anthony. Cindy seems to be the one that has acted the most affected in the family. I can't explain George Anthony's suicide attempt when he was found in Daytona Beach or his alleged affair with a woman he met who was helping look for Caylee. He must act out sexually when he is grieving, too, like his daughter. What a family. 


The only family member that we haven't seen very much of is brother Lee who was supposed to be hunting down leads to find Caylee. He only visited Casey a couple of times after she went to jail. I seem to remember a conversation between them where Casey said something like 'Don't worry. I didn't involve you.' I never saw that clip again so I'm not sure if that's what I heard.


Lee seemed to be sending a message of unity and love to 'C-M-A' at Caylee's funeral. He repeated that message to 'C-M-A ' more than once during his eulogy to his niece. It looked as if he was trying to send a message to the other 'C-M-A', Casey Marie Anthony. He could have been keeping a promise not to divulge a secret that he shared with her. He might have known about Caylee's death and Casey's frantic search for a dumping ground. Theoretically, he might have been involved. If the girls in the neighborhood knew about the 'pet cemetery' Lee Anthony had to know about it also. The kids in the neighborhood probably knew the land flooded periodically. It would stand to reason that the water would rise and destroy a lot of evidence, given time. Maybe that's what the person who dumped her there was hoping would happen. That's certainly what did happen. The policeman who when to search that area didn't look deep enough in the woods the first time anyone looked out there. It was marshy and snaky . We will never know if they could have found her more intact than she was finally found. Animals had scattered her bones.


I don't know how anybody could dump a sweet little baby in the woods left to the scavengers like that. I can't understand why a family would cover up something like that. Her family astonish me. Today Cindy Anthony told a jury that she was the one who made computer searches for chloroform instead of her daughter. 


Some people sympathize with Cindy and want to excuse her for defending Casey. They forgive her for trying to plant a seed of doubt in the eyes of the jurors. I look at her and realize that she is as big a liar as her daughter is if she is willing to lie for her daughter. I don't think Cindy knew what had happened to Caylee at first but now she is determined to defend Casey any way she can. I don't know how she justifies that and balances it with justice for Caylee. 


Someone put up clips of Lee Antony the other day. It looks like he has aged 10 years or more since Caylee went missing. It looks like the strain of the case has worn on him. 


I wonder if Lee and George might be involved somehow. I think Lee was trying to cover for Casey. When he was visiting her in jail, they were talking in code about Caylee's body being hidden close to home. It is the same type of code that Lee used during the eulogy for Caylee. Maybe Casey told her family the truth while she was out of jail and they decided to band together and their attitude changed from grief to . . . something else.


George must have realized that Casey was lying for a long time. He had been a law enforcement officer before he moved to Florida. He couldn't have been as blind as Cindy was as she grilled Casey about clues about where to look for Caylee. George seemed detached when Cindy was questioning Casey.  


Cindy started to change her attitude when she gloated about giving the detectives the wrong hairbrush when they wanted to test the brush for Caylee and Casey. I think, by then, that she suspected that Caylee was really dead and Casey was responsible. I couldn't think of any other reason Cindy would want to mislead the detectives who were searching for her granddaughter.


Now Cindy wants to blow off the entire 911 phone call and claimed she wasn't really hysterical about Caylee. She just wanted to get the cops out there to arrest her daughter, Casey, because the baby was missing. Say what? Are you crazy or something? It was an emergency and the worst kind of emergency; someone died! How can she be downplaying the phone call now, especially after the circumstances? 


I have one more riddle about Casey Anthony I would like the answer to. If her parents thought she was working and paying a babysitter to keep Caylee when she 'went to work', where did she get the money she used to live on? Nobody has ever explained how she was able to convince people she had a job. Wouldn't she be desperate for money? The stealing should have been a big clue that she didn't have any money of her own. How could she afford to go partying all the time? I want to know.


Casey Anthony may have wanted to live the 'beautiful life' but she had no regard for the beautiful life of her own child. I vote Guilty. What do you think?

As Always

PIO

Storm Damage

We had some pretty high winds and about three big thunderstorms yesterday. Today Don went out to see if there was any damage. A huge limb broke out of a Mimosa tree and tore down the fence and landed on the roof of our barn. I'm glad the dogs weren't hurt when the tree fell. It landed on 'Gitmo' where the dogs stay. Don used his chain saw to cut the limb off of the fence and the roof of the barn. Scout and Colt helped Don get the tree off of everything. They will have to repair the fence so the dogs can't get out. That's what we did for Father's Day.

It's always something!

I sure am glad I have a camera now so I can post pictures of all the crazy things that happen around here. I am so grateful for both of my wonderful sons who are always willing to help around here. I'm thankful to have such a good, hardworking husband, too. All in all, it wasn't a bad Sunday afternoon.

After that Scout and Colt went fishing.

As Always

PIO

I Love This

In the line at the store, the cashier told the older woman  that she should bring her own  grocery bag because plastic bags weren’t good for the environment.  The woman  apologized to him and explained, “We didn't have the green thing back in my day.” The clerk responded, "That's our problem today.  The former generation did not care  enough to save our environment."  He was right, that generation didn’t have the green thing in its day. Back then, they returned their milk bottles, soda bottles and beer bottles to the store.   The store sent them back to the plant to be washed and sterilized and refilled, so it  could use the same bottles over and over.  So they really were  recycled. But they didn’t have the green thing back in that customer's day. In her day, they walked up stairs, because they didn’t have an escalator in every store  and office building.. They walked to the grocery store and didn't climb into a  300-horsepower machine  every time they had to go two blocks.  But she was right. They didn’t have the green thing in her day. Back then, they washed the baby’s diapers because they didn’t have the throw-away kind. They dried clothes on a line, not in an energy gobbling machine burning up 220  volts – wind and solar power really did dry the clothes. Kids got hand-me-down  clothes from their brothers or sisters, not always brand-new clothing. But that old lady is right, they didn’t have the green thing back in her day. Back then, they had one TV, or radio in the house – not a TV in every room. And the  TV had a small screen the size of a handkerchief, not a screen the size of the state of  Montana. In the kitchen, they blended and stirred by hand because they didn't  have  electric machines to do everything for you. They cut up their own fruits and vegetables because they didn't have a food processor.   When they packaged a fragile item to send in the mail, they used a wadded up old  newspaper to cushion it, not styrofoam or plastic bubble wrap. Back then, they didn’t fire up an engine and burn gasoline just to cut the lawn. They  used a push mower that ran on human power. They exercised by working so they  didn't need to go to a health club to run on treadmills that operate on electricity. But she’s right, they didn’t have the green thing back then. They drank from a fountain when they were thirsty instead of using a cup or a plastic  bottle every time they had a drink of water. They refilled their writing pens with ink  instead of buying a new pen, and they replaced the razor blades in a razor instead of  throwing away the whole razor just because the blade got dull. But they didn’t have the green thing back then.  Back then, people took the streetcar or a bus and kids rode their bikes to school or  rode the school bus instead of turning their moms into a 24-hour taxi service. They  had one electrical outlet in a room, not an entire bank of sockets to power a dozen  appliances. And they didn't  need a computerized gadget to receive a signal beamed  from satellites 2,000 miles out in space in order to find the nearest pizza joint. Isn't it sad the current generation laments how wasteful the old folks were just because  they didn't have the green thing back then?  Oh yeah, we were so wasteful! __________________________________________________________ Those were the days my friend  We thought they'd never end  We'd sing and dance forever and a day  We'd live the life we choose  We'd fight and never lose  For we were young and sure to have our way.  La la la la...  Those were the days, oh yes, those were the days.

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I found this on the internet. Thank you Vivian from Media Domain All My Children discussion board for printing this.

Helping Daddy

We all got some sun today!

On Saturday the boys and I went to Daddy's and Momma's to help them plant their garden. As you can see, Daddy doesn't do small gardens. While I hid in the shade most of the time, Scout and Colt put up a fence for the tomatoes to tie to when they get bigger. I helped the boys plant tomatoes while Daddy watered the garden. In case you are wondering, he has a pump in the branch and uses that to water the garden. Smart, huh?

Layla and Kim hung out with Momma while we worked in the garden. Momma gave Kim lots of stuff for her home. Kim and Scout rented a house in Sugar Valley and are living together now. Our family is growing. We are so blessed.

As Always

PIO

Cooking and Mulching

Ain't that sharp? No, not the knives. The basket. I got this for four dollars at the 90 mile yard sale.

Fresh broccoli from the garden.

Fresh from the garden squash and broccoli.

Colander full of one broccoli.

Cut up broccoli and scraps.

Mulch bucket.

The head of broccoli I cooked from our garden.

MULCHING 101

I cut up that big head of broccoli from my garden. It was huge.  

We finally had fresh broccoli and yellow squash from the garden. I've never cooked home grown broccoli. It was delicious. I steamed it.

I threw the scraps from the squash and broccoli in my mulch bucket and emptied it in the mulch pile outback.

I've been mulching ever since we moved to Resaca. I have a little place under the trees near the house for our mulch pile. I put everything in it except meat. That includes scraps from potatoes, tomatoes, squash, broccoli, egg shells, cucumbers, banana peels, coffee grounds, grass clippings and stuff like that. I keep a 2 gallon bucket with a lid under the sink for a mulch bucket. 

The mulch pile provides good dirt for our flowers and plants in the garden and it is a dynamite worm bed. The boys put a little dirt from the mulch pile in the holes before they plant tomatoes and other plants in the garden. The rich soil gives the plants a head start and a good food source for the roots.

I keep hoping we will get a 'possum or something but we must have too many cats and dogs because they eat every chunk that is edible. The birds aren't even safe because of all the cats. I've quit feeding them. It was like an all day McDonald's for the cats. You know, fast food.

I bought this big beautiful basket from the 90 Mile Yard Sale on Sunday. It will make a great gardening basket or a great picnic basket. I feel like 

Little Red Riding Hood.

Does anybody else mulch?

As Always

PIO

Hydrangea Bushs

We have three hydrangea bushes in the front yard that were planted in front of the house when we first moved here. Hydrangeas will be either pink or blue depending on the quality of the soil. Acidic soil produces blue flowers, while pink flowers are produced from alkaline soil. Neutral soil produces cream color flowers. These bushes are almost five feet tall and over five feet wide.

Blue Hydrangea 

Hydrangea bush

Blue and purple flowers

Hydrangea bush

Pink hydrangea

The leafs on a hydrangea bush are oval shaped

Snowball bushes have jagged leaves and round white flower heads

As always
PIO

Backyard Garden

Tomato garden

Fenced in garden

Peanuts

Onions

Broccoli

Cabbage head

Feed me Seymour

Yellow squash

More garden space

Gardening fun

As Always

PIO