Monday, August 31, 2009

“Restaurateur ready for 'Grilling in the Garden' at Mark Twain Boyhood ... - Quincy Herald-Whig” plus 4 more

“Restaurateur ready for 'Grilling in the Garden' at Mark Twain Boyhood ... - Quincy Herald-Whig” plus 4 more

Restaurateur ready for 'Grilling in the Garden' at Mark Twain Boyhood ... - Quincy Herald-Whig

Posted: 31 Aug 2009 08:59 AM PDT

HANNIBAL, Mo. -- The Mark Twain Boyhood Home and Museum is planning a "Grilling in the Garden" program featuring Hannibal native Ken Norman, who will be preparing and plating a five-course meal at 6 p.m. Sept. 10, in the garden of the Mark Twain Boyhood Home Garden.

The twist is that Norman, a restaurateur, will prepare each course on a grill. He has operated such restaurants as Park Place in Columbia and Eugene's in Hannibal.

"Grilling is not just for meat. You can grill anything you eat," Norman said. "Grilling is my choice for most dinners, and I do so all year-round."

Dinner will begin with French onion soup, followed by an appetizer of roasted pepper boats filled with two kinds of cheese and herbs. The third course will be salad with grilled lettuce, tomatoes and red Bermuda onions.

"The diner gets the grilled flavors yet still has a garden fresh salad," Norman said.

The entree will be marinated flatiron steak paired with roasted Yukon gold potatoes, and roasted squash and zucchini, along with grilled pineapple served with a scoop of vanilla ice cream, maraschino cherry and whipped cream.

Preparation directions and recipes will be available to the diners upon request.

The jazz ensemble Music-Music-Music will provide musical entertainment. The band features Glenn Cornelius on vocal and lead guitar, Bill Cornelius on bass guitar and vocal, Tommy Williams on saxophone and band leader Brother Ronn Pashia as drummer/vocalist.

The Main Street Wine Stoppe, 303 Main St., will provide drinks.

Cost of the evening is $15 for museum members and $20 for nonmembers. Reservations are needed and can be made by calling (573) 221-9010, ext. 401. For more information, go to www.marktwainmuseum.org.



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Labor of love: Master gardeners volunteer to keep up Farm Museum ... - Carroll County Times

Posted: 31 Aug 2009 05:41 PM PDT

JOIN BATTLE TO STOP THE GROT - Grimsby Telegraph

Posted: 31 Aug 2009 10:13 PM PDT

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THIRTEEN-year-old Julia Hood's greatest wish is to be able to play in the garden with her brothers and sisters.

Unfortunately, she lives next to one of the worst Grot Spots in Grimsby – an empty house so derelict that its garden is commonly known as The Dump amongst locals.

Foxes, feral cats and other wildlife roam the overgrown grass, the fence between her neighbouring home has collapsed, and environmental health officers have previously investigated the spot for suspected rat infestations.

Most distressingly for Julia's family, the site has become a den for unruly youths, flytippers and others, meaning her mum Maria Brett is too scared to let her children play next to it.

Now she is joining our battle against the Grot, in the hope her children can reclaim their garden and have somewhere to call their own.

Maria, speaking from the home on Nunsthorpe's Byron Grove she shares with Julia and her other three children, Charlie, nine, Charlotte, 13, and Ann-Marie, 11, said: "I just want it cleaned up, or at least for the fence to be fixed so I can allow the kids to play out there again.

"My youngest child Charlie is autistic, so he can't play out with the other kids on the street because they don't understand his condition and he gets picked on.

"If he could go out in the garden, I could at least keep an eye on him and he would have somewhere to play.

"We used to have a trampoline out there, but the kids are able to shimmy over the broken fences and it got wrecked while we were on holiday.

"While it's like this, I don't see the point in looking after my own garden because more rubbish will just get thrown into it again."

Julia added: "I don't go out there anymore. There's so much rubbish and it's really creepy."

Maria's mother Elaine contacted the Grimsby Telegraph following the relaunch of our Grot Spot campaign to help YOU to win the battle against litter louts.

As reported, we first launched our campaign earlier this year, calling on North East Lincolnshire Council to clean up dumping grounds across the borough.

Already, many former eyesores have been turned into Hot Spots, and now Maria is hoping the same can be done for her street.

Elaine said: "The house has been empty for about 20 years. People dump all kinds of rubbish there and we have seen mice and rats going in and out of the house.

"Someone has also torn down my daughter's fence and people are now dumping rubbish in her garden too.

"It's not fair. She has four kids and they should be able to play in their own garden."

And the family are not the only grime fighters joining our crusade.

Jo White of Clark Avenue, Grimsby, called us to say she is sick of people dumping rubbish in an alleyway connecting Clark Avenue and Roseveare Avenue.

Ms White said: "There are smashed TVs, a microwave and all kinds of rubbish just dumped there.

"This is the way I walk to go to the shops and it's not nice walking down there. It's really, really scruffy."

John Waite, the council's environmental enforcement manager, said: "The Grot Spot campaign has been hugely successful so far and we need it to continue.

"The public has responded very well to it and we have done our best to clean up the areas suggested.

"We need the public to keep working with us so that we can continue to do so.

"We want to keep North East Lincolnshire clean and identifying the Grot Spots will help us to do this. Long may it continue."

For details of more local Grot Spots – which will soon be Hot Spots – see today's Grimsby Telegraph.

To report a Grot Spot in your area, call our news team on (01472) 372213 or email 'Grot Spots' on newsdesk@grimsbytelegraph.co.uk



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Elderberries will attract the birds – if that's what you want - Nashua Telegraph

Posted: 31 Aug 2009 09:09 PM PDT

Home & Family

Published: Tuesday, September 1, 2009

My elderberries (Sambucus canadensis) are starting to ripen, and I bet the birds in my neighborhood are singing my praises for planting them. Yes, I do sometimes pick some berries for juice, and once I made some truly horrible wine with them, but my elderberries are primarily for the birds literally.

According to "Trees, Shrubs and Vines for Attracting birds" by Richard DeGraaf, the berries of American elder are a preferred food for 14 species of birds, including some I am pleased to have around: robins, bluebirds, cardinals, thrushes and the rose-breasted grosbeak; another 21 species eat the berries on occasion. It is used for nesting by mockingbirds, catbirds, yellow warblers and goldfinches, among others. It is used for cover by 26 species of birds. Overall, it is one of the better things you can plant if you like attracting birds. Thumbing through DeGraaf's book, it appears that only grapes are used by more species, and maybe some types of cherries.

Elderberries grow best in moist places, though they will grow almost anywhere. Unlike blueberries, they will grow not only in acidic soil, but in alkaline soil. I grow mine right next to a brook where their roots stay nice and moist. My books tell me that they spread by root suckers, though mine have not spread aggressively. In eight to 10 years, they have expanded from a plant in a 3-gallon pot to a clump perhaps 10 feet across. Each plant is 8-12 feet tall. I've been told that growing two different named cultivars of elder increases fruit load, though that is not essential.

I love my elderberry in the spring. It blooms magnificently, the entire top of the plant alive with clusters of white flowers arranged in cymes and populated with bees. A cyme is "a more or less flat-topped determinate inflorescence whose outer flowers open last" (per "Manual of Woody Landscape Plants" by Michael Dirr). Think Queen Anne's Lace on steroids. And they are fragrant. You can make tea from them, and some people do though I haven't, as yet.

In late summer or early fall, elderberries come ripe. It is somewhat of an old-fashioned fruit, generally favored by people in their 70s and 80s for its jelly-making potential. The berries are pea-sized, so I use my pruners to cut off the cymes. If you use it for jelly, juice or wine, I suggest you pull the berries off their stems, as the stems are somewhat noxious tasting. A report from Purdue University indicates that elderberry outperforms cranberries and blueberries as an antioxidant and for levels of vitamins A and C. It is rich in calcium and iron, too. In folk medicine, it has commonly been used for treating colds and rheumatism.

As a landscape plant, American elder is not perfect. It is weak-wooded, so stems break easily in ice storms. It is a short-lived plant, but sends up suckers, so normally that is not a problem. There are now available a number of named cultivars, including two dark-leaved ones, Black Beauty and Black Lace. They are actually Sambucus nigra, a European species, which is less winter hardy than our native form. I tried a Black Beauty, and it only lasted two years for me.

When I was a boy, my grandfather grew gooseberries and currants (Ribes spp.). Unfortunately, they are secondary hosts for the white pine blister rust, a disease that can kill pine trees. In New Hampshire, there are restrictions and prohibitions about growing these tasty fruits. There are now named cultivars that are resistant to this malady, and available and legal to plant and purchase. Visit http://agriculture.nh. gov/documents/FinalRibesList 2009.pdf for a complete list of approved cultivars.

Gooseberries (Ribes hirtellum) are easy to grow and very tasty, not only in pies, but also straight off the bush. They can be as small as a pea or as big as a small plum, and range in color from green to lavender to a deep red. They have a nice crunch and taste something like a cross between a kiwi and a grape. They grow on bushes that rarely exceed 5 feet in height or diameter. The late Lewis Hill of Greensboro, Vt., loved gooseberries, claiming that no pie can beat a well-made gooseberry pie for flavor. His book, "Fruits and Berries for the Home Garden," is a wonderful resource for anyone interested in growing any small fruits.

Red and black currants are grown widely in Europe and made into a variety of soft drinks and throat lozenges. They are tasty off the bush or can be cooked into jellies or juice. Once you have tasted them, you will probably want to grow them. They are generally pest- and disease-free, but can suffer from powdery mildew in wet summers like this one.

Having had an Irish great-grandmother, I like to diversify what I grow. The potato famine was a severe problem, in part, because only one kind of potato was grown. So I like to grow many different kinds of fruits and vegetables. I lost a lot of raspberries to fungus this year, but my blackberries are great, and it looks to be an excellent year for elderberries. Now I just need some gooseberries.


Henry Homeyer is a gardener and writer. Contact him at P.O. Box 364, Cornish Flat, NH 03746, or by visiting his Web site, www.Gardening-Guy.com.




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KCC Lifelong Learning classes gearing up for fall - Battle Creek Enquirer

Posted: 31 Aug 2009 12:55 PM PDT

Kellogg Community College's Lifelong Learning classes are gearing up for the fall with a strong line-up of classes for personal enrichment and professional development. Classes begin the week of September 19.

Lifelong Learning class topics focus on fitness, health & wellness, foreign languages, cooking & wine, personal finances, home & garden, and computers and technology. New classes for this fall include: Plan an Affordable Green Wedding, Art & Craft of Screenwriting, Instant Guitar, A, Divorce Primer Workshop, The Energy of Color, Disc Golf, Zumba!, Hearty Fall & Winter Soups, Staging Your Home for Sale, and Credit Fix 101.

For more information, call (269) 965-4134 or visit www.kellogg.edu/lifelong.



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Sunday, August 30, 2009

“The home garden: Spending more, enjoying it longer - MLive.com” plus 4 more

“The home garden: Spending more, enjoying it longer - MLive.com” plus 4 more

The home garden: Spending more, enjoying it longer - MLive.com

Posted: 30 Aug 2009 05:32 AM PDT

by Kim Cook | The Associated Press

Retail may be in a drought, but for many garden supply stores, it's been a green season in more ways than one.

We're paying a lot more attention to beautifying our own backyards, perhaps because we're traveling less. Americans are spending about 20 percent more than last year on planters, benches and outdoor accessories, according to online sales tracker CSN.

Clockwise from above, the Outdoor Great Room Fire Pit from Patio Heaters and More; poly resin planters from Arizona Pottery; a Gothic Quatrefoil stepstone from Target; and the Amazing Grace Windchime from Target.

That's what often happens during a recession, apparently. Sharon Acocella, manager of Tony's Nurseries in Larchmont, N.Y., remembers her old boss saying years ago, "Economy's doing badly; we'd better buy heavy." She reports that while there's been a falloff in some categories -- notably statuary and fancier items -- there has been vigorous activity on other fronts.

"Blue and black glazed pots are more popular than ever," she says. "We've reordered those, and many of our square and rectangular containers, too."

Next door at Larchmont Nurseries, Gloria DeMatas and Donna Bianco echo the positive assessment. They've done well with wind chimes, window boxes and pottery. "We've sold lots of cobalt blue pots. They're so eye-catching; they stand out nicely in the garden, and all flowers look beautiful in a blue pot," says DeMatas.

Birdbaths are another brisk seller.

"Right now, people are enjoying staying at home," Bianco says. "Inside and out, they want to surround themselves with things that make them happy."

People investing the last of their discretionary cash in their gardens probably want to enjoy them beyond the summer.

Pam Brooks, president of online retrailer Arizona Pottery, likes the durability of polyresin planters, which resist the stresses of freeze and thaw and are conveniently lightweight.

"They're crack-proof, weather-proof, and will never fade like plastic," Brooks says.

A wide palette of hues, and styles ranging from classical to modern, make these a versatile choice.

For something a little different, Brooks suggests Vietnamese river clay pots, known for weather hardiness.

Terra cotta is often rejected by consumers as delicate, but Brooks says "clay's a natural material that, more than any other, creates a perfect ecological environment." Plant roots maintain an even temperature in clay, which absorbs excess moisture. But the pots can dry out, and do need to be protected in winter.

Try painting the pots inside and out with an insulating liquid resin. And make sure your plantings are well "crocked" by adding a bottom layer of pebbles or broken pottery for drainage. Set saucered containers on pot feet and keep watering whenever the soil feels dry. Move potted perennials to a sheltered spot when the harsher weather arrives.

Firebowls and pits are increasingly popular in colder climes. Tabletop and floor model propane-fed heaters, long popular in the Southwest, have found a wider audience. There are many versions of the firepit, some incorporating a coffee table or at least a ledge to support a smores stick.

For something more unusual, consider the chimenea, or chimneyed outdoor oven; it serves well in the wind, and channels any excess smoke skyward. Online retailer Teak, Wicker and More has some attractive cast-iron designs, while FirePitsCentral has a huge range of bowls and heaters.

There are other intriguing garden accents sturdy enough to take on the elements. Target's copper rain chain, an Asian garden fixture, channels runoff down its links from the edge of a structure. Temple bells or laminated wood wind chimes provide soothing tones when the weather turns gloomy.

Target's also got stepping stones made of recycled plastic or frost-resistant cast concrete, to mark a path in style.

Nestle one of Chiasso's stainless steel spheres amongst the greenery and watch how the light plays.

And finally, Castart Studios in British Columbia makes a collection of yukima-gata, or snow-viewing lanterns, which would be lovely in a winter landscape.



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The secret garden of kidnapped Jaycee Lee - The Australian

Posted: 30 Aug 2009 06:11 PM PDT

THE nine-year-old boy was quite taken with the blonde he spotted across the fence that separated their bungalows. He had not seen her before and thought she was pretty. She told him she was living there and her name was Jaycee.

Moments later a lanky, forbidding man appeared, grabbed the girl and bundled her away. Later that day the man started building a 1.8m fence around his back garden and Patrick McQuaid, now 27, never saw the girl again. "I was young, and didn't think anything of it," he recalls. "But she sure was pretty."

McQuaid reckons that encounter happened in July 1991, a hot and dusty summer in the town of Antioch, east of San Francisco, northern California. If his memory is correct, this was about a month after Jaycee was kidnapped at a bus stop near her home in Lake Tahoe, 270km away.

According to charges filed in court on Friday, it would also have been around the time the 11-year-old girl was first raped by Phillip Garrido, a sex offender.

McQuaid's sighting was the first of many missed opportunities to rescue the girl. As it turned out, Jaycee faced another 18 years of captivity, a prisoner in a hidden compound of huts and tents where she gave birth to two children, now aged 11 and 15.

Jaycee's ordeal came to a sudden end last week when Garrido, 58, walked into a police station. Jaycee, now 29, was instantly recognised to her mother Terry and her half-sister Shayna. A relative says the reunited family has been crying and laughing ever since.

California police have been honest about blunders in trying to crack this grotesque cold case, which might have been solved years ago.

In November 2006 Erika Pratt, a neighbour in Antioch, heard the sound of hammering as Garrido erected another shed. Garrido had talked to her in the street, speaking about "God's voices", which were helping him deal with anger issues and sex. This had made Pratt feel so queasy that she phoned the police and urged them to check on the compound. She told them he might be a religious psychotic with a sex addiction.

On Friday Warren Rupf, the local sheriff, confessed Pratt might have been right. "A deputy responded to the call and spoke to the homeowner in the front of his house. He did not feel he had reason to enter, and so did not realise there was a hidden compound with children living in it behind the house," Rupf says. "I do not blame him; I blame myself."

Rupf's department was not alone in missing the clues. Garrido was a registered sex offender who met his parole officer every month. The officer visited Garrido at home, checking that his satellite-linked ankle bracelet was working properly. But he never looked into the back garden and its tent city.

Last year Garrido was twice visited at home by police. The first time he was questioned about accusations that he swindled $US18,000 ($21,000) out of an elderly neighbour: a donation to his "church of God's desire". Then, in July last year, his house was searched by police. However, as it was a routine search ordered under sex-offender laws they were not looking for anything specific.

They did not notice the cables that ran from the house though a fence door concealed by a tarpaulin and into a 42m by 27m backyard within the backyard.

"Barriers had been built to obstruct viewing from the outside and prevent the victims contacting the outside world," says an investigator. "There were tents and showers and a chicken shed where the three girls lived.

"That's where we think he may have raped the victim and where, without any medical aid, she gave birth to his two children. The first time when she was 14. This is the area where this girl was trapped, for 18 years. Where this child raised her kids alone. He is one evil bastard."

On the morning of June 10, 1991, wearing a pink top and matching trousers, Jaycee was walking down the street towards a bus stop within sight of her home. This time the familiarity of the scene was shattered by a car, which did a U-turn in front of the girl.

"I was watching out for her from my garage 200m away when I saw a grey sedan pull up besides her on the street and a man reach out and snatch her up in a moment," recalls her stepfather Carl Proby. "It was all over so fast."

He jumped on to his bicycle and gave chase, but the car vanished. The middle-class town of South Lake Tahoe was traumatised. Locals were encouraged to wear pink ribbons to keep Jaycee at the forefront of people's minds. Vigils and marches were held. The FBI and local police interviewed nearly 5400 people and pursued more than 4000 leads.

Last week his father, Manuel Garrido, 88, choked as he recalled the boy who went so wrong. "He was a very gentle and sweet child, very popular with a lot of friends. They loved his jokes. He played guitar, and liked the Beatles," he says.

"But then, at high school, he started getting into drugs and his personality changed. After he found LSD, he started going crazy, and I lost him. I miss the boy, but the man, not so much."

In 1976 Garrido was sentenced to 50 years jail after he kidnapped and raped a 25-year-old woman in Reno, 32km across the Nevada border from Tahoe. The detective who led the investigation, Dan DeMaranville, 74, says Garrido came across as intelligent and educated.

"I asked him after he confessed why he did it, and he said it was the only way he could get sexual satisfaction," DeMaranville says.

Garrido was held in federal prison in Leavenworth, Kansas, but released 11 years later on parole after he claimed to have "found God". He travelled back to California with his new bride, a Philippines-born woman called Nancy, 54, who also stands accused of taking part in years of sexual assaults against Jaycee. They each face 29 charges.

Photographs give some clues to the life lived by Jaycee and her daughters in the garden campsite. Her living quarters appear to have been a three-man tent, patched up with tape, in which some of her clothes, a grey selection of cardigans and blouses, hang over a clothes rail. On her sheetless mattress lay a jumble of children's wear and a puppet.

A bookshelf contains 20 books, most of which had titles relating to cats, including Do Cats Think? and The Cat Who Went to Paris. Elsewhere, children's playthings - a packet of crayons, a couple of cuddly toys - are scattered. A bunch of flowers in a disused soft drink bottle sits on a ramshackle bedside table.

There is also a book titled Self-Esteem: a Family Affair, which deals with bringing up children and ways of giving them confidence. One of its chapters is headed: "What's a Nice Family Like Us Doing in a Place Like This?" The neighbours did not think that there was a "nice family" living next door. Yet they did little to intervene, even though Garrido was known locally as "Creepy Phil".

In a conservative town where many children are taught at home, appearances fooled many. Others did not want to get involved. Deepal Karunaratne, a real estate agent who employed Garrido to print flyers and business cards, says the Garridos introduced him to their blonde blue-eyed "daughter", Jaycee.

"Only he said she was called Allissa, and one of her daughters was called Scarlett," he says. "Jaycee was part of the family business, running the printing press in the back yard. I would see her in work overalls, covered with ink, (and) negotiated with her when she could not complete my order. She was always polite and professional."

Why didn't she try to escape? Reports suggest that Jaycee's spirit was broken by the years of incarceration and that she had reached a point of accepting her fate. She tells her parents that her children didn't know Garrido had abducted her, and her stepfather says that she regards their relationship as like a marriage.

Karunaratne is haunted by what has been uncovered. "Over the last three years he (Garrido) grew more intense about his religion. He said that God was speaking to him through this machine, and asked me to listen through headphones and sign a form saying I'd heard the voices too."

The second cold finger running down Karunaratne's spine is Garrido's account of a day when he took Jaycee on a "mission" to a nearby town called Pittsburg. "His car broke down on the way home, and he phoned me up for a lift back. I told him to take the bus."

On Friday, Pittsburg police provided a judge with evidence to obtain a warrant to search Garrido's house. They are seeking evidence in connection with the murder of up to 10 prostitutes whose bodies were dumped at an industrial park in Pittsburg during the late 1990s.

Was Garrido taking Jaycee and the children he fathered back to the scene of a series of serial killings?

Last week Garrido visited the San Francisco offices of the FBI, leaving a "manifesto" saying that schizophrenia was not an illness but a conduit of God being repressed by evil doctors.

Later that day he went to a nearby campus of the University of California. He spoke to Lisa Campbell, a special events manager and former police officer, who was struck by his peculiar manner.

When he returned she made sure she had a campus police officer with her. Allison Jacobs, 35, noticed the girls seemed to avoid meeting his eye.

"The older one was treating him as if he was a god, but they both looked like brainwashed zombies," Jacobs says.

She ran Garrido's name through a computer and found his sexual history. She called his parole officer and told him about her concerns. "The parole officer says, 'He doesn't have any daughters', and my stomach just sank," Jacobs says.

On Wednesday the parole officer summoned him to a police station. Much to the officer's amazement Garrido turned up with a woman and two blonde blue-eyed children in shabby clothes.

The charade crumbled as Garrido was moved to another room and Allissa revealed her identity, stuttering as she said she had not spoken her name for 15 years. She asked to speak to her mother: when she got through, her mother thought it was a prank.

Garrido was arrested but did not stay quiet. "It's a disgusting thing by me that took place at the beginning, but I turned my life around."

At least for Jaycee and her mother Terry, this long nightmare is coming to a close. Terry must deal with the experience of discovering that she is a grandmother by the child whom she last saw as an 11-year-old.

The Sunday Times



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Henry Homeyer: Elderberries, gooseberries an often-overlooked garden ... - Fosters Daily Democrat

Posted: 30 Aug 2009 06:37 AM PDT

My elderberries (Sambucus canadensis) are starting to ripen, and I bet the birds in my neighborhood are singing my praises for planting them.

Yes, I do sometimes pick some berries for juice, and once I made some truly horrible wine with them, but my elderberries are primarily for the birds — literally.

According to "Trees, Shrubs and Vines for Attracting Birds" by Richard DeGraaf, the berries of American elder are a preferred food for 14 species of birds, including some I am pleased to have around: robins, bluebirds, cardinals, thrushes and the rose-breasted grosbeak; another 21 species eat the berries on occasion. It is used for nesting by mockingbirds, catbirds, yellow warblers and goldfinches, among others.

It is used for cover by 26 species of birds. Overall, it is one of the better things you can plant if you like attracting birds. Thumbing through DeGraaf's book, it appears that only grapes are used by more species, and maybe some types of cherries.

Elderberries grow best in moist places, though will grow almost anywhere. Unlike blueberries, they will grow not only in acidic soil, but in alkaline soil. I grow mine right next to a brook where their roots stay nice and moist.

My books tell me that they spread by root suckers, though mine have not spread aggressively. In 8-10 years they have expanded from a plant in a 3-gallon pot to a clump perhaps 10 feet across. Each plant is 8-12 feet tall. I've been told that growing 2 different named cultivars of elder increases fruit load, though that is not essential.

I love my elderberry in the spring. It blooms magnificently — the entire top of the plant alive with clusters of white flowers arranged in cymes and populated with bees. A cyme is "a more or less flat-topped determinate inflorescence whose outer flowers open last" (per "Manual of Woody Landscape Plants" by Michael Dirr). Think Queen Anne's Lace on steroids. And they are fragrant. You can make tea from them, and some people do — though I haven't, as yet.

In late summer or early fall, elderberries come ripe. It is somewhat of an old-fashioned fruit, generally favored by people in their 70s and 80s for its jelly-making potential. The berries are BB to pea-sized, so I use my pruners to cut off the cymes.

If you use it for jelly, juice or wine, I suggest you pull the berries off their stems, as the stems are somewhat noxious tasting. A report from Purdue University indicates that elderberry outperforms both cranberries and blueberries as an antioxidant, and for levels of vitamins A and C. It is rich in calcium and iron, too. In folk medicine, it has commonly been used for treating colds and rheumatism.

As a landscape plant, American elder is not perfect. It is weak-wooded, so stems break easily in ice storms. It is a short-lived plant, but sends up suckers, so normally that is not a problem.

There are now available a number of named cultivars, including two dark-leaved ones, 'Black Beauty' and 'Black Lace.' They are actually Sambucus nigra, a European species, which is less winter-hardy than our native form. I tried a 'Black Beauty,' and it only lasted two years for me.

Other berries: When I was a boy, my grandfather grew gooseberries and currants (Ribes spp.). Unfortunately, they are secondary hosts for the white pine blister rust, a disease that can kill pine trees. In New Hampshire and Maine (but not Vermont), there are restrictions and prohibitions about growing these tasty fruits.

There are now named cultivars resistant to this malady that are available and legal to plant. For New Hampshire, go to http://agriculture.nh.gov/documents/FinalRibesList2009.pdf for a complete list of approved cultivars. In Maine, contact your local extension agent.

Gooseberries (Ribes hirtellum) are easy to grow, and very tasty not only in pies, but straight off the bush. They can be as small as a pea or as big as a small plum, and range in color from green to lavender to a deep red.

They have a nice crunch, and taste something like a cross between a kiwi and a grape. They grow on bushes that rarely exceed 5 feet in height or diameter.

The late Lewis Hill of Greensboro, Vt., loved gooseberries, claiming that no pie can beat a well made gooseberry pie for flavor. His book, "Fruits and Berries for the Home Garden," is a wonderful resource for anyone interested in growing any small fruits.

Red and black currants are grown widely in Europe and made into a variety of soft drinks and throat lozenges. They are tasty off the bush or cooked into jellies or juice.

Once you have tasted them, you will probably want to grow them. They are generally pest- and disease-free, but can suffer from powdery mildew in wet summers like this one.

Having had an Irish great-grandmother, I like to diversify what I grow. The potato famine was a severe problem, in part because only one kind of potato was grown. So I like to grow many different kinds of fruits and vegetables. I lost a lot of raspberries to fungus this year, but my blackberries are great, and it looks to be an excellent year for elderberries.

Now I just need some gooseberries.

Henry Homeyer's website is www.Gardening-Guy.com. He can be reached at henry.homeyer@comcast.net or P.O. Box 364, Cornish Flat, NH.






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Weeding out the Garden State - Washington Times

Posted: 30 Aug 2009 02:22 PM PDT

Weariness with political corruption could benefit GOP

By Donald Lambro (Contact) | Monday, August 31, 2009

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Democrat Jon Corzine won the governorship of New Jersey four years ago pledging to bring needed change to a state defined by corruption and the highest property taxes in the country.

And four years later, things did change. The state's Democratic political establishment became more corrupt than ever and its tax burdens heavier than before, in part due to a pay-to-play culture of corruption the governor did little if anything to combat and a bunch of new fees and taxes Mr. Corzine enacted in the midst of the recession.

Then along came U.S. Attorney Christopher J. Christie for the district of New Jersey, a beefy, crime-fighting palladin who promptly began filling up the state's prisons with scores of crooked politicians, including mayors, lawmakers and other elected and public officials.

Mr. Christie soon became the most famous crime fighter in the state and a breath of fresh air to its dispirited voters, and polls were showing the New Jersey Republican leading Mr. Corzine by double-digits. He resigned his post in December and began a campaign to clean up Trenton, rebuild the state's battered economy through lower taxes, and enact a new code of stringent ethical reforms throughout the government.

But before Mr. Christie stepped down, he had won convictions or guilty pleas from 130 public officials and had put in place a massive, statewide investigative net that last month snared another 44 public officials -- with more arrests likely.

The latest arrests couldn't have come at a worse time for Mr. Corzine. They showed that statewide corruption ran deeper than even the most cynical observers had feared and that the only political solution was to install a reform government determined to clean house.

Mr. Christie doesn't mince words when he talks about who bears the lion's share of the blame, placing it squarely on the governor's doorstep.

Mr. Corzine, he says, is an "obvious bystander," an "enabler" of corruption and "the No. 1 financier of corrupt politicians and county bosses in New Jersey."

Heading into August, Mr. Christie had been leading by anywhere from 10 to 14 points as Mr. Corzine's job approval numbers tumbled. In the last month, however, the race has tightened slightly, as Democrats mounted a fierce counteroffensive, charging that Mr. Christie has skeletons in his closet that raise questions about his own credibility on ethical issues.

Among the charges: a 10-year, interest-bearing $46,000 loan he and his wife made to a top aide in the U.S. attorneys office in need of financial help that he neglected to report on his tax filings or financial disclosure forms.

Mr. Christie recently apologized for failing to report the loan and said he had amended his tax filings: "When I make a mistake, I'm going to admit them. It was certainly nothing that I was trying to conceal or hide."

But these and other charges have apparently cut into his lead, though Mr. Corzine's approval numbers remain in the basement. A Rasmussen poll last week showed Mr. Christie ahead with an 8-point lead, 50 percent to 42 percent, with 7 percent "not sure." Even so, Mr. Corzine's job approval numbers are very weak: 35 percent approve but 65 percent disapprove.

"There is a natural tightening occurring. We've long expected it would. New Jersey is an overwhelmingly Democratic state, so we never expected a 14-point lead to hold," said Nick Ayers, executive director of the Republican Governors Association. "It can be attributed to a variety of factors. Some to the fact that Corzine is slinging mud, some to the fact that the base of Democrats is solidifying toward Corzine, but mostly as election day nears, polls tend to tighten," he told me.

New Jersey voters, who will go to the polls this November, have not elected a Republican to statewide office since 1997, and, though they may be turning against Mr. Corzine now, past elections often show that Democratic candidates tend to move into the lead in the race's closing weeks.

There is another big factor that works in the Democrats' favor. Mr. Corzine, a multimillionaire who made a fortune on Wall Street as a chief executive with Goldman Sachs, is self-financing his campaign and will easily spend $30 million to $40 million on his race. Mr. Christie, however, is abiding by state public financing and will have a total of $11.5 million to spend.

But maybe New Jersey voters have had enough of one-party rule and a state political machine that is one of the most corrupt in the country. Republicans are optimistic that this time will be different.

"Corzine can spend $40 million distorting Chris Christie's record, but what he can't change is his record over the past four years," Mr. Ayers said.

"Is corruption a big problem? Wow, is it," said Maurice Carroll, director of the Quinnipiac University polling institute. "Almost everyone in New Jersey thinks so. And two-thirds feel personally embarrassed to live in a state where politicians are pictured in handcuffs."

Donald Lambro is chief political correspondent of The Washington Times.

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Woman stabbed, allegedly for - Recorder Community Newspapers

Posted: 30 Aug 2009 03:34 PM PDT



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Saturday, August 29, 2009

“Pocono Home and Garden: Your very own woodcarving; curb appeal; tomato ... - Pocono Record” plus 3 more

“Pocono Home and Garden: Your very own woodcarving; curb appeal; tomato ... - Pocono Record” plus 3 more

Pocono Home and Garden: Your very own woodcarving; curb appeal; tomato ... - Pocono Record

Posted: 29 Aug 2009 01:12 PM PDT

Hey, the day wasn't a washout after all. You still have some time to head out to the West End Fair. It's winding down but we still have a couple of cool things to tell you about.

If you hurry, you can register to participate in the auction to buy a woodcarved sculpture for your house or yard. Registration opens at 5 and the auction begins at 6.

Meet the man behind the carvings and find out how he does it. The auction is a great event because you might be able to get a carving for less than retail price and it helps the fair. People don't realize how much it costs to run a fair. Imagine just the electric bill for the carnival rides alone.

If you already have a wood carving, we tell you how to take care of it.

More about the fair. The prize winners showcase a little bit of Pocono perfection. Read about it in our Home and Garden blog. Recent entries in the blog also deal with fruit flies, a real battle at this time of the year. Hint: they love tomatoes and bananas.

And finally, baking at its best. We have the winners from the fair baking contests. First prize winners in each category will go on to compete in the state farm show. The cakes look so yummy that we almost feel sorry for the judges who had to make the final decision.

If dessert is your thing, we have an easy recipe for a peachy-no-bake dessert.


You don't often combine the words creamy and low-fat, but we can do that in these summer pie recipes. Cream and custard pies often call for whole milk, several tablespoons of butter, four to five eggs, even heavy cream. But buttermilk and a little cornstarch will do the trick.

For something a little more substantial, you can try pork in Asian bean sauce.

Maybe you have antiques, or maybe you just want to sell a few things online. Dr. Lori has some practical tips.


Ever see a house with curb appeal? You know it's that house that just draws your attention, has just the right plants and just the right look. You can achieve this, too.

For some inspiration, check out our reader garden photo gallery. You can submit yours, too. As an added bonus, we'll select five winners from all the reader photos submitted before 8 a.m. Wednesday. We have five pairs of garlic festival tickets to give away.

It won't be long before we're planting bulbs for spring. Sorry, summer is just about over. One theory: You don't need a formal setting or mass plantings. And did you know? Planting bulbs isn't just for fall. You can work with them all year round.

Coming up: Tomatoes are one of the easiest things for novice gardeners to grow. Yet, home gardeners have been plagued this year with something called late blight. We'll tell you what it is and if you can do anything about it. If you're losing you're tomato plants, we want to know about it.



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Inside Jaycee Lee Dugard's secret garden - Times Online

Posted: 29 Aug 2009 03:35 PM PDT

The nine-year-old boy was quite taken with the blonde girl he spotted across the wire fence that separated their bungalows.

He had not seen her before and thought she was pretty, even if she was an inch taller than him. She told him she was living there and her name was Jaycee.

Moments later a tall, forbidding man appeared, grabbed the girl by her arm and bundled her away. Later that day the man started building a 6ft fence around his back garden and Patrick McQuaid, now 27, never saw the girl again.

"I was young, and didn't think anything of it," he recalled last week. "Kids came and went all the time. But she sure was pretty."

McQuaid reckons that brief encounter happened in July 1991, a memorably hot and dusty summer in the small town of Antioch, east of San Francisco, northern California.

If his memory is correct, this would have been about a month after Jaycee Lee Dugard was kidnapped at a bus stop near her home in Lake Tahoe, 170 miles away.

According to charges filed in court on Friday, it would also have been around the time the 11-year-old girl was first raped by Phillip Garrido, a 6ft 4in sex offender.

It was, through no fault of the boy, the first of many missed opportunities to rescue the girl. As it turned out Jaycee faced another 18 years of captivity, a prisoner in a hidden compound of huts and tents where she gave birth to two children, now aged 11 and 15.

Jaycee's ordeal came to a sudden and still mysterious end last week when Garrido, now 58, walked into a police station with Jaycee and, in effect, surrendered her back to her real life – and incredulous family.

Now 29, still blonde but a little taller than she was as a child, Jaycee was instantly recognisable to her mother Terry and her half-sister Shayna, who was one year old when they last played together.

"She smelled the same, isn't that weird?" said a relative, who added that the reunited family had been both crying and laughing ever since, and were unable to stop hugging each other. They are now planning a late summer holiday at Disneyland.

California police have been honest about blunders in trying to solve this grotesque "cold case" which, with a little more imagination, might have been solved years ago.

In November 2006 Erika Pratt, a neighbour in Walnut Avenue, Antioch, heard the sound of hammering as Garrido erected yet another shed in his back garden.

Garrido had talked to her in the street, speaking animatedly about "God's voices", which were helping him deal with past anger issues and sex. This had made her feel so "queasy" that she phoned the police and urged them to check on the compound. She told them he might be a "religious psychotic with a sex addiction".

On Friday Warren Rupf, the local sheriff, confessed Pratt might have been right.

"A deputy responded to the call and spoke to the home owner in the front of his house. He did not feel he had reason to enter, and so did not realise there was a hidden compound with children living in it behind the house," he said.

"I do not blame him; I blame myself. We are beating ourselves up over this."

Rupf's department was far from alone in missing the clues. Garrido was a registered sex offender who met his parole officer every month over many years.

The officer visited Garrido at home, checking that his satellite-linked ankle bracelet, which monitored his movements, was working properly. But, again, he never looked into the back garden and its burgeoning tent city, which was visible on such unsophisticated detection devices as Google Earth.

Last year Garrido was twice visited at home by police.

The first time he was questioned about accusations that he swindled $18,000 (£11,000) out of an elderly neighbour, which he said was a donation to his "Church of God's Desire".

Then, in July last year, his three-bedroomed house was searched by police from a "multi-agency task force". However, as it was a routine search, randomly ordered under the state's paroled sexual offenders act, they were not looking for anything specific.

"There were zero signs of kids living there," said Sergeant Diane Aguinaga of the Antioch police last week. "Only him, his wife and his mom."

They did not notice the electrical wires that ran from the house, though a fence door concealed by a blue tarpaulin and into a 140ft by 90ft "backyard within a backyard" beyond.

"Barriers had been built to obstruct viewing from the outside and prevent the victims contacting the outside world," said another investigator. "There were tents and showers

and a chicken shed where the three girls lived. There is a soundproofed 10ft square structure, which the homeowner called his church.

"That's where we think he may have raped the victim and where, without any medical aid, she gave birth to his two children. The first time when she was 14. This is the area where this girl was trapped, for 18 years. Where this child raised her kids alone. He is one evil bastard."

NEARLY 800,000 juveniles are reported missing in the United States each year. About 750,000 turn up hours days or weeks later – the rest vanish.

Some choose to cut themselves off from family and friends, are stricken by drug habits or want to adopt a new sexual identity. Others are murdered or die from natural causes and are buried in potter's fields. A handful are sold into the global slave trade.

Few have a story as dramatic as Jaycee Lee Dugard's.

On the morning of June 10, 1991, wearing a pink top and matching trousers, she was walking down the street towards a bus stop when American urban paranoia exploded into nightmarish reality.

The timing of the crime was easily established. Every day Jaycee waited until the clock on the microwave oven in the family kitchen turned to 8.05am and then said her good-byes before setting off for the school bus stop, which was within sight of her home.

This time the familiarity of the scene was shattered by a car, which did a screeching U-turn in front of the girl.

"I was watching out for her from my garage 200 yards away when I saw a grey sedan pull up besides her on the street and a man reach out and snatch her up in a moment," recalled Carl Probyn, her stepfather, last week. "It was all over so fast."

He jumped on to his bicycle and gave chase, able to see that the driver was an Asian-looking woman with long dark hair, but unable to see either his stepdaughter or the man who was holding her. The car vanished seconds later.

The little middle-class town of South Lake Tahoe was traumatised. Locals were encouraged to wear pink ribbons to keep Jaycee at the forefront of people's minds – a tactic borrowed years later by the parents of Madeleine McCann and their yellow ribbon campaign. Vigils and marches were held.

The FBI and local police interviewed nearly 5,400 people, including dozens of sex offenders, and pursued more than 4,000 leads, but all to no avail.

The answer, it appears, was 170 miles away in Antioch, and the clues were in the police records of Phillip Greg Garrido.

Last week his father, Manuel Garrido, 88, choked as he recalled the boy who went so terribly wrong.

"He was a very gentle and sweet child, very popular with a lot of friends. They loved his jokes. He played guitar, and liked the Beatles," he said. "But then, at high school, he started getting into drugs and his personality changed. After he found LSD, he was gone. He started going crazy, and I lost him. I miss the boy, but the man, not so much."

In 1976 Garrido had been sentenced to 50 years in jail after he kidnapped and raped a 25-year-old woman in Reno, 20 miles across the Nevada border from Tahoe.

Officers said last week that the industrial unit in which he committed the crime was set up as a "sex palace", with pornography and sex toys scattered around.

The detective who led the investigation, Dan DeMaranville, 74, said Garrido came across as intelligent and educated during interviews.

"I asked him after he confessed why he did it, and he said it was the only way he could get sexual satisfaction," DeMaranville said. "He gave the impression he was remorseful. But I don't know whether it was a put-on or not."

Garrido was held in a tough federal prison in Leavenworth, Kansas, but released 11 years later on parole after he claimed to have "found God". He travelled back to California with his new bride, a Philippines-born woman called Nancy.

It is unclear how Garrido met her while in prison but Nancy, 54, stands accused alongside him of taking part in years of brutal and sexual acts against Jaycee. They each face 29 identical charges including rape and kidnapping. Television therapists are already analysing the couple's relationship, some comparing them to the serial killers Fred and Rose West, though there is no evidence they reached such sadistic and murderous depths.

Others are more sympathetic, saying Nancy Garrido may, like Jaycee, be a victim of Stockholm syndrome – mesmerised into sympathising and even identifying with a charismatic monster.

Police said they recovered a "family jumble" of computers, without internet access, toys and food dishes for cats and dogs in the compound – and an old Ford that matched the description of the car in which Jaycee vanished.

A series of pictures released last night give some clues to the life lived by Jaycee and her daughters in the garden camp-site. Her living quarters appear to have been a three-man tent, patched up with tape, in which some of her clothes, a predominantly grey selection of cardigans and blouses, hung limply over a clothes rail. On her sheet-less mattress lay a jumble of children's wear and a monkey puppet. Some shelves and a wardrobe hint at the permanence of the arrangement.

There are also indications of what might be an obsessive interest of Jaycee or one of her children. A makeshift bookshelf in the tent contained nearly 20 books, most of which had titles relating to cats, including Do Cats Think? and The Cat Who Went to Paris. Underneath the shelf is 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle: its topic – cats.

Elsewhere children's playthings – here a packet of crayons, there a couple of Furby cuddly toys – are distributed, along with computer paraphernalia, such as joysticks, mouses and software.

Clearly somebody had tried to make the quarters homely. A bunch of flowers in a makeshift vase made from a disused soft drink bottle sits on a ramshackle bedside table in the tent.

Cruelly, there is also a discarded book that hints that at least somebody was concerned with the welfare of the family. Self-Esteem: a Family Affair, by Jean Illsley Clarke deals with bringing up children and ways of giving them confidence. One of its chapters is entitled: What's a Nice Family Like Us Doing in a Place Like This?

The neighbours apparently did not think that there was a "nice family" living next door. Yet they did little to intervene, even though Garrido was known locally as "Creepy Phil".

Many have reported suspicions they harboured about Jaycee's girls – named by one neighbour as Starlite and Angel – who were allowed to play at the front of the house, but were home schooled.

In a deeply conservative town, where many children are taught at home for religious reasons, appearances fooled many. Others did not want to get involved.

Deepal Karunaratne, a Sri Lankan-born estate agent who employed Garrido to print his flyers and business cards, said he believed "Phil and Nancy" when they introduced him to their blonde blue-eyed "daughter", Jaycee.

"Only he said she was called Allissa, and one of her daughters was called Scarlett," he told The Sunday Times last week.

"Jaycee was part of the family business, running the printing press in the back yard. I would see her in work overalls, covered with ink, negotiated with her when she could not complete my order. She was always polite and professional. Or wearing jeans and a blouse standing outside the house with Nancy, who did all the bookkeeping."

He added that he and Jaycee exchanged regular phone calls and e-mails.

"He [Garrido] would not let me see the press or the backyard: he said it was a trade secret. I was aware there were two little girls there, although I did not know they were living in tents. They went out to movies and to eat, nothing exceptional or strange," he said.

His testimony is backed up by Ben Daughdrill, who last year met a woman who was introduced as Allissa when he went to Garrido's house to pick up some business cards. "She was the design person; she did the art work; she was the genius," said Daughdrill, who also communicated by phone and e-mail with Jaycee.

Why didn't she try to escape? Reports yesterday suggested that Jaycee's spirit was broken by the years of incarceration and that she had reached a point of accepting her fate.

She has told her parents that her children did not know Garrido had abducted her and her stepfather said that she regarded their relationship as "like a marriage".

Both Karunaratne and Daughdrill are now haunted by what was uncovered last week. For Karunaratne, two recollections are particularly telling and troubling.

"Over the last three years he [Garrido] grew more intense about his religion. He said that God was speaking to him through this machine, and asked me to listen through headphones and sign a form saying I'd heard the voices too.

"I heard nothing but did it, to be polite. But he seemed to grow more crazy every time I saw him. He said he was being attacked by angels. He was melting down."

The second cold finger running down the estate agent's spine is Garrido's account of a day recently when he took Jaycee and the girls on a "mission" to a nearby town called Pittsburg.

"He told me he had set up a stall to hand out his tracts, and all the family was helping him. His car broke down on the way home, and he phoned me up for a lift back. I told him to take the bus."

This trip may prove horribly significant. On Friday Pittsburg police provided a local judge with enough evidence to obtain a warrant to search the house at Walnut Avenue.

They are seeking evidence in connection with the murder of up to 10 young women whose bodies were dumped at an "industrial park" in Pittsburg during the late 1990s when Garrido was working there.

It raises a nightmarish question: was Garrido taking Jaycee and the children he fathered back to the scene of a series of grotesque serial killings?

LAST week Garrido's plans to build a Church of God's Desire, outlined on his rambling blog, Voices Revealed, collapsed in the dust.

On Monday he visited the San Francisco offices of the FBI, leaving a "manifesto" saying that schizophrenia was not an illness but a conduit of God being repressed by evil doctors.

Why was he calling attention to himself with the law?

Later that day he went to the nearby campus of the University of California, Berkeley, with the two children to inquire about hosting an event called "God's desire".

He spoke to Lisa Campbell, a special events manager for the university and former police investigator, who was struck by his "peculiar" manner. She asked him to come back the next day.

When he returned she made sure she had a campus police officer with her. Allison Jacobs, 35, a former nurse, is so tough that she challenged her future husband to arm wrestle before she would date him. She noticed that the girls, who were wearing drab dresses, seemed to avoid meeting his eye.

"The older one was treating him as if he was a god, but they both looked like brainwashed zombies," she said. They answered questions as if by rote.

Unlike the sheriff's deputy, Jacobs ran Garrido's name through a computer and found his sexual history.

She called his parole officer and told him about her concern about Garrido's daughters. "The parole officer says, 'He doesn't have any daughters', and my stomach just sank," said Jacobs. "I said he had two daughters with him that day. They had his blue eyes."

On Wednesday the parole officer summoned him to a local police station. Much to the officer's amazement Garrido turned up with a 5ft 3in woman and two blonde blue-eyed children in shabby clothes.

The charade crumbled as Garrido was moved to another room and Allissa revealed her lost identity, stuttering as she said she had not spoken her own name out loud for 15 years. She asked to speak to her mother: when she got through, her mother thought it was a prank call, and then burst into tears.

Garrido was arrested but did not stay quiet. A few hours later he phoned a local television station and told a reporter that the "truth" was inside the document he had left with the FBI, and when it was all known it would be revealed as a "heart-warming" story.

"I tell you here's the story of what took place at this house and you're going to be absolutely impressed. It's a disgusting thing by me that took place at the beginning, but I turned my life around," he said.

At least for Jaycee and her mother Terry, the first chapter of this long night is finally coming to a close. Terry must deal with the discombobulating experience of discovering that she is a grandmother by the child whom she last saw as an 11-year-old.

The abduction destroyed her marriage to Carl Probyn, who for many years was regarded as a suspect. He did not attend the mother and daughter reunion at a local motel, but is overjoyed at the news.

"Terry says Jaycee looks almost as she did, although she is feeling terribly guilty for bonding with her captor," he said. "But we know she had to do that to survive, especially as this man had her children in the back. They are 11 and 15 and could not escape by themselves – it's the only life they have ever known."

Terry and Carl never gave up. They distributed 1.3m leaflets and every Christmas got together again to take time off work and search the town street by street.

The urgency did not fade. There was a march by 400 supporters 10 years after she vanished. In 2002 police searched the home of a defrocked Roman Catholic priest but found nothing. Local schoolchildren are still shown Jaycee's missing posters, as a warning about "stranger danger".

The girl left her mark on the city. "Jaycee was a sweetie," said her fifth grade teacher, Sue Bush. "It scared the kids, and it scared them badly.

"We tied a pink ribbon to her chair and kept her desk the way she left it. The class wrote letters to Jaycee and made posters. They needed to talk about it," said her teacher. They also planted a memorial garden with a plaque in her honour.

One friend, Angie Glatfelter, has a string of ladybird tattoos on her ankle, with a new one added every five years that Jaycee has been missing. "Jaycee just loved ladybugs," she said.

Does she still? The world waits to hear from the girl who spent her teenage years and twenties hidden away in a secret garden.

Life after the ordeal

- Natascha Kampusch, 21, inset, astonishingly opted for a career in the media after escaping her captor in 2006 following eight years spent in his house near Vienna. She briefly hosted a television talk show.

All the while she was receiving counselling and would rarely go out in public without being escorted by an expert social worker.

Despite her apparent successful recovery, she recently stated how she felt she was unable to integrate in society. "In my cellar, I was perfect, self-contained and complete. Today I feel like people have taken away my ability to be myself," she said.

- Elisabeth Fritzl, 42, was kept prisoner in the cellar of her family home by her father Josef for 24 years, and gave birth to seven of his children.

After their release in 2008 she and her six surviving children, then aged five to 19, received new identities and moved to a remote Austrian village.

Elisabeth is said to have entered a new relationship with one of the bodyguards assigned to her by the authorities. Her children are now going to school and attempting to start a new life in freedom.

- Elizabeth Smart, who in June 2002 was snatched from her bed in Salt Lake City by an insane "prophet" and held for nine months, has recovered enough to attend university. She said that she would advise Jaycee Lee Dugard to start "enjoying ordinary things again, one at a time" and taking a long family holiday. "I have shown that you can come back from this. You must not allow this man to steal the rest of your life, which starts right now."



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Care for plants during drought - Carroll County Online

Posted: 29 Aug 2009 05:15 PM PDT

In Carroll and surrounding counties, the land is parched. If you're a gardener you can probably tell by looking at your own garden which plants are suffering the most. Individual plants respond to drought in various ways. Plants may slow or restrict their growth, wilt or curl up in response to lack of water. Most newly established plants and trees need about an inch or so of water per week; however, those that are established can get by with somewhat less.

Some plants, such as grass, become dormant after prolonged periods without water. It's nature's way of protecting the grass. The good news is that grass does grow back, so there's no need to water your lawn during a drought.

Here are some recommendations that may help deal with the current conditions:

If you are allowed to water, do so in the morning before 8 a.m. or the early evening when your plants will have the ability to take up water more efficiently than during hotter parts of the day. This will also minimize the amount of water lost by evaporation, saving it for your plants. Water deeply to encourage roots to grow deep, which in turn protects them from drought.

Mulch your plants. Even though it's midsummer, plants still benefit from having the ground around them protected from heat and sunlight, reducing the evaporation of water from the soil. Mulching has the added benefit that by keeping additional moisture in the soil, the surrounding plants have to compete less for water.

Perform "triage" on your garden, and decide what you can live without. For instance, if you have annuals, you may decide to let them fend for themselves without water. This includes vegetables such as tomatoes and zucchini. If you're a plant lover or someone who takes pleasure in watching your garden mature and evolve throughout the summer, this can be a tough decision. Take heart, drought is a natural phenomena letting the plants go is part of this process.

As a last resort, you can reuse "gray" water from your kitchen and bath to water your plants. However, don't apply gray water to edible vegetables, since it does contain salts that could be harmful.

Planning ahead

When you're planning what to do with your garden next year, think about the following strategies.



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Physician's renovated home and garden in Ligonier rediscovers its ... - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Posted: 28 Aug 2009 09:13 PM PDT

When the morning fog lifts in the Ligonier Valley, Dr. Theresa Nimick-Whiteside relishes a view of the Allegheny Mountains from the gently sloping front lawn of her country home.

Dr. Nimick-Whiteside, a physician who specializes in tumor immunology, works at Hillman Cancer Center and lives in Squirrel Hill. On weekends, this stone cottage built in the 1930s offers the tonics of nature, a welcome boost to anyone's immune system.

Houses set on hills often trumpet their grandeur with large porticoes, massive columns and wrought-iron fences. This home is a jewel that sparkles because of the natural purity of its setting and its uncluttered landscape. Tall maples shade the long driveway of a property long known as Mill House.

"I wanted to keep it cottagy. There was a mill somewhere," the doctor said, adding that grindstones unearthed during a recent renovation were incorporated into a stone walkway outside the entrance.

Dr. Nimick-Whiteside bought the property in the early 1980s and began a major renovation in 2005 to add air conditioning, install modern appliances and preserve the home's woodwork.

Lacy green boxwoods form an elegant border around the front and side of the property, which stretches more than four acres. Flanking the front entrance are two very large blue vases filled with the same boxwood.

George Griffith, a horticulturist, florist and landscape designer, found the 'Winter Gem' boxwood at a California nursery.

"That's been 40 years ago. We propagated them. There's never any burn on them," said Mr. Griffith, who co-owns The Flower Barn in Johnstown.

'Winter Gem,' which is now available at local nurseries, has dense branches and small round leaves and is especially hardy.

"The color all year long is so good. They seem to be so free of any spider mites. I'm looking at the two original ones now. They are 4- or 5-foot square and about the same height," Mr. Griffith said.

During the renovation, one of the best discoveries was uncovered on the front lawn. After wildflowers and overgrowth were cut away and a fence removed, workers found a large stone patio and five old rhododendrons. For the first time this year, the shrubs bloomed beautifully with white flowers.

"They were so, so neglected for years. You wouldn't believe the difference between then and now," Mr. Griffith said.

About a dozen conical giant arborvitae have been planted along the driveway. Mr. Griffith said the 'Spring Grove' cultivar is hardy, fast-growing, not eaten by deer and holds its pyramidal form without pruning.

The interior of the house also is special. Inside the entryway is a large cozy living room with knotty pine floors and a red brick fireplace. Especially fine oil portraits of the doctor and Dr. Nimick-Whiteside's late husband, Thomas Howe Nimick, hang on opposite walls. Both were painted by the late Minette Bickel, a local artist.

During the renovation, which included construction of an addition, an enclosed porch just off the living room was insulated and a large picture window installed. Now it's the morning room where the doctor sips coffee and watches the wildlife on the back lawn, where she often sees deer and once spotted a black bear.

"I want to keep it as a lawn because deer come and eat everything," she said.

To the left of the morning room is a long dining room that was a screened porch; insulation and thermal windows were installed so it could be used year-round. A floor-to-ceiling stone fireplace at one end is the focal point while an artfully arranged collection of polished brass candlesticks and antique copper warms the space. From a varnished cathedral ceiling, a 50-pound cast-iron chandelier hangs over a long mahogany library table that seats 10 people. An English shooting party would love feasting here in front of the fire.

The physician likes the old stainless-steel counters in her kitchen, which has ruffled white curtains, a backsplash with patterned flowers and a narrow butler's pantry with two cabinets that hold dishes and glasses. Around the corner is a nautical-themed powder room that features a clipper ship model recessed into the wall behind glass. A brass ship's clock hangs on the wall.

Off the kitchen is a hallway where the substantive, harmonious addition begins. The first room to the left is a study with shelves for family photos, books and Dr. Nimick-Whiteside's collection of old green and turquoise glass, "which I am cuckoo about," she said.

Off the study is a stone terrace that runs the length of the house and overlooks a vast back lawn filled with mature trees and white wrought-iron furniture. The prettiest flowers in this landscape are near the terrace; pink Knockout roses and an array of white, blue and pink hydrangeas are the stars here. Also on the back lawn, there's an 18th-century bronze crucifix framed by a wooden capella.

In 1982, "We were married in front of that crucifix," Dr. Nimick-Whiteside said.

She spotted the crucifix on the floor of an antique shop in Munich. Later, she moved it to this site and had a wooden shrine built over it.

Beyond the study is a large master bath, a well-designed closet across the hall and a laundry room. At the end of the hall is a spacious master bathroom that overlooks the back lawn plus a sitting room painted in a warm yellow with a subtle glow. Above the bed is a hand-painted Venetian headboard.

One of the doctor's favorite finds in this first-floor master bedroom is a whimsical antique brass light fixture in the shape of white lilies that she bought at Mark Evers Antiques in Oakland.

This combination of bedroom and sitting room is her favorite space. Sliding glass doors lead to the back terrace and the sitting room affords a view of mountains in the distance. The sitting room features a formal green silk sofa, comfortable yellow chairs and a gas fireplace. Over the fireplace hangs a landscape by Albert F. King that shows trees along Loyalhanna Creek.

A hallway leads from the sitting room to a wooden staircase upstairs, where there are three spacious bedrooms with dormer windows. The home's original master bedroom is a guest room with slanted ceilings and a private bath. There's also a large white bathroom with red towels and an old-fashioned bathtub. A third bedroom, which has hardwood floors and Indian rugs, holds two bookcases that display her collection of pottery from Switzerland and Poland.



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