A different breed: new plants to expand your garden

Plant breeders often spend their entire lives dedicated to the development of a better version of a plant. They work diligently at developing plants that have characteristics that make them superior to other similar plants. These characteristics may include compact form, disease resistance, fragrant flower, colorful foliage, and drought tolerant. Today’s column focuses on 20 new plants that, thanks to plant breeders, have many of those characteristics.

Art is in the house

Hope you all had a wonderful Fourth of July. Now that the summer is in full swing, the multiplex has been finding it hard keeping interest up. Recent blockbusters have gone bust from the Fast franchise to Marvel. Studios seem hellbent on hurtling down this well-worn road, with little heed to what audiences are saying with their dollars. But can theaters continue on this trajectory as well? Hopefully managers will see that counter-programing might be the only thing keeping them afloat. Here are some recent examples that might hold your attention on those silver screens.

King of the eggrolls

Our kids have grown up and moved on, our house is too small to have them return, therefore, it’s just the two of us. Because of this, where is the logical place for us to go grocery shopping? Sam’s Club, of course. We can stock up on such necessities as the five-gallon jug of mayonnaise, the giant drum of nacho cheese sauce (both of which turn blue and fuzzy before you can use them up), and the giant log of processed American cheese which has a shelf life of…forever. After loading up the mini-mobile with our treasures, we headed home with the hatch back dragging on the road behind us.

Ask an Angel: July 13, 2023

My parents retired a year ago and have recently decided to downsize from our family home to a condominium. I agree with their decision to find a smaller home that requires little maintenance, especially since they no longer have the energy to pour into a large home. However, I’m most concerned about the emotional impact this move might have on my parents. Both my parents were extremely involved in their neighborhood and were accustomed to neighbors dropping by to shoot the breeze. I worry that they might feel a sense of loss as they leave behind familiar surroundings and friends.

Learning to leave well enough alone

It was just about a year ago that I got rid of my old, crotchety microwave oven and got a whisper-quiet new one.

The old microwave had served me for nineteen years, a long enough career I suppose for kitchen appliances and quarterbacks not named Brady. It still worked well enough, except that the handle had cracked and was held together by packing tape, and when turned on it whirred and sputtered like an asthmatic chipmunk riding a bike with a baseball card clothes-pinned to fan the spokes. (This is the microwave I’m talking about, not the quarterback, who may or may not whir or sputter when he’s turned on. How would I know?)

Weaving in the Imperfections

I slid a slightly crooked hand-woven bookmark into the envelope before sealing it and mailing it to a friend. I attached a note:

“My newest fascination is hand weaving on a loom. I made this bookmark for you. It’s one of my first, but I’ll send another one after I’ve had more practice. Hopefully you’ll see my progress. Happy Reading!”

Oh, it’s not something I’m proud of. It’s just that over the years, roadkill and I have often crossed paths, and I guess you could say that I took the path less traveled by most people.

Taking a 10-minute mini vacation

Even though my school years are long behind me, I still expect that once the calendar flips to June, summer vacation is supposed to magically appear. Remember those delicious days of summer vacation as a kid? Sprinklers on the lawn? Dreamsicles from the ice cream truck? Long days at the city pool, counting out change at the concession stand to buy nachos and a slurpee while the grownups commandeered the pool during Adult Swim?

Short subjects

In a recent article in The Hollywood Reporter, it was confirmed that Martin Scorsese’s latest film is going to be three hours and twenty-six minutes. For those who screened it in Cannes, I hope they took a long bathroom break and refrained from fluids. Running times have inflated even more than studio budgets of late. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer movie is three hours, which I plan to review next month. The question remains: can we still get smaller films made in the climate of spectacle? Have no fear, those still exist if one is willing to seek them out.

Caution, construction ahead

June is busting out all over. The weather went directly from a freeze warning to a heat warning. The flowers are in full bloom which means those orange cones are also in full bloom along all of our roadways. You can’t escape construction, not even in restaurants. This is the case with Jiang’s Mongolian Grill in Algonquin.

Moonlight garden

The influence of others can help us in many ways. A glimmer of hope can be seen when before we only saw despair. Encouragement in the form of a smile can change the trajectory of one’s day. Others can help us see things from a different perspective. Annie, my puppy, has helped me see the beauty in darkness. We spend time each evening, well after the sun has set, outside. While in the past, I would have spent that time staring at a screen, I now stare at the beauty nature has to offer under the stars.

Ask an Angel: June 15, 2023

I’m writing to seek your expert advice on behalf of my beloved aunt. She’s facing isolation and loneliness during the summer months, especially as her immediate family spends most of the summer at their lake home in Michigan. She has expressed feeling isolated and lonely, and not just because her family is away for the summer.

When a house becomes a home

Sometimes it’s hard to tell exactly when a house becomes a home.

But sometimes you know exactly to the moment when it happens.

The house where our kids grew up was in Schaumburg. It was ten years old when we bought it, so it had already been somebody else’s home, and as my wife and I toured it during their open house, we wanted to see what would make us feel that this house could be home to us.

A second chance at hello

As much as I’d like you to think that my Gentleman Friend and I have been married blissfully and perfectly happy for the past several decades, I’m going to take a risk and tell you that sometimes, we fight. Our fights aren’t typically the loud, plate-throwing variety. We’ve mastered the art of subtle tiffs, starting out as a tiny slight that grows into a stand-off —— and I am the half of us most guilty of this —— in an all-encompassing silence that can be louder than a freight train.

Nostalgia trips

Have you ever listened to a song and been transported to another time in your life? The pull of memory is one of the most powerful tools on which media thrives. Every thirty years, a new phase is rehashed with goals of reeling generations with wistful longing. The allure of our past youth shoved in our faces in hopes of attaining our attention and our wallets. Some, though, are created by those who remember it and want to reflect on as we would but in art. While conglomerates utilize it in more shameless ways. Let’s sort through some of these.

Ask the Woodchucks: Fix a leaky sillcock

You have two or more sillcocks on your house even if you don’t know the name “sillcock.”

They are the outside faucets where you connect garden hoses, and they often leak.

A stone’s throw away

Since we are retired and have the word “sucker” tattooed across our foreheads, we volunteer for everything and have absolutely no free time. We checked our calendar and to our amazement, we found a day with no appointments. With this new found free time, what is the number one choice for a senior mental health day? Going for lunch and to a casino!!! Some of you may not realize that there is a new Hard Rock Casino being built a stone’s throw away in Rockford at the site of the Old Clock Tower Inn. While this in under construction, a temporary location is open in a strip mall right down the street. Upon further investigation, we discovered a restaurant which caught our attention while Googling restaurants near the casino and found the Stone Eagle Tavern.

Gardening myths explained

For the past few days big black ants have been crawling on the floor of my office. I have been putting up with the presence of the ants because I thought they were needed to open the beautiful peony buds right outside my office window. It turns out though that it is a myth that ants are needed to open the flower buds on peonies. Ants, while can often be found on peonies, are not needed for the buds to open. Peonies buds can open on their own. This and several other gardening myths will be busted in today’s column.

Ask an Angel: June 1, 2023

I am writing to you today because I am an older adult who could benefit from home care, but I am scared because I don’t think it’s safe. I worry about letting strangers into my home and about the potential risks of having someone else help me with tasks such as bathing, dressing, and grooming.

You may ponder, you may wonder, but do you “sonder”?

My friend Lynn loves language, as I do, and she often posts an interesting or unusual word on her Facebook feed. But because she knows that I visit Facebook about as often as I visit my furnace filter or smoke alarm batteries, she sent me her most recent wonder-inspiring word via text.

The word was “sonder.”

Uninvited: Man vs. fowl

My husband is in a week-long standoff with a robin who insists on building a nest on the crossbeam of our porch.

We are a bird-friendly family. We don’t put chemicals on our lawn, put out birdseed in the winter, and we are delighted when our bird friends chirp happily from the branches of our crabapple tree out our front window. But even our bird loving has limits.