With the price of gas lately, I’ve been having to choose between groceries and gas.  If I don’t get the gas, I can’t get to work.  With kids to feed, I have to buy groceries.  When I was a kid, mom always had a garden but I live in an apartment.  I know I can grow tomatoes on the patio.  Do you know if anything else will thrive in containers?

 A:  I am not a gardener so that was a question I had to research.  I googled the phrase ‘apartment gardening’ and was surprised to find that you can grow almost all vegetables, even some kinds of corn, in containers in your apartment.  You can even do them indoors to give yourself year round fresh vegetables.  Some of the sites I visited were: 

http://www.backwoodshome.com/articles/wolcott61.html

http://www.rentaldecorating.com/gardenpatio.htm

http://ask.metafilter.com/83918/Help-me-do-some-apartment-gardening

http://daviswiki.org/Gardening#head-88234f255587afb8b6478d796332cb35b39b71c9

http://gardening.ygoy.com/2007/10/10/how-to-do-vegetable-container-gardening/

I’m sure this will be helpful to many people.  So thanks for asking!  Good luck on your garden.

Love,

Mom

Q:  I’m getting married in a couple weeks.  I love my fiancée but her mother is a total *!*?**.  She came here a few days ago to ‘help’ with the wedding.  She’s been ordering everyone around, rearranging plans we have made.  I told her mother to butt out or go home.  Now her mother is trying to tell my fiancee that she has made a mistake and it’s not too late to back out of the marriage!  How can I get this witch out of our lives!

A:  You can’t.  One of the most important things you can ever learn in a marriage is that you have married, not just the one you love, but the whole gosh-darn family!  The relationships everyone has with their parents is a complex one but it can never be broken.  To try to break that relationship will only put a rift into the one you have with your future wife.  So take a deep breath, count to ten, visualize a calming scene – whatever it takes to deal rationally with other family members.  I’m quite certain you’ve had to deal with members of your family who annoy you.  Now you get to add her family to yours.  Learn to understand and deal with each of them.  For now, I recommend that you sit your future mother-in-law down, apologize for the way you talked to her, and figure out how to work together on this wedding.