Yeah, my yard too, so after two years of letting the native plants come back I am now finding several types of seedling trees which has me struggling with a new set of ethical conundrums on what to do about that, because a lot of these new baby trees are growing too close to the house (don’t want them dropping limbs or worse falling over, one day, onto my home) and also growing into my drainage field and/or blocking sunlight that I desperately need where I container garden on my porch.

I also now have a slew of a certain type of weedy plant that grows massively tall and bushy, that are getting too big and too close to the stairs of my home, plus all kinds of vining poison oak/ivy/sumac encroaching on the house, that I never noticed before, because it was my spouse who use to always mow our lawn, but that I’m now realizing had always kept it at bay. And also one native grape vine, that again, I had no idea existed where it is, because the spouse would mow over it, but now it’s grown into a giant mound of five feet around and almost as tall and it’s sent out long vines and trying to grow over and choke out a small crepe myrtle I planted two years ago.

Same for me and that’s what I think and feel, that they’re babies, because they are.

Oh god that’s me with not wanting to throw away anything that sprouts, I was guilt stricken the other day because of too many sun flower seedlings and no place to plant them all. I’m still hurting about that one when I think of it now.

I have been running an experiment with growing collards in containers.

Started this last year, bought 5 plants from a hardware store and planted one each in a bucket (Lowe’s store and their logo bucket, the kind that you can buy Sheetrock compound/mud in).

I just used Miracle Grow potting soil, and once a week I’d feed them with Miracle Grow too.

The experiment was to see how well they would grow, and if they did well then how much could I harvest, but the main thing I wanted to know is if I could keep them alive and continue to harvest from them this year as well.

So, with all that in mind, then yes, they grew, but they didn’t make large heads that I could cut off to have bunches, but I was able to harvest them, and five plants enabled me to harvest enough, once a week, to get five to six large leaves bigger than my hand from each plant, once the plants got about two and a half feet tall. And it continued like that, but them steadily growing taller, up until the first hard frost of their first year.

When that first hard frost was coming, I was able to cover them up to protect them. Then they slowed down growing until spring weather of this year, and then it was back to business as usual for them, except since they were already established now, I was able to go back to picking off new large leaves from them earlier than the first go around from the previous year.

They are now another foot taller, and occasionally the lower stalk at the base of each plant tries to put new growth out, but I don’t want that to compete with the rest of the plant so I pull it off once any of it gets about an inch big.

Eventually I may try to see if I let any of that grow a little bigger if I could root it to propagate a new plant.

Anyway, I’m curious now to see how long I can keep these plants alive and producing.

I looked up, once, if collard plants are meant to be grown this way and info I found stated most types aren’t but there is one type that is cultivated to grow year after year, so I don’t know, I just know I have enough fresh greens each week that would equal a small head of cabbage or a large size head of lettuce and that makes me happy and is good enough for me. Also, anything I don’t get around to eating I can freeze for use later.

I’m glad you have hope, that’s gonna carryover and help you through. And I know we don’t know each other, but it touched me that you came here to ask for reassurance, so I’m seriously pulling for you, and putting all my belief in you and that it’s going to get better and you’re going to be OK.

Just out walking the fence, love it!

I bet that’s going to look awesome once the vines can reach the top, please post another picture when they do.

Agree with everything you stated, I still use Brave but it’s only for one thing, the built in ad blocker and then i only use Brave to browse one site: YouTube. And then the all encompassing reason why I for now still use Brave: I use an Apple tablet, and I’m ignorant on how to crack it (or anything else for that matter), and I haven’t been able to find a free ad blocker app at Apple apps.

Oh and I don’t see ads while using Brave, again because I only go to YouTube, and I’m also not receiving any sort of monetary pay from Brave, because of this, I’d assume.

Also, I use a FireFox app but it’s a striped down bare bones one, Fire Fox Focus. I actually enjoy spending time online using multiple browsers for multiple different needs on my tablet.