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Spring morphed into summer this week! If that wasn't a shot in the arm for gardeners, I don't know what is. It certainly got me going, wanting to fit many days into hours and thinking I could.

Plant butterfly bush in hot, dry area.

I've been thinking about what Roger Swain said recently and, as with all great ideas, how I can not only put them into practice but encourage readers to, as well.

Responsible gardeners will wisely assess the weather before installing their purchases. Don't let a 10-day stretch of gorgeous weather in April fool you.

On a recent picture-perfect day (and, if you are keeping score, they've been few and far between lately), I paused at a garden in our village. Its location receives full sun and also full exposure to the harbor, which gets its share of salt and wind.

Here are some details on soil for starting your own victory garden. The following is excepted from "The Moosewood Restaurant Kitchen Garden" by David Hirsch:

Staggering food prices and renewed attention to living green have redirected many people back to the land. Digging your own "victory garden" is a reliable way to ensure that your food is healthy, and you can save money.

Isn't it romantic? I keep thinking this as I stop to stare, smell, salute the garden at this time of the year. Maybe that is the reason why so many couples choose it for weddings. It's certainly well-timed for the Wareham Garden Club's wedding-themed...

Lyme disease is a concern for gardeners and anyone else who spends time outdoors.

For more information:

This is the second part of an ongoing series that will appear roughly bi-weekly on the basics of growing your own food, from ground preparation to planting to harvest.

Annie Rockwell of Parlow Mill Farm in Marion shows new gardeners how to plant tomatoes in the second part of out SouthCoast gardening series.

Forgive me if I seem detached. I'm absorbed with a question and I may be on the verge of an answer "» I was lamenting how summer comes and goes as though it could fit in a back pocket of winter. How exactly does that happen — how does the same...

When you companion-plant you, get double production in a single space, better and more natural growth and the added bonus of weed and insect control.

Louise Riotte offers the following observation in her book, "Carrots Love Tomatoes: Secrets of Companion Planting for Successful Gardening":

I must confess. I cannot pass up a garden tour. Like the proverbial box of chocolates, you never know what it will hold!

Apply slow-acting grub control to lawn.

Mid-July is the time when we begin to reap the rewards of earlier effort, but it's crucial to remain attentive to the needs of your garden. Don't let down your guard.

I marvel at successful partnerships, as when nature and humans live together in harmony. Such is the case at Celeste and John Penney's Westport property, where an ecosystem thrives.

Now comes Guitar Hero: Aerosmith, an undercooked cash-in proving, once and for all, that Guitar Hero is on life support. Strumming along to popular songs on a plastic guitar remains enjoyable, but the gameplay has gotten worse on Neversoft’s watch. Harmonix demanded precision timing, particularly during hammer-ons and pull-offs. Under Neversoft, these actions feel mushier and more forgiving. Yet it also seems that Neversoft has artificially amped up the difficulty level, thanks to the way the company has constructed note charts — Guitar Hero: Aerosmith feels less like playing a guitar and more like playing a video game. At least the sudden, brutal spike in difficulty that marred Guitar Hero III is gone. Indeed, there’s barely any progression at all — the final tier of songs is scarcely more challenging than the first.

Reaching those last songs doesn’t take long. Although it costs as much as any other game in the series, with only 30 playable songs (plus a handful of bonus tracks), Guitar Hero: Aerosmith feels more like an expansion pack than a stand-alone. Given the success that Harmonix has had releasing downloadable content for Rock Band to be purchased à la carte, you wonder why the makers of Guitar Hero didn’t go that route. Guitar Hero III owners probably would have clamored to download songs like “Dream On” at a couple of bucks a pop. But buying a whole new game? That’s dicier.

One could argue, however boringly, that in the phenomenon of the minisode — which proclaims its retention of the “full narrative arc” of its original, even as it scrunches that into near-nonsense — our culture is presenting yet another symptom of intellectual decline, creeping ADD, capitalist brain acceleration, or what have you. Twenty-five minutes with the Minisode Network on YouTube (it also runs on MySpace, Crackle, Joost, AOL Video, and Verizon Wireless) were enough to convince me otherwise: the minisode is its own thing, a kind of minimal, calligraphic rendition of the original story, rather illuminating in the spareness of its strokes. Did I say strokes? An episode of Diff’rent Strokes came in at just over four minutes and still seemed purgatorially long. Most of the old-school comedy dramas, in fact, are mercilessly deconstructed by the minisode, each one boiled down to its rag of a plot and its three haggard jokes. Larry Hagman frowns and jiggles the ice in his drink in I Dream of Jeannie; Edna Garrett mugs maternally through The Facts of Life; almost nothing else seems to be happening. The form rejects filler, but what if filler is all there is?

The kind of TV that adapts itself most readily to the minisode, in fact, is resilient mutant super-trash TV — daytime talk shows, soaps. Ricki Lake was more or less made to be minisoded: from premise (“The bitch gave me chlamydia!”) to moral (“This is not an easy show to sum up, but I think we can all agree that the children are of the utmost importance. . . . ”) all in 4:57 or less. A minisode of The Young and the Restless in which Nicki and Victor exchanged vows while Ashley recorded a tearful video message for Abby seemed to me an admirable display of dramatic economy. The plot moved smartly. The characters were vivid and alive. The posters in the YouTube comments box certainly seemed to dig it: “I hate his new wh're of a wife she a gold digger why can’t he see that?” wondered MoonGoddessFox. Equally immune to abbreviation is the obstacular ugliness and frenzy of The Three Stooges: the minisode, in fact, might be the format that finally permits me to get to grips with this very unsettling body of work.