Most of our blooming wild plants are considered weeds by the county, but I figure we don't have enough of those to draw their attention.

Those people from Omaha left them. I hoped they'd be larger, but they tasted good. It was a luxury to have a sunny spot on the riverbank where the flood took out the trees.

It's more elevated than the red cabin that flooded, but my dad always said it needs to be raised some more because the crawlspace was too small to work on the pipes, and now it's full of flood silt, so it really should go up 2 or 3 feet. What you see in the picture is just the porch that sits on pieces of log. Miraculously, it survived the flood waters that ran underneath there for three days - so that amount of porch elevation was adequate. The red cabin would go up quite a bit higher - 3 or 4 feet. I talked to the guy today - $20,000. We'd have to cut the back addition off with a sawsall - the bathroom, laundry room, and kitchen - and rebuild them with a new foundation to match the newly-elevated log part. Quite a project, and not included in the $20,000. I could get FEMA flood mitigation money to help with the new higher foundation, but then I'd have to buy flood insurance forever, and the premiums are several thousand a year and likely to go up - we could never get that much rental income to pay for it.

Potatoes take some room, and good sunlight, but they're easy and rewarding, even if they turn out little tiny. The best part is when you harvest them because you loosen the soil a little bit and then rummage around in the dirt with your hands feeling for the crop. That right there made me want to plant them again next year.

I figured since they were organic, they probably weren't treated with anything to keep them from sprouting.