The dollar stores are a fourite place for me to get some smaller pots........I usually find some brightly-coloured plastic waste-paper baskets. These are rather fun containers, and give a bit of colour to the garden first thing in the spring. You will hve to drill holes in the bottom, and, at the end of the season, simply put them in the plastics recycling bin, because the sun does a number on them.....they start getting brittle.

It may be possible to contain them at least until the pool cracks as plastic doesn't last forever. If you want a big bamboo, but don't want the ones that run rampantly, an very simple solution is to plant the least aggressive running bamboo that you can find that is still hardy enough to grow. Some species simply don't spread more than a few inches each year, and partial shade can further help to hinder their growth. In the northeast, some running bamboos can spread up close to 10ft a year while others typically run less than 1ft. I never use barriers, but I've been getting rid of species that run rampantly. Here's an example of one of my bamboos that has made it up to 15ft tall, but still hasn't spread much. I haven't done any rhizome pruning either. Here is a link that might be useful: Picture of my 4 year old phyllostachys dulcis- note their may be different cultivators of this

You know... you gotta take some things with a grain of salt. Everything has positive and negatives. Not everyone can afford expensive stuff. I have a big cinderblock garden set up. "Don't do it! The bricks will leach all your water!" they told me. Uh huh. As you can see by this old photo -- bit wilted, sorry it was the worst part of late July at the time -- apparently the plants survived. While I was setting that up, I decided to use a whole bunch of Dollar Store big tubs to plant things in. "Don't do it! The plastic has chemicals and is weak!" they said. As you can see, despite these many challenges, my homemade earthboxes worked out. I also used a variety of terracotta pots; Ceramic pots; Walmart plastic pots; ...and everything grew. And I ate the result. And nobody died. That was in 2006 that I first set all that up. All of it was perfectly fine until March of 2015 when we had an ice storm. Horrible, especially for my trees. Every single container I had was destroyed. Every. Single. One. The terracotta and the ceramic and the plastic -- as well as the tubs. A small fortune in gradually collected pots in front and back of my house. The only thing that wasn't destroyed was the cinderblock! So all I can tell you is that all that stuff lasted for nine years for me -- all of those different things outdoors. And it only died with the ice storm and even my quality ceramic and terracotta pots bit the dust just as much -- often even worse, most the plastic just cracked, those others shattered. So, you know, whatever... Do what you can afford, man! Gardening is fun! Plants grow even when we don't want them to, to which weeds attest. Put them in any growing media with some decent amendments for nutrients (or, in inorganic media and then water with nutrients), get the plant into the light, and it'll probably grow. That saying, "Don't let perfection be the enemy of good" probably fits here. If you've got lots of cash, buy premade products. If you don't, buy some cheap tubs (surprisingly, walmart online will now free deliver most of these things) and go to town. :-) PJ

Like Dave and Kate, I've switched to ziplock freezer bags. Remember, though, that there's a difference in the regular bags and the freezer bags, the freezer bags are thicker material. Like Dave, I portion the squash into bags (mine is mashed), squeeze all the air out of the bags and place them on a sheet pan in a flat layer. After they are frozen they stack right up and I can get a lot into a smaller space. Good luck, I had a ton of squash this year and I'm still putting it in the freezer as it becomes compromised in storage. I think we've eaten squash twice a week for the last three months, and I still have piles of the stuff. I've made squash pie and put it in dinner rolls and made pound cake and muffins. Good thing the dog loves mashed squash... Annie