Your Questions About Gardening

Need some help with successful metal-detecting?

I have a Garret, not top of the line, but not a real cheapie either. It is a good starter for an amateur. Anyway, I have had it for six months or so. Couldn’t really use it in the Midwest until the ground completely thawed, so it was close to April. Then July was nearly unending days of 100 degrees, so another month was lost. Even when the temps weren’t interfering the ground was so dry digging with a garden trowel was like digging through the sidewalk. So, I have only had a few months of ideal conditions with my detector.
So far I have found roughly $20.00 in modern money. I found a few coins from the 40’s, including a quarter, but no coins of real value. I also found two rings at the same lake that were made of sterling and lesser gold, so they had a little value, but not enough to get professionally cleaned and worth trying to sell.
The tips I have learned on my own (or through reading) are:

1) Wet dirt (but not muddy) is best for results. The dirt is more conductive. Mud will make digging and finding the object near impossible, besides being incredibly messy.
2) Sand is easy to detect in, and in parks the modern coins are easy to find.
3) Overturned dirt (such as piles in construction projects) are easy pickings, because the older dirt is brought to the surface (read this, never found it to be true personally).
4) Quarters are the most reliable coins to hit on. I will repeatedly get the same quarter hit if its genuinely a quarter. Dimes are notorious for coming up as aluminum cans. The Nickel beep sometimes also gives false readings, unless the actual coin is near the surface.
5) The default sensitivity on the garret is two slots from the top. Using the highest setting supposedly means you might miss shallow targets. I have not yet confirmed the top three settings really are better or worse than the other. The ’41 quarter mentioned above was 4-5 inches deep (one of the deepest I’ve found) and it was found with the default setting.
6) Pinpointing (at least on my model) is not very accurate. I use it more to verify that its a real target and not mineralization, and not for finding the exact location. You can buy handheld pinpointers for about $125.00, but that seems like a real waste of money to me.
7) I get a lot of random hits on almost everything the detector can hit on in most public places. This may be due to high trash contents. It gets frustrating when 4 out 5 digs are not precisely where the item is, and if it is an easy dig, its usually garbage. I suppose that’s the name of the game though.

Okay, I have went on long enough. Looking for tips to help me waste less time. I am also running out of ideas for places to go. I have hit county and state lakes, in-town parks, my own backyard (and other backyards), edges of cemeteries (not on graves), and schools. New ideas are very much needed and welcomed!

Looking for metal detecting tips?

I have a Garret, not top of the line, but not a real cheapie either. It is a good starter for an amateur. Anyway, I have had it for six months or so. Couldn’t really use it in the Midwest until the ground completely thawed, so it was close to April. Then July was nearly unending days of 100 degrees, so another month was lost. Even when the temps weren’t interfering the ground was so dry digging with a garden trowel was like digging through the sidewalk. So, I have only had a few months of ideal conditions with my detector.
So far I have found roughly $20.00 in modern money. I found a few coins from the 40’s, including a quarter, but no coins of real value. I also found two rings at the same lake that were made of sterling and lesser gold, so they had a little value, but not enough to get professionally cleaned and worth trying to sell.
The tips I have learned on my own (or through reading) are:

1) Wet dirt (but not muddy) is best for results. The dirt is more conductive. Mud will make digging and finding the object near impossible, besides being incredibly messy.
2) Sand is easy to detect in, and in parks the modern coins are easy to find.
3) Overturned dirt (such as piles in construction projects) are easy pickings, because the older dirt is brought to the surface (read this, never found it to be true personally).
4) Quarters are the most reliable coins to hit on. I will repeatedly get the same quarter hit if its genuinely a quarter. Dimes are notorious for coming up as aluminum cans. The Nickel beep sometimes also gives false readings, unless the actual coin is near the surface.
5) The default sensitivity on the garret is two slots from the top. Using the highest setting supposedly means you might miss shallow targets. I have not yet confirmed the top three settings really are better or worse than the other. The ’41 quarter mentioned above was 4-5 inches deep (one of the deepest I’ve found) and it was found with the default setting.
6) Pinpointing (at least on my model) is not very accurate. I use it more to verify that its a real target and not mineralization, and not for finding the exact location. You can buy handheld pinpointers for about $125.00, but that seems like a real waste of money to me.
7) I get a lot of random hits on almost everything the detector can hit on in most public places. This may be due to high trash contents. It gets frustrating when 4 out 5 digs are not precisely where the item is, and if it is an easy dig, its usually garbage. I suppose that’s the name of the game though.

Okay, I have went on long enough. Looking for tips to help me waste less time. I am also running out of ideas for places to go. I have hit county and state lakes, in-town parks, my own backyard (and other backyards), edges of cemeteries (not on graves), and schools. New ideas are very much needed and welcomed!

Is it ever acceptable for wedding guests (family) to ask that wedding photos they are in be destroyed?

My wife and I were married outdoors in the Public Garden in Boston – We felt it was a lovely ceremony, my wife looked beautiful, and it was everything that we had hoped for – It was a perfect October day, warm and sunny, in the low 70’s. We had 50 people there, family and close friends.

We had an excellent professional photographer who took photos throughout the day. We had some group shots we wanted in the Public Garden, but his style is mostly shooting candid pictures, and we felt that he really managed to capture the magic and feeling of our wedding day.

A couple of months later, our photographer had processed our pictures and posted about 140 proofs on his website, those he considered “best pictures” of the day. We also later received another 400 images on discs, which were also excellent. We logged in to his website, and could see that all of the pictures were beautiful, and looking at them took us right back to our wedding day.

We immediately shared the secure log-in with our friends and family by email, since they could order prints directly from the website if they wished, and we were sure they would be as excited to see the pictures as we had been, since it had been 2 months since we got married.

We received positive email replies (and a couple of phone calls) from everyone except for my wife’s parents. Without going into any details, my in-laws have always been “difficult” regarding our relationship, and have not been easy to get along with at all. What my mother-in-law did was to have my father-in-law send the following email about the pictures to my wife:

***********************************************************************************************
From: xxxxxxx, xxxxx
Sent: Monday, December xx, xxxx 6:38 AM
To: xxxxxxx, xxxxxxxx

Subject: RE: Hi

Mom looked at the photo this week end.

She did not like the one’s of her in particular.

Nu 4 ,38,96 and 102

They are candid and she looks terrible.

She though these photo will follow her and then she cried.

Can you have these pictures deleted ,erased ,destroyed.

***********************************************************************************************

The email did not end with “Love from Dad” or anything else, it was just as it is written above, errors included. In sending the email, my father in law showed little or no regard for anyone else. My mother-in-law was only in a total of about 8 photos (of the 140 “best” proofs) and here she was demanding by email that her daughter destroy 4 of them. The pictures were by no means offensive or embarrassing in any way, one showed her hemming bridesmaid’s dresses (she made sashes too) and another showed just my wife and her, they were embracing and both smiling, and the other two were equally normal..

Nobody else we emailed had any complaints, in fact everyone else said the pictures were lovely and showed what a wonderful day it was, the beauty of our ceremony in the Public Gardens and what a great time we all had at the reception after. My wife refused to destroy the pictures.

This is just one example of questionable behaviour that we have seen from my in-laws. My wife is a sweet girl and has done absolutely nothing to deserve such terrible treatment. My in-laws deny that there is anything wrong with their behaviour, and my father-in-law gave the excuse that he was under a lot of pressure when he sent the email, since he was worried about losing his job, which did later happen. If I was under a lot of pressure and stress, I would never use that as an excuse for a complete lack of judgement and as a reason for being mean to family members..

At this point we are stuck in a position where we try to limit the amount of contact we have them, to limit the damage they can do, except for seeing them at Thanksgiving and Christmas for a few hours at a time. This is not so difficult since we are in MA and they are in NY, and we meet for holidays at my brother-in-law’s place in CT. My brother-in-law is a single guy of 30 who refuses to discuss any of these issues with my wife, he just goes along with his parents’ wishes to avoid any conflict.

Another problem is that we have an adorable daughter who is now 10 months old, and my wife feels terrible guilt about not seeing her parents more, since they maintain that they love their grand-daughter and want to see her more. My mother-in-law actually sends text messages to my wife’s Blackberry which are only addressed to our daughter, on July 4th, on several “month birthdays” so far, on Valentine’s Day etc. When we do see them, they are obsessed with taking pictures of our daughter, rather than enjoying the time together, but they would not even sit down on the floor on a blanket where our daughter was playing with her toys.

Has anyone ever had to deal with this kind of situation themselves, especially regarding the wedding photos? Wh
Thanks for the replies so far – Opinions vary and that’s why I posted here, so we can see different people’s perspectives, even if we don’t agree..

I initially had no reason to dislike my in-laws. The problems only started when they told my wife “we don’t like him” and when asked why they said “we don’t know, we just don’t like him” so I try not to take it personally, and I know how to be civil and polite, but they have done a lot of damage over the years.

My wife is currently “stuck” and has not communicated much with them since Christmas and dreads it every time her Blackberry gets a text. We need to find a way to move forward, without accepting any more bad behaviour. When we had a “family discussion” they first denied there was a problem, then later told us we should “put up with it” because they put up with poor treatment from their parents – I’m sorry, but I don’t feel that parents have any right to abuse their children, even when grown up.

Also, my in-laws have no friends the
Also, my in-laws have no friends they socialize with – It seems the only people they’ve spent time with socially (not at work) in the last 7 years have been my wife, me, and my wife’s brother, and our shower and wedding guests. They’ve had disputes with almost all their other family members, on both sides, and I believe part of the problem is that they don’t know how to hold a conversation or conduct themselves in company.

Thanks for the answers! 🙂