Home sales in March declined by the most since 2022 as stubbornly high mortgage rates and house prices kept buyers on the sidelines.

In the era of supermarkets and wholesale clubs, growing your own food isn't a necessity for most Americans. But that doesn't mean it's not a good idea to try.A household garden can be a great way to reduce your grocery bill and increase your intake of nutrient-dense foods. It can also be a good source of exercise and a hobby that gets you outside in the sunshine and fresh air more often. However, not everyone has a yard where they can grow a garden or much outdoor space at all where they live. You can plant things in containers, but that requires some upfront investment in planters. Potted plants and herbs can thrive in a container garden.Photo credit: CanvaOr does it? Gardener James Prigioni set out to see if an Amazon shipping box would hold up as a planter for potatoes. He took a basic single-walled Amazon box, lined it with dried leaves to help with moisture retention, added four to five inches of soil (his own homegrown soil he makes), added three dark red seed potatoes, covered them with more soil, added a fertilizer, then watered them.He also planted a second, smaller Amazon box with two white seed potatoes, following the same steps. Two weeks later, he had potato plants growing out of the soil. Ten days after that, the boxes were filled with lush plants. - YouTube www.youtube.com Prigioni explained how to "hill" potato plants when they grow tall enough, which helps encourage more tuber growth and protect the growing potatoes from sunlight. Hilling also helps support the plants as they grow taller so they don't flop over. He also added some mulch to help keep the plants cooler as the summer grew hotter.After hilling, Prigioni only needed to keep up with watering. Both varieties of potatoes flowered, which let him know the tubers were forming. The red potato leaves developed some pest issues, but not bad enough to need intervention, while the white potato plants were unaffected. "It goes to show how variety selection can make a big difference in the garden," he explained.The visible plants have to start dying before you harvest potatoes, and Prigioni checked in with the boxes themselves when they got to that point. Freshly harvested potatoes are so satisfying.Photo credit: Canva"I am pleasantly surprised with how well the boxes held up," he said, especially for being single-walled boxes. The smaller box was completely intact, while the larger box had begun to split in one corner but not enough to affect the plants' growth. "This thing was completely free to grow in, so you can't beat that," he pointed out. Prigioni predicted that the red potatoes grown in the larger box would be more productive. As he cut open the box and pulled potatoes from the larger box, they just kept coming, ultimately yielding several dozen potatoes of various sizes. The smaller box did have a smaller yield, but still impressive just from two potatoes planted in an Amazon box.People often think they don't have room to grow their own food, which is why Prigioni put these potato boxes on his patio. "A lot of people have an area like this," he said. "I will never look at cardboard boxes the same," Prigioni added. "There are so many uses for them in the garden and it's just a great free resource we have around, especially if you're ordering stuff from Amazon all the time." Do you see a box or do you see a planter?Photo credit: CanvaPeople loved watching Prigioni's experiment and shared their own joy—and success—in growing potatoes in a similar fashion:"I have been growing potatoes in every box I can find for several years now. I have had excellent success. I honestly think potatoes prefer cardboard. And yes, most of my boxes were from Amazon.""I live in an upstairs apartment with a little deck and I have a container garden with containers on every single stair leading to the deck. I grow potatoes in a laundry basket. It's amazing how much food I can get from this type of garden!! Grateful.""I literally got up and grabbed the empty boxes by our front door, the potatoes that have started to sprout, and soil i had inside and started my planting at 1am. Lol. I will take them outside today and finish. Thank you James!""I grew potatoes and tomatoes on my tiny balcony in Germany (in buckets and cardboard boxes). Now I have a big garden here in America. I so love to grow my own food.""I grew sweet potatoes in cardboard boxes. It’s so much fun."Next time you're stuck with an Amazon box that you don't have a use for, consider whether you could use it as a planter for potatoes or some other edible harvest. Gardening doesn't have to be fancy to be effective. You can find more of gardening experiments on The Gardening Channel with James Prigioni.

Dogs are man’s best friend, and a toddler’s best hero. In a truly anxiety-inducing story, a valiant ranch dog named Buford made headlines after finding a missing toddler who had wandered seven miles away from his home in the rural Arizona wilderness.Seven. Miles. Can you imagine?On the night of April 14, Yavapai County Sheriff's Office shared a report of a missing two-year-old named Boden Allen, who had walked away from his home in the small town of Seligman, Arizona—wearing only his pajamas. - YouTube www.youtube.com The thought of a toddler making his way alone through rocky desert terrain is already terrifying, but to make matters even more harrowing, the surrounding area had at least two mountain lion sightings that night.Though a massive search party of nearly 40 search and rescue workers and officers had been initiated immediately, their efforts were to no avail, and by hour 16, things felt very dire. As reported by NPR, hope was all but lost until Buford, a “kid loving” Anatolian Pyrenees discovered the little boy, who had likely followed a power line down from his house and into a ranch owned by Buford’s human, Scotty Dunton. The poor little fella had been sleeping under a tree! A photo of an Anatolian Pyrenees dogtime.com Buford brought little Boden back to safety, and while he was understandably distraught, he was able to tell Dunton a bit of his plight after receiving some food and water. And aside from a few cuts and scrapes, he was in good health. He is now safe and sound with his very relieved family. "I'd heard about the missing child before I was going to town, and when I was driving out the driveway I noticed my dog was sitting down by the entrance. And I look up, and the little kid's standing there with my dog,” Dunton said in an interview with the sheriff's office.As for Buford, the gifts keep a’ comin’ for this goodest of good boys. He became an honorary member of the Yavapai County Search and Rescue Team—even got himself a nifty vest—and Dunton told NBC News that they’ve received “Toys, chew toys, snacks, you name it, just a little bit of everything” from folks around the world thanking Buford for his heroic feat.Thank goodness this story had a happy ending, but it truly took a miraculous chain of events to turn out that way. So here’s a reminder to do a little preventive maintenance–childproofing doors and windows, adding alarms, having a little safety meeting with the kiddos, etc. On the bright side, this is also a lovely reminder about how our communities, both the human and furry members, can show up for us when we need it most.As Corey Allen, Bodin's father, said, “It’s a story of faith."

Decent but far from perfect.

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The young actress "almost died" while shooting the pilot.

Before he was one of TV's most beloved villains, he was the son of one of the biggest families in Genoa City.

from Birch Gold Group: It’s said that if you asked a fish if water is wet, the fish would reply, “What is water?” In the same way, most Americans when asked if the dollar could lose its status as the reserve currency for the world, as the default currency of the world, would ask, “What […]

by J.M., Survival Blog: Having an operational computer network running in a post-SHTF world may seem frivolous to some people. But if you have any plans to use computers, tablets, or cell phones as part of your post-disaster operations, it can provide the capability for those devices to communicate, share data and synchronize their activities. […]