Designing a garden is one of the more intimidating things gardeners expect of themselves. It's challenging enough to learn all that you need to know in order to select, plant and care for landscape plants successfully. But design is not just learning how to plant and water. I it requires an expression of something from inside of us.

Still, that does not mean you have to throw your creativity out there like a kid just jumping into a pool to learn to swim. Your mind would likely splash around just like the kid. There are more effective ways to teach a child to swim, and there are helpful ways you can organize your thoughts and have a more effective design process.

The call to rewrite Louisiana’s constitution, adopted in 1974, has been growing over the last few years. But inside the Capitol, lawmakers haven’t been able to get enough support to approve a constitutional convention. The non-partisan Public Affairs Research Council (PAR) of Louisiana published a report recently, calling the state's constitution one of the major issues in this year’s gubernatorial and legislative races.

Mowers and string trimmers that use a monofilament line for cutting down weeds and grass can be very damaging to young trees. Young trees have relatively thin bark. If the line is allowed to hit the trunk part of the bark will be removed with east contact of the line.

If you are not careful, you might even remove an entire ring of bark all the way around the trunk, girdling the tree. Mowers pushed hard or dragged around the base of young trees can be almost as damaging.

August is a transitional time for your vegetable garden. While cool-season planting begins in earnest next month, some of the more heat-tolerant cool-season vegetables, such as the cole crops, can be planted into the garden now. And, since our first frosts generally don't arrive until late November or early December, we can also plant warm-season vegetables such tomatoes, peppers, squash and cucumbers for fall production.

It is important to prepare beds properly before planting. Clear the site of all weeds or finished vegetable plants and incorporate generous amounts of compost into the soil. A general-purpose fertilizer may be applied. Gardeners should consider having their soil tested through their parish LSU AgCenter Extension office to learn more about the fertility of their soil and what fertilizer to use. A soil test will also tell you if you need to add lime to the soil.

A new law will take effect in August establishing a minimum age for marriage in Louisiana.

In order to get married, a person must be at least 16 years old — an age limit the state previously hasn’t had. Any 16 and 17-year-olds will have to have both parental and judicial consent and can’t marry anyone more than three years older.

On this week's Capitol Access, Morgan Lamandre, legal director with Sexual Trauma Awareness and Response (STAR), discusses the new law and how it moved through the Legislature.

If you simply can't be satisfied with the occasional chance appearance of a butterfly in your garden, you might consider planting a butterfly garden... a landscape intended to attract butterflies.

Louisiana is on the migration route for the monarch butterfly. This butterfly overwinters in Mexico, migrates to the northern United States in spring and summer, and then travels back down to Mexico in the fall. Many gardeners plant milkweed in their gardens to provide for the monarch butterflies.