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RE-ENTRY MEETS
St. Mary Re-entry Community Resource Coalition meeting 10 a.m. to noon June 13 at South Central Louisiana Technical College, Young Memorial Campus, 900 Youngs Road, Morgan City. For info call 985-380-2957.

Diabetes affects as many as one in four older adults with Medicare. It costs hundreds of billions of dollars to treat and results in the loss of tens of thousands of lives every year.
If we could better control diabetes, we’d be taking a huge leap toward creating a healthier America.
Diabetes occurs when your body doesn’t make enough insulin or doesn’t respond to the insulin it does make. Insulin is what your body uses to process sugar and turn it into energy.
When too much sugar stays in your blood, it can lead to serious complications and even life-threatening problems, including heart disease, strokes and kidney damage.
Medicare is committed to fighting the diabetes epidemic.
If you’re on Medicare and at risk for diabetes, you’re covered for two blood sugar screenings each year at no out-of-pocket cost to you. Risk factors include high blood pressure, a history of abnormal cholesterol and triglyceride levels, obesity or a history of high blood sugar.
If you’re diagnosed with diabetes, Medicare will help pay for blood sugar self-testing equipment and supplies, as well as insulin and other anti-diabetic drugs. In the event of diabetic foot disease, it will also help pay for therapeutic shoes or inserts as long as your podiatrist prescribes them.
Because living with diabetes can pose day-to-day challenges, Medicare covers a program to teach you how to manage the disease. With a written order from your physician, you can sign up for training that includes tips for monitoring blood sugar, taking medication and eating healthy.
If you’d like to learn more about how to control diabetes, visit Medicare’s website at www.medicare.gov or call Medicare’s 24/7 help line at 1-800-633-4227 and visit with a counselor.
In addition to the 30 million Americans with diabetes, another 86 million live with a condition known as pre-diabetes, where blood sugar levels are higher than normal but not high enough for a diabetes diagnosis.
Pre-diabetes is treatable. But only one in 10 people with the condition will even know they have it. Left untreated, one in three will develop the full-blown disease within several years.
Confronted with those statistics, Medicare is ramping up its efforts to prevent diabetes among the millions of Medicare beneficiaries who are at a heightened risk of developing it.
Several years ago, Medicare partnered with YMCAs nationwide to launch an initiative for patients with pre-diabetes. The pilot project showed that older people could lose weight through lifestyle counseling and regular meetings that stressed healthy eating habits and exercise.
About half of the participants shed an average of 5 percent of their weight, which health authorities say is enough to substantially reduce the risk of full-blown diabetes. Through adopting a healthier lifestyle, people diagnosed with pre-diabetes can delay the onset of the disease.
Based on the trial program’s encouraging results, Medicare is now expanding its coverage for diabetes prevention. Using the pilot project as a model, it will help pay for a counseling program aimed at improving beneficiaries’ nutrition, increasing their physical activity and reducing stress.
If you have Medicare’s Part B medical insurance and are pre-diabetic, you’ll be able to enroll in a series of coaching sessions lasting one to two years and conducted by health care providers as well as community organizations like local senior centers. There will be no out-of-pocket cost.
Medicare is currently recruiting partners to offer the program so that it will be widely available to beneficiaries.
Diabetes can be a terribly debilitating disease. It can mean a lifetime of tests, injections and health challenges. Every five minutes in this country, 14 more adults are diagnosed with it. And in the same five minutes, two more people will die from diabetes-related causes.
If we can prevent more diabetes cases before they even start, we can help people live longer and fuller lives, as well as save money across our health care system.

In many regions, sufficient rain falls throughout the growing season that you can pretty much forget about watering except to get newly planted transplants established. But even in those places, timely watering often spells the difference between a ho-hum garden and one that is truly exuberant.
Timely watering need not involve setting up your sprinkler and then moving it around each day to ensure that the roots of all your plants get a good soaking.
One way to avoid being a slave to your sprinkler is to grow plants that can get by with natural or little rainfall. In the vegetable garden, plants like tomatoes and melons, once established, can go long periods without rain. (They will yield more fruit with additional water, though.) Among flowers, many familiar plants are drought-tolerant, including such favorites as sedum, yarrow, alyssum, butterfly weed, cerastium, black-eyed Susan, morning glory, moss rose, cornflower, sunflower and zinnia.
Another effective alternative to the hose and sprinkler is drip-irrigation.
EFFECTIVE WATERING
Of course, it can be relaxing to stand out in the early morning sun on a Saturday, iced tea in one hand and hose in the other. But unless you have a lot of patience, watering like this does little more than wet plants’ leaves. You don’t believe me? Scratch down into the soil after this watering and see how deep the water penetrated.
Effective watering can be just as easy, but takes some planning.
First of all, you’re more apt to water a plant in need if you don’t have to unroll the hose and drag it across the lawn, or fight through some shrubbery to get to a spigot. Make your garden as convenient as possible to a hose spigot, or vice versa.
WATERING TECH
Also, some technology makes watering easier, saves water and is better for the plants. “Drip irrigation,” sometimes called “trickle irrigation,” drips water to plant roots at a rate more in sync than a sprinkler does with how water is lost from the soil. The moisture level stays closer to the ideal for plants, never flooded (such as after a thorough sprinkling) or dry. Since the water is emitted at ground level, plants’ leaves stay dry and there is less chance for disease.
Drip irrigation emitters, which drip water at a pre-set rate of anywhere from 1 to 4 gallons per minute, come in two “flavors.” With the first type, you punch holes and plug the emitters into black plastic pipe at intervals. Since the emitters can be spaced far apart, they are useful for plants similarly spaced. By not watering the soil between plants, water is saved and weed problems decrease. The other type of emitter is a tube that drips water along its entire length; it’s useful for wetting whole areas of a garden or rows of closely spaced plants, such as carrots. With this type of emitter, water enters the soil through closely spaced perforations.
So-called soaker hoses — rubber tubes that ooze water — are poor substitutes for drip irrigation. They deliver water too inconsistently along their length and over changes in elevation and time, and they eventually clog.
AUTOMATE, SIT, RELAX
With drip irrigation, the ideal is to turn the water on and off many times each day. Plants, after all, are soaking up water from the soil throughout the day.
You don’t have to be tethered to your hose spigot, though, if you mate your drip irrigation system to a battery-powered timer. Some timers even hook up to a sensor that monitors rainfall and determines whether watering is necessary.
Once all of this is set up, you can sit back in a chair on your terrace and sip your iced tea there.