Charlotte, Congrats on your successful first full year of gardening and on your impending graduation from college. In the past, I know that some people found Dixondale onions at K & K Nursery on Sooner Road, but I am not sure if they still carry them. You can find seed potatoes just about anywhere at the right planting time for your area. I see them in places like Tractor Supply Company, Wal-Mart, Lowe's, Home Depot, and just about any and every nursery I venture into. Some Feed Stores/Farm Stores and even some garden nurseries sell the most common types out of bulk containers, selling them at a set price per pound. The big box stores tend to have them prepackaged in paper or plastic packaging. I am in southern OK and the potatoes usually hit the store shelves here any time between the week after Christmas and mid-January. It just depends on how long it takes the stores to clear out the holiday merchandise and start filling up the shelves with the first arriving gardening supplies. We don't plant that early here, but I like to buy them when the stores receive them so I can control the conditions they are exposed to while awaiting planting time. I'll try to remember to come back here and post when I start seeing seed potatoes in the stores here. Usually y'all start seeing them in central OK just a couple of weeks after I start seeing them down here. Garlic and onions will tolerate some shade, but they do better in full sun. There's lots of variables involved and not all onions behave the same way. I grow green onions (scallions) in a spot that gets afternoon shade and it isn't a problem since I am not trying to get them to bulb up. With regular onions, too much shade may give you smaller bulbs, but you'll still get onions. I haven't tried to deliberately grow garlic in shade,but sometimes taller plants nearby will shade my garlic some and I still get decently-sized cloves, though they sometimes are smaller than the ones grown in full sun. It kinda varies depending on how much shade they are getting and what the weather conditions are like in a given year. Y'all, I am not sure if SeedMama will be coordinating the group order for Dixondale as she has in the past. The last time I heard from her, she was starting a new job that was going to be very demanding, time-wise. Maybe Paula knows. Paula? Are you here? If SeedMama is too busy, maybe another one of you there in central OK could take on that task? You really do get a terrific price break when you place a large order with Dixondale. Mike, We are still eating on this year's crop too. I planted too many last year and need to plant fewer this year so I may switch to their Short-day and Intermediate-Day samplers so we still can have a nice variety of onions without planting a bundle of each kind they sell for our climate. We can only eat so many onions in a given year, no matter how yummy they are. I've been ordering Dixondale onions via the internet since 2007, and before that I could occasionally (though not consistently every year) find them at stores in Texas. I am so spoiled by their freshness and great quality that I don't think I'll ever plant onions from anyone but Dixondale. My onion-planting date is mid-February and some years I request an even earlier shipping date so I can get them in the ground earlier than usual if the weather is on the warm side. It doesn't seem like 2014 will be one of those "weather on the warm side" winters unless our weather pattern changes pretty drastically, but tomorrow I'm going to clean out the raised bed where I'll be planting onions this year so it is ready early just in case. Tomorrow's my last day to get some work done outdoors before the weather turns colder again and slaps some sense into all of us who are thinking thoughts of spring planting and such. I've spent a couple of hours a day outside in the garden this week and it was mostly wonderful, except when I found a tiny (3/8" long) grasshopper sitting there beside me. I have no idea why he hasn't frozen to death on these cold nights. It isn't often we still have grasshoppers out and about in December. Dawn

Desertsteph - naw, i'll give them each their own set of knives and they can settle things for themselves. Thanks for the opinions and pictures. Melinrk - your baskets look great! As usual their are opinions from both sides of the aisle. Hmmm, what to do. Rhome, where my baskets would be is on the island side closest to the two windows (the windows will be on either side of the range, opposite the island). You may recall this Rhome as you designed my kitchen....literally, i have changed next to nothing on the plan you came up with before i started building. Now the house is framed and i can see what the space is like. Very exciting to imagine myself in my new kitchen! I owe you many thanks. Anywho, the windows so close mitigate against this placement of open baskets. But the look is so darn cute, and i am a sucker for cute... I have to think about this a bit more.

The Fisher & Paykel CoolDrawer can be set at "Pantry" temp for a consistent 54 degrees. It would be a pricy solution, but it's an option... The original model Kitchenaid Superba / Jenn-Air refrigerator drawers (now long discontinued) also allowed you to set the bottom drawers to "pantry" at any temp from 40 to 60. You could also probably build something yourself based on wine cooler hardware...the temperature ranges are right, its just that wine cellars are meant to retain high humidity, which you wouldn't want here. The butler pantry in our condo, circa 1910, has a tilt-out for potatoes built in that we are keeping in our remodel...the biggest problem in practice is that we (a family of only 2) don't use THAT many potatoes and onions, and the bin is quite deep. When I was a kid, though, we just kept them all in the basement.

crh, The yard looks great! You're too far west for the snow, so that's good. However, your area of Texas has a Red Flag FIre Warning today. I guess that means you have the unfortunate combination today of high wind and low humidity. At this time of the year, the weather doesn't like to leave us alone to just have a pleasant, mild day very often, does it? My favorite days are the days when none of us have any advisories, watches, warnings, etc., but those days are fairly rare. Kim, I didn't mean to scare you. The TX panhandle is a big place and I'm glad the snow is staying north of you. Yes, cold weather can come really late there, sometimes shockingly so, but I wouldn't let it keep me from planting in a year like this. In a warm year, the odds are more in your favor that the cold won't come back. In a cooler or colder year, early planting becomes more risky but it is a risk a lot of market gardeners will take anyway because of the need to have bountiful harvests by the time the markets open. It is April on the southern plains, so of course we are going to have everything but the kitchen sink thrown at us, weather-wise. At least we are safe from tsunamis here. (grin) Dawn