That TS you bought looks like a rooted cutting with about 1.5 seasons' growth on it. I'm not slamming it or anything, just observing. It can be fun watching things grow from a smaller size, especially if you've found the right conditions for it. It's likely the ones available in the next few years will be bigger (and get slightly cheaper) because it takes time to grow them larger and increase quantities, especially with the widespread droughts out there. Example: mac. Pistachio will likely not be available from F&E this year due to growing conditions.

Just another little garden project for your DH's list: Low tunnels. You can use them to support neavyweight frost blanket type floating row covers to protect your plantings from late frosts or freezes. You can use them to support lightweight floating row covers to protect something like squash plants from squash vine borers and squash bugs, or bush bean plants from Mexican bean beetles. In the event of a late season snow storm, you could put greenhouse plastic (or any 4 or 6 mm clear plastic from a home center store in a pinch) over your hoops and place frost blanket row cover directly on top of the plants beneath the hoop for two layers of protection. You could add big 5 gallon buckets of water (or WOWs) to young tomato plants as solar collectors if the snow stuck around a few days and you needed to leave plants protected inside your low tunel. That would give your plants three levels of protection. Finally, somebody who had a little bridge, for example, could use hoops to turn it into a covered bridge. And, then, if they wanted, they could train some very long vine to cover the hoops and shade the bridge. I'm just sayin'.......you can do a lot with these things! In my perfect garden that exists only inside my imagination, every raised bed in my garden is covered with a neat, tidy low tunnel. Visit the website of Johnny's Selected Seeds and click on Quickhoops to see what they say about the use of Quickhoops to protect beds. (Or, you can build tidy high tunnels with a larger hoop bender.) Or, visit Eliot Coleman's website. Then, go to the link below to see a place that sells hoopbenders for a lower price than JSS. They have all sorts of examples of low tunnels, high tunnels and greenhouses on their website that were built using the various hoop benders they sell. Carol and I take great delight in throwing out a couple of words to see who's paying attention. : ) Just wait and see what we come up with next! Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: Lost Creek's Hoop Benders

Hi woodswalker....I agree about the weather...want rain very much. I use drip irrigation. It saves what little water we have. I have a large yard and 12 gardens. At this point I have 3 water stations in my back yard and 1 in the front. All have timers and I water about 5 minutes in the early morning with each station starting 10 minutes apart. Occasionally, I water for 5 minutes in the evening. The advantage of drip irrigation is the water goes directly onto the roots and not all over the plant wasting water. My plants thrive and the only work is when you first install it...and then when you put your plants in. I put a dripper at each plant. It is so easy to install...I use individual timers for each station, but if you are mechanically savy they have things that will let you do all stations together...have never been able to figure out how to use them though. Each timer is contected to a hose that is connected to tubing that then has smaller tubing to each flower...My gardens go up hill and it still works great. It works great and is pretty inexpensive to set up. You can email me at rcsheeler@gmail.com and I can tell you where I get my irrigation supplies since I'm not sure if I can say where on here.

jenna..I am a trailrunner :) I always dreamed of running the Leadville 100 but wasn't THAT good LOL ! I did 24 Ultra-marathons in 4 years. Travelled all over the US and Canada to compete. Now I just run for fun. I have done a lot of mountain biking too. Can't imagine riding the Leadville. Your nephew is AWESOME !! Would love to see pics of him doing his thing..action shots :) I leave here June 2 and will be back sometime in early September so let me know if you are going to P'cola and we will meet up . Sochi...you are so nice !! Thank you . I added some herbs today so it is going to be very full. I couldn't find any clemmies that I liked at the nursery so I will probably mail order them next year. Too warm here now...80's some days. It is pouring rain now. We are getting the storms the mid west got. We aren't going to get the tornadoes etc though..at least they say we aren't. The thunder woke me :( I hope you will all take pics of your gardens and post. I love to see what others are doing and get ideas. c