Hey Bart - your situation sounds somewhat similar to ours - you are surely right about getting creative - but then again, surely this is why hazel has been grown - we are making great use of hazel poles as lashed together tripods. Regarding differences between ramblers and climbers - I have usually worked on a loose definition according to how the plants grow and are pruned. Ramblers, as far as I know, regularly regrow from new basals so the entire old woody basal canes are removed during pruning. Climbers, which I confess to not loving so much, will grow from all over the place, often flowering on the new seasons wood (so pruning can be less fussy and more about shaping and control) and is generally more of the heading back rather than complete removal of canes. I should say that when (or if) I prune, I do it willy nilly, whenever I have secateurs to hand or have been lashed by stray villainous canes (off with their heads!) If you have a hilly topography, ramblers can possibly come into play by allowing them to be used as ground covering plants -although, there are also some cunning set-backs to this idea, as anyone trying it will soon find out if general weeding is required (can you tell I have been pulled into this, to my regret) but on a wild and unused bank, there is nothing nicer than a sort of vegetative barbed wire with seasonal flowers. Growing ramblers in a poplar wood is a definite possibility for us since the canopy is both high (very high) and light - I am intending to actually grow ariel swags suspended from tree to tree on high ropes between the poplars (Oho, all those gigantic ramblers which I have never had room for). Because it was a non-natural plantation, the trees are both regularly spaced and of the same size and age - we are going to try to build platforms and ropewalks as well - especially since we have spotted purple emperors flitting about the canopy (we also have oak and sallow - perfect caterpillar food plants). I am excitedly ordering hundreds of wood anemones and little blue bulbs(and have been in a seed sowing frenzy - there are now no seats or tables or walls available anywhere throughout the house, garden or allotment, while the greenhouse is so full, I have been suspending shelves from the roof). Needless to say, at least one day a week is spent in a kind of slumped torpor (usually after a stay in the woods) since we are glazed with exhaustion, somewhat numb and vacant. Reuben spends his day reading the sports pages in rubbish rags.....while I sit at the keyboard, listlessly flitting between screens (obviously, this is such a day). Sometimes, we barely make it into adult clothing (instead of the old t-shrts and slipper combos we favour - we are not at the level of 'onesies' yet!). The rain falling outside even provides a guilt alleviating reason to stay semi-dressed indoors (eating biscuits and toast) although I am still horribly conscious of the many hours of berry picking still to be finished. My tomatoes though, are, without a trace of modesty, the best on the allotment (more to luck than judgement) having romped through the growing season without a single check to growth (this is a rare occurrence) and are as tall as I am (not very) with 5 or 6 good trusses - so as well as the endless jamming, there will be weeks of saucing.....but after last years utterly dismal fail, a break in the sweaty spoon waving has dimmed my memory so it seems like a pleasant prospect still.....and we do get great ketchups and passatas.

You didn't say whether you'd actually grown onions from seed? yes, i grow 3 varieties each year from seeds. i used to buy plants and forget sets all together. i've grown onions from seeds for several seasons under shop lights so i do know what i am talking about. you are wise to question my experience as i'm telling you flat out that advice is pure bs. a lot of people on the net like to give advice. i doubt they mean to be misleading but sometimes they are just that. I do believe bulbing can be triggered in onion seedlings, I'm just not sure of whether fluorescents will do it at 14-16 hrs. So I wonder when I read stuff like this: "If you start onion seeds under lights, remember to turn the grow lights off to give the plants a suitable night. Onion seedlings will bulb too early if exposed to long days at any time during their development. You will not get anything bigger than sets." - Jarvis, B., Yard & Garden Line News, University of Minnesota Cooperative Extension, Volume 3 Number 2, February 1, 2001/ i agree that all plants need that dark time to rest. it occurs in nature. but plants under shop lights require 16 hours of light followed by 8 hours of dark. now i'm going to make a swag, remember i told you that the longest days or shortest nights trigger bulb formation. so perhaps, just a swag now, if you vary the length of the light the plants are exposed to, increasing it from say 8 to 16 hours over a few weeks time THEN possibly you fooled the plants into thinking they went from april to mid june and that is exactly the scenerio that causes bulbing IN NATURE. i know of no one that does this with shop lights. no one. start with 16 on, 8 off, until you've hardened them off and plant them outside. going from 16 hours of shop light to say 14 hours of natural sun light DOES NOT effect the plants and cause them to start bulbing. believe me all i have written is true! oh, btw, where i live the longest day is 15 hours and my giving the plants 16 hours of shop light light does not effect the plants when they go out in late april with a 14.5 hour day. if you gave the plants 24 hours of light that would harm them as they need a dark period to rest. i grow about 33 to 40 pounds of each variety each year, my methods work just fine. good luck. tom

My black lab and border collie mix have taken to checking out what's on the counter lately. Might have something to do with 17+ and 19 year old cats who don't belong to the clean your plate club. They coordinate with the marble and black granite very well, but it makes me chuckle to think how silly (and uncomfortable) they would look if I ever put them up on the counter. The Great Pyreneese? Better be a BIG island! LOL I meant to say earlier that I would not want a movable island. I would have no place to move it to where it wouldn't be a bigger problem. Now, I suppose that you could custom build something that had an island that fit under a counter height table(would still allow some storage but would have to preserve leg room for the table) you might be able to address that issue -- even use it as a table extension at holidays, but one of the things I love about my island now that I moved the cooktop out is having a sink there. I also really want power there. We use the waffle maker and blender mostly st the island. Again, if you really engineered the thing, I suppose you could have a power strip on the side of that island, a cord running down the leg and an outlet inset into your floor to plug it in when it's in place and be covered and smooth when it's not. But all of that seems like a hassle. In my mind, you probably either have room for an island or don't and you will wind up using it one way or the other. You might as well figure it our and make it the best you can in the right configuration rather than trade off. For example, if you don't do an island, you can extend your counters to 30" depth and have more workspace there, but you can't do that if you try to squeeze in an island. My kitchen is less than 14 feet wide -- pretty minimal for a 3 ft wide island (cabinets are 34", so it is 36" overall). Had we made the perimeter cabinets 30" deep, I'd have had 8 feet to trek across from stove to sink and half the work space. No question I'd rather have the island.

I did my own measurements with a pH meter, but unlike $10 HomeDepot specials, this one is supposed to be fairly accurate.This is the meter I used. The results were pretty consistent (yet variable) across different spots in my backyard. Having said that, plugging this meter into soil would measure very top layer of the soil, vs a bit deeper that I've sent for analysis. I don't doubt lab measurements, but am wondering if my sampling was not good. What I did is this: first, I cut existing sod on a small patch of the lawn (~25 sq.ft that I was re-sodding), so top 0.5-1" of soil were removed. Then I core aerated this patch, so there were plenty of ~2" plugs (aerator goes ~3-4" down). Then I randomly collected ~1 lb of plugs in a plastic can, mixed it, and this was my soil sample. I should try chemical home method, to see if I can get similar reading to the lab. Any pointers on improving sampling (should I go deeper, take top soil/thatch into consideration, etc?) Now when I am thinking about this, there is a lot of hardscape (interlock, flagstone, retaining wall), all of which have limestone screenings as compacted base. Could it be leaching Ca / raising pH? There are no screenings under lawn itself (but it's small, about 20x15'). And what would be specific Mg deficiency signs for a lawn (considering it is not in full sun conditions, so some lack of vigor can be attributed to that)?