I have white bleeding heart seed from your want list and would like to trade for your dianthus. Doreen.

Hi Mike, I would be happy to do a SASE for you on the Yellow Pear Tomatoes. They are one of my favorites. I may even have some Sugar Baby Watermelon to add; I can check. thx, kathy

Are you looking for a pattern for a totally knitted tea towel, made with cotton yarn? If so, check any of the discloth sites, many of them have patterns for dish towels as well. And you can make your own pattern - find a stitch you like, cast on about 60-70 stitches, depending on your gauge and how wide you'd like the towel. A few rows of garter stitch to start and end the towel, and keep the first and last 4-5 stitches of each row in garter also - and you can do any pattern you want to in between.

"I have a lot of heavily compacted clay. I want it ready by February." Heavy mulching and composting right over the top of the clay can do it. I had hard-packed alkaline desert dirt - hard enough that I had to use a mattock to dig planting holes for 6-pack seedlings - and turned it into a veggie bed I can dig in with a hand trowel. Drip lines under everything for even moisture. Fertilized well with ironite and soil sulfur (we're short on iron and high on pH) Fertilized lightly with ammonium nitrate (both were sprinkled on the dirt, not even raked in) Spread layer of whatever compost and other material I had about 4 inches deep. Did not till it in. Dug holes and planted veggies (okra and eggplants) Spread a thick (4-6 inch) layer of wood chips as mulch. Okra has an astounding root system, going down 4-6 feet, so at the end of the season when I sliced off the plants at the base, it left a large amount of organic material in the dirt far deeper than I could dig. Repeated for the next year, adding compost as it became available, adding mulch as it decomposed, enlarging area as well. I had the advantage of a mild climate, but the freeze-thaw cycle in a cold climate does a lot to destroy plant material. And there are cold-tolerant fungi and bacteria active then. Amend whatever you can amend really well, and add onto the amended area as materials allow. it's better to amend thoroughly than to skimp over a larger area.