As I'm looking at your photo, to the right of the yews under the window, it appears you have some weed trees, including a norway maple and perhaps some kind of ash or whatever. At any rate, remove those, they want to be huge trees and are way out of size for your lot. They will just get larger and larger and larger and larger until they eat up your house. Chop them down if you can't spade them out, and paint the trunks with Roundup becuase they will sprout from the trunks. Keep pruning down the sprouts and painting with Roundup. You can cover the trunks with bark or stones while waiting for the trees to finally die. Dig them out if you can, or cut down below soil level, but like I said, it will take some persistence because they will sprout up again. You have yews under your window. Hard to keep those babies small and pruned, unless they are dwarf varieties which I doubt. The hedge doesn't look to great but maybe I'm missing something. Why are all the hedge plants bare and yet the other vegetation has leafed out? Did you just prune them after this photo was taken? If you're going for a japanese theme, (maybe with th bamboo) then maybe a japanese maple is a good thing for the middle. There is a yard near me that has something like that, I'll have to take a photo of it. Make sure to get a CLUMPING bamboo otherwise you'll be fighting it, a regular bamboo is really innapropriate for such a small yard, unless you get the right species. You might even be able to grow it in a large pot over those stumps until they give up the ghost.

I just spent considerable time trying to ascertain the effects of high temps on different peppers, both "hot" and "sweet". That thread is just below and is titled; "How will extreme heat and high humidity effect my peppers?" Most seem to agree that the bells are tough to grow in the hottest part of summer. I just purchased some seed of the "bell type" Keystone Giant. The feed-store guy was confident they would perform in the heat. It's only seeds-n-time! And water, fertilizer, compost,.. did I mention time? We're not supposed to discuss a whole lot about "Other Vegetables" here in pepper land. So here's the short version; These should do well for you; Cucumbers, melons, okra, peas, amaranth, collards, eggplant (the long, skinny oriental types are more productive in heat). Others include Jerusalem artichokes, Malabar spinach, New Zealand spinach, peanuts, hot peppers, and sweet peppers like Banana, Gypsy and Cubanelle should perform better than the bell types. Sweet potatoes enjoy the heat along with Swiss chard (with some shade), tomatillo and tomato. There are now many specific heat-tolerant tomatoes such as Heatwave, Solar Set and Sunleaper.... The Yardlong bean (asparagus bean) flourishes in the heat of summer and is as unusual as it is delicious. Of course, you should check with your local Cooperative Extention Service for more info. For more "other vegetable" questions, go to "Vegetable Gardening". Click on my username, then my "trade list" and email me with something you'd like to have, your address and, I'll send it to you New Guy. Ray

Raven - I have one of my posts that got eaten by goblins - and one of your posts that is missing from this thread. I will paste them both here - for the sake of keeping the integrity of the thread. Let me know if this is what was missing that you posted (or did more disappear) Here's my missing post: Damcoy - I'm always forgetting to do a google search. Raven - it was an OEM drive from Dell - no instructions. I vaguely recall that I'd want to format in NTFS and not FAT32 - though I don't recall what each of those are. When i first booted up my pc it did see the new hard drive - but I haven't known how to find it again. It seems to be suggesting that it's being labelled as a canon something or other. I don't know what that means to go into the boot menu at start up to see how it's listed. It did not give me an option of which to boot to - of course there's no operating drive on the second drive (at least I guess there's not since I didn't put one there). I also don't know how to back up my existing drive - which is part of what I want the second drive for. I'd like to back up my programs (and drivers? how would I do that) - perhaps on one partition. And have one or more partitions for files - like video, picture, music, data (word files, emails, etc, saved pages from the web?). So again, how do I go into the boot menu and see how they're listed? There is a difference in size - the second drive is 1/5TB =- the first is 500 GB. How could I mess up my existing original drive? by reformatting it? seems i have to have a place to back it up to before i back it up - I guess I could back it up on my external 640GB hard drive. Thanks. Lynn. ------------------------------- And here's the one from you that was emailed to me: I would use an imaging program and make a full copy of your existing drive to your external hard drive so that you have it should something go wrong. There are good free imaging programs, for those with vista and windows 7 there is now a built in imaging feature. On my computer as soon as it starts to boot up it flashes up and says to enter the boot menu hit esc, I just keep tapping it so I am sure I hit it at the right time, your computer may be different this is not uniform on all computers. Once you get into that area you will see the drives listed, you can choose which one to boot to and what order. I would do some research on what you are wanting to accomplish. I did a lot of reading and researching before I did mine and it really paid off. One thing I had not expected was for the SATA cable to come loose from the mother board after it was all set up, scared the you know what out of me! Luckily I have a see through case and saw the cable dangling. (http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/copywipe.php ) CopyWipe free imaging program (http://dottech.org/featured/6194 ) 8 free software to image/backup/ghost your computer (free alternatives to Acronis True Image, Norton Ghost, etc.). ---------------------------------------------------- It lookslike some of your post didn't get copied and pasted intact - but it's mostly there. Or was there more than this? Thanks. Lynn. PS - I'm on my way out for the evening (and tomorrow's a day trip that could turn into all day) - so I don't know if I can get to this in the next day or two - as eager as I am to do so)

How did it go up there in the U.P., Arborvitaent? The growing season is a bit short, eh? (Still laughing about March being the middle of winter still?!?)