I live in the Hudson Valley of NY and thanks to a little nudge from my daughter in law, we started our own Victory Garden. You see my son is a US Marine and is overseas right now. His wife is staying with us and thought it would be nice to have a garden that celebrated my son's service to America. Hence a "Victory Garden". Our garden is 32ft x 32ft and we hope to keep it as organic as possible. We spent most of today tranplanting seedlings to the garden that we had started indoors. The piece of yard we decided to use for the garden proved to be a challenge. It was overgrown with wild roses and all kinds of weeds and rocks. It took us about 4 weekends to get it ready for planting. You can see a you tube slide show of our progress to date by clicking the attached link. Here is a link that might be useful: The Ramaglia's victory garden

Phil - I think your GE is mislabeled. At the risk of starting another war here, yours looks too white, the leaves are not round enough, it doesn't have the seersuckering and looks like it does not have the substance of any GE I have seen (other than very new TC's and if you have a very new TC then I take it back and post a photo in a few years). Melati - my first guess was that your 1st photo was GE, but I didn't have a good guess for the 2nd. They both are lovely though - great growing. Alexa

NGU, Cutworms start out as small caterpillars that browse above ground on almost any green foliage, including small weed seedlings. In the youth stage you would not recognize them as cutworms because they are small and greenish and, in that stage, they are susceptible to Bacillus thuringiensis biological insecticide. As they get larger they change into the familiar fat, brownish cutworm mode and hide underground during the day and fell seedlings at night. I doubt seriously that you can "starve them out". When a cutworm fells one of my seedlings, I probe around the base of the felled plant until I find the culprit and destroy it. I get about 95% of them. That's worth doing because, otherwise, the cutworm will move on to kill more plants on successive nights before it matures to the pupa stage. Keeping your garden pretty much saturated with BT would be your best hope at preventing extensive cutworm damage. But you need to start that early in the season to get their youthful version. ZM

Lily, huck toweling? Just googled it and hard to tell what it is... Can you enlighten me? About microfiber, honestly I cannot stand the way that stuff feels on my hands, it's similar to chalk on a blackboard and it snags on cuticles. I have to wear a pair of disposable latex gloves when using them -- which sort of defeats the purpose of using something re-useable, LOL. I just noticed yesterday that the horizontal part of my PT holder is covered with PT dust. It has been up in this house for a year. It's a very nice one from Ballard Designs and was up in my last house for 2-3 years and never got any dust on it at all. It's definitely little PT fibres.