I'm glad you're having a great tomato year. If I was guessing, I'd think the weather has been the biggest contributing factor, though the changes to your soil probably also helped. No matter how good my soil is, the weather and how early I get the plants in the ground largely determine what sort of tomato year it will be. You know, you can have the best soil in the world, but once the temperatures are high enough to impede fruit set, which can happen as early as early to mid-May in a hotter/drier than average year like 2011, then most tomato plants stop setting fruit period. So, when the weather allows for lots of fruit set, you've got to give the weather the credit. If you're liking the flavor better, though, then you probably could give the soil credit for that. I generally have not grown Heidi and Viva Italia in the same year, so I don't know that I can tell you how to tell them apart because I think it would be hard to just look at the plants or fruit and know which is which. I always label my plants and make a map that shows the location of each plant by variety name in the garden. I do both on the day they are planted before something happens to the plant labels/tags. Based on my experience with my soil and my weather here in whichever years I have grown either of them, (and yours may not be the same), I think Heidi plants get a foot or maybe 18" taller than Viva Italia and Heidi is less prone to BER in a very dry and very hot year when it is hard to keep the soil evenly moist. The fresh flavor of Viva Italia is more pleasing to my taste buds, but I don't grow either variety for fresh eating---only for canning. I do think that in most years, Viva Italia has been less prone to foliar disease than Heidi, but then I wasn't growing them in the same year, so it is hard to compare since our weather is so variable from one year to the next. Viva Italia pumps out relatively uniform fruit, and some years you see more variation in the shape of Heidi's fruit (but not always) so that might or might not be a way to tell them apart in any given year. Now, here's something interesting---I am moving more and more away from growing paste tomatoes or even from growing Principe' Borghese for drying just as you are achieving success with them. It is more about my evolution as a canner than as a gardener. Over the years, I have gotten to where I prefer the flavor of salsa and pasta sauce made from a wide variety of heirloom slicers and beefsteaks to that of salsa and pasta sauce made with paste tomatoes. Of course, it matters less with salsa since the predominant flavors are those of the peppers and spices and the tomato is just the base flavor. The flavor of a blend of many heirloom tomato varieties is just so superior to the flavor of any paste tomato that I don't even use paste tomatoes in sauce any longer, only in salsa or for sun-dried tomatoes. This year I planted the smallest number of paste tomatoes ever--I think I put maybe 24 to 26 paste plants in the ground versus about 80 non-paste plants. I already had canned at least 160-170 pints of salsa (yes, that's a lot but we give it as gifts to a ton of people at Christmas time) made from blends of slicers, beefsteaks, hearts and cherries before we even got our first ripe paste tomato. If I'd had to wait for the paste types to get busy and produce ripe fruit, I'd just have started making salsa in the last 10-12 days and likely would be sweating it out in the kitchen for all of July. Instead, I am almost done with the tomato canning and am contemplating yanking out the paste types this week after I harvest one more round off of them. It isn't entirely their fault they are so late---they were the last two rows of plants I planted this year and then they got hit by herbicide drift a couple of times, so they have had to struggle to survive. With a pronounced lack of rainfall and with the real summer heat now here, I have no desire to keep watering plants I don't really need. I used to love Principe' Borghese for drying, except for the fact that they are so small and take forever to slice in half before I dehydrate them. It probably isn't a big issue in a small garden with only a couple of PB plants, but my garden is large and I usually plant a lot of PBs, or at least I used to. After the summer of 2012 when I could spend 6 to 8 hours a day picking only PB and nothing else, I told myself I'd let that variety go and only grow larger varieties for drying simply as an efficiency measure. Because I can, freeze and dehydrate so many different crops and not just tomatoes from our large garden, it got to where PB just slowed me down too much. I have to find ways to grow, harvest and preserve food more efficiently or I'll never get to sleep, so the little tomatoes that are time-consuming to process are out. We never liked them as fresh eating tomatoes anyhow since it took dehydrating to bring out their flavor, so we won't miss them much---there's plenty of other varieties to dry that won't be so time-consuming to pick and slice. I started trying varieties that produce larger, meatier paste type fruit after I started using BrokenBar's recipe for wine-marinated sun-dried tomatoes. They're so delicious to eat, so I started looking at her grow lists of big, meaty paste types that she used to make sun-dried tomatoes and have tried several of them. Processing the larger fruit is so much more efficient, so now I am dropping the varieties that produce smaller paste or plum types in favor of those that produce larger ones to use for the marinated SDTs. Next year I plan to plant even fewer paste tomato plants, and I can see the time coming where I won't plant many of them at all. If it is all about flavor, they cannot compete with the heirloom slicers and beefsteaks, and I'd like to find more hearts that do as well here as Brad's Black Heart, so I probably will start trying more of them. I've been trying lots of paste varieties that are new to me from Marianna's Heirloom Seeds that produce significantly larger fruit and have been pretty happy with some of those varieties as they produce fruit that is much larger than that from Heidi or Viva Italia. Whichever paste varieties I keep growing in the future likely will include some of these bigger varieties. I really like Speckled Roman because it does produce huge fruit that's easier/quicker to pick and process. Brad's Black Heart has produced huge fruit this year, including some doubles, and I like the meatiness of Dolly Parton tomatoes. I love Cherry Falls and it has done equally well in the ground or in containers, so I hope you try it again. It has been a long time since I grew Tiny Tim and it was severely lacking in flavor and didn't produce very well, so wouldn't grow it again even if someone paid me to grow it. It is just as waste of space in our garden. Cherokee Purple is great, and I like the closely-related Indian Stripe even better. It is slightly more productive and the fruit seems a little larger than CP most years, so if I had to choose only one of them to grow, I'd only grow IS. Luckily, I don't have to choose only one, so this year I grew Cherokee Purple, Cherokee Purple Heart, JD's Special C-Tex, Indian Stripe and Indian Stripe Burson. I'd hate to have to choose only one of those, but if I had to, I'd choose JD's Special C-Tex because it has the same great flavor as the others, but normally produces larger fruit and produces slightly earlier. It also has the best heat tolerance of them all. My JD's Special C-Tex often sets fruit deeply into July, long after the CP's have been shut down by the onset of our usual summer heat. Pruden's Purple, though, has flavor just as good as any of the ones I just listed, and I only planted two Pruden's Purple plants this year and wish I'd found space for more. So, there you have it----that is why my grow list is so long every year---why grow only Cherokee Purple when there's so many other similar ones that also have great flavor? It is a good thing your garden is small because once you fall in love with the flavor of great varieties, it is easier to grow more than you need and more than you ever could want. I plead guilty to doing that every year, and it is only possible to do that because my garden is too big, which allows me to overplant everything. So, a smaller garden does, by necessity, keep a gardener from planting too many plants. That is not a bad thing. Dawn

Start with a sheet of paper, or photo copy the report and using pencils correct each error and then send it back. Is it the same on all the credit agencies? You need to get copies from each agency, Equifax, TransUnion, and Experian and compare each. I would clarify the mistakes, but I don't know if you can remove addresses. One of the companies you can call, and this might help. If you never worked for a company, you can put in a disbute. On the credit report you received, it should tell you what to do to change/disbute the information. As to the married question, talk to your tax person or a lawyer about that. I too am in the process of clarifing some information on my reports. Good luck and you can get help by just typing in credit score information.

Thank you for the kind words everyone! rm - I love this tablecloth too, but DH pronounced it "garish" so I needed some backup. Seems a shame to cut it tho' caryscott - of course the budget was blown. We were thinking about 25k and it will be closer to 40k. But the excess went not on fun things (note the old appliances) but on asbestos removal, heating, electrical, etc. The cabinets themselves we less than 9k, the countertop installed with sink about $3400. So this is really a budget kitchen, but required a lot of labor. laurie - The faucet is Elkay Victorian, the sink a single bowl 10" deep Suneli. I didn't really choose the sink, the soapstone guy seems to have provided it for free? My GC showed me the bill and there is no mention of a sink. I'm ashamed to say I didn't know what was going on here! Maria - it sounds like what you have is similar to what I used to have, but much of the heat from my radiator was trapped in the corner. My heating guy spent an entire day making this: and one of the carpenters made this There should be lots of heat coming from the bathroom (behind kitchen), so I hope this will be OK. Has anyone ever seen such a thing? We were looking at a european-style flat panel radiator but it was hard to find one for this space and they are very expensive.

My husband and I grow huge onions in our zone 5 garden in Northern Nevada at just over 38 degrees latitude. Because onions are day light sensitive it’s important to choose the right variety for your latitude. We buy all of our intermediate day plants from Dixondale Farms and have never had a problem of any kind. We regularly grow 3½” to 4½” ‘Candy’ and ‘Superstar’ onions. They’ve been doing it for over 100 years and raise more onion plants for growers than any other producer. Take a trip to Corrizo Springs, Texas and see for yourself! Dixondale has a very comprehensive growing guide on their website, http://www.dixondalefarms.com/online_guides that we’ve been using for the last 8 years. We fertilize every 10 days to 2 weeks with Dixondale’s 10:20:10 product. It’s reasonably priced and they ship for free. Once the weather heats up we water every 3 to 4 days with soaker hoses we install at planting. The attached picture is of one of the 3 wheel barrows we harvested in 2014.