Thanks NeonCactus I got a desk lamp & grow light strip from Walmart. I set it up in my small closet that has a bench and put all seedlings/rehab/over winter plants in there. It gets warm in the closet during the day from all the lights and at 5pm I pull the plug from the wall and keep the door open so air circulate. Lights are 6am-5pm because I leave for work at 6:20 and get home at 5. So u have one curly bulb (warm spectrum) and LED which is (cool spectrum) and the light strip which the color is purple so it's the broad spectrum light. And it is cheap so here's pic lol my mom gave me the idea since all my plants Weren't used to the dry air in our new home here and kept dying. Leaf drop, shriveled branches, yellowing, it was bad and plants aren't cheap, so I thank mom for this idea

Borderokie, I answered the potato-preserving question on your thread about preserving potatoes. I freeze quite a lot from the garden and usually fill up three freezers in a good year. I can a lot, but don't particularly care for canned potatoes, and I dehydrate a lot because my convection oven has a built-in food dehydration mode. Scott, I found a few rotten ones yesterday and today, and that almost never happens. Like you observed, they were under plants that still had plenty of green and which I met have left in the ground a bit longer, but the heat is making me paranoid. I've been digging as fast as I can by hand, and only have one raised bed of potatoes left to go. I'm 90% done so I am feeling like the finish line is in sight. After carefully hand-digging each bed, I still felt like I was missing some taters, so took my little Mantis cultivator and ran it down the rows and it unearthed quite a few potatoes I had missed, and it didn't cut up many of them either. That's the first time I've used the Mantis that way....to sort of glean my own rows after I thought I was already done. I have been harvesting Candy and Superstar this week too, and took out the last few today. Their necks were soft but they hadn't fallen over yet. However, with all the others harvested, I was worried these last 8 or 10 onions would sunburn so I went ahead and yanked them out. They did really well this year and gave me the biggest onions of the year. We had quite a few that were softball sized. All the other onions had a wide variety of sizes, but the Candy and Superstar were more consistently big. I had volunteer Laura Bush petunias pop up in the onion rows where Candy and Superstar were growing and let them stay there, and those were the biggest onions, so maybe next year, I'll let more volunteer petunias stay in the onion rows. While it is true that the onion and potato harvest are really good, I still haven't forgotten all the trouble involved in dealing with those late frosts, but I'm trying to forget them. We have had to work hard for the good harvest, but at least the hard work paid off.So far, knock on wood, the squash, sweet corn and cucumbers are looking really good too, as are the tomatoes and peppers. I think at the rate we're going, it is going to be an exhausting summer, but in a good way. Now, I'm racing like crazy to get all the corn harvested. I have 5 varieties and I staggered the planting dates as well as I could (and some varieties are separated from others by either distance or barrier plantings or both), but in that way that nature has of ignoring the best-laid plants, all the later plantings have just about caught up with the earlier ones, so as soon as I finish harvesting one variety, it is time to move on to the next. For a long time, you could look at the size of each planting and know which one was planted first, second, third, etc. and then they all shot up overnight and started tasseling and silking and I've never seen corn grow so fast before. Not sure if it is all the rain since May or all the heat, but it is as if the 5 varieties are racing one another to the finish line. I just hope some rain falls occasionally. One thing I haven't missed at all is all the irrigation. I've hardly had to water at all since mid-May, and then only to get seeds to sprout or to water in new transplants. Our last water bill was "normal", which was nice after the way they had skyrocketed the last two summers. :Larry, The way I found the first icky rotten potato was I picked it up to brush the dirt off of it and it pretty much collapsed into a gooey mess in my hand. It was just gross. After that, I watched the sticky soil on potatoes more carefully. Dawn

Hey hoosiercherokee - I too am a vanderburgh co resident! I forgot to mention that our garden was used for years with not-so-good techniques including leaving/tilling diseased tom growth back into the soil and no crop rotation...that coupled with our ohio-valley humidity = blight/fungus heaven. But I'm happy to hear someone else from the area doesn't have these problems! For me though (at least until I find another spot), I'll just stick to the varieties that prove resistant...plenty of them out there with great taste like I mentioned above ie. cherokee purple!

Thank you, thank you, thank you!! I feel so much better getting some other opinions. If boxerpups says it's ok, it must be! : ) And I like the paint recommendations too! I will go check them out soon. Appliances are all SS - already purchased during the course of the last year to help keep the costs down. I just scored my OTR micro/hood off Craigslist Sat - brand new for $175! I am clueless as to granite edges - I can only say that it will be a standard edge! We are trying to contain costs wherever we can but still get what we love! As for backsplash, I was thinking travertine w/glass accents. DH only had 2 requests at the start of this - some glass tile somewhere and that he use the "leftover" money to get a new shed in the backyard. I'm going to make sure he gets his glass because I think #2 ain't gonna happen!!!! (just for ideas - not the actual colors - tho I do like both!)