Wow! Lot's of great ideas, but most won't work...don't waste your sanity or household funding on traps and chemicals. You have to know the insect's vulnerability and have the willingness to go to town on them a few days a week when they come out to breed...usually in the month of July...the little buggers bee-line straight for anything resembling roses, vining plants and assorted fruiting trees...treating you garden like government cheese. Here's the trick. The Japanese beetle's vulnerabilty is temperature and it's innate tuck & roll defense strategy. When the sun goes down and the temperature drops the beetles do not fly. Simply put your non-dominant hand under the leaf of the plant and then lightly tap the leaf with the other and they will fall directly into your palm...they don't bite, sting or scratch...no worries. You can humanely crush them between your digits or if you're a wimp you can put them in a jar at the end of your raiding mission...cap the jar and let the sun bake them the next day...empty jar of baked beetles in the trash, rinse and repeat the following evening. I guarantee they will get the hint and you can have your garden back.

Yeah, my neigbhors asked me how I was able to achieve that many plants. They saw me working on the garden around early March. They were curious about the garden beds I was making. They saw the milk jugs. I explained to them what it was and also gave them the Wintersown site. I actually watched their reactions when they saw it. They didn't pay much attention to it kinda like "oh, ok". However, when plants started to come out/bloom, they went back to me and asked, "was that from the tiny greenhouse". :) I'm going to make more beds maybe by fall once my knee gets better. :D Thanks mnwsgal! :)

My first round of beans are interplanted with onions and there are a LOT of plants. I'll count them later and let you know how many. If the timing works out as it should (and, uh oh, it might not because we had late freezes here through the beginning of May and I planted beans about a month late for us), I'll harvest beans before I harvest onions. If the onions are done first, I am not sure if I will go ahead and harvest them then, or wait until the beans are done and then harvest the onions. Why interplant beans with onions? Because bunnies always find their way under or through the fence and eat my bean plants. Louise Riotte interplanted beans and onions to keep the rabbits out of the beans and I figured if it worked for her, I'd try it. So far, so good, no losses to the rabbits.....and we have tons and tons and tons of rabbits. How many? Well, they sit in the driveway and in the grass between the driveway and fenceline and watch me work in the garden. I guess they find it entertaining. Or, perhaps, they are looking to see what is "on the menu" if they sneak into the garden when I'm not around. The second round of bush beans, which should go into the garden in about a week (I start the second round when the first round starts blooming.)will run right along the west garden fence line. This particular woven wire fencing has chicken wire attached to the bottom two feet to keep the rabbits from reaching through or crawling through. This double row of beans is on the edge of a bed of cantaloupe, but the cantaloupe (being planted today--late like everything else) are going to be planted inside tomatoe cages and growing vertically. By the time these beans are "done", the cantaloupe will have climbed up the cages, down again and will start spreading horizontally into the beans, which are going to be "done" by then, so it won't matter. So, Round One of the beans (interplanted with onions)should produce at least through the end of June, and perhaps into mid-July. Round Two of the beans should produce at least through the end of July and perhaps into mid-August. Round Three? When the onions and round one of the beans are done, that bed gets a 2" or 3" layer of compost tilled into it and that is where I plant a double row--approximately 24 plants--of fall tomatoes. On either side of that double row will go a single row of bush beans. Round three goes into the ground between late June to mid-July depending on when the onions and round one of the beans are done. Then, there is always a Round Four, but it is pole beans and it goes into the ground in its own location, surrounded by winter squash. I hope to get the winter squash and pole beans into the ground (in their own dedicated area, which has nothing planted in it right now) before next weekend. I plant two or three kinds of pole beans on poles made from bamboo, cedar, or willow--whatever isn't already being used for something else. I try to time the pole beans so I can harvest them in the late August to early September timeframe. Since pole beans mature pretty much all at once, most of them go into the freezer for the winter, but I also will be freezing beans from the other rounds as we go along. I try to time the planting/harvesting of the beans very carefully. Otherwise, they all mature at once and I don't do anything but pick and put up beans for days and days. : ) Round one of the beans/onions is followed by fall tomatoes and round three of the beans in the same bed. Round two of the beans, planted with cantaloupe, aren't really followed with another crop IF the cantaloupes are moving into their space. If, by chance, the cantaloupes are staying on their cages and not spreading out, I'll plant mini-pumpkins in the space vacated by the bush beans, usually Jack-B-Little and Baby Boo. Round three of the beans (plus fall tomatoes) follow round one in the same bed once it is cleared out and has compost added. They keep that bed occupied until the first frost. Then, that bed gets a winter cover crop. Round four are the pole beans climbing high in their own space while winter squash creep and crawl all over the ground around them. Sometimes I have to be careful picking round four or I step on the winter squash vines....and I have to watch the ground for snakes hiding in the winter squash vines. Once round four is done, the winter squash occupies that space until late fall or even early winter. You also can succession plant by repeatedly planting beans in the same place. To do that, I start successive rounds in paper cups and plant them, cup and all (with an "x" slashed into the bottom of the paper cup to let roots grow through), the same day I yank out the previous round. I do add compost and Espoma Vegetable-Tone organic fertilizer to the soil in between rounds. I try to have pretty good sized plants in those paper cups by planting time so they take off quickly when I put them in the ground. Succession planting is part art, part science. Sometimes I run out of space and don't get to plant one of the rounds. This year, repeated late frosts in our low-lying location here by the Red River really, really slowed me down. I kept waiting for "one last frost" before planting anything other than tomatoes (which I had to cover up many, many times to protect from freeze and frosts) so I feel like everything is late. However, crops planted in warmer weather grow faster than those planted in cooler weather, so I am sure it will all work out. Dawn

It's important to note that a mixture of lighting options allows us to select which ones we're going to use at any time, which in turn helps cut the BTUs and the bill. It's a mistake to wire a room to be very bright in all corners at all times when all that's necessary sometimes is one or two bulbs for reading the paper at the island. One of DH and my goals was to make selectable lighting. Our house tends to be quite dark in the interior even when the exterior walls are lighted by windows, so we tried to work this out. A couple new or improved doorway openings will help. We have planned a lot of new lighting--perhaps too much. But we will be able to leave much of the room dark-ish if we want it so. We like the term "task lighting" and have employed it. We spent a lot of time asking ourselves "what lighting will we want when we ____" and we tried out a lot of scenarios: walking through the space and returning again quickly; working for hours at the peninsula; eating at peninsula; eating at table; washing dishes; etc. We tried to avoid overkill by choosing a range of lighting types and sites. Example: a single 2-bulb ceiling light over the main corridor section alongside the kitchen, the "walk through and leave" light, which will also serve for "go get the salt in the kitchen" trips. But our decisions also required a lot of wall switches, esp. because we can enter the space through 5 different doorways. My wallet is glad DH was the electrician.