Use a coarse or sandy soil to make the mounds or berms, if the soil used is fine-textured the internal drainage of the beds will still be poor. Depending on how low a site is raising plants up mere inches or feet may get them above the layer of stagnant frosty air that forms on level ground. For an increase in elevation to expose the plants to greater cold you would have to move them to a new lot located in a higher, colder climate or microclimate. A planting bed isn't high enough to produce this effect. In the mountains here in the West it is often the shaded north-facing slopes that have the richest vegetation, the sunny ones being a tougher situation with fewer kinds of plants. In lowland gardens and woods here after a tough winter the broadleaf evergreens (as a group inherently more vulnerable to cold than coniferous and deciduous trees and shrubs) located in sunny spots are more damaged than those in the shade. I have even seen Viburnum davidii blackened on the east side of a building, where morning sunshine would hit them during severe cold with other specimens just around the corner, on the north side left largely intact.

That's a shame. Our winters are off and on, and most nurseries have them already, and only one that I know of keeps them inside a greenhouse that's heated. It was about 45 last night and will be probably below 40 tonight. I have 5 planted, and am covering them at night with pots, and the rest are still in pots or seed trays, and I'm bringing them in at night. I'll see how those that are already planted do this spring. I'm tired of not getting more than a few tomatoes.

Mary, Surely for your Sweet 100s you must have gotten more than two at one picking. The practice I now employ to pick all cherry tomatoes is to fasten a gallon jug(top cut off) onto a belt so I can pick with both hands-- At last evening's picking I filled my jug from just two plants repeatedly. My Sweet 100s are producing over a 10 foot section of the plants on a stringline support system. There are ripe tomatoes from ground level where I need to bend up to where I need a ladder to reach them. I can't lower the plants else I'd be laying fruits onto the ground. So if you are having ripening issues you need to check for thieves. Someone might be visiting tour tomato plants prior to your arrival.

Thank-you for the explanation about the scaling on the website. I'm sorry I maligned a fictive editor! I was just trying to make the amounts match and thought the second addition was an error too. :) If there had been a single measure of honey and the directions had said "half of the honey" it would have been clearer and worked better on the scaling. Oh, well. Scaling a recipe you've never made can be dangerous even if you think through every ingredient. My mother's challah recipe, which I've made the most, and made for decades, makes three loaves, and it's much better to make three loaves and freeze two than to try to make it work for a single loaf. One thing to remember in baking bread is that recipes often fail the first time you make them, especially while you're developing expertise. There are so many variations in flour, kitchen climate and oven climate, that a recipe is really a starting point, not an absolute. I'd also follow the recipe exactly once to get a better idea of what it's supposed to be before changing the ingredients. After that, remember that when you make changes, you're not following the recipe, and you're relying on some very precise chemical and biological reactions not to care. Keep in mind that you're making an experiment, not a recipe, and that there are things that may be going wrong. I've been doing that almost weekly for the last year, and learning a lot from it about what reactions such changes bring, It's fun! But if your point is to make a good recipe and have a good loaf of bread, do start by actually making the recipe. I have all kinds of ideas of how to proceed and tried writing them out, but I realized I'm not expert enough to make them make sense. It sounds like it might be overrisen, underbaked, or perhaps baked at too low a temperature. Do you have an oven thermometer? Re soaking, if you're trying to adjust the nutrients of the whole wheat, you should do at least 8 hrs. and with some acid (I found a jar of vitamin C crystals easy to find and use a pinch of that, but normal kitchens acids will work). Adding extra liquid for it might have required a little extra baking too. I've found that even if a soaker seems very dry, when I mix everything together, it's fully hydrated and doesn't need an addition of water. This is true even when I knead the ingredients together by hand. My best advice is to decide on a few small adjustments, try again, and see what happens. :)