Limas are very prone to rotting, especially if conditions are too wet and/or too cool. Because of my exceptionally cool wet spring this year, I started mine indoors, with great results... "King of the Garden" was 100%. When starting beans under lights, I always use peat pots (usually Jiffy strip 32's, or pots for the largest limas), sterile seed starter, and boiled water. This reduces the chance of the seed rotting, or damping off. I do not recommend the use of inoculant for starting beans indoors, since I have had some poor results using it. If you don't want to use seed starter, I've also used play sand for beans with good results. The drainage is excellent, and the seeds have no difficulty breaking through. You need to transplant them quickly though (or feed them) since there are no nutrients in the sand. Watch for drying too. If you are able to control temperature, 80 F. degrees is ideal for most beans. Bottom heat works well, if you can supply it. You can also make a small temperature-controlled germinator, with a box of sturdy material, a baseboard thermostat , and an incandescent bulb at the bottom as a heat source (be sure the socket is protected from water!). I modified a small "Germanette" greenhouse for seed starting, adding lights above the shelves & a small thermostatically-controlled electric heater. Beans sometimes germinate poorly in peat-based mixes. Adding a little nitrogen to the water used to soak the pots initially will give the best germination rate. A relatively weak solution is all that is necessary; about 1 tsp. of liquid fertilizer per gallon. If the fertilizer is from an organic source, boil it with the water to ensure sterility. Be sure not to use too much water; I soak the pots in a flat over-night, then pour off any excess solution in the morning. Once the beans begin to germinate, get them outside as soon as possible. They get leggy quickly under fluorescent lights. This also avoids the necessity of hardening them off before transplanting. As with all peat pots, tear off any loose edges before transplanting, and be sure the pot is buried completely.

Morz8 - I need to get myself a pair of hip boots! I never thought of that. I'm covered in mud all the time and I am sick of mud stained knees. I've tried kneeling on cardboard, plastic bags, placemats... but I still get muddy. Today the rain stopped for a while and it was only misting. Although it was only 46 degrees, the wind wasn't blowing for the first time in days. So I put on my rain coat and went outside. With all the rain in the forecast, I figure this is a great time to do some transplanting. I'm a fiddler. I am compelled to move my plants around from year to year. I feel comforted knowing the temps will be low and the plants will have plenty of water while trying to re-root. I moved Goldstrum Rudbeckia sown last year to a sunnier spot. I didn't get any flowers last year so this year I'm looking forward to them. I transplanted Shasta Daisies sown a few years ago. I also moved a whole bunch of ajuga. My backyard is so water logged the ajuga was under 2 inches of water. That stuff is tough! I dug up and divided hosta. Last, I moved some Asiatic lilies too.

It rains plenty in Portland except in July, August and September when it hardly rains at all. Hostas grew like weeds for me in the house we rented before we bought this one and that was under a black walnut and a tree of heaven, both whom are supposed to suppress plant growth. I've had disappearing hosta here in shade beds under Douglas firs, arborvitae, boxwood, dogwood and Japanese Maples. The soil is red clay but I've been amending it with compost for over ten years. I have multiple ferns though some like deer fern also did the disappearing act. The hostas that have disappeared did not wilt or act water stressed. They just simply fail to come back in spring after a year or two and the second year is smaller than when planted. They were gallon sized when purchased. I have not been careful to not put the crown too low. I do plant rhodies, heathers and heaths high but never hostas. Here is a photo of one of the beds in March, don't you think it needs hostas?

"The last time it acted up i checked and had the 24 volts coming from the thermostat to the board but no voltage from the board to the contactor which is what made me think a pressure switch may be locking the voltage out" I want to be clear about something... When you say "the board", do you mean the control board that sits inside your furnace\blower? If so, that's what I mean as well. That board does a lot of things (including the timed shut-off delay mentioned below) but as far as I know, all it does to turn the condenser unit on or off is sent 24 volts over two lines to the unit, specifically the contactor within the unit. There certainly may be more complicated control systems out there but that's the way traditional A\C systems were set up. In such systems, the control board has absolutely no idea of what any "pressure switch" inside the condenser unit is doing, no idea of whether you have no coolant in the lines, no idea of any sort of problem or situation that might exist within the condensing unit. When that control board wants to turn on the condenser unit, it simply sends 24 volts down those little wires. If you turn your thermostat down far enough to signal that you want the room cooler, the thermostat sends a signal to the control board in the furnace, which then turns the blower on by the coils, and then sends the 24 volts to the condensing unit. If in fact you have "no voltage from the board to the contactor" despite you adjusting the thermostat to start the cooling cycle, then your first concern would be to understand why the board or the wires from the board aren't working properly. If, on the other hand, you mean some sort of control board within the condenser unit itself, one that acts as a second brain (third if you count the thermostat) in the system and takes into account information from within the condenser such as high and low pressure readings before sending the 24 volts along to the contactor, then sure, you might well have an issue with that particular board or the pressure sensors or perhaps a whole bunch of things. Don't know. What I do know is that if you are indeed talking about this sort of internal control within the condenser itself and when you think it should be triggering the contactor but you can't detect any juice between the internal board and the contactor, then your problem isn't the contactor. The only way you can determine whether a contactor is bad is to send 24 volts to it. If you do that but the 220 volt lines within the unit aren't energized, then it's the contactor and indeed, because contactor issues can be all about carbon buildup on the contacts, you might have the symptoms you describe. But if the contactor isn't getting the 24 volts at all, you need to look for another answer. I strongly suggest that you turn this over to a repair tech given that you're no longer talking about replacing a $12 contactor in 15 minutes. Nick in Palm Springs