If it is not a scalding hot spot and the soil is nice and loose (fluffy), they can root pretty quickly in mild temperatures. If it's too hot they'll go dormant for the summer and not try to root themselves until fall, so you might try to root them in a pot on the patio if that is the case and plant them in October when it cools down. I've had cuttings of Aloes sitting around for a year not rooting, then suddenly get going, so don't worry if they take their own sweet time.

Yes you can cut it. Now may not be the most ideal time but hey you gotta get it inside right. Some people will seal the cut with DAP brand of caulking you can find at home depot and lowes. the cuttings can be rooted. Also winter is not really the easiest time to try. If you do cut them let the pieces callous over and sit them in a dry, dark and somewhat cool place. Plumeria cuttings are pretty good at sitting for awhile awaiting to be rooted. Almost all tropicals wont receive any damage until the temps hit freezing. Thats not to say they wont like it very much below 40. if you have no choice you can wrap some christmas lights around it and then toss an old sheet over it. That can offer a few degrees of protection and keep the frost if any off of it. mike

First as creekside said you *have* to be sure of the boundaries if you don't already have them surveyed. Then as lwo said you have to determine about running power - how far off the road (how long a driveway) do you plan? Contact the electric company and see what they charge - you may want your house closer to the road than originally planned, over a certain distance you will require a transformer (and of course more digging/conduit or poles). Then once you have an idea of how long the driveway will be, you can walk with engineer to determine where best to site the house - he should be able to give you an idea of suitable sites (avoiding ledge, wetlands, etc.) though sometimes ledge can lurk where you least expect it (ask me how I know!). He'll do the perc tests to find out where best to put the septic and what design will have to be. You may also have to hire a soil scientist and a surveyor to then go out and mark wetlands and proposed foundation/septic/driveway locations to bring to planning and zoning and/or wetlands commission. Of course you have to have an idea in mind of what the foundation size and shape will be. Although our preliminary site plan showed we were more than required distance from stream, our engineer *and* soil scientist as well as DH had to attend wetlands commission meeting (at $100/hr each, they got to us at the end of the meeting). Be prepared to pay $$$ and build in plenty of time for delays. B/c the commission only meets once per month and we had an ice storm the day in Feb they planned to meet, we did not get reviewed until March meeting, and we could not start clearing land until we got their approval so we lost a month. Once we had the site cleared and started digging we hit ledge and had to move the house (took some doing, since we couldn't change approved septic site w/o losing even more time), clear more, dig and pray the new location would allow us to have full 9ft basement. Since we were doing modular builder said we couldn't change house/garage plans w/o impacting schedule, we had to keep all windows, garage orientation the same, so tried to shift foundation SW without changing passive solar design/orientation. This from 100 miles away, looking at site plan while on the phone with excavator! So we ended up with 3ft door walkout on gable end, 4ft change in elevation, instead of 11ft drop with walkout (bigger door) in back. At least I was GCing all the sitework myself so we could change the foundation plan and the driveway length/curve. As far as well, our driller said you never know what you're going to find until you start drilling. Be prepared for cost overruns there. Our neighbor's well produces so much he can't use it fast enough (with 2 teenage girls!), he had to put in an overflow. We took 3 tries to find decent amount of water (used other 2 wells for geothermal), then we had to hydrofracture. GT wells are 279ft each and water is over 500ft.

Boy do I remember the sugar camp. When I was a kid on the farm we had a wooden shed about 18' x 30' with a 5' sliding door on both ends. Inside the shed there was a huge stone fireplace with the chimney on one end of the building and the firebox extending nearly the full length of the room. The top of the firebox was covered with a steel pan 16' long, 5' wide and about 8" deep. The pan was set so the end near the chimney was about 3" higher than the opposite end where the opening to the firebox was. Along the right wall there was 600 tin & 450 wooden buckets stacked upside down from floor to ceiling. During the month of February there was still too much snow & mud to use wagons so we hitched a team of draft horses to a home made wooden sled called a "Stone Boat" and we would cut & haul firewood until we had at least 4 to 5 cords stacked just outside the sugar house door. About the last week of February we would fill 15 or 20 ten gallon milk cans with water and haul them down to the sugar house on the stone boat, then we would put the water in the sugar pan and start the fire. When the water was warmed a bit we began washing the buckets and loading them on the stone boat, then off to the woods to hang the buckets. Using a hand brace & bit we would drill a 3/8" diameter hole in the bark of the maple tree stopping just at the cambria layer (the internal layer between the bark & the wood of the tree). We then used a hammer to drive in a "Spile" which is a little tubular tap and we then hung a bucket on the spile and snapped a sheet metal lid on the bucket. (1 spile for each 12" of circumferance around the tree.) In an average year we would put out about 800 buckets scattered throughout about 45 acres of woods. We then laid two 50gal wooden cider barrels sideways on the stone boat so the bung hole on the side of the barrels was on top and chained the barrels in place and we set a huge copper funnel in one of the bung holes and stacked about a dozen 5gal buckets on the stone boat, hitched up the team and headed for the wood. As we wound our way along the roadway through the woods we stopped every 100ft or so and we each grabbed two 5 gallon buckets and went to the trees were we poured the sugar water from the buckets on the trees into our 5gal buckets and carried it back and poured it into the barrels on the stone boat. When both barrels were full we went back to the sugar house and parked the stone boat on a hill outside the side window of the sugar house and used a rubber hose to siphon the sugar water from the stone boat into the evaporator pan on the fireplace. We then stoked up the fire and stood around the sugar house a few minutes to warm up, while the men had a few drinks from the hard cider jug, then we boarded the stone boat and headed out to the woods again, generally hauling at least two and sometimes three loads of sugar water a day from the woods to the sugar house. Once the process was begun it was a daily routine for the next 3 to 4 weeks.(it takes 35 gallons of sugar water to make one gallon of maple syrup). As the sugar water evaporated down into maple syrup the heavier syrup would collect on the low end of the evaporator pan and we used a big dipper to take the syrup out of the evaporator pan and put it in 10gal milk cans so we could haul it to the house where Grandma would fill one gallon cans for retail. In 1965 a one gallon can of pure maple syrup sold for $72. (The maple syrup we buy in the grocery stores today is at best a watery substitute that is about 10% maple syrup and 90% corn syrup). I remember there was a thick yellowish gray clay in the creek that ran close to the sugar house, Us kids used to take potatoes and eggs and pack them in that clay and set them in the firebox. With about an hour the clay was dried hard as ceramic but when you cracked it open the potatoes or eggs were thoroughly cooked and that was our snack while working. If we were lucky we would get a nice clean snowfall, then we would take a dipper of the maple syrup out of the evaporator and pour it on the snow. Instantly the maple syrup cooled and formed a thick maple sugar candy. After the sugar run was over it would take about a week to collect all the buckets and stack them back in the sugar house and that signalled the end of winter activity. It was now time to begin spring plowing & planting.