Happy Birthday Susannah! Sounds like a lovely day you've had so far. Hope you get more surprises in the pot.

Thanks Wanda. It's been a good day, and I think the beginning of a good decade. I'm happy with it, thought still a bit stunned. :)

Happy Birthday!!! I am so glad you got a surprise from me. :o) I think that must be the double pea vine that surprised you and I just love it. I do have some passion vines along with many others, so it's possible that's what the other one is.

How am I supposed to know it's your birthday when I don't have facebook to remind me, lol. Hope it was a nice, quiet day. Am glad you got to party. 40? really? No wonder you seem like a daughter to me. :)

Happy Birthday Susannah!!! May each year of your life get better and better!

Silvia

thanks silvia and kristi. It's been a good, relaxing day. And thanks for the vines Katkin!

Happy belated birthday Susannah... :)

Thanks Izhar. I've received good wishes from Iraq, Bosnia, Haiti, Chile, Colombia, the Dominican Republic and now Pakistan. I appreciate all of them!

And many more...on both accounts ;-)

Tom

Thanks Tom. I'm confident this is going to be a good year on several fronts - tomatoes are not one of them however. A whole crop died as seedlings when the little pods got moldy (coir pods, btw. totally disappointing, but I think their problem was the gimmicky bio-degradable tray they came with. The whole system is about to biodegrade in the composter.)
And I'm way behind on prepping the bed. I should be almost ready to put plants in the ground and I'm not even close.

Ah well. The good news is, hopefully I'm going to sell a book this year (got a bite last week,) so I'll just buy farmer's market tomatoes this year. Seems a fair trade-off, since I never was going to be able to feed us out of the yard.

(don't worry, I"m still planting tomatoes, but I'm definitely going to have a shortened season because I probably won't get anything into the ground until end of the month.)
Susannah

If you really want some home grown tomatoes, why not buy a couple of plants, I've seen them with flowers on them already. You still can do the special seeds you have as well. I usually get tomatoes from now until around the end of June and you are further south then me. Last winter was not a normal one.

Bummer about the tomatoes Susie, I'm with Kat, buy a few tall seedlings and start again.

I agree about the coir, I threw out all the peppers I started in them because they just didn't grow. Burpee has something in their grow cubes that makes the seedlings grow like crazy....I'm going to have to take a few lessons from Bamboo Rabbit, Lou, Silvia and others about liquid fertilizers for seedlings as that's something I've just never done until after the pot-up.

Great news about the book, keep me posted so I can buy it!

Tom

Yep, Tom and Kat. That's the plan. I'm booked with family in town this weekend, but next weekend I'm going to get the bed all fixed up and put some store-bought plants in there so we can get going. Then when the new batch of seedlings is ready, I'll put them in too. Then I'll spend all winter defending the tomatoes from the puppy, who thinks farming is just the most wonderful thing because it allows him to supplement his diet with tasty almost ready to pick tomatoes, sapodillas that fall, entire broccoli plants (broccoli is going out front this year - only broccoli we ate last year was from two plants that didn't fit in the broccoli bed in the back and got stuck in a front bed, a shame because broccoli was always so happy in the so-called broccoli bed, but it only took Atticus a few minutes to decimate them one morning when our backs were turned, he's sneaky that way) and so many cherries he gets sick (we've gotten rid of all the cherries finally.)

As for the book, I'll definitely let everyone know when it's out. I'm pretty excited about the whole effort.

Happy Birthday- remember, forever 39 ! ... all the best, sally