As a general rule of thumb for a conatiner veggie gardener, how much lime should I be using to be sure I'm covered. 1 tbsp per gallon of mix? That is plenty. I bought some Espoma Garden Lime recently, would it help to pulverize the small pellets and make it into more of a fine powder? Kind of, but not really. The smaller particle size will make it more readily available, but read on please. Reason I'm asking is I think I under estimated how much lime I should put in my mixes last year with mediocre results. I suspect your mediocre results are not really related to lime. I would ask you to consider light exposure, water retention of the soil (particularly if it was a fine particled growing media) and overall nutrient supply before looking to lime issues. Without enough light nothing grows well no matter what we do. With a soil that retains too much water roots die and sap energy from the part of the plant we see. Without a proper nutrient program plants won't direct their food energy (from sunlight) into the kind of growth we want. Lime (calcium/magnesium) is important, but it's pretty far down on the list of things that may have gone wrong. Your mediocre results could be explained by too much/little lime, but I would consider overall light exposure, potting mix drainage properties and overall nutrient program before zeroing in on the lime.

In regards to your question,"Why two cleanouts?" unless your plumber has a few gray hairs it is highly unlikely they have ever seen that before. What you have is a "whole house trap" With some extremely rare exceptions as a rule whole house traps were outlawed in the late 60's to early 70's. A whole house trap is an inverted U section of cast iron with a cleanout on the top of each of the risers of the U, then a 3" line is tee'd into the riser just below the top on each side. The whole house trap was installed at the junction of the "house sewer" (line from the municipal sewer or septic tank to the house) and the "House Main Drain" (The main sanitary line inside the structure). For structures on slab the junction is usually made approximately 3' outside the footer wall while in structures that have a basement or crawlspace it may occur immediately inside the footer wall. Under the present codes we are required to install a cleanout at this point but whole house traps are prohibited. The purpose of the two cleanout caps is because a drain cleaning machine cannot pass through a whole house trap so it had one access to rod the house main drain and the opposite access to rod the house sewer line. Genarally today we install a "Rodding Tee" which is a Tee with a radius curve in both directions to permit using a drain cleaning machine. (A rodding Tee is the only Tee that is permitted to be installed on a horizontal line). In some jurisdictions today they require two Wye & 1/8 bends be installed, one in each direction to permit rodding the line both ways. To understand the purpose of the whole house trap we must examine a bit of plumbing history. Prior to world war II it was common practice for a municipality to discharge raw sewage in a local river, bay or estuary. In those days storm drainage and sanitary waste was conveyed by one common sewer pipe thus the municipal sewer was vented through the curb side storm grates. shortly after WWII it became a common practice for cities to install sanitary waste treatment plants to treat the sewage before discharging the excess water into the rivers. The capacity of the sewage treatment plants was determined by the average volume of sanitary waste generated by the community at large. It was soon learned that the shear volume of storm runoff overwhelmed the treatment plants and resulted in mass spills of sanitary waste into the waterways. In order to prevent future spills the cities then installed a second set of sewer lines dedicated to storm drainage. Understanding that storm runoff is pure water it was then determined that the storm runoff could still discharge directly into the watershed. The problem that occurred was venting the sanitary sewers. Previously the sewer gasses vented out through the storm grates but now there were no storm grates on the sanitary sewer and each house had a whole house trap so the gasses could not vent through the house vents. This resulted in extremely high levels of sewer gas in the sanitary sewer lines which commonly reached explosive levels. (In one community in southern Illinois in the mid 50's a sewer exploded ripping a ten foot wide trench for 10 or 12 blocks down the main street of the town, killing a number of people and setting numerous structure fires.) The solution to the venting problem was to eliminate the Whole house traps. Once they were removed as each new structure was added onto the sewer main the vents in the structure provided a proportionate amount of additional venting for the main. In this manner instead of having the sewer gasses concentrated at one point they are evenly distributed across the entire community where they normally will not reach toxic or explosive levels at any one point. Occassionally we still find a whole house trap in older homes such as yours. In most jurisdictions there is no mandate to remove it but if it should happen to fail for any reason it should be removed and replaced with a straight section of line with a rodding cleanout Tee. Now in regards to the other cleanouts in your home. In addition to the main cleanout at the junction of the house sewer and house main drain the code requires a cleanout at the base of the main vent, on the upstream end of all branch lines and at each point where a line makes a change of direction greater than 45 dgrees. Now for your question about the floor drains. In many homes that have a basement the main drain exits the structure at an elevation higher than the basement floor. In this situation a floor drain is below the sanitary drain so it is generally routed to the sump pit or to a storm drain.

You can put as many circuits as you want in the conduit (subject to the conduit fill rules). Do note that if you run more than three current carrying wires in the conduit you will have to derate which may mean increasing the wire size. If you run two independent circuits, that would be FOUR current carrying wires. You can use whatever colors you want to keep things straight as long as your hots are some other color other than green or white. More often than not everything is black. Running THHN through the conduit allows you to derate and still make 20A. Another out is to ditch the GFCI receptacles for a GFCI breaker and install a multiwire branch circuit (which would be allowed to share the neutral providing for only 3 current carrying conductors). Your biggest issue is 1/2" PVC is going to be too small. It's legal limit is 4 #12's. You'll not get two independent circuits in there (that would take 5 wires at least). The other thing to watch out is for your box fills, you need to count the conductors that pass through even if they don't terminate at a device or are otherwise spliced there. As for the lights and the garage doors, again you can run wires together again as long as you don't exceed the conduit fill rules and wire ampacity rules. Again the same applies for your 240V circuits (other than the fact you can't have a MWBC for 240). The code only mandates garages (at or below grade) to have GFCI's for the 120V 15 or 20A receptacles. It is up to you to decide if you want or need GFCI protection on the 240 circuits. They most certainly do make 240V GFCI breakers. They're a bit pricy and the borgs do carry them for some of the more popular panel brands. Otherwise, unless you can wrangle the trade discount out of the local electrical supplier, you can find them on the Internet at competitive prices. The ground wire doesn't need to be insulated or in conduit except as necessary to be protected from physical damage. I might sleeve it where it emerges from the ground for a 18" or so. It's not a strict code requirement, but frankly if direct buried stuff can be damaged emerging from grade, so can your ground. Keep it safe from weed whackers and other careless gardening. The fact that you put ground rods in seems to imply this is a separate structure. Did you run both a neutral and ground with your feeder?

I overlooked the white line question also. That is what happens from a little bit of small hail. All my hostas look like that this year. The small hail goes through the leaf so fast that it tears the leaf but the tissue bounces back into the same configuration as before and you see the outline of the tear. The holes are where the hail took out a piece of the leaf. You can check the other hosta with the second strip. Does it show any HVX evidence? If so please take a picture of whatever leaf you check on it. It's good to have three Gold Standards showing discolorations and have them all tested. If anyone else has tested a suspicious leaf it would be great if you posted a pic of the leaf and the results. We'll all be training our eyes to recognize the disease.