Elisabeth I use the 2 inch soil blocks. Soil blocks work great. As others have mentioned for large onions only one seed per block. I grew Candy in blocks and they were the largest of all the onions I grew last year. Start your seeds in the blocks and then when ready plant out spacing plants (not blocks) about 4 to 6 inches apart. Plant just deep enough that 1/4 inch of soil covers the block. It's that simple. There is one down side to blocks. A 1020 tray will only hold 36 two inch blocks. I want 200 storage onions this year so for me that would be 6 trays. That is half of my light area. From your post you are new to blocks so I will tell one thing that helped me. Get web trays and put them into the 1020 trays when you make your blocks. To bottom water I take another 1020 tray and put water in it and then lift the web tray containing the blocks and put that tray into the water. Let it sit till the blocks absorb the water then transfer the web tray back to the original tray. That makes it very easy to water the blocks. Good luck, Donnie Mac

This is my second summer with Square foot and I now have 175SF. One box is awaiting planting and another has Lettuce seedlings that even with row covers only gave 50% germination...no worries though seeds are cheap and it's not that hot right now. Now for the good stuff, Harvesting Gherkins every day, Straight 8 Cukes every few days, The others are not yet ready ( I had a nasty slug problem that destroyed most of my seedlings in my cold frame and I had to start over on many plants.) 2-3 Lavender Touch eggplant are ready every few days, The Diamond and the Rosa Bianca are just starting to produce. A few of 15 Heirloom Tomatoes I have are harvested each day with more on the way. The Black From Tula are heavenly, but small. I'm getting Peppers (still green) Sandia, Jalepeno, Serrano, Cubanelle, de Arbol, Jimmy Nardello, Pasilla Bajio, Poblano, the others I'll wait till red. Collards, Kale and Chards are ready and going strong. Beets are small but have great greens. Pole beans are 8 feets high but nada yet. Bush beans are flowering. Chives, Tarragon, Oregano, Mints...

This was really, really good. I will definitely be making it again. Two suggestions...Allow plenty of time for peeling and cutting all those onions. And, to help with that, I saw a post (after I'd done mine) that gave a tip for peeling pearl onions. Give them a quick dip in boiling water first which will not cook them, but will help release the skins. I used Gruyere in mine and found that the cheese did seize up somewhat when the dish cooled. Not as bad as mustang's, but I would suggest trying to time things so that you can serve it close to when it comes out of the oven. It took time to collect and prep the onions, to roast them, cut up the bread, toast that, shred the cheese, layer & bake....but I think the results were well worth the time/effort spent making this one.

About 10% of my dishes are flops in one way or another. Fish course for SWMBO's surprise dinner was kind of floppy. Indifferent cod is not greatly improved with hollandaise sauce. Cooking bacon on the gas grill was a flop. Too much grease and flareups, result was 2 lb of bacon that tasted like a house fire. Come to think of it, much of the stuff I make on the grill is a flop. I just don't ''get'' grilling, and probably lack the patience for a two-level approach. My experiment with sweet sauce on halibut was a flop. Tried making a hazelnut sauce, didn't know how so ended up basically making a custard suitable for hazelnut ice cream. SWMBO said, thoughtfully and gently, ''well, this would have been really good ice cream . . . '' When I first started simmering fish for a Japanese-style dish, I thought that it was like meat - longer simmering at lower temperature would make for the tenderest fish. Silly. Ended up with fish-flavoured rubber. Learned that less is more. Now I simmer fish for at most 3 minutes. So far all of my attempts at xiao long bao (dumplings filled with broth) have been floppy. I don't have ''the touch'' when pleating the dumpling skins, end of pinching them too hard resulting in dense, tough pleats. The broth is tasty but you have to gnaw through the pleats to get at it. I am determined to persevere. Last holiday, I spent untold hours (days, actually) making aspic for a big dinner. I liked it, but some guests looked askance at jiggling cubes of meat jelly. Some of it ended up being recycled into soup broth, which is a disappointing reward for that much work. Along the same lines, there is a soup I've had in Taiwan which is sort of aspic, cubes of jellied meat broth that stand up in little piles on the bowl, but are perfectly calibrated to dissolve into scrumptious soup as soon as it touches your warm tongue. I've not succeeded in making that. I think I can, but will need to get the consistency just right. So far, I end up chewing my soup which is Just Not Right. I went through a phase of bringing home and cooking up various organs and other peculiar animal parts. Hearts, kidneys, tongues, livers, spleens, tendons, necks. Cost me the trust of my children that summer. For months they would interrogate me on the precise nature and source of any meat dish. You'd think I was serving the family cat or something. Oddly, I have a hard time making fluffy rice without a rice cooker. I know, it is supposed to be simple to make on the stovetop, but I get impatient and peek/stir/sample too much, resulting in pasty, mushy rice. The first time I made tomato pesto (pesto a la trapanese) I used a food processor. Results looked like stomach contents after a college drink-fest. I learned you have to hand-chop it, or have a much lighter touch on the button. Broiling is a fertile source of floppery. When 15 seconds makes the difference between perfect and burned, and you have to sit on the floor in front of an open oven door to monitor, well, sometimes I end up dumping a half sheet pan of stuff into the trash and starting over. And on and on. If you're not flopping, you're not trying!