Hello, I have a pink diamond tree also. I planted it either in 05 or 06 also. It is my only hydrangea tree and is about 6.5-7 feet tall. I am far from an expert but I will chip in my 2 cents. Either early spring or fall would be my best guess in when to transplant it. Hopefully someone else can tell you which of the two times would be the best. I try to never transplant shrubs/trees unless I absolutely have to. I bought mine from a local nursery and was in something like an 8 gallon pot or bigger. No real noticeable height has been gained either for me which is fine for me. Maybe has gained a foot or so at best across the years and mostly I would say from the head of it. I think once they train it to be a single lead and cut it to branch out. I dont think the trunk of the tree will get much taller in maturity. Only the head will continue to get taller/wider, but i think is limited by being a single lead in tree form. I think it would take a long time to train a single lead to be 10 feet or more tall and the growers want to cash out long before that...lol. But again I am no expert in it and I am happy with the height of mine in my situation. I see many people around my area with limelight trees that flop and need staked and seem to not like being in tree form. The pink diamond has never needed staked and seems like a very sturdy grower in tree form. Havent got to see a quickfire in tree form, but have them in shrub form. How fast they grow and well branched, my guess would be they will be another winner in tree form.

Hi, I just wanted to add to the ESummer discussion. I am surprised about dissatisfaction with the color etc. I love the mophead hydrangeas and not having been able to keep one flowering in my yard before was a great disappointment to me. So I was delighted with the Endless Summer I had last year. It bloomed a lot and my blue flowers were a fine color blue to me, in an unamended clay/loam soil with a ph of 6.4. It was a vigorous grower and the leaves were healthy all summer. It was placed in morning sun only just under the dripline of a silver maple tree. No wilt despite two months of barely any rain but supplemental watering and lots of heat last summer. I added an oakleaf hydrangea to the yard last year, and it died back to the ground over the winter and I have one little sprout just barely up. The ES on the other hand has a bushy 8" growth covered with healthy green leaves. So if the ESummer blooms again and stays healthy for me, I will be very grateful to have a dependable mophead in the garden with pretty blue flowers. I will try to remember to come back to this thread later when the plant blooms and post a photo of it. :-)

For me, sea salt and salts gathered from salty waters do have a bit of different taste. When on trip one time, I bought a container of salt gathered from the Great Salt Lake in Utah. That salt contained a small amount of other minerals that did enhance its flavor. Supposedly, the trace minerals were healthy - I don't know. One way to ensure the contents of sea salt is to manufacture it starting with pure salt and putting in additives in controlled amounts. Otherwise, one could pick up some nasties such as arsenic by taking raw salt from sea water. A strange fact: Sea water from the large oceans has salinity that closely matches the salinity of human blood.

This has been an interesting thread to follow, and I would have to say cooking is both an art and a science. In fact, I would say food at its best is a blend of art and science, after being a foods judge at fairs for many years. Leave the salt out of a bread recipe and see what you end up with? Bad science. Add the salt twice, an easy mistake, and see what you end up with? Bad science. Add the salt early and the gluten is harder to develop. Add the salt late in the gluten-development and it's easier to develop and won't require as much kneading. All science! The same goes for adding too much water, flour, sugar (or other sweetener); or flavoring ingredients which can affect the gluten-development in bread when you add too much - like cinnamon and nutmeg when added directly to the dough (this is why we sprinkle cinnamon/sugar on the dough surface for cinnamon rolls, rather than adding large amounts of cinnamon TO the dough. Add too much dairy and you'll end up with loaf with characteristics like - low-volume, poor symmetry, poor cellular structure and texture..... That's pure science. When people have a failed recipe, it's generally not from bad intentions or bad artistic interpretation, it's from bad science. Most modern baked goods are based on a ratio of ingredients. Stick to the common ratio whether you use a scale to weigh each ingredient, cups, pint canning jar, tea/coffee cup or mug... for your measuring tool-of-choice.... So take a moment to marvel at the science. "A standard plain cake has, by measure, 1/3 as much fat as sugar, 2/3 as much milk as sugar; and about 3 times as much flour as liquid." This ratio works whether you are making one small cake, one large cake, or enough batter for 100 cakes. Alter the ratio, such as trying to make a low-fat or low-sugar cake, or changing the type of flour used, and you will need to alter the known science with different ingredients and/or mixing methods. This science is most important when you develop recipes because you need to keep in mind ingredients that are tenderizers (fat and sugar) and those that are structure builders (flour and eggs), along with the other ingredients. Back to measuring flour for bread. This is one area that is completely without a standard for a scale or a dry measure, as all measurements for flour in a bread recipe are just a "good (or bad) guess". Add to that the way each person fills a cup with flour which will get you completely different amounts of flour if you were to weigh the amount on a scale, and the measuring cups themselves have NO standard in manufacturing. This is one area of baking where experience (art) along with science will help improve your bread. Due to the differences in the amount of gluten and moisture in flour, and those differences vary from brand-to-brand, season to season (moisture high during the rainy season and low during a dry winter) as well as from bag-to-bag of the same brand, you need to develop the "feel" (art) for bread dough. Your hands will "know" more about the dough than an exact measure. This is why you need to hold back 1/2-3/4 cup of flour during kneading. You may not need to add all the flour once it has the correct "feel" - and you may use all of the flour and require even more than the recipe called for..... It is also better to err on the side of a loose/wet dough than a hard/stiff dry dough. But I would also encourage EVERYONE to get a scale. There are lots more uses, along with measuring ingredients (especially if you find a recipe that is all weight measurements). It's the best tool in your kitchen when you MUST weigh something. It's far more accurate to measure 4-ounces of shredded cheese on a scale than it is to try to measure an equivalent in a cup - do you pack it tight/loose???? You can scale (weigh) the amount of batter in two cake pans to make sure you have an equal amount of batter in each of them so you have cake layers that are the same size. I even scale dough for burger and hot dog buns so I can adjust the size wanted/needed and make them consistently that same size, as well as the amount of bread per serving (a serving of bread is considered 1-oz.). When buns/rolls/loaves are the same size, they will bake more evenly. A reason to weigh the amount of salt is because of the size of the grains of different salt products. The finer the grind, the more salt grains there will be in a teaspoon (or whatever measure) because they will pack very closely together, while there will be less total salt when you put coarse-grinds of salt in the teaspoon because there are more voids of air between the larger chunks of salt. But the difference will probably not make a really huge difference in this bread recipe, but it IS a science factor you may want to keep in mind. And plenty of bread has successfully been made with plain old iodized table salt - even though I personally stopped using it many decades ago. So many things are choices, and neither totally right or totally wrong. -Grainlady