Terrible customer service and completely unprofessional. I emailed the company after almost three weeks without email of shipment We paid for expedited shipping. I received a response with an apology, promise to ship the following day, and an offer of refund for expedited shipping. Four days later I received an email stating that now two of our seeds are out of stock and we were refunded $8. No refund for expedited shipping. Of course the seeds were now out of stock since it took three weeks to fill the order!! I emailed inquiring about the shipping refund and this company wanted to argue with me terminology regarding shipping and expedited fees. Sending email after email arguing and finally an email that said “You can’t read English?”!!!! What business manager sends out an email like that. Rather than admit their mistake and attempt to make things right they want to argue and be absolutely unprofessional. I had to email them threatening legal action if they continued to send me emails. I don’t even want these products now. We will never order from Reimer seeds again

Yum, I haven't grown German Giant, but I have tried many a season with Brandywine Sudduth and found it on the whole pretty stingy with its fruit. This past year was better than ever before, but still only about 5 or 6 big ones, all delicious of course. I've also grown Earl's Faux which is very much like Brandywine S. but only marginally more productive��"by which I mean for me in my garden in a particular year. Others may have better experiences with these. This year I'm replacing both of them with Stump of the World, another 'taste-alike' but much more productive or so I'm told. And so it goes.... Let us know what you decide and how it comes out. Gary

I wonder if they have managed to fix the problem of rogue plants in big zac as yet, because at one time mini was advising people who were growing big zac to make sure they rogued them well when selecting the seedlings and young plants as lots of rogue plants appeared in the strain. ***** Yes, that problem has been fixed, actually several years ago. Minnie Z did come here to GW and talk about it. At the time there was a problem in making the right cross or using the right parents, I can't remember which right now, or both, and at that time even in the TT catalog it was said to rogue plants which shouldn't happen if the seed sent out was true hybrid seed. The only problem lately has been making enough F1 hybrid seed to satisfy demand. For the past few years they've run out of seed quite quickly. Carolyn

For stripping, a lot depends on the paint you are trying to remove...how old is the house? how many layers? any chance it is lead paint? Are you planning to paint or stain the treads once they are stripped? If you've only got a couple layers and/or if it's not lead paint, a heat gun may work well. Otherwise, you'll want a stripper. We stripped the stairs in our last house - a 200 year old farmhouse with about 15 layers of flaking nasty paint. I started with conventional methylene chloride (I think) based stripper. Each application would get one layer off and it was taking forever - I worked on 2 stair treads for about 3 solid days and they still weren't done. I tried a heat gun but it wasn't all that effective either, plus it's not really safe on lead paint. Plus the bottom layer or two were milk paint, which is near-impossible to strip with either a heat gun or regular stripper. I ended up using Peel Away, which is a lye based product - you paint it on like paste and cover it with special wax paper. Then you leave it sit for 24-48 hours. When you remove the paper and scrape off the peel away, the paint comes with it. You then wash the new wood and spray it with vinegar to neutralize the lye (otherwise your wood will continue to get eaten away). Peel away was great because 1) it eliminated a lot of elbow grease - the stripper did the work for us, 2) it was nasty, but not nearly as nasty as the meth chloride stripper, 3) it is considered one of the best strippers for lead paint because something in the lye bonds with the lead and prevents it from being absorbed by the body. Plus the lead paint stays wet and gooey, and never has a chance to get scattered as dust like it would be if you were scraping/sanding. Alas, it's not all peachy though. Peel Away (at least the formulation we used - they have a few different ones) can discolor/darken the wood, so it's best to use on wood you are planning to repaint, not stain. We stained the treads and painted the risers and handrail and you could definitely see the discoloration where we stained (we prefered to think of it as "patina" though!). It also didn't get all the paint out of the little cracks. In places it made the wood very soft so we had to be very careful when removing it - we gouged the wood in several places. Oh, and one thing I noticed was that you REALLY have to soak the thing in vinegar (which raises the grain) - if you don't neutralize it enough, you will wake up one day 3 months later to find your new paint job sliding down off the wall because the peel away has eaten it away from the backside. (Ask me how I know this....) Even with the Peel Away, it took us several months of weekends to get all the trim stripped in our house - it's a dirty messy job, but worth it in the end. HTH! Good luck!