emmie9999, try corn if you want to and have some extra room (particularly if you expand your beds). I live in the country in PA, with lots of corn around. There's a farmstand a half-mile up the road that always has great corn, but I still grow some of my own, just becauase it feels good to look out and see a little patch of corn in my garden. (But I've got a pretty big garden, so I'm not so worried about the space.) This year I'm increasing the fun factor by experimenting with a couple of open-pollinated heirloom varieties along with a regular supersweet hybrid type. You can plant a small patch of corn, but then it helps to hand-pollinate it to get good ears. When the silks show up, cut off some bits of the tassles from the top and dust it over the silks. CAVEAT: I haven't tried that yet, but I read somewhere here that it works well. I'm going to try it this year. Last year I had one very small patch of late summer corn that didn't pollinate well -- I didn't know about hand-pollinating then. A lot of my gardening is just aimed at getting fresh veggies, but a lot of it is also just for fun. I grow some dried beans, for instance. From the perspective of food, it doesn't make any sense, since you can buy a pound of dried beans in the market for about 80 cents. But I grow old heirloom varieties, like Steuben and Amish Knuttle, which you can't get in the market. I don't have room to plant enough to get more than about 1-2 pounds of dried beans per variety, but the beans are pretty and it's just fun. With green beans, you might consider pole beans. You get a much larger harvest from a small amount of garden space. You also can harvest a lot of it standing up. And the teepees look lovely -- I make mine out of 7- or 8-foot lengths of bamboo. One of the downsides is that you can't use row covers (at least not easily), if you're planning on using covers. You also have to make sure the teepees don't shade something else in the garden. One last downside to teepees is that occasionally a good wind will make them start leaning, especially in the early summer before the beans are strong enough to anchor them. Have fun and good luck with your garden.

Carol, I hate to say it in the face of such a generous offer, but I am going to come down on the side of the forces of law and order, and not take cuttings with me to Italy. I certainly do most heartily appreciate your and Luanne's offer of help! Thank you both! If you could send me the names of promising roses that you and Luanne grow, that you think might do well here, that would be decidedly helpful. Niels and I are going to work together on a list of roses to order from the U.S., and with suggested names I can go looking in Europe as well. I think you and Luanne already know that you'll be welcome if you make it over to Italy and want to come to us for a visit. You'd be doing me a favor, in fact, by allowing me to share my garden. I think it's a beautiful place, and I have no one--NO ONE--to share it with. It kills me. Frustration, thy name is loneliness. I never did get answer your response to my earlier thread "Paying the price", though I had meant to, so let me do that now. I think your climate in northern California is probably similar to what I knew in Olympia, Washingon: mild, wet from fall to spring, and with dry summers. Oddly, it was in famously wet western Washington that I began to think about water thrifty gardening, on account of the dry summer weather. I found out that roses did just fine without additional summer water; I learned to use a mulch; I realized that plants have their periods of growth that coincide with the rainy season of their place of origin. I brought all these ideas with me to Italy and have been developing them ever since. I'll get in touch with you privately about your publication, and thanks for the offer! It will be interesting to see if it has any tricks that I haven't thought up yet, because when we go on drought regimen we are very conscientiously stingy. I'm wondering what plants you have that you're worried about in case of drought. Do you have acidophile plants? Offhand, those are the ones I would imagine to be thirstiest. There is a long list of noble plants that do well in dry summers, many of them classics of the English garden: many roses, viburnums, peonies, box, yew, lavender, rosemary, and other Mediterranean sub-shrubs, buddleia, barberry, clematis (are you surprised at that one? I was), spring-blooming bulbs, lilacs, privet, sarcacocca, daphne, tall bearded iris; and I could probably come up with more. I have the huge advantage of clay soil that holds water forever, and naturally some of these plants need the cooler, shadier, and moister parts of the garden, while others thrive in good drainage and a baking sun. Kaylah, I understand perfectly what you mean. You're talking about a community that has no laws because it doesn't need them: a place in which people know and trust each other to an extent that laws aren't necessary to create a healthy social environment. When I lived with my father for a while in the eighties I didn't have a key to the house, because the house was never locked. Likewise here in our little three family settlement at the end of the road, we don't need to worry if we forget and leave the car keys in the ignition or go on a walk without locking the house. By "lawlessness" I mean something different. I'm talking about a widespread contempt for the law and for the civil order and safety of individuals that laws are, theoretically at least, designed to protect. Lawlessness means people who evade taxes and yet want social services; people who drive drunk and hit other automobiles head on, murdering everyone in the other car and their own, or who don't stop at crosswalks, slaughtering the pedestrians who are trying to the other side of the street; corporate managers who embezzle and lie and drive their company bankrupt, cheating thousands of small investers out of their savings; arsonists who burn up thousands of acres of public forest to get grazing land, uncaring about the people they kill in the process; kids who vandalize schools and cemetaries; Mafia bosses sitting in their cells, plotting deals with the political parties (on both ends of the spectrum) in which they offer the votes they control in exchange for an easing of their prison regimen, which currently aims at preventing them from managing their organizations from inside jail; gang shootouts in the streets of the cities of southern Italy; mountains of garbage in Naples.... perhaps I ought to stop here. I've seen signs recently that the Italians themselves are getting sick of the situation. One symptom is a recently founded political party called something like the "Party of Italians who have Values", and their party guidelines include not running candidates who have criminal records. They increased their vote respectably in the last elections, and I hope they stick to their priciples. Perhaps I should add that life in the Bel Paese does have its charms, and its values as well; if I didn't think it was a good place to bring a child up, and to live myself, I wouldn't be here. Rosariumrob, Somehow I missed your last message. I'm a collector. The roses that I would like to get from the U.S. are roses that, as far as I know, are not available in Europe, at least not to a private gardener. Last year I bought roses from German and French nurseries, as the selection in Italy is limited, and will continue to do so. I buy rose varieties and grow them in my garden to see how well they conform to my criteria: I'm looking for roses that are beautiful in plant and flower, fragrant, healthy without spraying, able to thrive with low summer water and moderate nutrients, and propagable by cuttings. My dream is to establish a collection of roses with these characteristics that in time can be brought into circulation in Italy, to benefit the gardens of a country that's getting warmer and drier. Italians are in general ignorant of the old roses, of the Teas in particular, and they appear to be rare both in the specialized rose nurseries and as found plants. Italian gardening tradition doesn't favor the use of a great variety of plants, and its nurseries are weak from this point of view compared with countries like England and Germany. Unfortunately the countries with the good collections don't have the climate for growing Teas, Hybrid Giganteas, etc., so these roses are poorly represented there as well. The U.S. is a country with a long history of growing warm climate roses many of which have survived as passalong plants, and there are motivated collectors and curious gardeners aplenty, plus an interest in organic gardening. Naturally it helps that the U.S. is my own country and I know the language and the culture. All these are reasons why I look to the U.S. as a place to find Teas and other roses that meet my criteria. Melissa

Ok I am still thinking on the low tunnel thing and now I have to get to the point of placing orders for row cover and poly fabric. I will probably order that from Growers Supply/Farmtek. I am not sure what sort of poly film a low tunnel needs. I can call them. I am also not sure how wide my tunnel will be so I can't order row cover for it. Also I found this pic. below It has the tubing go into plywood and seems moveable. With enough sandbags this might just stay. One per bed instead of going over 2 beds. But would this be that much warmer than what I already use? Probably not. I want to cover 16 tomatoes and 120 peppers in early spring for early planting. They will be 2.5 feet apart- path in middle 2.5 feet wide. (one linear row of tomatoes, 2.5 feet, one bed of triple wide peppers). That is around 7.5 feet wide from edge to edge. in fall I want to cover some other tomatoes and peppers in one bed. That will need to be taller but narrower. And I want to go in it for picking in October and November. For determinate tomatoes it will need to be 4 feet tall. Over at my field, in the barn, there are rolls of tubing. Maybe I should go play around with them and a tape measure. That might help me decide how long the tubing will be and how wide the covers will need to be. Here is a link that might be useful: pic of tunnel with plywood

When I bought the place there was already an irrigation system. Since then I've modified, rearranged and replaced things. Added new parts and extended it. It's easy enough to get the parts to set something up. Then you can use your own design/plans to suit your situation. You basically need a controller which you set with the time and frequency when different sections of the system come on. Then you need to connect it to your water supply. If you're on town water that's pretty simple. The way you run the irrigation lines around to your plants depends on what you want, how you want it to look. Some people don't like the sight of irrigation lines running around all over the ground. You can bury them (but not easily if it's on a concrete slab). There are different sizes of irrigation line, here it's black "polypipe". Probably the same thing where you are. There are joiners and branches. Worth putting clamps on joins to prevent them accidentally coming adrift while you're away. You can get drippers, sprinklers, or spray jets to mist water. Check out the gardening sections of your big stores. Most of the staff should be able to give you advice on it and what's available. My system comes on at 5:00AM and runs to 7:00AM. That gives the water a chance to seep in while evaporation rate is at its lowest and before the sun comes up. The advantage of the automated system is that it frees up your time but also allows watering at less convenient times (like when you'd prefer to be sleeping).