Plan! 1. Continually assess for future cramming. The next couple years will still be very busy in this regard. This Spring for example, I sold, traded or moved over 300 specimens. 2. Allow those that mix well to 'grow into' eachother. As long as the plants are very slow growers, or only have minor 'collisions', I'll happily allow them to 'mesh' together i.e. nature. This will take a lot of thinking and planning, but considering how much effort I've put into the first two years of gardening, I feel more then up to the challenge. 3. Any VERY large specimens that can't stay will go to a local botanical garden, with whom I am partners with. I'll either be paid in cash or in trade(more plants!) with which I can sell or plant at friends, neighbors, etc. The botanical garden is over 90 acres, so we have a lot of space to use and he's already asked me to plan for a future 'conifer walk', a 5-10 acre section full of mainly large dwarves and other larger conifers where visitors can walk a series of windy paths through these wonderful plants. 4. Some plants *will* have to be removed, outright to conifer heaven as Ken likes to say. The idea here is that I can keep whatever looks great and not worry when other plants don't. 5. Gifts. I've found that most of my plants are more then happy being transplanted, provided I dig a decent sized hole and then give them 3-6 months to establish. With the plants I've already moved to the rock garden at the botanical garden, we've literally had a 100% success rate of transplant - and that's over some 100-150 plants. Plenty of conifer lovers, friends, family, neighbors, etc. that would be happy to take my 'removed leftovers' and plop them into their yard. My current total is somewhere between 1150 and 1250 different conifers - a total of about 1600-2000 once you account for duplicates. Eventually in 15-20 years, I expect I'll have 400-600 on my property and the rest will have been moved, died, given away, sold, traded, etc. If you want to worry about me, picture me trying to water these gazillion plants as a full-time firefighter!! Now that's the hard part! And don't be sorry for your opinion. It's allowed(and has been repeated here), and I'm taking it all into consideration, even if you do have monkeybrains! -Will

I'm a firm believer in a flex/getaway room, but you have plenty of those. I agree that what this house needs is one large living area for the family to gather. If you are hoping for your children to grow up and for you to retire in this house, this plan is not the plan for a large family gathering! A couple of friends, kids, their spouses, a couple of grandkids, and that room is going to seem like a closet. (With three sons-in-law and 3 grandkids, I know of which I speak! :) ) Anyway, the back six feet of the room are dedicated to hall area, so you won't have any furniture there, and the opening to the other two walls have doors on them. This makes the family room about 13' X 15', which seems EXTREMELY small for a house this size. You will have to squeeze behind the chairs to walk into the "getting away" room and you will have to squeeze behind chairs to get out to the porch. Where else you would you put additional seating? It's a nice plan, and I like the upstairs, especially, but it doesn't seem suited to your purposes. If I were building a house to grow old in, I would want something more spacious than the study/bathroom on the first floor and certainly more closet space. Perhaps you could put more money into more square footage there, and finish out some of the rest of the house at a later time. Good luck! There's certainly a lot to be excited about in this plan. :)

Thanks, everyone! It's a Raynox DCR-250. Not expensive--I paid around $40 plus shipping. There's a DCR-150, too, that a lot of people like. The degree of magnification is less, but that makes it easier to use. I heard about the lens on DPReview's Panasonic Talk forum, where I viewed some fabulous shots taken with it.

Nina, In most parts of Oklahoma the summer weather, particularly the heat but the sunshine as well, is brutally hard on raspberries, especially in the hotter and drier years. They'll do best in afternoon shade, and you're going to be growing them in afternoon sun, which is even more challenging. First, to address the zone 7 issue. Many plants that are said to be hardy in zone 7 may be cold hardy in zone 7 in some parts of the country---but zone 7 is not the same everywhere. All that being in zone 7 tells you is what the range of your average minimum temperatures is----so zone 7 in Oregon could be quite different from zone 7 in Oklahoma or Texas or Long Island, NY. Even though all those diverse areas have minimum low temperatures in the same range (0-10 degrees Fahrenheit), they have different climates overall. The zone maps commonly used are only reliable as a reference for cold hardiness, not hot hardiness. So, keep that in mind when choosing plants. In our climate, the AHS Heat Zone Map is a more reliable indicator of whether a given type of plant can thrive here, but even it is based on the plants being kept in moist soil at all times, which is incredibly hard to do in our heat, particularly in containers. Even letting a plant get too dry once can make it underperform compared to its AHS Heat Zone rating. Blackberries are more commonly grown in Oklahoma because they tolerate our erratic weather better than raspberry plants do. Often, with raspberries, a little warm spell in winter or late spring causes them to break dormancy and leaf out, and then when we have a return to colder spring weather, the new foliage and canes can indeed suffer freeze damage. That may be what happened with your plants. Since the damage isn't spreading, that's my best guess about what happened. If it were spreading and if you are in an area that has received plentiful spring rainfall, I'd be thinking it might be a fungal disease. Since it seems more likely that it is cold damage, you have two choices: you can go ahead and prune off the damaged canes since it is likely the scorched leaves aren't conducting photosynthesis and therefore aren't helping the plant, or you can wait a couple of weeks and see if the old leaves fall off and are replaced by new ones. With regard to the soil-less mix being well-draining, that may be an issue as well. In Oklahoma, it can be really hard to keep containerized plants moist enough in July's and August's extreme heat. In our hottest, driest summers I have had to water tomato plants grown in 10-20 gallon containers up to 4 times a day to keep the soil evenly moist. It is hard to keep plants moist on summer days when the high temperature exceeds 100-110 degrees, especially if that weather goes on for many weeks. I find it easiest to keep them on a drip irrigation system with a timer, but you still have to adjust your timer as the summer weather can fluctuate from flooding rains to no rain at all for long periods. I'll link the OSU Fact Sheet on Growing Blackberries and Raspberries in Oklahoma for you, but be advised it mostly is about how to grow blackberries since growing raspberries in our state is not recommended by OSU. Some people do grow raspberries here but it takes an extraordinary amount of effort and attention to detail, as well as some luck and cooperation from the weather, and raspberry production tends to be lower than blackberry production. Dawn Growing Blackberries & Raspberries In Oklahoma