Thanks for being excited with me, everyone! It was so great to be outside this house longer than to get in and out of the car. I did over do it a bit yesterday and was pretty miserable late last night but I slept okay. A little achy this morning so I sat and sorted out my seeds while I waited for the temperature to reach 60 and my medicines to start working. It got up to 77F. today and the mud is drying up finally!! Today I planted all of the RED poppies and three packages of mixed color poppies (all different kinds) which I mixed together. I used an old plastic toothpick holder with just the single hole in the top so I was able to line part of the side walk borders with them. If they come up, I'll save some seed for next year, none of the packages discuss whether they are annual or perennial so I'm guessing they will be annual in my zone. Some were called the Maltese Cross, red with a black eye. Some were gifted and just called Shirley Poppies, Mixed Poppies, or Mixed color Poppies. One pkg. I had purchased, and they are called Eschscholzia Californica, Ballerina Mix, they are rather fancy looking! The petals are pleated. My big garden sits over the top of my root cellar and I have a tall vent pipe that sticks out of the roof of it, sort of, right in the middle of the garden. Today I planted Purple hollyhocks around one side of it and pink around the other side. It sits just to the left (west side) and little forward of (south of) the bed spring trellis. I think the colors will look nice with the clematis. I may add some white or yellow hollyhocks in with them when I get the last pile of mulch, we made last year, moved. Along the full length of the west fence (where you saw the cows in another post) I planted two rows of pink hollyhocks. All of the hollyhock seeds have been given to me by Garden Webers so I don't know for sure what shades of pink or purple they are. I still have some other pink ones and some white and cream mixed so I'm hoping all the shades of pink are different. I have three types of Columbine seed too. Should those go in early too? Or later after the last freeze?

Jan, It is too bad the coons got the corn. It happened to me too this year. The coons get my corn about every other year. In 2008 I beat them to all of it, in 2009 we split it, and this year they got it all because they were willing to harvest it 4 or 5 days before it was going to be fully ripe, and I wasn't! Tim said he'd build me a fully enclosed 'corn cage' similar to our fenced chicken runs that are attached to each chicken coop, so maybe we can foil the coons once and for all. With the Red River to our west, south and east, we have raccoons the way some people have butterflies or birds....just all over the place. Our first year here, they'd sit on the lawn furniture on the front porch and knock on the windows and make faces at us. They can be quite vicious and are only 'cute' from a distance. I hope your kids are feeling better. That MRSA is nasty stuff. Tim came home from a housefire one day with a little black spot on his calf and told me he thought a spider had been inside his boot at the fire station and had bitten him. He went to work that night and his leg started heating up and feeling inflamed. He went to the doctor and found out it was MRSA. It took it quite a while to clear up, but he was lucky because it didn't grow larger or spread and a simple course of antibiotics cleared it up, just slowly. Zucchini time is one of my favorite times of the year. With all the various veggies that can be slow and stubborn to set and ripen veggies, it is nice to have plants as enthusiastic as squash plants! Here, we just sneak bags of zukes into people's cars when they leave them unlocked downtown. About 5 or 6 years ago, Tim's best friend's son planted his first garden. He planted a whole row of yellow squash and a whole row of zucchini, and gave away tons and tons of that stuff...but never ripened a tomato at all, which was perceived as quite a tragedy. So, what he learned from his first garden was to plant less squash and to plant more tomatoes, and to plant the tomatoes earlier. That was a really good summer for zukes here, and I ended up 'feeding' a lot of the ones he gave us to our compost pile because our own plants (and everyone else's) were producing well and you can only eat/can/freeze so many zukes. As far as the grasshoppers go, we have the most I've ever seen, but the only damage I'm seeing so far is that they are eating holes in the leaves of all my large-leaved herbs, sweet potatoes and beans. They did a lot more damage in the early 2000s when we had the last really huge outbreak. I think the difference may be that we had severe drought then so there wasn't much for them to eat, but we've had adequate rainfall this year so there's lots of green forage in the pastures for them to feast upon. Susan, You're welcome. As soon as I saw the name Pokemon, I felt pretty sure you had Li'l Pump-ke-mon. I've grown it here before, but only used it as an ornamental autumn decoration and didn't try it as an edible. I've never tried dehydrating in the car, but cannot imagine it would work with our humidity. Tomatoes are just so high in water--around 90-95%--that the air has to be incredibly dry in order to dry them down to the proper percentage of water (8-16%) for them to be considered properly dehydrated. In a dehydrator, you have a fan blowing warm air to help dry them out, and in a car you wouldn't have that. With a dehydrator fan blowing, it still can take from about 12 to about 36, or sometimes 48, hours to dehydrate tomatoes to the right dryness level and that's at a constant temperature. With fluctuating temperatures and no fan to circulate the air, there's no telling how long it will take. You also wouldn't have any control over the temperature reached in the car. When you dry tomatoes in a dehydrator, you use a specific temperature that dries them out evenly so they don't become too dry on the outside while still so moist inside that they will mold. Depending on the outdoor temperature, the size of the car, and the area in which the car is sitting, you actually could get higher heat inside the car than the recommended temperature for drying tomatoes and that would give you the mold. Finally, with a dehydrator, you have constant, even temperatures. In a car the temperatures likely would go too high during the hottest part of the day and too low after the sun goes down in the evening. I just don't see it working for tomatoes. You might be able to dry the leaves of some herbs in a car, but not a high-moisture fruit like tomatoes. Inexpensive dehydrators are easy to find at big box stores in spring through at least mid-winter. Gardeners tend to buy them during the spring and summer, and hunters buy them in fall and winter because a lot of them use dehydrators to make jerkey. That was why I purchased my first dehydrator in the 1980s or 1990s---to make jerkey from venison given to us by Tim's deer-hunting coworkers. As far as your green tomatoes, I don't think there is anything wrong with them. Some tomatoes have that sort of color variation as they go through the ripening process and it is perfectly normal. Blossom drop is common in the heat and there's no way around it. That's why planting as early as possible in spring is so very important--so you can get the maxium fruit set before temps get too high. Unfortunately for much of the state, temps got too high about 6 weeks earlier than usual so a lot of people did not get good fruit set early and have had to battle the temps and diseases since then. Hopefully, new fruit sat during the cool spell. I know I had good fruit set during the week or ten days that we had lower temperatures. I'm still harvesting from the fruit that set in May, but it is nice to know small ones have formed and are coming along that I'll be harvesting sometime in August. In that respect, the cool spell was perfectly timed. I'll be canning salsa every week for the rest of the summer if the tomatoes continue ripening at the current pace, and I prefer that to having a huge number of them all at once. I had my largest tomato harvest during the fruit harvest/canning marathon and gave many of them away because one person can only preserve so many batches of food in one day, but I've still got several dozen jars of salsa put up already and feel like I'm ahead of where I was at this time last year in terms of canning salsa. I could have frozen them and canned the salsa later, but DS and his family and the guys at the fire station were wanting to do some salsa-making of their own, so I passed those tomatoes on to them so they could have a little fun too. I cannot imagine Tess's grown in a container, so if you're planning to grow it, I hope you'll put it in the ground. In my garden, Tess's Land Race Currant usually climbs to the top of an 8' cage, and cascades back down to the ground again. Once the cascading branches are beginning to touch the ground, I cut them off to keep them from having constant soil contact and develop diseases. In a large enough cage, the plant gets about 5' wide. Diane has a photo of her Tess's on her blog and it is huge. I'll go find it so you can see what a jungle one plant would be. My only 'complaint' about Tess's is that you can spend hours just picking all the fruit off one in August when it is a maximum production. I love it though because it gives me tons of small tomatoes to dehydrate, plus I can eat them all day long in the garden (a gardener's form of Gatorade, lol) and still have more ripe than I care to pick daily. Jay, For me, Indian Stripe sets just like Cherokee Purple (only maybe a little earlier and a little heavier in spring), meaning it sets a great crop early if I get it into the ground early enough, then sets nothing for ages during the heat, then sets again in August for the fall. If I get it into the ground late, or if heat arrives early, I don't get great numbers of fruit from it until fall. Amazon Chocolate, by contrast, set heavily all summer long last year. I had AC and IS side by side and AC set fruit evenly all along, but IS set just as many...only it formed them all at once in the spring and the fall. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: Photos of Tess's at Diane's Blog

The dinner was served tonight, but it was half-hearted on all side - SWMBO and my son are still sick, dear daughter might be sinking, and I have the start of something. Current symptoms are a wincing headache, achy joints, and a draggy feeling. Crap, I have to go on a trip Tuesday. Back to the food - the duck breast turned out tasty, I couldn't get the gastrique-or-whatever-we're-calling-it to look pretty so I left it off for the pics (I didn't process it smooth enough for a squeeze bottle, lesson learned). The veg is pretty charred after re-heating but tasted fine. I'm taking a Tylenol PM and going to bed. Thank you all for helping me with this "meal". Oh, P.S. I've decided it could be fun for those of us who cook with music to mention what we were listening to when we made whatever we're talking about. Tonight: Lana Del Rey, Isaac Hayes. This post was edited by johnliu on Sun, Feb 10, 13 at 21:48

In my opinion, the 18" flex duct for supply/return is properly sized for a 3 ton gas-pack system period, 2-stage or not. Again, it is not proper to size the ductwork based on low stage. I checked the fan performance table on the 3 ton XL16c. At 400 cfm/ton, on high stage it will move approx. 1200 cfm and on low a bit less than 850 cfm. Heating airflow is a bit different but in the same ballpark. I assume they quoted the model with 75k heat input. I strongly doubt you require the 96k model. I'm not sure I'm clean on the duct system setup. So you'll have 18" flex coming off the packaged unit, supplying one primary distribution box which branches off to two other boxes with 12" and 14" flex ducts? I'd rather see properly sized metal, rectangular (matching unit openings and transitioning as/if required) supply and return trunks coming off the unit with appropriately sized branch runs rather than flex duct everywhere, but what you describe is not all that uncommon. I don't see an issue with the 12" and 14" flex duct from a size perspective on either high or low stage. There is no "maximum" or "minimum" airflow a duct can handle, but with 1200 cfm or less, assuming the ducts aren't badly kinked, the static pressure and friction should be within reason. Are you certain they did a Manual J load calculation? Have you seen the results? I question a 210 sqft addition adding half a ton to the cooling load, unless it's all glass. Many homes have systems that are already oversized. So 2.5 ton may not be "undersized" even with the addition, but a load calc will tell for sure. Of course, 2-stage systems come in full-ton sizes, but proper sizing of 2-stage systems is still critical. An oversized 2-stage system will spend just about all of its time in low stage, acting as an expensive single stage system. I wish I could type more but have to leave. Hope this helps and doesn't add more confusion.