Who ever says they are not sweet are picking them too soon. They turn blue but the inside also needs to turn blue if it is green inside it is not ripe. Also if they do not release easy from the bush they are not ripe. Or maybe they have the wrong varieties. Best berries I have tasted when ripe, and everything you made from them turns out excellent ie Wine, jam, ice cream, pies, juice ect.,

My garden is zone 4/5 southwestern Wisconsin and usually my peonies bloom about the 3rd week in May through the first week in June. However this year everything was late and they bloomed the last week in May and first two weeks of June. Everything was about 1-2 weeks behind this year including my June flush of roses. However later in the summer, but July, everything caught up and the daylilies bloomed about the usual time. I really think you might have a little earlier bloom time in your zone than I do, depending on the year? But again micro climates can make a difference too.

Crimony, Herb, I thought US blue laws were bad :( Yes, "Gemutlichkeit" is a sort of feeling of 'God's in his heaven & all's right with the world', with a shade of 'even if not, things are pretty darned pleasant just here and now, and I am very content to enjoy them in this moment'. My intention was to see how many different national references I could shoehorn into the vignette (I now realize that the carpet should be Persian :), not to give you a run for your multilingual money. "Gemutlichkeit" is sometimes (apparently not often enough :) used as an example of a word than has no exact equivalent in English, presumably because English speakers are so little inclined to contently enjoy pleasant moments that they don't need a word for the state of such enjoyment. Guessing that French may be one of your languages, I will confess that to being so French-deficient that I tend to pronunce "raison d'etre" as if it meant "reason for singing cowboys (e.g. Gene Autry :)", and have been warned that travel to Quebec could be hazardous to my health unless I improve in this area :) :) :) Au revoir, - evelyn

a "great" recipe depends on what you're doing, raising worms or recycling waste, someone who raises worms to get a lot of worms might want to feed some fancy purchased stuff to get the fastest growth and reproduction possible, someone who is using vermicomposting to avoid sending organic waste to the landfill uses whatever waste is generated, and the worms will thrive just as they do in the "wild" with no access to human food :) what really feeds the worms is bacteria, what feeds bacteria comes down to carbon and nitrogen, nothing else really "required" ... OTOH, when it comes to using the finished castings/compost as "fertilizer", it does increase it's value if there was a wide range of material used in order to wind up with a range of micronutrients, although the real plus of worm castings is the high load of bacteria added to the soil - a healthy soil is microbially rich, and that's where you find the worms, a poor, heavily chem fertilized soil has few bacteria, so few worms at the same time, folks seldom are aware of just what nutrients are really in the food we eat - one example: many of our common foods are high in Boron [apples, pears, grapes, all legumes, leafy greens and nuts], so a compost with a high percentage of those foods will have a high Boron content .... maybe even TOO high for the health of the plants it's used on - at the same time many areas have soil deficient in Boron [coastal BC included], so mixed food waste compost includes a bonus there, but the worms couldn't care less, and the bacteria never notice to microbes, the carbon ["woody" waste like paper] is the energy food, like carbohydrates for us, the nitrogen [greens are highest] is protein, supporting growth and reproduction, an ideal mix of C to N [mixed food waste on average is close to ideal] encourages the largest/fastest volume of bacterial growth, but nothing else is required, and with worms it's best to keep the N on the low side so the bin bedding doesn't turn into a hot compost pile and cook the lil critters, meaning heavy on the bedding [like paper] that's the long and short of it all, that many who get into vermicomposting don't seem to understand, the whole thing is about decomposition, basicly a bacterial process, and worms are part of the large decomposer community Bill