Carol, I am having a lot of fun with the greenhouse. Last night I didn't even want to come in at dark, but I did. Then I went out several times during the night to see how quickly or how slowly the temps inside the greenhouse drop after the sun sets. We have a night in the mid to upper 20s this week, or maybe two, but nothing so cold that I have to worry about anything in the ground freezing. I worry a lot less than I used to now that I've got frost-blanket weight floating row covers. Last year both the Lowe's and Home Depot had blue potatoes, but not until closer to mid- or late-February. They don't have any seed potatoes in either of those two stores down here yet, but they've got a lot of bulbs in, bagged onion sets, garlic and shallots, and bags of strawberry plants, horseradish and rhubarb roots, so the potatoes cannot be far behind. I remember the year you had to hold plants forever in pots. I have saved every Tidy Cat litter buckle we've ever gotten so that if we ever have a wet, flooding year like 2007 again (I held plants in pots until June or July that year too), I can plant whatever I want in the cat litter buckets. It wouldn't be real attractive, but it would lok better than dead plants in a flooded garden. We still have tons of peppers in the freezer too, and to my great delight, when I was removing a bag of roasted jalapenos for Super Bowl Sunday, I found a stray bag of dehydrated cherry tomatoes in the pepper area. Woo hoo! I thought all the tomatoes were gone, but now we have a whole bag left. I could scarcely contain my joy. I love the security of having twice as many tomato plants as I need, and that explains partly why I grow so many. That way, if baseball-sized hail rolls through (or even golfball-sized hail), I have replacements for the shredded plants. It has been about a decade since large hail completely destroyed my veggie garden one May, and every year that passes, I feel like the odds are greater we'll have one of those destructive hail storms hit us. We had hail 11 times last year, which was remarkable since we usually see hail maybe once or twice a year, but none of it was overly big. We had small hail last week, about pea-sized, but it fell very briefly and wasn't big enough to hurt anything. I never have trouble giving away the extra tomato and pepper plants, as you know, and bring many of them to the annual Spring Fling. I also give them away to friends here, and sometimes Tim comes home from work and asks for a variety recommendation for one of his co-workers, and I'll give him a list of sugested varieties...and send some tomato plants to work with him to give to that person. The good thing about being out-of-control with tomato seedlings is that it doesn't leave me a lot of available space to get out of control with peppers. lol Increasingly I am growing only jalapenos and habaneros for canning purposes, and sweet bells and Yummy peppers for fresh eating and freezing. I used to grow several dozen pepper varieties every year, but just don't have the space and time for as many without sacrificing space where I'm growing canners. Diane, I've wondered that myself. Carol, I saw the soil-block makers in the Lee Valley Tools catalog too. Jay, I have a personal rule for myself that I don't purchase from anyone who spams our forum with 'messages' that are thinly-veiled attempts to direct us to their commercial website, and by that comment, I DO NOT mean someone like Gary who is a regular participant on our forum. I mean people who do not post here at all except to promote something they sell. Dawn

Ezzirah, Peat pellets are not the best way to start seeds. That could be the problem. People who use them tend to have many problems, including slow growth and nutritional deficiencies, and that is especially true of newer gardeners who are still learning how each type of vegetable best germinates and grows and what it needs in order to do well. (Peat is a 'dead' material, so it has no biological activity and no nutrition.) Many people who use peat pellets lose their plants to damping off because peat holds on to moisture a long time which contributes to various damping off fungi that kill seedlings, and then if peat gets dry, it is hard to rewet. You'll likely have more success with seed-starting if you use a sterile, soilless seed-starting mix. With peppers, you cannot compare two different varieties to one another because some pepper plants get big early and others get big late and some never get very big. If you were growing the exact same variety side by side from two different vendors, and the seed was fresh and packed for the current year, that would be a more valid comparison. I started about 20 varieties of peppers, including hot, sweet and ornamental varieties, from seed this year and every vaqriety has its own rate of growth and no two are just alike. Some of my smallest plants that seemed 'behind' the others as young transplants are now the tallest and best-performing plants, so you can't judge by their early size and growth. You judge them by how they grow and produce once they are transplanted and growing in the garden, not by how they perform as tiny seedlings. The recommended transplant date for fall peppers is July 15th, which is next week. I don't know when you started your peppers, but in order to them to be large enough to survive being transplanted in mid-summer head and grow well and produce, they need to be a minimum of 6 to 8 weeks old when set out. One reason that is especially important with summer plantings is that the pepper transplants need a large enough root system that they can survive a hot, dry day. Celery is incredibly hard to grow in our climate and is a cool season crop. Temperatures above 90 push it into dormancy. It is hard to germinate and dies easily. You germinate it at 60 to 70 degrees, then move it to a cooler location with sunlight to grow on for quite a few weeks before it is large enough to transplant. It takes celery 3 to 4 months to reach transplant size and the best time to transplant it is in early summer, so to plant it here, you would have needed to start the seeds in February or the first half of March and then set them out in approx. June. Celery has to mature before temps drop below below 28 degrees in the fall or early winter, but temps over 90 in the summer make it go dormant which disrupts its growth cycle. Oh, and it needs well-drained soil. If celery seedlings or plants get too dry at any time, they stunt or die easily. There's a reason you don't see "celery" on everyone's grow list here in this state. Not many people grow it here because most years our weather is completely wrong for it. Last year's cooler than average, cloudy, rainy, humid summer might have been a good year for celery for anyone with really well-draining soil. So, I'm not sure there's anything to blame Johnny's for. Peat pellets are notoriously troublesome as we discussed a lot on this forum back in the winter months; with peppers you're comparing apples to oranges; and it is the wrong time of year for celery transplants to grow in addition to it being one of the most finicky vegetable varieties around. I can't see where Johnny's is responsible for any of that. I'm not saying any of the above to be harsh or unkind, but rather to be honest so you'll understand why you might be having problems with your seedlings and blaming Johnny's unfairly. If a seed vendor sends out bad seed, I'd be the first to suggest they were at fault if I thought they were and the first to suggest that they should correct what is wrong. Honestly, though, I don't think Johnny's is at fault in this case. The poor seed companies often get blamed for new gardeners' inexperience and that is not fair. Gardening is a learning-by-doing process and you'll learn lessons every year, whether is it you first year or your fiftieth. There's just so very many variables and great results are never guaranteed. Don't let your frustration with starting seeds in the middle of summer ruin the fun of gardening for you. It is all a good experience because you learn something every time. Dawn

Jay, You and I are in the same class and you know it. hee hee And, if we were in a tomato class together at school, we'd be sitting in the front row, taking copious notes and challenging our instructor on arcane points. Outside of class, we'd be standing in the hallways handing out tomato seeds trying to get others addicted to growing too many. It isn't Burpee's quality that bothers me. It is the endless hype of varieties that just aren't that special compared to what else is out there and the continually increasing prices of seed packets that seem to contain fewer and fewer seeds each year, and I'm not specifically talking tomatoes. Their flower seeds have not performed well for me in recent years, and I don't usually have trouble raising flowers. I liked Porterhouse but think the Harris hybrids taste better to my tastebuds. And, do you remember the year Porterhouse was on the Burepee catalog cover? They showed a person's hands holding, I think, 3 Porterhouse tomatoes. The tomatoes looked huge in comparison to the hands holding them, and eventually (after we grew the plant and got much smaller fruit) we figured out that the person holding the Porterhouse tomatoes must have been a child because we normal gardeners didn't get huge tomatoes like that. I felt like it was a deceptive photo then and feel the same way now, even though I like Porterhouse and often grow it. I think it was Bill P. who first mentioned he thought it was a child holding the tomatoes on the cover, or at least it was in one of GoneFishin's threads....and he liked Porterhouse tomato too, but not the photographic trick. I've been really unhappy with Burpee's seeds as sold at Wal-Mart in recent years. When the 'Highlight Yellow' zinnia came out a few years ago, I ordered a packet from the catalog and it had maybe 25 or 30 seeds (their zinnias used to always have at least 50 seeds but this one didn't) but it cost about $4 or $5 for a packet. Before my seed packet even arrived, I saw the Highlight Yellow Zinnia on the Burpee seed rack when the rack first appeared at Wal-Mart and bought 4 packets for $1.07 or $1.37 each. For that price, the seed packets had either 7, 8 or 9 seeds in them. I expect more than 7, 8 or 9 seeds in a packet even if the packet is a low-priced one at Wal-Mart. And, to make it worse, germination was horrible, I had a lot of damping off, which is very rarely an issue for me, and the transplants that made it into the ground didn't live long. Last year I purchased transplants of Highlight Yellow Zinnia at a local store and they did a little better than the ones I raised from seed a couple of years ago, but not much better. I think I'm through trying to grow it. The flowers are a lovely bright yellow but the plants themselves have low vigor. I've been pretty disgusted with Burpee ever since. I used to order oodles of seeds from them and in recent years I have chosen to make my purchases from other companies that give you better value for your dollar. They sell some of the same varieties as other seed companies, but charge more for the same amount of seeds or for fewer seeds, and I'm not going to pay extra for the Burpee name. (Other than that, I like them just fine. LOL) Dawn

Cooked up a sample yesterday sorta following this recipe, vegankittypatrol.blogspot.com/2014/06/polish-stewed-beans-and-story-of.html I don't measure, added a bit of diced fried bacon. I halved and garlic buttered two hoagie buns, put under the broiler until they started to brown, took them out and spooned on the bean mixture, topped with grated cheddar and popped them under the broiler again until the cheese melted. Sprinkled with a little garlic salt and freshly ground black pepper, what can I say delicious. These beans cook up tender and have a potato like consistency, they take up flavors very well, it's a keeper. I was going to put a little raw diced red onion in the mix but I forgot. Annette