I am a little confused on this because in Carolyn's book, her recommendation for the size of the container for the first-and-final pot up seems tiny - "I transplant into plastic four-packs that have 2 inch cells", she says. Even if she is only starting seed 6 weeks before plant out, it seems like the plants would be extremely root bound by that time. ***** And that's the way I do it and so did all the commercial farmers in my area. And yes, they are very rootbound when they get put out and that's also the way I want it. And the roots are not as fragile and break as easily when transplanted as with seedlings that were potted up, which I've also done. I prefer seedlings that are about 6-9 inches tall to put out and yours aren't far from that already. So it's up to you what you want to do but if it were me I think I'd put your plants in as cool a place as you can right now and hold back on water and nutrients b'c in the next four weeks you're going to have huge plants as I see it. IN your MA zone 6 I think your last average frost date should be about May 1st, since in my zone 5 next door to you it's about May 15th, and I never plant out until about two weeks after last average frost,weather permitting, so for you that would mean planting out May 15th or so, so you'd have another month of growth on those plants. Another thing you might consider is taking some lateral branch, aka sucker, cuttings right now and I bet you'd have decent size plants in roughly a month, after hardening off. So pot up if you wish to; your choice. ( smile) Carolyn

Thanks, Ravencajun. Before I saw those careful instructions, my daughter's PC was prompting to install SP3 - so I did (about a week ago). At first I thought we got lucky and all went well. She has so little on her computer that I thought it was a good place to start. However, now she's getting flickering - if that's the right word for it. For instance, she's looking at her inbox in gmail - and it keeps scrolling over and over so she isn't able to click on one email and open it. It's also scrolling too quickly to hit the sign out button. Ultimately I hit alt-cont-delete to end gmail. I believe we saw this flickering in another program the other day - it seems that little green boxes were flashing at points along the screen. I realize this may have nothing to do with SP3. So I should probably mention, she has a dell dimension 4500 - 40GB hard drive, 768 MB Ram, Firefox browser. It's possible all the trouble has come within the Firefox browser - I'm not sure. Anything else that might need fixing or updating that could cause this. Thanks. Lynn.

Thanks azinoh, All 4 packets were sent/received. Round trip times: Min - 73ms Max - 80 ms Avg - 75 ms I broke down and phone my ISP. They're sending someone tomorrow. Her supervisor told her that my modem shows that it is online but is not "passing". I asked what that meant and she said she'd gotten a smart answer when she asked her supervisor the same thing. Thanks again for helping me. I'll let you know what happens.

If you have Windows XP, here's a nice, easy way to resize photos. Download and install the XP Image Resizer Powertoy from Microsoft via the link below. Once installed, all you have to do is right-click on an image file (I know it handles jpg/gif files and it may handle others as well). You will now see an option to "Resize Pictures." Click on "Resize Pictures" and you will be given a menu that looks like this: Choose the option that you'd like and click OK. You can use the advanced button to enter a custom size. The tool will leave your original picture untouched. It simply creates another file named "imagename (small).jpg" or medium or large, etc. You can easily resize multiple pictures this way by selecting multiple items from your explorer window (using the CTRL or Shift key), right-clicking and selecting "Resize Pictures". It's a really nice little tool that most people don't know exists and it's much easier than doing the same thing via image editing software. And it's free. Feel free to ask questions if my instructions above are unclear. Here is a link that might be useful: Microsoft Windows XP Image Resizer Powertoy