~Winter Sowing Container Count / Zone Wars~ Zone Wars Summary: Zone 4 . . . . . . . . . . 78 Zone 5 . . . . . . . . . 758 Zone 6 . . . . . . . . . 458 Zone 7 . . . . . . . . . 710 Zone 8 . . . . . . . . . . 92 Total Containers: 2,096 Good morning winter sowers. We've broken 2,000 containers! And zone 5 has taken the lead! Please note: this thread will soon reach the maximum number of replies, and I will be starting a new thread sometime today. Click the Container Count / Zone Wars Spreadsheet to see the container count in detail. ~Happy Sowing Everybody~

Hey Josh! Good to hear from you! I'll tell ya, this gig is crazy. Good money, but man, I don't think that I'll be able to keep it up for more than a year or so. I think I'll just grab as much knowledge as I can and move on. Idk. Craziness. Speaking of CRAZY. The Florida weather IS crazy, especially way down here in the Miami. Fact is, we are a tropical climate here. The only such wet/dry season climate in the continental US. To say that it's a challenge is an understatement. It's either really, really dry and cool(er)(~meaning spring/summer for most~)....or really, really wet and HOT, HOT, HOT - not to mention the constant seasonal threat (and occasional reality) of tropical storms and hurricanes........ * * * A thought jogs his memory and he reflects: ".......I stood in amazment one late August afternoon, when my simple garden thermometer read 95 degrees with a delightfully refreshing 89% humidity, all this without a cloud in the sky.....the jungle.....it's just like the jungle here..." He remembers dark times long past: ".....Everybody wanted me to do it, him most of all. I felt like he was up there, waiting for me to take the pain away. He just wanted to go out like a soldier, standing up, not like some poor, wasted, rag-a$$ed renegade. Even the jungle wanted him dead, and that's who he really took his orders from anyway......." He snaps back to the reality of his computer screen and chuckles. * * * You'll either enjoy that APNow reference wrapped up in my garden reality, or wonder if I'm a serial killer....LOL ;) Anywho, switching gears.... DM, Ya know, I had the same epifany myself. My yard is wierd in the sense that I really only have full shade, or full sun. I mean, I do have some shade, but it's not optimal, and it's not in the right spot - it really just doesn't work for me. So I thought one day, "I'm going to make my own shade....and it's going to be mobile." The rest is history. I figure, if your not trying to make what you have better...you're just falling behind. Regarding the 12 month season: Yes and no. Many things grow here year round...many of those suffer during the summer and rebound in the fall. Few tolerate summer without some affect, while even fewer flourish during those months..but there are certainly those evolutionarily select few natives that love it here. Peppers, specifically the hot ones, are tropical in origin - so they can tolerate summers ~if~ you provide a mostly shade environment. They get crushed in full summer sun, I know this from experience ;) That being said, the sun is not the real summer enemy for vegetable crops here, specifically containerized ones, its the bugs, the rain, and the disease. So again, yes and no. The better you are, the better chance your plants have down here. That's the skinny, straight and narrow. Good to be back. Good. PJ

Thank you, Kate! What a great job you are doing to revitalize this forum. It had gotten a little slow. I plan to make a quilt (queen size) for my brother and his wife. He doesn't have any from me yet. And yes, I will share pictures of the finished product! Thank all of you for the congrats! Tamie

A long time ago, I did a Mint Mate install(actual install, not live) onto a 16GB Gigaware USB flash drive. It booted slow as molasses and the first time running apps was just as slow. It ran fine afterward though. I considered getting a faster flash drive such as a SanDisk Extreme, but it wasn't it my budget at that time. I seem to remember playing around with bcd.exe but my memory is short. Some day I'll have to give EasyBCD a try. In the meantime, GRUB works for me. An extraordinarily boring (and embarrassing, mostly because I flubbed customizing GRUB2 because I'm too lazy to learn to use it properly right now) video of my installing Mint Mate alongside Windows 10 in a virtual machine... I suppose the point is that they can, at least sometimes, live happily beside one another. I was really expecting Mint Mate to offer to "install alongside windows" and auto-partition but it did not. Don't some other Ubuntu based distros do that? Or is it just full blown Ubuntu? Anyway, after all my stumbling, doing it incorrectly, redoing etc., Grub now reads exactly the way I want, remembers the previous boot choices etc. ... That's just a virtual machine though. I wouldn't suggest others try it on their real machines. I suppose if one were to practice setting up a dual boot system, a virtual environment would be the safe place to learn, right? BTW, I used Oracle's VirtualBox in the above videos. Free and open source. Oops, I just read the warning on the VirtualBox download page: "Please be aware that Windows 10 is not yet officially supported!" Oh well, seems to run fine for me.