I had a great day outside today. I put the shade cloth on the greenhouse, finished putting a misting system in there to keep it cooler in the summer and sowed hundreds of peas (Snow and Shell). Tomorrow is going to be 70, whoohoo, I can start digging that new bed that I want to put succulents in :) Termater

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

You will be fine. In reality no matter what size handle you are using it will attach with two points (handles that is, not knobs). The size of the hardware will be the same for regular handles. The longer handles provide more comfort when opening a heavy item. On a DW you are not applying much more force than you would on a heavy silverware drawer. Only when you step up to appliance pulls designed for fridges do they increase the size of the screws that attach the handle.

Guys, sorry if I got things off topic! I just know I'm tired of hurting and I really need to get out and weed weed weed! My husband and I were out for a bit and did some more weeding, trying to get the vetch out. OMG! It's so dry! We decided to take a rest and go visit my Mom in Hospice and then I'm coming back and watering so the weeds will be easier to get out. I haven't watered since the last rain which was almost 2 weeks ago. That area up there is in full sun almost all day, and the sprinklers can't go up there because it's up-hill and the water valve closest has the least amount of pressure. So I gotta go hand-water!! And I really need to mulch up there too. I started to in the fall, and even cleared out most of the weeds, but they came back with a vengeance with all this rain we've been having! (I'm not gonna complain about the rain...)