The wen cutter or concave cutter is the only really indispensable tool. You can root prune with old scissors or secateurs. Small nail scissors or cheap sewing cotton cutters will do for tip pruning. Whatever you do, invest in the best concave cutter you can afford. Cheap Chinese ones last no time at all. Don't be tempted by stainless steel either. They don't hold their edge as well as proper forged steel ones. Joshua Roth are a good manufacturer and they have a good range here http://www.joshuaroth.com/catalog/page3.html

All of my vegetable gardening books are many years old, most from Rodale Press purchased during the seventies. Rodale Books: ENcyclopedia of Organic Gardening Organic Plant Protection Plants-a-Plenty (lots on vegetative propagation) The Solar Greenhouse ORganic Gardening Under Glass (Someday I'll have one) The Self-Sufficient Suburban Gardener Getting the Most FRom Your Garden--This is the book that inspired us to switch to wide-row, deep-bed gardening. With these books and several years worth of ORganic Gardening magazines, we learned to garden. Another good book is Gardening, The Complete Guide to Growing America's FAvorite Fruits & Vegetables by the National Gardening ASsociation. My favorite flower gardening books are : Best Plants, 1000 easy-to-grow garden plants, published in Great Britain by Hamlyn but appicable here as it gives hardiness zones. Lovely pics. Flower Gardening 1-2-3, a Home Depot book, a great book for beginners Good Planting by Rosemary Very, another English book. But I love, love, love the chapter on Woodland Gardens and have used it as inspiration for my own The Long-Flowering Garden by Craigmyle, yet another English book with great photos. (I'm a sucker for 'purty pichurs'. The Perennial Garden, Color Harmonies Through the Seasons, by Jeff and Marilyn Cox is another Rodale Book I don't know if you can even still find these books, but that's my list for what it's worth. Dorothy

Ok, I had a long post almost set and my battery died. And I have to sleep. Here's a reply to a similar question, my appologies it's not 100% tailored to this post. "Ok, first things first. You need to decide roughly how much risk you are willing to take. This would be based on your age/closeness to retirement, what percentage of your savings this money represents, your risk tolerance, etc. Then you have to decide if this is as good time to jump in. You don't have to wait for an ideal time, but if you think we are due for another "adjustment" in the economy in the next year or less, you would want to wait for the adjustment to occur then get in. If you think we are going to continue to head upward, then by all means the sooner the better. Now this is not on a day to day or even week to week basis, but overall trending. Nobody knows the answer to this, this is where even the most conservative investors have to gamble, especially when investing a lump sum. When you buy a little at a time, like paycheck deferral, you get "dollar cost averaging" where you are buying shares regularly as the price goes up and down, so some shares you own you bought a lot cheap and some you paid more for a few. If you just want to toss the money in someplace relatively safe-ish and leave it there, the Vanguard Total Market Index is a great choice. Leave it there for a while while you educate yourself on financial matters. You don't need to agree with them, but listen to Ric Edelman, Bob Brinker, or Dave Ramsey on the radio for a while. Listen to the way they think about things, the lingo, the thought processes. You will pick up a lot. At the very least, you will know enough to ask good questions if you seek professional assistance, what to look for in professional assistance, and much more. If this money is all your savings, I'd keep at least $1k easily accessible in a bank as an emergency fund, for actual emergencies. Then most advocate for 3-6 months living expenses in a safe investment. Then anything left you can take enough risk to grow and invest somewhere based on your risk tolerance." -----the important points here are to not rush into anything. Your not losing ground, so either leave things alone for a little longer or dump the gains into a Vangaurd total market index while you figure something else out. Spend time listening to the people mentioned above. You will pick up a ton of stuff. Maybe enough to pick some funds on your own, but certainly enough to understand most of what an advisor will tell you and ask good questions. And definitely see an independent fee for service advisor. This is a serious chunk of change, and you need to make sure you understand the tax stuff a bit as well as make sure you avoid any hidden penalties, or loopholes, or whatever else might be a problem. Sadly, regular people trying to be smart and save their money get hit with a lot of obstacles.

Your home is not an investment. I agree with that. Home is where you live and if you break even at the end of your life, you have done well, IMHO. Most people do not have the discipline to be able to divert the money that they would have spent on their home and invest it 'wisely' to do better than what they would have done in their primary home. This is why it works for most Americans; it's a forced savings account for most people. Even so, you are at the mercy of the housing market and the timing of it. If you relied on cashing out of your home to retire in 2010, then you would be very sad. If you cashed out in 2006, then you would have looked very smart. The most difficult part of using primary residence as an investment is that it is not easily liquid AND you have to live somewhere after you sell. Unless you downsize significantly AND/OR move to a lower COLA, you may not be able to benefit from that paid off house. If you plan on living in a paid off house, you have to plan for the expenses associated with the house in retirement. Unfortunately, retired people can be in a situation where they are house rich but they cannot sustain the house with their retirement income because they did not plan well, ie taxes, insurance, maintenance, and utilities may be significantly more than the rent for a small apartment. Sometimes, the retirees struggle to hold onto their paid off house or the house degrades (and loses value) due to neglected maintenance. ANY investment can lose everything, including real estate. That is not a reason to NOT invest in real estate. There is risk in every investment strategy. bonds can lose value. stocks get delisted and go to 0 value. commodities are crap shoot, dependent on the whim of weather and natural disasters. (look at corn prices this year due to drought) gold and silver; hmmmm money market is not even keeping up with inflation these days. I am getting less than 1% return in my money market account. I have to have some cash laying about but geesh, this is rediculous... short of keeping it in treasury bonds, there is no guarantee. Most people want to do slightly better than the treasury bonds with 'minimal' 'moderate' or 'high' risk, however way they define their own risk level. There is NO safe investment. Real estate is one investment strategy one can use if one is educated and one wants to work at it. It is more difficult (work) than keeping it in the indexed funds and forgetting about it.... For many people in America, income producing real estate has done as well if not better than equities. I know nothing about Canadian RE because my particular RE investment strategies are so tied to the tax structure in America.... LauraHall, if you are interested in RE, read some books and really learn how to evaluate the numbers. Unfortunately, investments are all about numbers. Unless you can make sense of those numbers, you can't really evaluate your own position; this is for ALL investments. As I am raising my children, I am realizing that I have to educate my children how to do this even if they do not have a finance degree. This is not difficult math. But it is a way of thinking about numbers and not 'lying' to yourself about what the numbers mean. I wish you the best Laura. My best answer is to read and study enough to know how to evaluate your position....