So, Ann-I was wondering if you were the only American keeping a pet wasp in the house to eat the spider mites but there must be more. And drying their little wings? Just goes to show you nothing keeps a good rosarian down, except when you're pruning. These are the times that try men's souls. February, oh, February. Snowed hard all morning but the sun came out this afternoon and it rose to forty. One trudges through the dog slopping days like a bear disturbed during hybernation. I think the ancestors had it right. Chop the wood, kill a beef, hens in the freezer. Then go to bed for the winter. Out at the ranch, the wood pile was as high as the house. The house smelled like chicken feathers all fall. It was awful. Everything canned, killed, frozen, chopped, stuff done, a three hour work day ensued. Uncles, grammaws, grandpas snoozed all afternoon by the woodstove. We had one rule: "Stay away from the creek!" Off I'd go, down the creek, listening to the ice crunch beneath my feet, choosing the thick parts and looking at the beautiful animal tracks. Crunch, crunch, crunch. Campanula, that's a good idea about the fan. Everything is on a water fast, now. Treebarb, they came in the mail, I don't remember when. I haven't been checking the dirt that deep but now I will. I'm pretty sure they're spider mites. They make webs and drive around like a speedway. I tried every insecticide, fly spray, soapy water, now I'm using horticultural oil. Blush Damask and Abe Darby are history now but the rest are bumbling through.

Brands? There are a lot fewer than you might think. Basically, three companies make almost all of the chest freezers sold in North America. These are: Frigidaire which owns a variety of brands (like Kelvinator, White Westinghouse) and also makes freezers for big-box store house brands plus some of the freezers sold under GE and Kenmore brands. I've been told by Sears salepeople that Frigidaire makes the large capacity chest freezers sold as Kenmores. Whirlpool: bought the WC Woods factory in Canada out of a bankruptcy liquidation in 2009, and has continued production. Sold under Whirlpool's various brand names (Amana, Kitchenaid, Maytag) plus some odd brands it owns (Admiral) plus some brands like Danby, Crosley, etc. Haier: selling under its own name plus a variety of brands for big box stores plus the rest of what GE and Kenmore sell. Haier has had some intermittent quality control and warranty service issues on some products but a scan of ConsumerAffairs.Com did not turn up any complaints about their chest feezers. Some of them apparently are assembled in North or South Carolina. Consumer Reports membership survey results do not report on long term reliability and problem rates for chest freezers. CR's product performance ratings favor Whirlpool and Frigidaire branded chest freezers. The buying advice is pretty much look for features (like lights) and energy consumption, and buy whatever has the best price. I bought a small (5 cu ft) Firgidaire about 16 years ago (from Costco, IIRC). Near as I can tell, it is essentially the same small model that Frigidaire is still selling. According to the Kill-a-Watt meter, the old one consumes about 2% more power than the current models are supposed to use, at least according to the DOE tags in the store models. (Consumer Reports cautions that their testing has shown that the ratings are an average of 17% low. Maybe they test the freezers differently than I do or maybe the current sealed sysmes and motors aren't so good.) Never had a hint of problem with Firigidare chest unit and it is still going strong for a friend of mine. We had a 9 hour power outage a couple of years back. When the power came back, my friend dropped in a probe thermometer and found internal temps were still -4F. I'm told they'll go for days without power. I'd still be using that Frigidaire except that I needed larger capacity and only had room to get it in the basement by going taller. That's how I wound up with 14 cu ft Firgidaire upright. I find it a lot more convenient to get at things in the upright but at the price of a lot more noise (which I did not expect) and power consumption (which I did expect.) The Kill-a-Watt meter tells me the upright is using about three times the power of the old chest freezer. This post was edited by JWVideo on Sun, May 5, 13 at 19:53

When the fridge in the garage went out four or five years ago we moved the side by side out there. I never liked the SbyS. It just seemed both compartments were too small. I have a fridge with a bottom freezer in the house and I like it better because my refrigerated items are at eye level. In the bottom freezer is the ice-maker, all my frozen herbs, nuts I have already toasted, white bread, wheat bread, containers of lemon juice and lime juice and some odds and ends. I had a 15 foot freezer in the garage which had to be defrosted. It stayed so packed that I could never find what I was looking for so we just sold it and bought a new self defrosting 21 CF freezer. It holds a lot more and I have vowed not to get it junked up with bits and pieces of items. It has one pull out tray the width of the freezer. It isn't deep and I keep things like frozen BBQ, the small amount of beef I buy, and various sausages in it. There is a bin in the bottom with a drop down closure where I keep boxed items for the grandkids such as corn dogs and other misc items. ONe shelf is devoted to frozen veggies. Large bags of nuts and ice cream go in the door. I bought 3 plastic bins from Wal-Mart. In one bin I placed packs of chicken parts, one has packs of all of my boneless, skinless chicken breasts in it and one contains pork chops and pork tenderloins. The top shelf contains a country ham which I had sliced and I used the Food Saver to put each slice in a separate bag. The Food Saver is great because anything frozen in those bags last a long time and doesn't get freezer burn.

[I posted this on the Garage forum and can't figure out how to reduce the size of the picture. Sorry.] DH is a packrat when it comes to hardware. We share an 8' x 12' shed now and he has a walk-in closet in the house filled with office supplies and hardware. I'm tired of stepping over the lawn mower to get to my gardening tools. I've put together my ideas and DH's and this is the shed we want: It'll about 16-18' long and 6' deep. It would have two bays, one 6-8' long with a wide (double?) door for lawn mower and bulky stuff. The other would be about 10' long with shelves on both ends and across the center with two doors, each opening into a 3' aisle with shelves on either side and pegboard on the end. [I hope this, with the attached drawing, will make some sense.] At one end of the shed there would be a covered area for my potting, etc. DH figures on having enough space between the storehouse and the cars for a workbench. With pegboard and MANY feet of shelves, he should be able to sort nails, tools, and all and still leave me one wall of shelves.