Greetings again, everyone, Here's an idea worthy of consideration: avoid *all* management fees related directly to your currently envisaged (and future?) investments! Buy some shares of a high quality stock, paying a commission. Buy some shares of other companies, as well, in different industries, for diversification, paying a commission on each - lower if you purchase using a discount broker (but they don't give any advice).(1) If you own mutual funds now, that'll help with your important and legitimate concern for diversification. Hold it/them for 5 years - or 10, 20, 40 years, or for whatever length of time suits you. Even 10 - 20 months might do, now that the market's down - but there's major increased risk, especially if you *will* need the money in that time (but, with good credit, you might be able to defer liquidation by using the share certificates as collateral for a temporary loan till market recovers - how much steel do you have in your backbone?). Having stock share certificates issued costs $35. - 50. each; having mutual funds' units' certificates issued usually is done at no fee. With me, death may intervene ... but, crowding 80, I (who took the course that stockbrokers must take, 25 years ago - and others, later) have 80% of my assets in equity-based investments. Over 80% now, I guess, what with recent drops in the market, including, so far, drops in value of some recent purchases: but that's O.K., I expect them to come back, after while. In fact, I'm thinking of buying some more, likely will continue to do so from time to time during coming months. I live on less than my 3 + 1 pensions, so I don't need to draw on that money currently. Fees paid during the holding period? None! Most high quality companies pay dividends annually, which the company sends to you directly: an exception being Berkshire Hathaway A, Warren Buffett's vehicle, that grew from $12.00+ in '65 to $139,400. today ... which is down $1,705. from yesterday, so it was $141,105. yesterday ... annual compound growth rate of 24.35%.(2) Some financial advisors claim that he's never paid a dividend: they're wrong - he paid 10 cents in '67. In talking to a friend a while ago, he mentioned how I'd suggested to him something like 8 - 10 years ago that we share to purchase a share, when they were about US$22,000. (which would have required about CDN$30,000. then ... I almost went to the bank to borrow $8,000. to do it, but was a smidgeon short on nerve, though I then had no concern about the value of the stock). Also ... the increased value of the Canadian Dollar, since then ... would now pay off the loan (if I were dumb enough to sell the shares just now)! The shrinkage in value of the U.S. Dollar during those few years... would have paid the principal of my loan! Note the usual disclaimer found with all mutual fund and stock-related people: providers, managers, etc. ... "Your experience may vary ..." - 'cause the value of such assets varies a lot. Back to the story: sell the stock(s) now (though I usually don't like to sell several at the same time, either - same as not buy several at once), pay another commission. Management fees paid in between ? Zero. Not a cent ... unless you have a financial advisor and run your portfolio past that person for evaluation, occasionally, then pay evaluation fee directly. Actually, if your advisor is licensed to sell mutual funds, I think that you'll find that if s/he gives advice regarding stocks, s/he may well be breaking the law! In any case, if an advisor can sell one kind of products but not another, what possibility do you think that there may be that you might receive an occasional recommendation from him/her to purchase some of a product that s/he doesn't sell? It's mild and sunny here today - I'm doing a wash to hang on the outside line. Six hours later: Did - fairly comfortable hanging, but (not having slept last night), I overslept, took them down when some chillier, just before dark. Did it comfortably all in one go. Now doing some final drying, spread out in living room - taking some of the desert-like dryness out of a northern-area home in winter. I hope that you all have a fine winter weekend. ole joyful 1. With, say, under $10,000 - $20,000. to invest and not wanting to buy shares in one company each in three or four sections of the market, you can choose to buy some Exchange Traded Funds, each of which will give you a cross-section of each of various sections of the market: construction, real estate, medical, gold, consumer products, oil and gas, lumber, grains, ... even overseas markets, etc. Instead of about 1.5%(US) or 2.5%(CDN) annual management fee (or more) charged by most mutual fund managers, these (more passive) managers mostly charge about 0.4% annual management fee. If you assume long-term average growth rate of the market being 8%, instead of paying $1.00 in $4.00, $5.00 or $6.00 of your earnings in fees ... you'll be paying about $1.00 in $20.00! Some difference! If you figure that the market grows at 10% average ...do your own calculations. Plus - don't forget, you don't get to keep all of the rest of the growth ... the Income Tax people want part of it. Inflation accounts for part of it, as well. If you're paying $1.00 in $5.00 growth to the mutual fund manager, that's 20% of assumed growth ... do you pay more than that percentage to the Income Tax people? Have you ever thought that your mutual fund manager may be charging about the same rate as the income tax people? Hey - remember how I've said that there are two rats that eat your cheese? If you're using regular mutual funds ... looks like there may be three, and your mutual fund guy gets more or less what your income tax friends do ... and if it's capital gain, the income tax people are willing to wait for their bite of the cheese. Mutual fund managers ... and inflation ... get theirs every year! But... ask your mutual fund sales guy whether s/he can sell Exchange Traded Funds (ETF) ... cause only stockbrokers can sell 'em, around here. If your mutual fund salesperson can't sell 'em ... what's the probability that s/he might recommend that you buy them - from somebody else?? 2. Don't have a financial calculator? Use Rule of 72: Divide number of doubles of the asset value into the number of years invested, then divide that figure into 72 to find rate of growth. You get $12.00(+?) doubles to 24, 48, 96, 192, 384, 768, 1,536, 3,072, 6,144, 12,288, 24,576, 49,152, 98,304, 196,608 ... 141,000 is about half way to the 196,608, so there are 13.5 doubles, right? From 1965 to 2008 is 43 years, divided by 13.5 produces 3.185. Divide 72 by 3.185 gives 23.59 - close to the 24.35% that my financial calculator indicated. Didn't know the Rule of 72 before? Remember my oft-repeated phrase, "It's a poor day that one doesn't learn something"? Today's your lucky day! See how much more power your brain has than you thought? Just needs a bit of exercise/sharpening from time to time, like a scythe, to get more/better work done! Take that, all of you essential, but drattedly frustrating at times, computers! o j

Thanks for all the feedback everyone! I'm re-examining the island idea. I want to answer some questions/points that have been raised. The current "cabinet guy" is also a kitchen designer and my decorator works with him on many, many projects. They both are creative and I enjoy them very much. When he met me he had me walk around the kitchen and show him what I usually do. He asked me what we cook the most. Where we lay our stuff when we come in the garage door....we come in from our garage 99% of the time. The Dishwasher...yes I agree it needs to be next to the sink. The plan shows a double sided sink but we want a single bowl, stainless. I would like to have the dishwasher over there. The two pantries...I have 4 kids...so I felt I needed quite a bit of pantry space. I HATE my current pantry...stuff is so high/deep and it takes up so much space! What I don't like about my current kitchen? Well I think its rather ugly. The cabinets are builder grade. The appliances are awful (DW, oven, cooktop). It has limited cabinet space. I want more cabinet space. I have very little storage for serving pieces, etc. I don't prefer bar height seating. I much prefer counter height. I think it is so much more comfortable and I like have one large piece of counter top. I'm drawn to an "island" because I see it being a gathering spot while entertaining and I like having it for my 4 kids to have breakfast & lunch. And no there are no windows. This is an "interior" kitchen. Up at the top are photos of the current kitchen and also there is a drawing showing the other rooms that are connected. The Ushape kitchen. I think could be an option....however...it seems odd to walk in the door from the garage and there is a long counter immediately on the right??? Also there is no counter seating with that layout. I really love having my 4 kids being able to eat at the counter for breakfast & lunch. But you would walk in and right into seating....doesn't work. BTW....no one (Cabinet person/designer/KD) is pushing their layout on me. I asked for certain things and they have made suggestions or pushed back on some things. I'm not shy about asking for what I want but I'm also not closed off to hearing opinions of those who do this everyday. Please keep the ideas coming!!!

I'll never publish anything, trust me. No time and no desire. Anyhow, anything that needs to be said about growing edible crops has been written by more knowledgeable people than I----including the amazing (may he rest in peace) Dr. Cotner, and.....if you don't have Greg Grant's book, which I'll link below, you're missing out on a modern-day version of Dr. Cotner's book, with info on growing fruit added. Now, Greg Grant's book doesn't go in-depth like Dr. Cotner's book does---it never was intended to be a replacement for Dr. Cotner's book, but it is a more modern book intended to provide info quickly, sort of at-a-glance, which is more in keeping with life in the 20-teens, compared to Dr. Cotner's book from the 1980s. Greens bolt because they are biennial and must produce seed in their second 'year' in order to assure the survival of their species. However plants don't experience years in a human calendar way. Their growing seasons are influenced by natural cycles that include daylength (number of hours of sunlight per day, which we all know cycles from its low point at the winter solstice and reaches its high point at the summer solstice) and temperatures. Greens planted in late summer or autumn are in their first year, or first season, and grow well in the conditions we experience in this region in autumn and winter. However, after the winter solstice (easy for me to remember its date because it also is my DH's birthday), daylength begins lengthening again and the temperatures gradually begin to increase as well. Once you have the lengthening daylength and the warming temperatures, the plants are triggered at a particular point (not necessarily the same point for each type of green) to begin the cycle that will lead to seed formation. A less experienced gardener who hasn't been through a cycle or two of bolting greens may not recognize the signs, but once you've seen it happen, you'll always know when the bolting is coming. In general, the plants begin to enlarge more vertically, and many also began to spread a bit more horizontally. Eventually the emerging topgrowth gives way to a stem or stalk that will flower (though, often, the flowers of leafy greens are relatively inconspicuous) and then set seed. As a part of the bolting process, the leaves can begin to take on a more extreme bitterness. This is very obvious with some greens, and not so much with others. So, bolting is just a natural process and one we cannot override. Well, not completely. Sometimes, when you see the early signs that bolting has been triggered and is going to occur, you can intervene, especially if you don't mind taking a risk. If you can do something to interfere with the bolting process, you might get to harvest greens a bit longer. There are various ways to interrupt the bolting process, and not all of them will work with every green vegetable. However, it is fun to try them, and you don't have much to lose since the plants are going to bolt anyway. Here's a few things to try: 1) Cut the plants back hard to within about one inch of the top of the ground or the growing medium in which they are being grown. Then, immediately feed them with a nitrogen-heavy water-soluble fertilizer. Miracle Grow General Purpose is fine, or any of the liquid organic fertilizers is fine. You just want it to have more nitrogen than anything else so it promotes leafy growth. Often, this combination of cutting back and feeding kicks off a new round of leafy growth that has interrupted the plant's urge to form seed stalks. The plant still is going to bolt, but by forcing it back into a new round of vegetative growth, you likely will get 2 to 4 more weeks of leafy harvest before it tries again to make a seed stalk. Sometimes I can do this 3 or 4 times with the same plant over the spring and keep a plant producing new leaves until May or June, even though it initially tried to bolt in March. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. 2) A different way to accomplish the same thing is to kinda, sorta pull the plant out of its growing medium. You don't want to completely uproot it. You want to sort of halfway pull it out, twist it around halfway and then pack it back down into the growing medium. Pack down the growing medium firmly, water and/or fertilize the plant. Cut it back some, but not as hard as you did with the method described in item 1 above. You've done the same thing here---you've interrupted a plant's regular growth cycle and, with any luck at all, it will be scrambling to recover from the root disturbance by putting out lots of leafy new growth before it begins to form a seed stalk. 3) Lettuce is tougher than it looks. One way to interrupt its biennial cycle of going to seed is to cut it back hard, dig it up and transplant it. This is just a more drastic move than either 1) or 2) above. The process of being transplanted and cut back kicks it back into a vegetative growth cycle. I've used all three of the above to keep greens producing seemingly endlessly. Some years it works really well, other years it does not. It could be that in milder weather the plants seem to be in less of a hurry to go to seed, whereas in hotter weather they feel more pressed to hurry up and make seeds. Regardless, since the greens are going to bolt anyway, I like to mess around with them and see how long I can keep them going. You can do something different to cabbage to get a bigger harvest from it. After you harvest your main cabbage head by cutting it off the plant several inches above the ground, carefully cut an X in the remaining stalk. You cut the X into the top of the stalk, and I usually slash the X into the stalk about 1/2-3/4" of an inch deep. Then I water the plant and maybe give it a little bit of a gentle fertilizer like compost tea or liquid fish emulsion. Guess what happens? Most of the time, since you have essentially cut the end of the main stalk or stem into 4 pieces still attached to the plant, each cut section of the stem will form a tiny head of cabbage. The heads will enlarge and eventually reach a harvestable size. They won't get huge. I usually harvest them when they are begin baseball size to softball size, but how cool is it to get 4 little heads of cabbage off a plant that already has produced its big, main head? You can start seeds of winter greens in different ways. I start them indoors because I have a light shelf. A light shelf doesn't have to be fancy. My first one was a $10 plastic shelf from Wal-Mart that was about 24" long and 3' tall. It had three shelves. I hung a $10 shop light from the top shelf and the middle shelf to shine light down on the shelves beneath them and started peppers, tomatoes and petunias indoors. It worked great, took up very little space and was not a huge investment. Over time, I moved up to a bigger shelf because I have a huge garden and wanted to start lots of plants, but even that little shelf paid for itself the very first year because I saved so much money raising plants from seed instead of buying them. You can start seeds of winter greens in a south-facing window in a year when we have a warm, fairly sunny winter. It is harder to do this if every day seems to be a cloudy, snowy or rainy day just because there's less light. You can start seeds of winter greens using the wintersowing method outdoors, utilizing plastic containers like milk jugs and muffin, berry or salad containers from the grocery store. Go to wintersown.org to read all about how to do it, and check out their free seeds offer while you're there. You can start seeds of winter greens in your growing containers if you cover the container with some form of plastic to hold in the heat. However, you need to vent the plastic during the day so the greenhouse effect doesn't roast your tiny seedlings. You can start seeds of winter greens in a raised bed just by sowing the seeds in the prepared seedbed and then by putting a low tunnel over the bed to hold in the heat. You can use PVC or EMT hoops, made a home for next to nothing cost-wise, and then cover your hoops with clear 4 or 6 mm plastic or with a heavy-duty row cover. You'd be surprised how much heat you get inside a low tunnel in winter here---not enough to grow tomatoes or peppers in the ground, but enough to germinate and grow greens. One quick way to grow winter greens is to put the seeds you want to germinate inside a wet paper towel or coffee filter (they are less prone to stick to the coffee filter) and then put the paper towel or coffee filter into a ziplock bag. Label the bag with a Sharpie, noting the type of seed and the date. Keep the paper towel or filter moist but not dripping wet. Check daily to see if the seeds have germinated. Once you have sprouts appearing, carefully transfer the young sprouts to paper cups filled with soil and grow them on, indoors or out, using any of the methods detailed above. All this does is get you off to a quicker start by germinating the seed indoors in a more controlled environment. I've even taken freshly germinated kale seeds directly out of the baggie/paper towel and gently planted them directly beneath existing kale plants growing in my garden in a very large container. The older plants sheltered the smaller ones from the weather a bit. By the time the older plants were bolting and were on their last legs, the younger plants were a few inches tall and ready to take over. They looked sort of like a ground cover growing beneath the existing kale plants. I removed the older kale plants by slicing them off at ground level with a sharp paring knife. (You have to do this carefully to avoid also slicing off your new plants.) Sometimes the old plants resprout, which is okay. They won't last long and I think trying to pull them out by the root would disturb the younger plants too much, so I just leave them. If they continue trying to resprout, I continue cutting them back until they give up. By then, the replacement plants already are providing a harvest. The weather here in this part of the country can make it hard to successfully grow greens. By using all these little tricks to prolong our harvest, we can get a harvest of greens for a fairly long time. Oh, and you mentioned being new to growing collards. Understand this. They grow like mad when they are happy, and they absolutely are pest magnets. Every insect that eats greens will migrate directly to your collards. The collards won't care. They can outgrow everything except a herd of voracious caterpillars. You can use this knowledge to your advantage because the collards will 'warn' you that your cabbage, broccoli, brussels sprouts, cauliflower and kale are about to be hit by those same pests. By spotting the pests early on the collards, you can hopefully kill them off there first, but if you can't, at least you know it is time to protect your other greens. These are the kinds of gardening how-to conversations we have here on this forum all autumn and winter long. Talking about gardening in the 'off' season helps keep all of us sane and helps us prepare for the next planting period. Dawn You Can See Greg Grant's Book Here

Heidi, sometimes I think that standing on my head might be the answer! I'm already planning what I'm going to do this year, in my gardens. I'm looking forward to seeing what the plants I bought from Prairie Moon will do in their second year. They looked rather weevily this year, but that's to be expected. On the other hand, the Silene Regia sure attracted the hummers, they looked like they were fighting over the few blooms there were. I'm not buying any plants (oh sure), l want to work on my containers, hanging baskets and planters - seeds for the annuals. I need to do a heavy mulching again this year too. Can't wait to see the Iris! Well, I am watching the second game of the night - the Dubs are winning - nothing unexpected about that. I am also composing a letter to the Pistons coach, which starts: "Dear Mr. VanGundy, why do you bring your team high scorer in off the bench? And in case you haven't noticed, KCP can't hit for S--t. Just saying" I am too old for this. Shirley!