Hello, colonel_kernel. Several years ago, I was able to buy a small-leafed 1.5-2' high tea plant locally at a nursery called Calloway's (called Cornelius in Houston). The plant did not make it through the summer-fall season though. If you plant one, I would add extra care and effort to monitor soil moisture levels. And additional hand watering on the first years may be needed until it becomes established. I planted two different camellias in the same general protected area that year and the tea plant was the one that did not make it. The other one was a large leaf japonica. The japonica was planted in early Spring whereas the tea plant was planted in the summer months. Very disappointing. That may have been the year when I decided not to plant anything whatsoever during the hot season.Hee hee hee. So, go for it! I would recommend an extra effort monitoring it in Year 1's summer and if possible, planting it very early so it can handle our hot temps asap. I have not looked for them online. Maybe a Texas-based nursery might carry it or just drive to East Texas and see if anyone carries it. When Sudden Oak Death (AKA, Ramorum blight) became a well known issue in California, Texas instituted restrictions in the importation of camellias & other selected plants from "the outside". When buying sinensis, you may want to order more than one shrub so as to have an adequate supply of leaves, especially if you drink a lot of tea or the plant is small to begin with. You should be fine in Z9 as long as it is exposed to afternoon shade by 11am-12pm-ish and protected from our summer drying winds. It may do better in environment where you water with a sprinkler as opposed to drip irrigation since drip will not moisten the top's tiny roots. Luis This post was edited by luis_pr on Sat, Jun 28, 14 at 3:25

I think getting a wii is a great idea! While she's tending 8 babies, she can plug in the wii and tell the six kids to bowl, hula hoop, or some sport. They need to keep busy! I can't imagine she's buying it for her own use, at least not daily. Unless she's super woman. It's going to be mega tough taking care of 8 babies but 8 toddlers plus six others would make me lose my mind. I hope she has some help. yea, I'm tired of hearing about it all too.

"More than most of you probably wanted to know about eggshells." toxcrusadr, not really. That's really the root of the issue - "everybody" knows eggshells are a good amendment, but that isn't true for all environments, and not knowing enough about eggshells is part of the dilemma here. elisa_z5, I wish gifting them were an option. My only friend east of the Rockies lives in a Brooklyn apartment and doesn't grow even houseplants and would be utterly appalled at a gift of eggshells anyway because she is a germaphobe. If I ever get really pissed at her, I am going to tell her that all that kale she eats is actually grown in dirt. Maybe I can make Christmas ornaments out of them? Cover something in glue, roll it in the shells? I'm almost afraid to check Etsy and Pinterest to see if someone is already doing crushed eggshell crafts. glib, when bone fragility rears its ugly head and I am advised to take calcium supplements, maybe I will try that. LoneJack, I don't have chickens. I have thought about getting some, but then I would wind up with more eggshells. I guess what I'm thinking now is that four pounds won't hurt anything if I scatter them over 4000 square feet, I just have to forget about hoarding them and thinking I can use them to improve anything. Still probably gonna add some to Mom's ashes, though.

I do use the salsa screen for Annie's Salsa and love it. The salsa screen gives you a semi-chunky puree. I hate to use the word puree, because it isn't really a puree. The sauce screen gives you a puree that is the exact same texture as canned tomato sauce, so I use it for tomato sauce, pasta sauce, ketchup, bar-b-q sauce, etc. The salsa screen gives you something thicker than puree with bigger chunks, but I hate to call it chunky because it really isn't chunky either. It is just bigger pieces of tomato in something that is too semi-chunky to be considered a puree. It is a finer cut than handcut, but I've used it for so long---since around 2008, that I have forgotten what salsa looks like if made from all hand-cut tomatoes. If I am making one batch of Annie's salsa, I usually cut the onions, sweet peppers and jalapeno peppers by hand. If I am making multiple batches in one day, I switch to the food processor and cut huge mounds of onions and sweet peppers, and a smaller mound of jalapenos (or serranos if I am subbing in some serranos for part of the jalapenos to get a hotter salsa) first before I do anything else. Then, I measure out the onions, sweet peppers and jalapenos into gallon zip lock bags, essentially creating a pre-mix of those three veggies that I'll add to tomatoes and the other ingredients one batch at a time. It is a huge time saver, and allows me to get all that chopping out of the way, put the food processer washable parts in the dishwasher, and put away the food processor to keep the counters clear. I have a little herb mill I use to cut up the cilantro in big batches that I can measure out and dump into the previously mentioned pre-mix of veggies, and I do all the garlic at once using a garlic press. If I work really hard in the morning and nothing interferes, I can quickly cut up all the veggies and herbs for up to 4 or 5 batches of salsa in the morning, and then cook/can the salsa in the afternoon. Or, I can do all the chopping and cutting in the evening, and get up and can first thing in the morning. When I do this, I call it speed canning and the one rule my family knows about speed canning is that everyone needs to stay out of my way when I'm speed canning because if they come into the kitchen during that time, I am likely to put them right to work. In the early years here, I cut up and chopped and minced each batch individually as I went along, so when one batch went into the canner, I started processing all the veggies and herbs for the next batch. That seems much slower to me than the speed canning method I use now. I like that I can run all the tomatoes through the mill and be done with it for the day. I like that I can then do the same with everything cut up by the food processor, herb mill and garlic press. I do run through a lot of zip lock bags when doing prep for speed processing, but I can turn them inside out and wash them and reuse them. My favorite thing is merely that once all the chopping and such is done, then all those machines and tools are out of the way and I have all the kitchen counter space available just for the canning part of the process. You have to find what works for you. The method I described is what works for me. Because I grow so many tomatoes and because our plants' spring productive period generally is cut short when the June heat sets in and stops fruitset, I find myself processing huge amounts of tomatoes in the main salsa canning period which normally starts around mid-June and can run through sometime in July. It is almost too much to do in that time frame, but the tomatoes are ripe when they're ripe, so I just deal with it. Once I've made all the salsa I want to make, I switch to making sauce, catsup, bar-b-que sauce, chili base, a veggie juice similar to V-8 juice, etc. During the same time frame I'm making salsa, I often am dehydrating excess bite-sized tomatoes to save for winter snacks and salads, and am freezing excess tomatoes (sometimes whole, sometimes run through the salsa screen for tomatoes to use in cooking in the winter). It always is a relief to finish the main crop of tomatoes. When that day arrives, I pull out about 90% of the tomato plants, leaving a few to provide us with tomatoes for fresh eating for the rest of the summer. It would kill me if I had to keep up that pace of canning all summer long. The biggest trick is just getting the tomatoes, onions, sweet peppers and hot peppers all to be ready for canning at the same time. Sometimes the sweet peppers are lagging behind all the others. When that happens, I just buy sweet bell peppers in bulk so I don't have to postpone salsa making endlessly. While our canning talk has been focused on tomatoes, let's not forget that everything else is maturing at the same time, so I'm usually squeezing in husking and processing corn at the same time, along with picking fruit and processing it, and harvesting snap beans and dealing with them. At least potatoes and onions will sit in a cool room and wait until I can find time to process them. My summer squash was planted (probably in too much shade) at the west end of the garden this year and has been slow to grow, so I'm just now getting enough squash to process. June and July is harvest/processing insanity time and I'm always relieved when it is over. I do not regret that I have a large food processing garden, but there are days I wonder if I've lost my mind. I have wondered what summer would be like if there was no harvest at all to process, and I cannot even picture it. Well, in 2011 there wasn't much of a harvest to process due to the exceptional drought and extreme heat, but we were at fires day and night virtually every day, so I didn't even have time to think about the food that I wasn't processing. That's one reason I try to process 2 years of food every single year. That gives us a big reserve of preserved food to get us through year 2 if any crop in the garden fails in year 2. It just kills me to have to buy produce at the grocery store if it is something we can grow here and preserve. I'd much rather have our own produce, picked and then processed right here at the peak of perfection, or (of course) eaten fresh within a day or two of being harvested. I make my meal plans for the day after doing the morning harvesting, and wouldn't want to live any other way. Sometimes I think that Tim forgets how much money the garden saves us on buying fresh, organic produce, so I drag him to Central Market down in Southlake, TX, after we leave CostCo and I make sure he notices the eye-popping prices of fresh, organic produce. He goes home with a brand new appreciation for all that the garden produces for us, and he also doesn't mind buying organic lettuce or whatever in the summer because he understands what we can and cannot grow here in the heat. He appreciates organic produce more than he used to because he has learned how hard it can be to grow organically. I cannot imagine our lives without the garden, but every now and then I'd like to have a day where nothing is waiting to be harvested or to be washed, sorted, blanched, cooked, canned, frozen, fermented or dehydrated. I do stay very busy in the main harvesting/canning season, but I have days I just want to be lazy and do nothing. However, what I have found is that when the lazy urge strikes, after a couple of ours of laziness, my conscience gets the better of me and I get up and to into the kitchen and deal with the waiting produce. Our first southern peas now are 3 or 4 days from harvesting and I am excited, even though that means I am about to start in on the endless routine of shelling peas. I love it even though it is time-consuming. To me, nothing says summer like sitting with a big bowl of purple hull peas and shelling them. Then, if I have enough purple hulls, I make purple hull pea jelly. And, of course, we get to eat purple hull peas for weeks and weeks and weeks in the summer, and I put up and freeze the rest. I also planted a long row of lima beans this spring, and they are flowering now, though I don't know if they've set any beans yet. I just kind of run right past them every day to get to the tomatoes. I don't even have to look at the calendar in summer, and neither does anyone else in my family. We can tell, at the very least, what month it is by what produce is piling up in the kitchen. I kinda love that, though there's days I also hate it. I was normal when we moved here in 1999 and was perfectly happy if the garden produced just enough for us to eat fresh and give away the excess. Over the years, though, as the soil improved and our yields improved, I realized that I could preserve huge amounts of food if I tried. So, I do. I grew up with a father who gardened and canned, and with many relatives who did the same, so putting food by was nothing new to me. It is just that when we lived in town on a relatively shady lot, I couldn't grow enough of anything to have much excess left over after fresh eating. Now, we have endless sun and endless space and I grow too much of everything. My attitude is that too much is good. Dawn