I was going to start a new posting when someone was talking about plant labels, but searched first and found this and figured that I would add it here instead... hopefully it gets found if people are interested. I found this trick in a magazine, and although the markers aren't as attractive as the commercial ones, when I am doing hundreds of seedlings, I am more worried about cost effective than beauty. Heavy duty plastic knives with either permanent marker or a printed label work wonders. They are way tougher than any commercial plastic markers I have found, go into the ground very easily without breaking, and are quick and cheap! I buy mine at Costco in a box of 600 for around $9. I use them for everything from marking my seedling trays, to marking the actual garden perrennials. Julie

Thanks, ladies! BTW, I'm not reading that book --it was just a prop that was lying out because I tore the cover off. I read somewhere that old Readers Digest book covers make good little canvases and I have a bunch of them so I thought I'd try it. LOL!

No need to reply to this. Just FWIW: What if you dropped the wall behind the stove quite a bit. Kinda like this. How much you could drop the wall would depend on what you had to put behind the stove. On the top of the wall behind the stove, to at least partially conceal the stove's protrusion, you could put something like one of these? (In my mind's eye, I see a collection of copper boxes, not a single one.) I was looking for something that might hold kitchen tools or somehow be useful as well as pick up the sink's copper and be interesting. I found a couple. This one isn't long enough, but you'll get the idea. Here's a detail of the planter: And here is the link: Here is a link that might be useful: hand-tooled copper planter with birds This post was edited by Bellsmom on Sat, Feb 23, 13 at 17:35

Rented a Bosch chipping hammer with a ground rod driver attachment at a local place. Had 3 hours before the rate bumped up to the next level. Worked on rod #2 first. It was well soaked over the past week. But again, heavy clay here, doesn't percolate down far. And lots of sandstone boulders, some the size of cars. So I knew it was a roll of the dice. Managed to get rod #2 down to within 18" of grade. That was all she wrote. Rod #1 had to be repositioned slightly to the left. I got it down about 2 feet in the original spot, but it would not go further. So I used an auto floor jack under the clamp and pried it out of the ground. Moved it and tried again. Got it down to within 8" of grade before stalling out. I tried bending over rod #2 into the trench, but spring back is not letting me get it down flat. So do I cut them off, or is there a trick to bending them all the way down? Yes, learned a lot doing yet another project myself. The info here from you guys helped. If I were to do it again, I would hire someone to do that trench or rent a small trencher if they had one that I could use in the space I was working with. Or, I would have just used rigid or intermediate conduit and not had to dig as far down. BUT, I would have rented or purchased a ratcheting manual pipe threader if I went that route. Trying to get the hardware store guys to do pipe threading was just ridiculous.