I always thought that those machines method of operation was self-explanatory! first, ya start the engine. second, place the blade outside the edge of the sidewalk, or where you want to edge. third: Push the edger along, trying to not touch the concrete. fourth: At end of sidewalk, pick machine up out of the slot you cut, then do the other side. After you have it all edged, turn the machine off, and store away until next time! fifth: If you intend to try to edge a round flower bed, i'd think a spade would be less troublesome. But, you can try it! sixth: watch yer feet and toes! Don't want to edge them, too!

Borderokie, I answered the potato-preserving question on your thread about preserving potatoes. I freeze quite a lot from the garden and usually fill up three freezers in a good year. I can a lot, but don't particularly care for canned potatoes, and I dehydrate a lot because my convection oven has a built-in food dehydration mode. Scott, I found a few rotten ones yesterday and today, and that almost never happens. Like you observed, they were under plants that still had plenty of green and which I met have left in the ground a bit longer, but the heat is making me paranoid. I've been digging as fast as I can by hand, and only have one raised bed of potatoes left to go. I'm 90% done so I am feeling like the finish line is in sight. After carefully hand-digging each bed, I still felt like I was missing some taters, so took my little Mantis cultivator and ran it down the rows and it unearthed quite a few potatoes I had missed, and it didn't cut up many of them either. That's the first time I've used the Mantis that way....to sort of glean my own rows after I thought I was already done. I have been harvesting Candy and Superstar this week too, and took out the last few today. Their necks were soft but they hadn't fallen over yet. However, with all the others harvested, I was worried these last 8 or 10 onions would sunburn so I went ahead and yanked them out. They did really well this year and gave me the biggest onions of the year. We had quite a few that were softball sized. All the other onions had a wide variety of sizes, but the Candy and Superstar were more consistently big. I had volunteer Laura Bush petunias pop up in the onion rows where Candy and Superstar were growing and let them stay there, and those were the biggest onions, so maybe next year, I'll let more volunteer petunias stay in the onion rows. While it is true that the onion and potato harvest are really good, I still haven't forgotten all the trouble involved in dealing with those late frosts, but I'm trying to forget them. We have had to work hard for the good harvest, but at least the hard work paid off.So far, knock on wood, the squash, sweet corn and cucumbers are looking really good too, as are the tomatoes and peppers. I think at the rate we're going, it is going to be an exhausting summer, but in a good way. Now, I'm racing like crazy to get all the corn harvested. I have 5 varieties and I staggered the planting dates as well as I could (and some varieties are separated from others by either distance or barrier plantings or both), but in that way that nature has of ignoring the best-laid plants, all the later plantings have just about caught up with the earlier ones, so as soon as I finish harvesting one variety, it is time to move on to the next. For a long time, you could look at the size of each planting and know which one was planted first, second, third, etc. and then they all shot up overnight and started tasseling and silking and I've never seen corn grow so fast before. Not sure if it is all the rain since May or all the heat, but it is as if the 5 varieties are racing one another to the finish line. I just hope some rain falls occasionally. One thing I haven't missed at all is all the irrigation. I've hardly had to water at all since mid-May, and then only to get seeds to sprout or to water in new transplants. Our last water bill was "normal", which was nice after the way they had skyrocketed the last two summers. :Larry, The way I found the first icky rotten potato was I picked it up to brush the dirt off of it and it pretty much collapsed into a gooey mess in my hand. It was just gross. After that, I watched the sticky soil on potatoes more carefully. Dawn

Here is a trick to get as hot as possible wash for your whites if your water heater is a distance away from your front load washer without an internal heater. Just purge the water line. A similar principle as running your kitchen faucet a minute on hot before running the dishwasher. With the washing machine empty, start it on a hot wash and let water enter the tub until the window steams a bit (it takes mine about 20-30 seconds.) Stop the machine and cancel the cycle. Start it again set at "drain and spin," and cancel it as soon as the tub drains. Then load the machine with clothes, reset for hot wash and you are set. This whole little process takes about one minute and I pretreat any stains on the clothes while I do it, so no time wasted. And you get a piping hot wash for whites. A heater in a washer can heat the water much hotter than what is delivered by the water heater, good for sanitizing laundry. But I wouldn't advise passing up a good deal on a machine without a heater just to get a true hot wash for a load of whites when you can this.

One example: I was buying hanging plants at WalMart and I couldn't reach/take them down to check them out. A young clerk, maybe 18 years old, came to help me. He took several plants down, looked each one over, picking out any fallen leaves, and putting them back if they didn't look good. Finally he settled on two and said he thought they were the best. We chatted all the time. I was surprised and pleased that he did all that. I had potting soil, bird seed, etc. in the cart and he moved everything around so the plants wouldn't get mashed. Then he pushed the cart to my car, and as I opened the trunk, he arranged everything to protect the plants. When he closed the trunk and was ready to go back to the store, I thanked him and told him to tell his mother that she had raised a gentleman. He grinned a big smile and said he would do that! There are still good kids out there. Kindness begets kindness. Sue