Chris W says; How deep should you plant a hosta? What are the consequences of too shallow? Too deep? What is the "right" depth for a hosta? Plants that are too shallow get heat stress faster, drought stress faster, and can get cold damage over the winter if that crown gets exposed. Deeper plants tend to stay dormant longer which can be important with frost sensitive plants like the fragrant ones. If you have hostas coming back smaller with smaller leaves, check if you can see the crown. If so it is too shallow. Plants that are too deep will need to grow up closer to the surface. Eyes may emerge further out from where the main clump was located so that you no longer have a tight clump. Stems may rot a little easier if they get buried in summer by mulch. I always try to get the "right" depth, but I would much rather err on the side of planting a little too deep. Plants will establish the "correct" depth the very next season if they were too deep. For example if you plant a crown at 3" and it wanted to be 2" you will probably never even notice that it had to grow up that extra inch below the surface before producing a new eye. However, plants can take several seasons to grow deeper if they come back at all when planted too shallow. In our rows we will often find that the largest hostas are the ones that were planted a little deeper than the rest. TOO deeply and we will see that the eyes are spaced a little further apart but are still usually the largest plantlets. When we have a plant that is struggling we find that the crown is often right at or slightly below the surface. We also find that moles often tunnel underneath plants causing them to rise up closer to the surface, plus creating an air pocket under the plant. Those plants dry out in the summer and struggle over the winter. The only time that depth may pose a problem is if they were buried or sank during the season. If a hosta was growing at a depth of 1" from the top of the eyes/dormant buds to the surface and was then planted at a depth of 3" you might get some stem rot. By early to mid summer most stems are hardened off to the soil and can tolerate a little covering but you might get rot problems during the heat of the summer. Because of this we prefer to topdress shallow hostas in the fall after they are starting to go dormant. In most cases it is just better to get the depth close when planting and the hosta will find its way the next spring if you were off a little. Two examples of plants finding the right depth after being planted too deep: 1) A Hosta 'Riptide', one eye, was planted last summer with the crown at a depth of 3 1/2". This particular eye emerged last, but by mid summer the eye was slightly larger than other plants around it. I dug it up and it had grown an elongated stem out of the main eye and then established a new crown at a depth of 2", measured from the top of the dormant buds to the soil level. Roots were at about 2 1/4". Our remaining plants were only at a depth of about 1" but should have been planted up to 2" deep without causing any harm. 2) A Hosta 'Pineapple Juice' was noticed in the growing area with 6 eyes spaced very far apart. It was planted last fall. Upon digging it I noticed that it had been planted too deeply, and possibly at an angle. The deepest eye from last fall was at a depth of 4 1/2". The shallowest was at a depth of 1 1/2". All of the eyes produced elongated stems and every single one produced a new eye at a depth of 1 1/4" with roots around 1 1/2". So in this case the proper depth would have been about 1 1/4". Butch adds; Nothing I'm about to say disagrees with Chris but there is a method to make it easier. Choose the depth you feel is proper then mulch when you've finished planting, the plant can find its own depth with out much suffering. Mulch will not overcome way to deep but help and mulch will absolutely overcome to shallow. Mulch is creating new soil, building it up slowly and the plant will find its own proper level. Two things mulch offers is insulation, summer and winter and air. Air is a little discussed subject and just as important as water, sun and food. Ive found that hosta roots do not need as much air as most believe but the crown area does need sufficient air. The air around the crown is consistent with hosta growing in the wild in Japan.

I'm not sure how you set up your backup drive, but mine only backs up files periodically according to a schedule. The schedule I chose was to backup at 3am when I'm not using it. In my experience, when the backup drive is copying files from the main hard drive, the main drive might respond a tad slower. However, being on the Internet and surfing to things like Facebook shouldn't really be affected unless you are trying to upload pictures, etc., while the backup is running, especially since it sounds like you have a newer computer with probably adequate RAM. You may coincidentally have something else going on.

I am having the toughest time trying to convince my dh that we don't need to set up our new TV in the one bedroom that the four of us are living in. (in-laws basement spare room). You should see this room, it's packed with stuff. It is jammed packed w/ everything that I, dh, 2 kids and one dog need and the last thing it needs is a bigscreen TV...I guess this is the downside of shopping early :) he is really grieving about it. One of the things we did when we started this whole building process was budget in the toys we wanted for our new home. We made a big wish list of about $20,000 worth of items and prioritized them. As we upgraded the actual house we have deducted the $$ from the wish list that we were willing to sacrifice so now we're down to about $10,00 for our toys. Of course, we never even considered putting the TV on the chopping block. Tragusa "By the way, My wife was having morning coffee on our back porch this week and a coyote came into the back yard. Neat." OHHHHH I can't wait!!!!!

I have a suggestion regarding garbage bins. We have our garbage picked up twice a week. We started with one garbage can, as our family grew from 2 to 4 we added a third can. I had noticed our house getting cluttered and producing even more trash. If I did a good clean-up, I didn't have enough space with only 2 garbage cans. So we bought a third. As the years went by, hubby and I retired, kids went off to college and their own apartments, and we started to actively recycle garbage- putting a compost pile in for our vegetable garbage, sorting out and recycling plastics (even plastic bags), metal, glass, newspapers and cardboard. Now it's just two of us and we barely fill one can each garbage day. But it's nice having a couple of "spares" in case I go on a gigantic cleaning and toss-out binge (or not).