Veilchen, I got an email from you on the 5th of April acknowledging receipt of the Redstart pepper seeds, but nothing after that. With respect to the peppers, it must be something in your soil, or not in your soil. Our garden soil is fairly sandy and well-drained. Do your peppers get full sun? We had a bountiful crop of peppers from only three plants. Peppers definitely can do well here in Maine. Of course, the killing frost ended their productive season. But the day before the frost, we harvested all the good ones and it amounted to nearly half a bushel of peppers that had accumulated after the previous picking. The plants were loaded. We have been picking and eating peppers all summer. Lots of stirfrys. Some in salads and some in slow cooker dishes. A few found their way onto pizza toppings. I'm optimistic about the zinnia cuttings. I do have a 3-shelf fluorescent light setup in the little computer room where I am now, and it can accommodate as many as 12 standard 11" x 22" trays. With its heavy duty 5-inch casters, it is 75 inches high. I have two additional chrome wire shelving units in our breezeway that I can press into service as the plants grow larger. Each chrome wire shelf is 2 feet by 4 feet. I have four shoplights over each shelf and the fixtures on the top shelf are overdriven for the light equivalent of 12 fluorescent tubes for just that one shelf. Overdriving increases the light output by at least 50%. Thanks to them, this room is very well lit. I took 8 trays of cuttings, which should be enough to start with. It appears that those that I took two weeks ago are now rooting. I'm still keeping them under humidity domes until they develop better root systems. I lost a few to bacterial rot, but I am now combating that successfully with Physan 20. I'll be applying a few lessons learned next year. One lesson is: when you first take the cutting, rinse it in diluted Physan solution to disinfect it immediately. MM

davidrol, The faucet was an American Standard---about twenty years old. It had been slowly falling apart in various ways for some time. We had been putting up with it until now. I am shocked to hear that the hose could not have been full of holes, because when I emptied out the cabinet and turned on the faucet, the hose was leaking at multiple points along the length---kind of like a soaker hose. Unfortunately, the faucet has been put out in the garbage, so I can't offer a post-mortem autopsy to provide any other answers. As I said, the faucet must be about twenty years old, so I think it provided adequate service for some time before giving out. This was one of the first faucets made with a pull out sprayer instead of one on the side--quite advanced for the time, but archaic compared to modern faucets. The pull out sprayer portion was made of black plastic. You pressed on the top of the sprayer and the water stream would change to a spray and automatically go back to the regular stream when it was turned off. It stopped going back to the regular stream when it was turned off years ago, so we had to turn it on and off manually ourselves. We had a friend who worked for a plumbing supplies distributor at that time and he was able to get us a good deal on it at the time.

Report of prostate biopsy due in a couple of days. Daughter called on Easter morning - the best Easter present. When I suggested that if I got bad news at the biopsy report ... that I'd have a great deal of work dealing with the messy house ... ... and she laughed: said that most folks, informed of limited life expectancy, would be talking of travel ... visiting family, etc., etc. ... ... and with Dad ... it was dealing with messy house, not leaving it for survivors to cope with! Which reminds me ... I've thought for some time that one of the things that I must add to the "Last wishes" folder ... ... is to write down Gardenweb's address, so son can inform folk here of Dad's mouth being closed ... finally! Fingers no longer keyboarding. ole joyfuelled ... who figures that life should be taken seriously at times ... and not too, at times ... P.S .... but one thing's for sure: no one's gonna survive it ... ... what's that you say: that they're figuring ways for folks to live pretty well forever? No kidding! That'll mean - no more kids ... no more grandkids! (of which I have none: end of the line for my branch of the family) And the world, with 7 billion or so, going on 10 ... will become so heavy ... that it'll fall out of orbit, for sure! o j

Schoolhouse - We didn't want another piece of equipment to store and maintain, so we didn't get a leaf shredder. We just use our lawnmower. We take the bags of leaves or barrels of leaves and spread them on the lawn on a sunny day, let them dry out and just mow over them. It does a good job of chopping them enough for our purposes. and then you are just emptying the mower bag where you want the chopped leaves. I always have slip on shoes from LLBean in the garden. Very comfortable for me. My DH can't wear them, he needs better support of a sneaker. He buys a new pair for good and then the old pair becomes the gardening shoe until they are in awful shape and get thrown out. [g]. It's hard to work in the garden if you are not comfortable. We're going to get the leaves done today too. Tons of them on the ground out there. The mower is gong to get a workout. [g] You know Dee, I think you have it right. I don't usually wait to put them down, I skip that step only because I don't find it easy to package them up and store them. But I have had issues with moles/voles sometimes and not waiting does not help with that problem.