My DH rescued an old 8HP tiller on it's way to the dumpster and revived it. Smoky, noisy thrashing beast that it is, it does till the soil quite well. We can till up grassy areas into rough garden areas in mere minutes. Our next big garden adventure will be to get compost from the mushroom farm and till that in. There are several gardening tools which I've become quite fond of, one of them is a titanium rock climber's hand pickaxe (I'm sure rock climber's have a specific name for these things) which makes a great weeding tool and small digger. It was a dollar at a garage sale and I'm certain I really do not want to know how much someone paid for the thing to take climbing with them but it makes a great garden tool. Another good garden tool we found at a yard sale is a five tine adjustable cultivator which was fifty cents although it did need to have a handle put on it. This hand cultivator gets used a lot after the garden has had the original tilling done with the machine. Small sections get cultivated before being reseeded after their crops have finished. We have a reel push mower with a grass catcher so it is a good way to get mulch for the garden path. There is also the scythe for the taller grass which also makes nice mulch and compost. We are also populating the yard with furniture. Benches scattered about, hammocks, lawn and lounge chairs. It is much nicer and now we can go hang out and be comfortable in the back yard.

I just tried my hand at grafting some Cherry scion wood (Black Gold, and White Gold) onto an old cherry tree in my yard. I mainly grafted to some watersprouts coming out of the trunk. I used cleft grafts for all of them except one, (tried a t-bark graft). I used trowbridge grafting wax to cover all exposed wood and then wrapped it with parafilm tape. I was originally going to cut the trunks at about 2-3feet off the ground, wait a year, and graft to the watersprouts, but I decided to try this first. if these grafts take should I cut the tree down above the grafts? Any Advice?

zafo, this is consistent with what I have found. I've only had one or apparent failure and that plant had a little waterfall hitting it pretty hard right on the crown. I'm guessing the force of the water knocked off the new growth. The roots still look good but no petioles new or old. Note; one loss out of 30 or more plants is insignificant, one might find that much loss out of every 30 plants. I have to believe that we are at or near the end of the time when new growth will start. I just put a new plant received from a friend that had the crown severed into the stream to see if this cut would callous over and heal. I'm continuing this looking for the outside limits and since you don't care if you lose it, please, I need the data. I don't think you will kill it and if the results parallel mine it will go thru the winter right in the stream.

sidpost, did you make up your mind? We got our 30-inch Capital Culinarian manual clean a couple weeks ago and it's awesome. We also live in a condo without a properly vented hood but we got a recirculating hood and pointed the vent "toward" the window -- it's better than nothing, and it's certainly better than the under-the-microwave hood we used to have. To answer some of your questions: "The new model has 3x23k burners and 1x8k burner" - correct, but that 8k burner still boils water really quickly. We haven't tried to simmer on it yet. -"The new model has stainless center grate, while the old model has cast iron center grates" Not sure about this: ours arrived with the old cast iron grates which we were relieved about. -"The new model comes standard with no vertical back trim piece/vent." Not true: ours came with a 4-inch vertical back trim which we installed and it takes up no depth whatsoever. -"They removed the glass cover on the broiler (the distributer told me this makes more space in the oven)" Apparently this is true, but the broiler on the manual clean is gas and has some kind of diffuser plate that makes the cooking very even. -"The igniter seems to be mounted differently -- apparently this is true, too -- it's tucked on the inside rim of the burner rather than outside." Also, you didn't ask but you can get these stoves in any RAL color for an upcharge. We got a dark green.