Just an update - seed greed won out. I ordered the complete echinacea set and a few other goodies. I kept reading up on all of the different echinacea species and they all fill slightly different growing niches. Augustifolia has a really long tap root and needs constant moisture during the germination - once I save enough seed from it that makes it a good plant to sow high up on our hills where it's all clay and rock. The soil there is baked dry and cement-like except when it's gooey during the occasional rainy winter - perfect for a long tap rooted plant. Sow it during a moist year and that root should help it survive the dry years. Purpurea is fibrous rooted and likes a bit of shade - perfect for the section of woods we were clearing yesterday. What I'll do is garden grow all of the species and then save all of the seeds as a mix for direct sowing out in goatland. The variety of growing conditions out there will favor some species in one place and different species in others. So here's the list of what I ended up ordering: Echinacea Set (9 seed packets): angustifolia, atrorubens, laevigata, pallida, paradoxa, purpurea, sanguinea, simulata & tennesseensis Skullcap seed set (4 seed packets): Baical, Barbat, Downy, Official Sarsaparilla, Wild (Aralia nudicaulis) Persimmon, Wild Form (Diospyros virginiana) seeds Persimmon, Lotus (Diospyros lotus) seeds Bergamot, Lemon (Monarda citriodora)seeds Tulsi, Rama Holy Basil (Ocimum sanctum) seeds, organic Horehound, White (Marrubium vulgare)seeds, organic Cordao (Leonotis nepetaefolia) seeds, organic Looks like I need to stay off of that "all done buying seeds" thread for a while! Lynda

Well that really sucks hope you can get there later this winter. Maybe there will be another show sometime soon. A few of our nights have been cool but the days are great! We BBQ'd game hens on the grill a few days ago. DH grills and uses the smoker on a regular basis and does a great brisket. Its funny, there are eagles and buzzards here that show up and circle around every time when he is smoking the brisket (it smokes slowly all day) LOL! I told him maybe that was a hint that his food stinks...I was just kidding of course, cause it is awesome, but its still funny! I told dh that I am gonna go tour several of the botanical gardens in S. FL in March for my bday. So we are planning to do that then and hope to look at some property then as well.

No worries bud-the minute you land there is the minute you're on my wavelength! Not at all sure how intelligent people of yesteryear ever got such a bad name. What was right and true in 1967 is still right and true, methinks! And the average "consumer" would never catch so much as a glimpse of the way in which yesteryear's "hippy stuff" has been co-opted and repurposed into every-day consumer products. It's so diffuse as to be invisible to most folks, but it's right there in front of our eyes.....and ears. OP and some others in this thread have wondered about landscape fabrics. While there are legitimate uses for this stuff, such as underlying pavers, covering drain tiles, backing up retention walls, I just don't care for it in any of its guises. Wherever and whenever possible, I prefer to not use the stuff. And certainly it is not necessary under a shell path, where the path material is so similar already to the "soil" that any intermixing is of little to no consequence, at least in my world. Another few fresh wheelbarrows full would serve to dress up as needed periodically.

We recently purchased a 800 series Bosh DW to replace the low end whirlpool the builder installed. I am sure there are many different brands/models of DW that will work for you, I only have experience with the low end model whirlpool that the builder installed and our new Bosh. (This is not to put down the whirlpool, I am sure their higher end stuff is very different from the low end model we had) At first my wife mentioned that she didn't think it would hold as much as the old one, like you, we got the impression it was a little smaller inside, then we realized that we could completely remove the silverware box that sits in the bottom taking up room because the DW has a 'third rack' for silverware in the very top of the unit -- this now gives us (I think) more room, and we have been able to fit as much or more into the unit as we could with the older unit. I think the Mieles and Boshs both have this rack - I'm not sure about other brands, it seems to be becoming a popular feature -- if you don't like the big silverware box in the bottom then I would definitely look for this. It works very well in our Bosh. As you mentioned adjustable tines, the Bosh has tines that will completely lay flat for larger items and the middle rack is adjustable up or down by several inches -- good for having lots of pots in the bottom or taller glasses on top. We have kids and have lots of little plastic cups - they do not seem to dry very well - there is supposedly a version of jet dry that works better with plastic but it isn't a big enough problem that I have tried that yet - not an issue for you however as you mentioned you don't have any plastic. Now, the reason I am writing this -- one of the first tasks we used the DW for was to wash about 5 loads of old china and some stainless steel pots and pans that had been left in an abandoned home - with food still on the china plates and burned into the pans -- these dishes had sat almost one year with the food now totally dried onto the plates. The pans (SS) had food burned into the bottoms and had been used on an old electric coil stove so the bottoms of the pans were black - with food that had burned in over the years of use. If I were going to have to clean these manually we would have just tossed the whole lot - but since we had a new DW we thought we would run them through, fully expecting to have to hand wash them after the DW. We threw all kinds of assorted china, and lots of pottery pieces as well into the DW with no regard to whether or not the piece was DW safe or not. When I opened the DW after the first load -- WOW -- the china sparkled like it had been hand cleaned by the most careful of butlers - every piece shined. I wish now that I had taken before and after pictures. It repeated this performance for about 4 loads of china. Then the SS pots/pans. I remind you these had cooked on leftover food that had been sitting for nearly a year, and they came out *almost* spotless, even the bottoms of the pans that had been totally black in color were shiny silver now. I took some advice from others on this forum and purchased some Barkeepers Friend and the few tough spots that were left on the pans cleaned up perfectly using a small scrubber and the BKF. The pans are literally like new! I am sure that other high end DW's could and would do the same, but needless to say we are happy with our purchase. Our Bosh DW is model# SHX8ER55UC/52 We used finish Powerball All-in-One and finish DW Salt finish Jet Dry rinse aid Good luck on your decision! This post was edited by jw1844 on Sat, Jun 8, 13 at 14:26