I have 2 from Rosemania that I have not had any trouble with - so far. One is the small Duromax (Flo Pro) 1.3 gallon sprayer... http://rosemania.com/shopsite_sc/store/html/product490.html sells for $89.95. I like it because it has a shoulder strap and I can zip around and quickly spray all of my roses in about 30 minutes. The other one is the Spotshot 7 gallon sprayer that you already mentioned earlier.... http://rosemania.com/shopsite_sc/store/html/product93.html I have not had any problems with it either. But it IS rather pricey - $400. It is harder for me to maneuver around the garden when it is full - even though it has wheels. I mainly use it to apply the Bayer All-in-One soil drench. It makes applying that so much easier. I use it without the spray nozzle. Here is a link that might be useful: Duromax (Flo Pro) 1.3 Gallon Battery Powered Sprayer

Mimi, Well, sanity prevailed and we didn't get that fourth freezer. All my freezers are full now, though, so I can't freeze much more beyond maybe a couple more gallon bags of jalapeno peppers. I don't know how this happened. It was only a good year and not a great one, and I thought only one freezer would be fully filled, but somehow, they all are. I will confess I am completely and totally exhausted and burnt out and at the point I don't want to step foot in the garden again this month nor am I really in a food preservation mood either. A great sweet potato harvest awaits though, and I am excited about that. Kassie, Ambrosia is a hybrid melon so seeds saved from it will not necessarily give you the same melons you had this year. While you can save seed from open-pollinated, stable varieties and they will (assuming they were not cross-pollinated) give you the same variety, hybrids by their nature don't work that way. Hybrids are created by crossing two (or more) parent plants to get fruit that produce hybrid seed for planting purposes. So, to get new seed for planting purposes, you have to cross those two (or more) parent plants each time to produce F-1 (first filia, or first generation) seed. Plants grown from that F-1 seed will produce seed, but it won't be F-1. It will be F-2 and may be similar to the F-1 or may not resemble it at all. So, if you save seeds from an F-1 plant, you might get great plants and fruit the next year and you might get crap and there is no way to tell in advance. I don't know if the melon you know as Sugar Melon Classic is a hybrid, but there is a melon called Classic and it is a bybrid as well so likely would not come true from seed. When you save any seed, you dry them down to very, very low moisture levels. You need to dry them long enough that you can break a seed in half between your fingers. If the seed only bends and doesn't break, it usually isn't quite dry enough. Oh, and if you had Ambrosia and it was not incredible, you either didn't have the true F-1 Ambrosia melon or had something go terribly wrong because it is one great melon and most people do not get the results from Ambrosia that you had. Dawn

Pam, The general rule of thumb is that boiling water bath canning is used for high-acid foods (including fruit, pickled vegetables in vinegar, tomatoes and sauerkraut (which you ferment first and then can). You use steam-pressure canning for low-acid food like meat, seafood, poultry, most vegetables and combination products that contain both high-acid and low-acid ingredients like chili, soups, stews, for example. An easy way to figure out if you would use a steam pressure canner enough to make buying one worthwhile or if a boiling water bath canner would be more useful to you, would be to buy the Ball Blue Book (or visit the website of the National Center for Home Food Preservation) and check out the recipes. As you read through the recipes, observe whether the ones that appeal to you are preserved via pressure canning or BWB canning. Ironically, I dehydrate a lot more now that I have an oven that does it than I did when I had a dehydrator that sits on the counter. Of course, my oven is bigger than the dehydrator, so I can dehydrate a lot more at once. If you don't dehydrate a lot, you might not want to buy a dehydrator. I generally use my BWB canner for everything that can be safely preserved using the BWB method, and freeze or dehydrate everything else. I know how to pressure can and I have done it, but it generally is a longer process (the processing time for some pressure canned items is over an hour) and I don't do it very often any more. I have 4 stock pots in sizes we refer to as big, bigger, biggest and gigantic. I like my Ball Elite more than I like all 4 of them together because its bottom is much heavier and thicker and heats so evenly and does not scorch quickly. However, the set of stock pots that I have were not really high-quality but they've done the job for many years. You can use any stockpot as a boiling water bath canner and you can purchase canning jar racks in several different sizes so I would think it would be possible to find a canning rack that would fit in a stock pot. You can find a standard sized canning rack on the canning aisle at Wal-Mart, but for other sizes you'd likely have to look at Lee Valley Tools, Canning Pantry, or someplace else similar online that offers more sizes. How you choose to preserve food usually depends on your family's preferences. My family prefers frozen green beans to canned ones, so I freeze all the ones we can't eat fresh instead of canning them. I have a friend whose family prefers the texture of canned green beans, so she pressure cans hers. Different strokes for different folks and all that. You also have to consider your weather and its effect on your electrical power. We rarely have power outages here, being just far enough south to generally escape the ice storms that cause severe and long-lasting power outages across many parts of OK some years. Thus, I fill my freezers with food and know the risk of a power outage that lasts long enough for the food to spoil is incredibly low here. Since you're in hurricane country, you might be better off preserving more food by canning than by freezing unless you have a generator that would allow you to keep the freezer running. For years and years I searched for a salsa recipe that was not as vinegary (or hot!) as my dad's and never really found one we loved (although we ate them all), until I found the Annie's Salsa recipe at the Harvest Forum. It is just ridiculous how much we love Annie's Salsa, particularly when I use Realemon and ReaLime as an approved sub for some of the vinegar. By varying the type of hot peppers I use, I make it with different levels of heat and indicate the extra heat by putting 3, 4 or 5 stars on the jar label. I have found food preservation to be just as much of a fascinating journey as gardening has been. You just don't know where the food preservation activities will lead you. I used to be happy if I made a batch or two of peach and plum jelly, a couple of batches of salsa, a few batches of pickles and some canned tomatoes. Now I can endlessly all summer long until I've completely exhausted myself. When you have technical questions, the experts over at the Harvest Forum can answer any question you can come up with. It sort of amuses me that canning and other forms of food preservation have become so popular again. In the 1980s and 1990s I often felt like I was the only person my age who was canning. If I needed to ask a question, I was calling someone who was old enough to be my grandmother. Nowadays, everyone is canning. While I think that is great, it also means that the stores run out of canning supplies more than they used to. For much of my adult life, people my age thought that I was weird because I preferred to grow our own veggies and fruit and to preserve as many of them as I could. Now, after being "out of style" for so long, I suddenly find that I am right back in style again. Tim and I get a big laugh out of that! Dawn

The book, How To Grow Native Plants of Texas and the Southwest, by Jill Nokes says madrone is "widespread but nowhere abundant on woody, rocky limestone, or igneous soil in canyons or occasionally open plains in the Edwards Plateau and mountains of the Trans-Pecos, also southwestern New Mexico and Mexico south to Guatemala." She says it grows in slightly acid (5.7) to alkaline (8.0) soils with rainfall ranging from 15 to 30 inches per year. Clearly, Arbutus xalapensis is adaptable to pH. In the south of its range the tree is found in the mountains up to 10,000 ft, and in its northernmost range is below 1,800 ft. It grows taller (80+ ft) where it gets more rain, but is less than 20 ft in west Texas. Here is a map showing Texas Madrone in light green and the Arizona Madrone in dark green. By the way, since I'm being so pedantic. The name of the river and park is spelled Pedernales. Local vernacular transposes the r to the first syllable.