I like your feather quilting on the Fall quilt. I would like to learn how to quilt the feather design with some sort of confidence. I can barely DRAW it on paper, much less quilt it! Need to practice more. You and your friend are both very talented! Love the colors in the last quilt. Julie

Here are my last tips for this first week of November. The tips y'all have shared are just great. Thanks for contributing. This tip for storing berries is wonderful. When get home from the grocery store, immediately rinse blueberries, strawberries and raspberries in hot water, drain and put in a glass jar when dry. Instead of a 24 hour life they can go almost a week with their flavor, texture and appearance intact. They'll keep as long as a week; it's amazing, but they last. Harold McGee To keep grapes juicy, plump, and tasty for at least twice as long do the following: As soon as you get them home from the store remove them all from the stems, wash thoroughly, and seal in a plastic container. The grapes will last for several weeks without any loss of taste or texture. Silpat Cooking Mat -use it for forming dough on, instead of a floured counter or a bread board. As long as you handle the dough with oiled hands, no bench flour is necessary and clean-up is q & e. -pour that holiday peanut brittle on it and it doesn't stick. Great for making small rounds of peanut brittle. -line a jelly roll pan with a Silpat and bake meatballs or sausage balls on it. The grease wipes off and the meatballs don't stick. Take an ear of corn and stick it into the hole of a Bundt pan, then slice the corn off into the pan. Never put tomatoes in the same drawer with your other produce. It gives off a gas that makes produce ripen too fast. If you use non-stick frying pans, never use Pam type sprays on them. The propellent eats into the coatings and ruins them. Instead, add a drop of oil and use a brush to spread it around. Microwave sliced fresh mushrooms on paper towels just until they give up their water then squeeze them just a little. Then fry them in butter and they brown nicely and quickly without that moisture you always get in the frying pan. Whenever you need oat flour, you can make your own by blending oatmeal into a fine powder in your blender or food processor. It takes approximately 1-1/2 c. of oatmeal to make about 1-cup oat flour. After buttering the bread for grilled cheese sandwiches, press the buttered side into some grated parmigiano or pecorino before grilling. It totally adds to the texture and flavor. Crispy cheesy salty bread. If you want the yolks of your deviled eggs to be perfectly centered, stir the pot a few times in the first moments they are beginning to simmer. Purchase a whole bone-in rib roast when it goes on sale the day after Thanksgiving for an obscenely cheap price. Then it can be butchered into a Christmas rib roast, several steaks, have bones for beef stock, and scraps for grinding meat. Greens - The grit problem was brilliantly solved by the Mississippi Delta Chinese families. Put greens of any kind into a net bag like stockings are washed in and put it in the washing machine for a quick rinse in cold water and a spin. Works great.

Well in fact, we do have an "orangerie", which is generally another name for a conservatory, as I learned from the British firm that built ours. However, it is open on one side to our indoor pool. The indoor pool air is kept dry through the use of an enormous piece of eqp called a Dectron. It is the reason no one ever feels any humidity when they come into our house, despite the indoor pool. But, it makes it very hard to grow plants in orangerie/conservatory/greenhouse. We have a disco ball in there and hula hoops instead, LOL. It's a great place for the kids to play loud music that we can't hear!

Update: Eucalyptus deglupta that I raised several dozen of and only this past winter I planted 6 of them into the ground at an elevation of around 150 m above sea level, into a poor "soil". They did not grow too large in their pots over the past 5 years. After clearing an acre or so of shrubby woods with an excavator I was struggling to find some soil to purchase in order to cover the field. The soil I covered it with by just a barely a foot or so is very poor and has a lot of volcanic "gravel" in it mostly, stones and clay. It is dug up from down deep so it has got no organic matter yet. Finally the 6 x "Arcoiris" (Rainbow Eucalyptus) are in the ground and are slowly growing. Some showing deep, red foliage and some green foliage. The bark is still mostly light brown with some opened up patches of light green. They should show more colour when the trunks grow to at least 10-15 cm thickness if they will have tropicals colours here at all. Will see how their bark will look after several more years, whether all brownish and light green or will show some more tropical colours such as orange, red and especially blue. I will post an update then and now here are some photos of the pot-grown ones after 5 years (they grow very slowly in the pots): Anyone growing these in Portugal or Spain please post up close photos of the bark of larger E.d. (Eucalypto arcoiris) trees if possible.