Borderokie, I answered the potato-preserving question on your thread about preserving potatoes. I freeze quite a lot from the garden and usually fill up three freezers in a good year. I can a lot, but don't particularly care for canned potatoes, and I dehydrate a lot because my convection oven has a built-in food dehydration mode. Scott, I found a few rotten ones yesterday and today, and that almost never happens. Like you observed, they were under plants that still had plenty of green and which I met have left in the ground a bit longer, but the heat is making me paranoid. I've been digging as fast as I can by hand, and only have one raised bed of potatoes left to go. I'm 90% done so I am feeling like the finish line is in sight. After carefully hand-digging each bed, I still felt like I was missing some taters, so took my little Mantis cultivator and ran it down the rows and it unearthed quite a few potatoes I had missed, and it didn't cut up many of them either. That's the first time I've used the Mantis that way....to sort of glean my own rows after I thought I was already done. I have been harvesting Candy and Superstar this week too, and took out the last few today. Their necks were soft but they hadn't fallen over yet. However, with all the others harvested, I was worried these last 8 or 10 onions would sunburn so I went ahead and yanked them out. They did really well this year and gave me the biggest onions of the year. We had quite a few that were softball sized. All the other onions had a wide variety of sizes, but the Candy and Superstar were more consistently big. I had volunteer Laura Bush petunias pop up in the onion rows where Candy and Superstar were growing and let them stay there, and those were the biggest onions, so maybe next year, I'll let more volunteer petunias stay in the onion rows. While it is true that the onion and potato harvest are really good, I still haven't forgotten all the trouble involved in dealing with those late frosts, but I'm trying to forget them. We have had to work hard for the good harvest, but at least the hard work paid off.So far, knock on wood, the squash, sweet corn and cucumbers are looking really good too, as are the tomatoes and peppers. I think at the rate we're going, it is going to be an exhausting summer, but in a good way. Now, I'm racing like crazy to get all the corn harvested. I have 5 varieties and I staggered the planting dates as well as I could (and some varieties are separated from others by either distance or barrier plantings or both), but in that way that nature has of ignoring the best-laid plants, all the later plantings have just about caught up with the earlier ones, so as soon as I finish harvesting one variety, it is time to move on to the next. For a long time, you could look at the size of each planting and know which one was planted first, second, third, etc. and then they all shot up overnight and started tasseling and silking and I've never seen corn grow so fast before. Not sure if it is all the rain since May or all the heat, but it is as if the 5 varieties are racing one another to the finish line. I just hope some rain falls occasionally. One thing I haven't missed at all is all the irrigation. I've hardly had to water at all since mid-May, and then only to get seeds to sprout or to water in new transplants. Our last water bill was "normal", which was nice after the way they had skyrocketed the last two summers. :Larry, The way I found the first icky rotten potato was I picked it up to brush the dirt off of it and it pretty much collapsed into a gooey mess in my hand. It was just gross. After that, I watched the sticky soil on potatoes more carefully. Dawn

The chairs are entirely different story. I bought them off some antique dealers site on ebay from New York. Got all them for like $125 but it cost me a total of almost $600 by the time shipping factored in. Still a deal in "chair world". They had some hideous old gold brocade fabric on them. I refinished and recoverd them myself. They are two arm chairs too. DH was so worried that they wouldn't go with the table. "How can you know" he asked? And I told him... " I just know they'll be perfect... trust me". When they delivered them it was funny. they came at night when my husband 60's style band was practicing at night at my home. These boys have been together for over 40 years... since they were kids. Anyways, the delivery man was a Jamaican man who was not familiar with the music. So I told him to stay and have some dinner. (Had made baked ziti for the boys). "what's baked ziti" he asked. Well I sat that young man down to a big plate with home made bread.He devoured it and kept asking... "this is called baked ziti"... "seconds please"... He got up and sang some wiht the guys and was dancing. I gave a big fat tip and he left a happy kid. DH will no longer question me on my choices at all. He'll say, I never would have picked those colors/whatever... but it looks tremendous.

YELLOW, The patio is AWESOME! Are you planning to cover the entire surface or just the "path"? We, too, have a lot of leftover floor tiles and this would be a FAB way to use them. Are you a Texas girl? I'm only asking because our local contractor said we should use porcelain tiles on our patio because of our weather. I don't wanna (too difficult to cut). Love your blue star!

If you post pics as a comment and they load sideways, you can edit the comment by deleting, and reloading. The pics will most times straighten up. If they are in the OP, then I'm not sure they can be edited. You can re-post them as a comment if you like.