crabjoe, welcome aboard, glad your garden is doing well. Now's the time to begin thinking about next year's garden. Set up a compost station and make yourself some nice soil amendment. Also this fall gather all the fallen leaves you can and bury them about a foot deep right in the garden. Use alot, around a foot thick. It'll look rather mounded if you use enough but by spring it'll be compressed and black and rich. Next spring turn in some composted, not fresh, cow manure and mix it with that layer of leaves that will have worked down. Add some blood meal, bone meal and greensand if you can get them (follow directions) and you'll have the richest soil in the neighborhood. If you've got compost going then use it as a mulch around the plants after they come up. Don't mix sawdust, wood chips, unfinished compost, etc. in the spring - it eats up too much nitrogen at that time. Believe me, if you feed the soil you've fed your plants. Oh, it's a good idea to have your soil tested if only to determine Ph. It's great to have it at 6.5 but not absolutely necessary. Best Regards.

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

Thanks John. The Dorset Naga and Seven Pot were started from seeds you kindly sent me. wickedmick. thank you as well. I started from seed on Jan. 5 in 72 cell trays. When the got their second set of true leafs they were moved to four inch pots. They were moved to their present 5 gallon pots two weeks ago. Four more weeks until I start the hardening off process. It can't come soon enough! Bill

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!