The fruits of your labor will be rewarded by doing the so called boring stuff first. Instant gradification for this project will come with great disappiontment. So you are on the right track. If you want those roses sooner try growing in the large pots as you say. Put in an area that won't get in the way of the project area. You can also dig holes and place those pot in the holes to be lifted and planted when ready. Some can be placed above ground level and some placed in dug holes. Kind of a win win. Don't forget to use annuals to also give great color and interest during the growing season. It is a compramise you may beable to live with. I agree get pics of before during and after. Watch it evolve I think you will be suprised and quite pleased with the results.

I got a free sample of Bobbi Brown Moisturizing (?) Cream Compact foundation. Didn't think I'd end up liking/using it. Though the samples were available in different shades, it was not available in the lightest one, which I'd assumed I'd need. I got it in the next lightest shade though, which turned out to be a perfect match color-wise. Also, I have oily skin (in the T-zone), so tend to stay away from anything with "moisturizing" in the name. I've been using Stila Illuminating Powder Foundation for a number of years now, and couldn't imagine using anything "heavier" or with more coverage, but free is free! I was very pleasantly surprised. I apply it with a BB makeup brush (travel sized--another freebie I'd gotten years ago, but had never used), and use very, very little of it on the brush. It blends in well, is very lightweight (esp since I use so little), yet evens out skin nicely. I dust over it with some sheer powder foundation and/or translucent setting powder just to mattify it a bit (and absorb any skin oils). I really like it. I tried the oil-free version in the store (no samples) and it didn't look nearly as nice (color match, blending, skin itself--all looked blah). The Moisturizing version seems to hold up very well, and I actually look less shiny throughout the day than when I used the powder foundationn alone. I apply Smashbox's Photo Finish Primer (the Light version) before applying any make-up, which I find helps, too.

I would think that because they died in the water maybe they felt it was appropriate to 'bury them at sea'. And, the sisters were probably very close so why not buried them together (especially since they also died together). I guess the single sister could have laid next to Aunt Mildred and cousin Pete or even by herself in a nice plot, but I would bet she would prefer to be buried with her sister. I remember thinking it seemed odd at the time too, but the more I thought about it the more I thought it wasn't all that weird and was probably the best thing to do.

I haven't seen any concentric cracking or radial cracking yet, but fully expect I'll see some soon. There's just been too much rainfall in a relatively short period of time for the tomatoes to not crack. I expect to see a lot of weather checking on the fruit as well. I haven't stepped foot in my garden in two days, so every tomato out there may be cracking at this point and maybe I just don't know it. With roughly 20" of rain in the last 30 days (and about 14.4" of that in May), the real shock is that the fruit's not cracking. After the rain stops falling this morning, I'll go out and see what I find. Brandywine is prone to crack pretty badly anyway, so I am not surprised that yours are cracking but I hate to hear that it is happening. I had a huge Brandywine harvest last year but don't think this year will be the same. I'll probably look back at the end of the year and regret that I "wasted" garden space on several Brandywine plants. Maybe we'll get lucky and summer will be drier than spring has been and our Brandywines will manage to set some fruit that won't crack. In an excessively wet and prolonged rainy period, it is hard to avoid some sort of cracking, though some varieties are more prone to it than others. You can do everything right in terms of what the tomatoes need, but then if Mother Nature decides to dump 6 or 8 or 12" on your garden in one day, there's nothing you can do about that, and we're all in the same boat this year. With concentric cracking, I leave those tomatoes on the plant until/if they start growing mold in the cracks. Often, with concentric cracking, the plants form scar tissue and heal over and the fruit can be harvested and eaten eventually. I don't know if that would happen with concentric cracking under the current conditions because there's not enough dry days for the skin to scar over and heal, and with rain falling several days a week, it seems more likely the cracks will just widen and then start growing mold. With radial cracking, my experience has been that the fruit won't heal at all and I might as well remove the fruit when I see the cracks. In an odd way, it is better to be perpetually wet in terms of cracking as opposed to swinging back and forth from dry to very wet to dry again, so what would help most would be some consistency. Often, tomato fruit crack as they near maturity and the epidermis loses its ability to expand rapidly, so heavy rain following prolonged dry weather can be harder on tomatoes than continually heavy rain, up to a point. With continually heavy rain, the tomato skin seems able to keep stretching more, more and more, until it just reaches a point, genetically, where it cannot do it any more. In the kind of weather we're seeing now, I don't know if there are any tomatoes that won't crack. Even varieties that are known to be fairly crack-resistant likely will crack over the next few weeks because there's just too much rain falling constantly. Brandywine is a heart-breaker, but it is worth the heartbreak to have a chance to eat a few Brandywines during the tomato season.