Yeah, I realized my phal.s were underlit when I read that the leaves should be more like the color of Granny Smith apples! I had always read that they don't need a lot of light, but guess they need more than what I was giving them. I recently had to repot the sad phal. because it fell off the table and came out of the old pot. Should I leave it or put it in a smaller pot? As for the dendrobium, I was using some spray fertilizer that is made from worm castings in H2O that I bought. It is very weak in nitrogen, will that be OK? Should I use this or a granular fertilizer on the phals.? I have used both up to this point. I will try to post some photos if they ever do bloom again! I was starting to think I just didn't have what it took for growing any kind of orchid in AZ.

Agghhhhh! When my new acquired red-fleshed Dragon Fruit produced a stray vine, I promptly cut it and planted it near the mother plant when it was about 8 inches. When I looked at it few days ago, the whole thing was gone! Vanished. I suspected it was one of those darn slugs, I'm sure of it. Fortunately, the mother plant produced another vine that has been planted on a pot and growing lots of roots on the bottom. This time, I'm going to harden and fatten the vine first before I plant it in the same spot near the mother plant.

Shelley, Viva Italia is pretty compact--reaching maybe 3 or 3.5' in height. It doesn't spread out a whole lot, so you can plant them closer together than you'd plant an indeterminate. I prefer indeterminates because tomato plants that are 6 to 8' tall generally give me a larger harvest than those that are 3' tall. It makes sense as there is twice as much plant there with the taller varieties. Heat tolerance, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. What a person considers heat tolerant can hinge, largely, on what level of heat their area has. A hot summer in Pennsylvania, for example, is not the same thing as a hot summer in southern Oklahoma. I have not noticed that Viva Italia is any more or less heat-tolerant than any other paste tomato. For me, paste tomatoes set fruit in hotter weather in the summer than slicers do, and since they do that, I tend to think of all pastes, as a group, as being better heat-setters than slicers and beefsteaks. I don't necessarily notice a huge difference between paste varieties in terms of which one is still setting fruit when my daytime high is 95 versus 98 versus 102, but it is clear to me that they continue setting fruit in July long after the heat and humidity have shut down most slicing types. The spacing of tomatoes is a hugely complicated subject. I vary my spacing from year to year, depending on the variety I'm planting as well as what sort of weather I am expecting. I space them farther apart if it is going to be a wet year because they will get a lot bigger, and space them more closely if I expect a drier year. I space them farther apart if I know from experience that the variety I'm planting grows into big monster plants. I space them more closely if experience has shown me that they tolerate closer spacing. I might space them more closely in a bed that's been super-enriched that year with the addition of tons of compost, and might space them farther apart if that bed didn't get much compost lately. So, I cannot tell you how closely I space tomato plants because I vary the spacing from year to year, and even from one raised bed to another in one year. In general, three foot spacing is fine, and four feet is better for the largest indeterminates. You can space some determinates 2' apart although 3' apart is better. Some years I want to grow too much of everything and cram plants in much more close to one another than I should. What works for one variety doesn't work for another. You just have to experiment with different spacing in different situations until you learn what works for you in your soil and with your temperature and with your moisture levels. With Tess' Land Race Currant, I don't like to plant anything within 4 or 5' on any side of it because it is a monster plant. It would be smarter to just plant it out in the middle of the yard where there's nothing within 8' of it. So, you have to know your plants and how they grow in your soil in the average year in order to determine what spacing works best for you. Closer spacing often gives you fewer fruit per plant, but if it enables you to plant more plants in the square footage you have available to you, you still might get a larger harvest overall. I always plant 4 times as many tomato plants as I need (though never as many as I'd truly love to plant) and I plant them twice as close together as I know I should. Virtually every year I get all the tomatoes we can eat fresh, all the tomatoes I wish to can, dehydrate or freeze, and still have plenty to give away, so I won't change planting that closely....but I wouldn't necessarily recommend such close spacing to someone else because I don't know what their soil, their moisture levels, and their weather will allow. Make sense? In a perfect world, I'd plant my indeterminate tomato plants 4' apart in rows 6' apart, but in the real world, they are lucky if I plant them in 3' apart in rows 2' apart. I'll have a two-foot pathway, then a 4 or 5-foot wide raised bed that has two rows of tomato plants, then another 2' wide path, then another raised bed. I don't even measure how far apart they are. I just eyeball it, though I've done it long enough that I can eyeball it pretty well. What works for me with the soil I have and the fertility level it has reached after 15 years of improvement might not work for someone else with different soil. So, spacing is something you have to master for yourself in your own conditions. Because the heat tends to shut down production at some point in June or July, I try to get all my canning done in June and the first part of July, and then I can just yank out the paste tomato plants and focus on other parts of the garden. Usually by mid-July, I've 'had it up to here" (lol) with canning tomatoes and am ready to move on to making pickles or canning peppers or whatever. Some people in some parts of the country that cannot put their plants into the ground until late May or early June haven't even starting canning tomatoes yet, and there I am already done....and glad to be done. Canning in August when the high temps are 105 to 110 or even higher is not my favorite activity. I'd rather be done with all the canning before we get that hot. Finally, the single factor that plays the greatest role in what sort of fruit set I get in any given year is simply how early I can get the tomato plants into the ground. My average last frost date is March 28 but we usually have a freezing night about once a week through the first week in May. If I waited until May to put transplants into the ground, it likely would get too hot for fruitset before they even had time to flower and set fruit, so I'd have to wait until autumn to harvest tomatoes. Instead, I plant as early as I possibly can, cover up the plants with floating row cover when cold weather threatens, and do whatever I can to get those plants flowering and setting fruit before the heat sets in. This involves lots of guess work and lots of hand-wringing when April brings an Easter snow storm a month after I put tomato plants in the ground. Heat tolerance will carry you and your tomatoes only so far, but you can win the war by planting early, early, early. Gordon Graham liked to put his tomato plants in the ground two months prior to his last frost date in Edmond, and he often had to stack two WOWs on top of one another to protect his tomato plants from late freezes or frosts or snow or sleet. I have a sloping garden so WOWs don't work for me....they just topple over and roll downhill when I fill them with water. I use floating row cover instead, and in some years when early warm weather was followed by snow around Easter, I have built low tunnels of PVC pipe and 6 mm greenhouse plastic and kept the tomato plants covered by the low tunnels for almost 3 weeks. Since our weather seldom cooperates with us, we just have to work around it in order to achieve the garden harvest we want when we want it. My best tomato year in ages was in 2012 when I was able to start putting tomato plants in the ground around March 10th. We still got really hot in June and were really dry in July and August, but the plants had set huge loads of fruit in April and May, so that I was able to just keep harvesting them pretty deeply into summer. A year with an early last freeze like that is pretty rare---maybe once a decade or, in a really good decade, maybe twice. I correctly concluded, based on the January and February weather, that I could plant in March that year and it all worked out. However, you're really just guessing when you take that sort of risk and it can just as easily not work out. If my soil temperatures and air temperatures are in the right range for the tomato plants, I'll plant early more often than not. It is the air temps and the soil temps that either allow the tomato plants to grow or not, not a specific date on a calendar, so I tend to plant when my brain tells me to, not when a calendar says it should be safe. As erratic as our weather is, I almost never do things the same way two years in a row. That is part of what makes gardening fascinating.....it is like playing chess with the weather and you have to use whatever strategy it takes to help you win the game. Tracy, I was sort of assuming that TLC would have BI seeds, but didn't want to guess. Thanks for confirming that. Carol, Thanks for linking the recipe. Dawn

Yes we are not redesigning the house! I agree it might be more "balanced" but the floor plan won't work that way. . . . the protrusion is the dining room (actually only kicks out about 18 inches and the kitchen is behind. The friends porch opens on to the back hall and connects the kitchen and the garage so it is what it is. I think it will be balanced (somewhat) by the fact that our house is on a lot that has never been developed (old YMCA camp) and is very very wooded. so the trees will "hide" portions of the house from the street so you will rarely (ever) look at it head on. . . We also have a semicircular island in front of our lot (part of the subdivision - creates a little slightly curved drive in front of only our lots) which is landscaped very nicely which also hides our house and forces you to drive past the whole thing before pulling in the driveway. In other words, we have lots of "setting" to work with! We are also have some landscape ideas for the left corner to hide those last bump outs (8 feet out - the master closets). What I would really like to do over there is do a wall to the left, cover it with creeping fig, insert old iron gate in the wall and create a secret woodland garden over there but that will have to wait! It is funny - I think if you were to see the elevation of the prior house I think you would think georgian - it is essentially 5 over 4 with a door. The french is in the details. That will be the same with ours: flared roof eaves, french doors, copper gas lanterns (on yoke on the front and on bracket at the friends porch), slate roof (unless our budget goes bust), limestone portico, french colors (painted brick b/c I don't like stucco but flush mortar joints so it will not read as brick - think creamy with taupe shutters), french doors, french brackets on the friends porch and garage - just a twist :. We may have to (if the Architectural review board requires it) put some stone on the house somewhere but if we do it will be on the friends porch only (as if it was where the house evolution began) and highly mortared over so it looks aged. . . still working on this part! I think I am leaning towards louvered shutters also.