I grow veggies - that's how I got started as a gardener, and I can't imagine summer without a veggie garden. Most years I do some freezing of tomatoes and pesto for the winter. I also put onions and potatoes into the root cellar and grow more garlic than we can eat in a year, even though we use garlic in relatively large quantities. I also grow leeks and have begun experimenting with heavy mulching in the garden in the late fall and then digging them in milder winter weather and early spring. Last winter they wintered well, though the snow was so deep I couldn't dig them until much of the snow melted. This winter I don't know how it will go, since they weren't as heavily mulched and we had some relatively cold weather, 0 degrees, with no snow. Prior to last winter I tried storing them in the cold cellar or the fridge, but it never worked too well. I'll eat most veggies, but my husband is like Dee in that he doesn't like many veggies, and except for onion family vegetables, unfortunately most of what he does like are warm weather veggies like peppers, eggplant, and tomatoes, so they aren't good storage or winter crops. I'd still like to try wintering over root veggies and some greens in a hoop house/cold frame at some point. I have a few blueberry bushes and cranberries, but haven't been successful with strawberries (the chipmunks get them just before they ripen!), so I get them as well as tree fruits from local farmers. Around here it's quite difficult to successfully raise tree fruits like apples or peaches without a heavy duty deer fence and the orchards use IMP to reduce their pesticide use to a minimum while still getting quality fruit, so I'm OK with that. Good resources for those who want to grow winter crops in cold frames or unheated greenhouses are Eliot Coleman's books, such as 'Four Season Harvest' or 'Winter Harvest Manual' which are great as far as when to plant crops for winter harvest, what can be grown successfully, etc. At some point in the future I would like to try this.

Who told you the 3-days-at-72-degrees bit? There's a lot of bad tomato folklore out there.... AFAIK, the pollen becomes non-viable if daytime lows are 90-95 degrees and nighttime lows are either below 55 or above 75. There is some variation by variety (and cherries will set at higher temperatures). The FAQ says "Fruit set will resume when temperatures moderate." Why are the blooms on my tomato plant dying and falling off? The only high-temperature effect I'm aware of is on the pollen. So the plant should continue to make flowers, and those flowers should set fruit when temperatures are more favorable. [Have you ever experienced a hot summer where tomato plants continued to grow but no longer flowered?] Now, high humidity is another factor: it also makes pollen non-viable. I don't know the figures for overly-high humidity. And on a stressed plant, tiny, developing blossoms will often drop for whatever reason (I assume mostly either inadequate water or the plant has already set as many fruit as it can take care of).

I'm sorry about your living conditions. It sure sounds like a nightmare. Are you able to live on your own--or maybe with just one roommate so you could help each other out? Try talking with your social worker (in a calm and gentle way) and see what alternatives you might have. I sure hope you can get some help. Wishing you good things!

I think it is overpriced myself, but I don't know what the real estate was worth at the time and the construction is steel like a large commercial building so its hard to know what construction costs were. Stylistically, there is enough about the exterior of this house that I don't care for that is not made up for by the glass box interior. The immediate neighborhood was awful up to about 5 years before the house was built: not dangerous awful, but a number of unnocupied properties in semi-open condition. (Well "dangerous" is relative...some six hundred arrests in a nearby block per year and an infamous murder nearby in the decade right before this house was built--but it didn't keep regular folks out of the neighborhood)But Philadelphia is unusual in that huge houses were built on the East West Streets, houses for merchants etc. were built on the number streets and in between, houses as smally as 1/10th the size of the mansions occupied the little alleys in between. So from the beginning the demographic has been really mixed. A great-Aunt of mine lived across the street where I am now in the 1960s when the neighborhood was a slum. She worked, she lived on the remains of an inheritance, and she was respectable. She just locked her door at night and stayed in. I still have neighbors that lived here back then--thats just how it was. So it had some precedent that this house was built in the early regentrification of this block. However, the block got a bit better, and then a series of events made it stall, and now its probably slightly worse then when the house was new. As is typical, some of the current hottest restaurants in town are just steps away, just not immediately surrounding this house. Philadelphia has always been full of strange juxtapositions, and this is just one of them.