Hi, A couple of questions: -Would hardy pricklypear cactus (Opuntia humifusa/compressa) be the only hardy pricklypear to endure zone 6 winters? -Would sweetshoot bamboo (Phyllostachys dulcis) be suitable for zone 6? -Comment: Pawpaw, Asimina spp. (including Asimina triloba), contains the compounds associated with increased risk of atypical Parkinson's; you'd have to it is frequently enough, I would suppose. -Comment: I believe that ginko nuts must be eaten in moderation - I remember reading some materials describing them as toxic to some extent. I wonder if making tea out of the leaves would be a good thing, however. -I know Lucky has some varieties survive his zone 6 winters, but anyone have any varieties of Pomegranates survive zone 6, 6a or 5b? - and fruit? -What are the best Amelanchier spp./Juneberries/Serviceberries w/regards to taste? I think that the only berries I absolutely loved must have been A. alnifolia - 5' thin suckered bushes with dark, sugar-sweet berries; the A. canadensis and A. canadensis x laevis I've tasted are not as good as what ever variety that happened to have been. -Will American hazelnut/filbert & American beaked hazelnut hybridize with the European species? -If I were able to obtain a true American Chestnut selected from a stand that showed great disease resistance, would the taste hold up to the Chinese and/or English varieties? -In comparison to a straight D. virginiana or D. kaki, would there be any taste improvement in the hybridization between American x Asian persimmon? -Would you think that a fully ripe Wild Mandrake/Mayapple would be at all toxic; or would it be risky if consumed in excess? -What are cold-hardy, reliable varieties of Black Mulberry (M. nigra)? [non-hybrids] -In zone 6b, my 'Brown Turkey' Fig never dies back to the ground; I do nothing to protect it. -I purchased a grafted D. kaki 'Saijo' and a friend of mine showed me his orchard containing grafted Asian persimmons - the grafts reject after several years; he explained that if you had an American x Asian hybrid as the inter-connection between the D. virginiana rootstock and D. kaki scion, the graft would last indefinitely. I hope the tree will last, contrary to this - probably won't. -Are the berries of native/American shrub-dogwoods and tree dogwoods (other then the toxic Cornus florida - Flowering Dogwood) really edible? C. sericea/stolon., C. alternifolia, etc.? -Besides Black Oak, any other good oak nuts? -I'll contribute a few I can think of here (edibles): Salmonberry, Thimbleberry, 2 varieties of Ligonberries - American/European, Bearberries, Wild Wintergreen Berries, Berberries spp., (water lily and lotus/parts, arrowhead/parts, pickerelweed/parts, Acorus - sweetflag, not iris!), various man-made blackberry x raspberry hybrids, the man-made 'jostaberry' - ribes spp., a wide array of vaccinium spp. (blueberries, deerberries, bilberries, false huckleberries), Garden Huckleberry (not a huckleberry), varieties of cranberry, Akebia, Orange trifoliate, Crabapple spp., nuts: chinquapin, species of hazelnut/walnut/varieties of hickory (including pecans), forbs: daylily species, various flowers, Monkey Puzzle Pine, Pine Nut species, syrup from Walnut & Maple species, Prinsepia, Asparagus, Globe Artichoke, Jerusalem Artichoke, various greens, various man-made stone fruit hybrids, foxgrape (including 'Concord' & 'Neptune'), purple passionflower, Mountain Ash species, Aronia spp., Western Sandcherry, Buffaloberries, native Silverberries, Sala, Yuka spp., Magnolia virginiana for tea - leaves and culinary, chokecherry, wild black cherry, pin/fire cherry, American wild plum, Chickasaw plum, Beach plum, cloudberry/bakeapple berry, smooth & staghorn sumac, teas from birches, American larch, and others - be cautious, tall & stinging nettle tea, the species of Jujube, Streptopus amplexifolius - I forgot the name - I call it watermelon berry, but it's not the above mentioned Che/Melonberry which is a good one to have. ____ When you think about it, there really are only a few fruits out there: Apple (4 types), brown or green Pear, Cherry otherwise know as Bing or Yellow Cherry, Melon, Apricot, Nectarine, Orange, Grapefruit, Grape, Kiwi, Plum, and Pineapple - if you don't believe me, just go to the supermarket or your local cooperate sponsored fruit consumption advocacy materials. Well, they do have around 5 other rare ones: Starfruit, Date, Fig, and Fruit-roll-up Fruit.

If I could just comment her and maybe get some feedback on this topic. I have a somewhat related issue. I hade my master bath toilet and the cold water feed for the washer in the adjacent laundry room freeze up twice last year. The master bathroom bumps out 18" from the rest of the house. These pipes run up the outside wall and thru the subfloor of that 18" bumpout section. FOr whatever stupid reason, the builder's design didn't put the piping on an interior wall. The attempted fixes last year included adding more insulation inside the soffit of that bumpout, and then adding an second wall vent in the laundry room behind the washer so that warm air could circulate behind the wall, and that was supplemented by encasing the pipes behind there with insluated foam board of some kind. Anyway,the same pipes froze again last night. BY the time my wife got the builder's site foreman over to the house, the pipes thawed out. Toilet bowl filled back up and the cold water runs again on the washer. How that happened overnight is beyond me. It had to be in the teens during the overnight, if not colder. Well, he first tried to blame the frozen pipe situation on the fact that he says we leave our garage door open for great periods of time. ThatÂs crap, IM! How can that seriously be a contributing factor to the pipes in question?? My master bedroom is fully above the garage space (it's not abnormally cold and the proper insulation is in the garage ceiling, according to code), and adjacent is the master bath, and adjacent is the laundry room. The feed pipes for the toilet and washer are located about 14 feet to the side of the garage area on the backside of the house and in the area of the first floor ceiling/second floor subflooring. And he's claiming that cold air from the garage is causing or contributing to these pipes freezing? It's not like we leave the garage open for extended periods of time in freezing weather, and we certainly don't leave it open overnight! The master shower and jacuzzi tub don't freeze up, and they are phjysically closer to the garage than the toilet. GIVE ME A BREAK!!! In addition to that, IÂd also point out the fact that the toilet area of the master bath is directly above the first floor pantry, which is extremely warm, with a floor vent in there and the pantry door closed most all the time. All that warm air in the ceiling of the pantry. What a real jerk this guy is, trying to peddle this lame excuse as the contributing factor to the pipes freezing!! Two different plumbing contractors that have worked for the home builder in the past year, they both said the piping didn't belong on the outside wall. But the foreman says they aren't going to tear up the tile flooring and walls to move the pipes. They want the issue to be shored up via insulating methods. Any comments? The garage excuseby the foreman is bull$hit, right?

I also have been working on my "keeping room"--an 8x11 room on the northernmost corner of our 120 year old wood-frame home in Indiana (It has a window and about 1/3 of the floorspace is the stairwell to the basement. While the stairwell is "old" I am not convinced it is original to the house--it may have been added when a bedroom upstairs was converted to a bath as the plumbing runs through this room behind a false wall and the waste pipe is boxed in (and nicely stained to match the woodwork). This basement configuration is not the best because this is the cold part of our basement (and we haven't done a good job weatherproofing our basement yet) and there's no way to shut off the basement from the laundry room. Since there's plumbing in the basement and this room (it's a laundry room/pantry now, I need to keep my room above freezing even though it doesn't have a heat run (and I wouldn't want to heat it since it's really part of the basement), I need to keep it above freezing. The room had an ancient (1960?) in-wall space heater (from the time when it was a bathroom) which was broken, and since it's a laundry room and there is a lot of fabric in the room, I don't really want a space heater in there. The first thing I did was look at the window--it was 8' tall, missing its storm, rattled and the glazing needed some attention (about 40 years ago!). I realize that's not your problem--is the gas still good in your window? You could also try a thermal curtain on the window if that's not enough. The second thing I did was caulk the trim and patch every crack in the room. Then I painted. The paint wasn't necessary for R-value reasons, but it seems to me the room was "tighter" after I painted...it felt like all the little cracks in the plaster were "sealed" after I sealed, primed, and painted the plaster. Tomorrow we have a windy zero day coming...that's my test to see how much better the room is... my basement has offset rooms also, and they do not match the floorplan of the house above--and 2 of the front rooms are over crawlspace. I think that your next task should be to figure out what's underneath your keeping room since it could be wind blowing... if the floor in there is wood and has "gaps" maybe you can feel a draft (with wet hands)...or you could take a bright work light and point it at the floor, then go down in the basement (at night if it's not too creepy, lol)with the lights out in the surrounding rooms...so that the work light on the floor will be a "beacon" calling you to the room. A more invasive way to do this would be to drill a hole in the floor (in a place you don't want to look at every day, lol! maybe in the joint between two boards or in a knothole where you can patch it later. If that doesn't work, you may want to try to measure from some landmark like your kitchen water pipes...or if you're not afraid to pull up a floorboard (I am!)...that'd be cutting to the chase... The other thing I was wondering is...my keeping room's ceiling is a kneewall attic...it got much warmer in the room when we insulated the floor of that attic. All the rest of my house is 2 stories with a huge attic, but this room (and part of my kitchen) is 2 rooms below and 1 above with triangle attics on top of the 2 rooms below, so they are cold. What's the ceiling of your room?

livewire: Of all the responses I've received, yours really made me think the most. Yes, our house is only 1096 sq ft. And yes, I suspect our house is overpriced. Actually, I think ALL of the houses in my neighborhood are overpriced. Like you said, this is an entry level market but a few years ago it was suddenly a "hot" neighborhood. Prices went up, some of the original owners sold, I suspect others used their homes as ATMs, taking out equity to live beyond their means. I won't lie - we did a little of that too. Then the bubble burst, the economy in our area went far, far south and some people found themselves under water. (Insert rant about short sighted economic practices here.) What we seem to be left with is a slow recovery, a glut of houses, and people desperately trying to recoup some of their money. We have more wiggle room than most and could sell for less but I think our Realtor may be reluctant to list our house at the top of the next lower tier for fear of what it might do to the other values out here. She's asked us to hang on at this price level for a little while longer. You asked me why you should buy my house instead of one with 3x the space for less money. I don't want to bash that other house; it seems nice but ... To start, that 3048 sq ft in the listing is a typo. The house actually has around 1875 sq ft of finished living space -- still significantly larger than ours. It also has a basement, which ours does not, but basements in 100+ year old houses here are usually creepy with partially dirt floors and sometimes even dirt walls. The rooms look great in the listing and I have no real reason to think they won't look good in person, other than the fact that the house sold for only $60K in January 2011. Is this a flip? And, if it is, did they use quality materials in the upgrade? I see what looks like painted paneling in one of the shots and plastic-y wallboard tile in another. Then there's the yard, the garage and the neighborhood. The lot is not only small, it exists only on the side and front. The garage is one car. The neighborhood is ok (really, almost ALL the neighborhoods in our town are good) but it is close to the commercial area and there are partially abandoned industrial areas nearby. It's still bigger though. And it looks pretty nice. And it's cheaper. So why would you want my house instead? My house is 20 years old, not almost 120. It's energy efficient. The systems are all modern - there aren't any surprises lurking like lead paint, corroded cast iron waste pipes or funky hybrid electrical wiring. My house doesn't have a basement but we do have a floored attic (with new pull down stairs) for storage. It's above the partially finished (and well insulated) two car garage that also features a new insulated garage door and wide shelves on two walls that stay with the property. Our less than two year old matching stainless kitchen appliances and high efficiency dryer also go with the property. Their fridge doesn't match and the appliances are negotiable. Where is their laundry? I hope it's not in the basement. Ours is on the main floor. Our house is smaller but even with the overabundance of doorways in the livingroom, it is well planned and lives pretty large for a small family. We don't have much wasted space and we don't have to butt our furniture up next to the entrance doors. Probably the biggest advantage is our neighborhood. It's close to shopping but entirely residential. All but three of the properties out here are single family, and those three are well-kept duplexes. The other house has a lot of multi-family units nearby, not all of them well maintained. Our neighborhood is in flux right now. We have too many homes for sale. But I don't see that as a bad thing long term. The people who are moving out are mostly empty-nesters like me. Soon this neighborhood will be younger, more vibrant and full of kids again. Which is the main reason we bought here in the first place. It is a wonderful area for raising children -- if only I could figure out how to show that in pictures. I'm not trying to be contentious, livewire. I'm really glad you asked the question. It made me think about many of the reasons I like living here. It made me realize that I won't be heart broken if I end up having to stay here a while longer. Thank you!