hi mark, glad to hear you did well, but i am not surprised, you are a genius at growing anything! now how's that money tree going? get any seeds yet? :) i am NOT a fan of mel bartholowmay (sp?) and his square foot gardening. i know people swear by it, i swear at it! for some things it's ok for others it is a disaster. maybe i did it wrong, any guess what a 4' X 4' square of bush string beans planted 2 or 4" on center looks like? it's a horror show. that said, i'm a big advocate of using 4' sq beds for some things. my garlic did fantastic! i grew garlic in '95 and '96 and it was a small amount, 1st year ok the 2nd was not good so i gave up. this past fall i allocated 4' X 12' for garlic (same as onions). i used my 6" onion planting guide to plant the garlic. i had 10 or 11 rows of music, 5 or 6 rows of german white, 2 rows of georgian crystal, 2 rows of an unknown hard neck i got at a health food store and 2 rows of softneck from stop and shop, the cloves for the sn were HUGE. of the hardnecks, 3 or 4 plants grew funky, maybe 2 or 3 never came up. of the sn, 1/2 did not come up and compared to the hn it did poorly tho ok. i dug it all about 7/25 and dried it in my shed. i trimmed the roots and stalks on friday. i did very well! i did have a problem (only with german white and only 8 or 10 bulbs with about 30+ that are fine) so i went to the farmers market looking for the farmer i bought my garlic from to ask about it but he was not there. so far i have not been able to get him on the phone. i did ask a few farmers why happened and the concensus was that i watered too much. my problem was that only the german white had 8 bulbs that had a white mold or fungus around the stalk within the bulb. the cloves were firm but looked water logged, a sort of translucent pearly grey color. the other 30 or so german white were ok. all the other garlic was ok from what i can discern. i did mulch with 5-6" of 1 or 2 year old shredded leaves, removing all but 1" in late march (which was too late but that did not harm anything). i thought that the leaves introduced the problem but then all the garlic should have had it. these guys told me they do not water their garlic, it rains enough here in the spring and summer to suffice. all the sources i read always said to keep it evenly moist but i 100% discount that now. unless we go for 3 weeks without rain, i will not water garlic again. however, if you saw the size of the hardneck bulbs they were selling you'd laugh. my german white has some cloves that are so huge that 1 clove is 2/3 the size of their entire bulb! i am not kidding you. my music cloves are just about the same tho i think the german white has larger cloves while music has larger bulbs, more cloves per bulb. my bulbs are about 2.5 to 3" in diameter, theirs were about 1.5 to 1.75"! so like i wonder about watering, you know :)! still, one guy told me garlic originated in siberia and they have wicked dry weather so the no watering does make sense. i harvested about 160 bulbs out of about 175 cloves planted. i used 48 sq feet of garden. to compare, i used 120 sq feet for potatoes. i grew 13 superior and 13 yukon gold and got a WHOOPING, SIT DOWN, HOLD ONTO YOUR HAT, 15 pounds of superior and 16 pounds of yukon gold and i use a soaker hose around the seed for adequate water. prior to that, my potatoes were often hollow or very small, so the soaker hose helps. garlic requires only cutting the scape and virtually no weeding with 1" of mulch. digging is easy. potatoes require work to plant, 2 or 3 hillings which is a lot of work in the heat, usually a lot of work killing colorodo potatoe beetles tho i saw only 12-18 this year and no larvae and the digging to get the potatoes is really hard work especially with a soaker hose in there. so i wasted 120 sq feet again! this fall i plan on planting at least 100 sq feet of garlic, NO potatoes, i may plant 125-130 sq feet. i plant 6" on center. i know from experience that if you crowd onions you get small bulbs. my red wings and copra are much larger now that i space them 4" on center vs the 3" i used to use. i suspect garlic is the same. i gather you used 6' too using the crw? storage is something only time will tell. i don't know what to make of the taste of all my garlics. georgian crystal is mild. the others are not like grocery store garlic which is HOT and SPICY. it is what i am used to. some of my cloves have been hot but most are so so. not sure what to make of this. but it is organic, it will be free once i grow enough to plant and eat for the whole year. this is why i need to buy garlic cuz i'd have to plant too much of the harvest based upon the amount i want to plant/grow next season, maybe 3/4! the guy i buy from charges just $4 a pound and he is organic!!!!! one of the guys i talked to at the farmers market told me he wholesales his to whole foods and he is organic and he gets $6.50 a pound, wholesale!!!!! so i gotta find the guy i dealt with last summer for about 30 pounds of garlic and that'd be $120! but i think that would allow me to have enought to plant and eat all year. yes, it was very successful and i am very pleased with the results. garlic is easy to grow. the hardest part is cutting the scapes when it's 90 and humid but anything is difficult under those conditions! as a side note, ever grow grandfather ashlock (i'm on tomatoes now)? i tried it this year and it is 1 heck of a fantastic tomato rivaling earl's faux! tom's yellow wonder was the only other new variety i grew this year and it too is quite good. i am not a fan of yellow tomatoes but tyw is very good. the 1st 1 i ate i would have thought it was a red tomato it had such good flavor. they are huge too 1 to 3 pounds. tom

This year has been my first success with cucumbers. They started flowering when less than 10 inches tall. I think the variety is a shorter, space saving variety though as they haven't gotten more than 2.5 feet long. My minnesota midget cantaloupe also started blooming when little.

roguejim, the statement "The primary way to attract Beneficial's is to provide a habitat they can live in and that means food, shelter, and water." is accurate. However, we can manage any or all the elements of a habitat. There is an axiom in the profession that runs, "By the time you see the first insect, there are at least a hundred". It applies to both prey and predator. Seldom have I seen an aphid problem without seeing that (often solitary) adult lady bug on the move. Given time, the predator(s) will bring things under control but the plant or hedge will not look pretty ... and every self-respecting horticulturist will want to mitigate that. So it is back to the (IPM) tool box. It is possible to maintain the 'good looks' by selectively pruning. The "survivors" will entice the predators to stick around. Of course, selectively pruning. is subjective - to the 'eye of the beholder'.

You're absolutely right, Friedajune. The right way is the way your mother, may her memory be a blessing, made it! And the way my father does. We treasure every Pesach he's with us to make it. I found a kind of dark picture of the table, though not the food (that's the box for the books in the background). The tablecloths come with the tables and chairs so I get a different color every year. It's so warm and Springy this year, hence the pink: I did make the pastry cream and raspberry sauce, finally, and put together the douzaine de crêpes (is that the right way to say it? It's certainly not the mille crêpes I was originally aiming for). The top crêpe in the package turned into a frisbee, but the rest were just fine, but only 13. Given that they had some problems to start with. Judicious stacking and patching actually made for a fairly round cake, I used a bit of pastry cream to ice the sides to make it look better, then ringed the whole with raspberries and edible flowers. There may be unevenness, and some overbrowning, and it's more cheesecake high than cake high, but it tastes great, and the raspberry sauce is awesome. Using arrowroot starch was expensive because I didn't have enough and had to buy it in a little glass jar, rather than the pound bag. Sigh. It made for a divinely smooth custard, however, that was still strong enough not to ooze under the weight. I took it to a family dinner, and this is the remains on its way back in to the fridge.