I keep a small 4 litre pail by the kitchen sink. All of my coffee grounds, egg shells, veggie scraps, mouldy bread and other non dairy, non meat scraps go in there. I only put a tiny amount of this into my worm bin at a rate that they can handle. The rest goes outside to the compost bin at least every week. I never store food for the worms as there is always an endless supply of fresh scraps for them. Since I use small pieces of corrugated cardboard for bedding, the worms will survive for months and months just on their bedding alone. The worms don't actually eat the bedding and compost scraps; they feed on the mould, fungus and other organisms that are breaking down the bedding and the kitchen scraps. I add a bit of powdered limestone to the bedding as the worms use this "grit" to grind up their food. (Red wigglers don't have teeth for chewing). The limestone also helps to neutralise acids in the worm bin. I do NOT bring food for the worms back in from the outdoor compost pile as this can be a source of some nasties that I don't want inside my home or in my worm bin. At the first "whiff" of rotting material (like the inside of your garbage can on a hot day), my pail of kitchen scraps goes outside to the compost pile. If this smell should ever come from my worm barrel, it means I'm feeding them too much and the moisture content is too high. It's better that the worms have too little food as opposed to too much. The key thing to me is the temperature and the moisture level. I think that the commonly used phrase, that " A worm can eat it's own weight in food scraps every day" is somewhat misleading. Most vegetable scraps are mostly water and the idea that one pound of worms will eat one pound of lettuce (for example) in a day does not hold water ( Yes...... pun intended). Most of the vegetable matter simply loses it's water content into the bedding and to evaporation. Besides, it takes several days for the scraps to decompose to the point where there is food in a form that the worms can process (digest).

Magic secret #1 about tomatoes: Smaller transplants that are healthy and in the proper growth phase will outproduce larger transplants 2 to 1 or even more. Why is this? Tomatoes go through several phases of growth from the initial soft stem seedling to a rapid growth phase and then to a reproductive phase. If you set out transplants that are already in the reproductive phase, they don't grow as large or set as many flowers as the smaller plants. By comparison, the smaller plants will go through a rapid growth phase where the plant produces vigorous leaves and stems before it sets blossoms. The result is a much bigger plant that keeps expanding as it supports an increasing fruit load. Should you throw out the small seedlings? Not on your life! They will be the most productive tomatoes you have. The comments above re seedlings being too close together are correct. The varieties you named are indeterminate. They will produce best if they have at least 3 feet between plants. The tomato growers mantra should be Small But Healthy! Fusion

Lord, I hope Twinkie doesn't hear this. He talks all the time about how crazy people are getting and how you could just be sitting in a restaurant and somebody come in and start shooting. (Which is true but I try to downplay it.) There's no sense worrying about it all the time. On the other hand, it DOES happen and it sure is horrible when it does. Those poor families - to have to be notified that their relatives were just out minding their own business, doing nothing wrong, and now they'll never come home!

Thanks so much for the help! Using the search + zipcode (which I read about first) I did get more appropriate results. Most were places that deal in custom windows, but after skimming through all the websites, one place did turn out to be a store/workshop that also sells glass and supplies! ItÂs only about half an hour away in Skokie. It shows up on the Google map one too. Odd that my other searches turned up window dealers even further away but not this place. I see thereÂs one in Naperville too but thatÂs too far. I canÂt believe I did not know about these tricks before. Better late than never! GinGin, IÂm in Buffalo Grove. Where are you? The Skokie place (Stained Glass Emporium) does say on their website that they carry fusable supplies. I took a workshop in fusing at NIU and the teacher got all her supplies from Ed Hoy in Warrenville. But thatÂs pretty far for me and I have never been there. I think it is all wholesale too. I liked fusing (I used to do a lot of enamelling) but decided I needed to work with the equipment and supplies I already have before starting on a new tangent.