A lot of plants actually do require sodium...even discounting C4 plants. Though the amount needed for health rarely needs supplemental amendment help, it is considered an essential micronutrient by many. If we want to be technical about it...there's a chunk of people who don't consider sodium an "essential" micronutrient...and some that do. It's one of the more debatable and debated nutrients out there. I happen to fall into the camp that it's an essential functional nutrient and here's why... I don't want to get too "heavy" into this, but long distance ion transport in plant tissues is achieved very easily via sodium and it's "negative" effects are excluded in various blocking mechanism sites in the plant's pathway (depending upon the plant). Plants have evolved to use sodium to get solutions in water and plant tissues where it needs to go in a kind of osmosis effect. Sodium is an important "transport nutrient" for many other important processes in many plants even though it is rarely involved in the makeup of many essential plant chemicals/compounds. It accomplishes this better and way more efficiently than any other cation (even potassium). You can kinda think of sodium as a "movement booster" for both water and complimentary nutrients/compounds/etc in the solution hitching a ride with the Na+ getting where it can do more good in a much faster manner. This action especially aids a lot of quick water movement through the plant and cell walls up until the Na is excluded from the process. This exclusion happens sometimes in the roots, sometimes in parts of the stem, and sometimes all the way to parts of the leaves...partially blocked and sometimes almost fully blocked. Like many things biological, these systems can be "overridden" by an excessive amount of sodium and if the plant cannot deal with excess, damage can occur. Beyond that, some non-essential benefits from sodium help form chemical pathways for some sugars in crops we enjoy...such as carrots...as well as being quite important to glucose production in sugar beets. Sodium and glucose (sugar) have a somewhat weird, yet important relationship with each other in this respect. It all comes down to energy storage allocation, but it results in sweeter carrots and beets you can make table sugar out of for us humans. In many C4 plants (especially low-water adapted C4 plants) sodium is a crucial part of the plant's water management scheme...from water movement to stoma control keeping the plants from losing water through transpiration...as well as some other metabolic things which would require a lot more explaining, mostly involving pyruvic acids and their role in glucose use in photosynthesis in C4 plants. This post was edited by nc-crn on Sun, Oct 6, 13 at 8:00

(bump down) This was supposed to be a "Have: " post, not a want. Please see the replacement post. Thanks, Tina

I had to go look at my door hinge because mine folds back nearly flat and I knew that I had never seen the hinge between the doors before. It's not a piano hinge, just two small regular hinges. It's really the other hinge--the one that connects the door to the cabinet that seems to dictate how flat the door can fold back. Mine wasn't as flat as I thought, but it has never gotten in my way in the slightest. I'm assuming yours will open in the direction of the sink, not the stove. Correct? I would not want the hinge to be visible when the door is shut. We also have natural cherry cabinets, and those small hinges are brass, which makes them even more invisible. It seems like chrome would really catch the eye, and not in a good way.

Thanks for posting this, Heather! Shaker boxes are great for flower petals. Maven