Yes we do have a very different view of the zones. Mainly for me, that is because I think the USDA zone map is "somewhat" useful in a limited way if I apply it to plants that I want to landscape my yard with. Its a "loose guide" for me, no more, when landscaping. Mainly because it only deals with COLD temps. You have to use a separate criteria for HEAT here in the South. There's no one map. I think that's a shortcoming. I know a separate heat index map does exist. But as far as the USDA zone map is concerned, I find it a lot more useful for my greenhouse. I am in zone 8B. However, I am still able to grow many plants in my yard that are supposedly only labeled for zone 9 and above. If I gardened by what books said about the zones certain plants would live in, and paid attention to the zone maps, I would be shortchanging myself on growing a lot of neato plants that actually do very well here. I do find the concept of "zone" imminently useful inside the greenhouse though. I have plants growing and blooming in a zone 11 environment that are supposedly "zone 10 and above" plants that friends of mine in South FL zone 10 have not been able to get to bloom in their yards. I have to wonder, if I turned down the heat, would they still do as well? Probably not. When I first moved to FL in the very early 1990's from Los Angeles, I was stunned at all that could be bloomed here, in the ground and even just in CONTAINERS in my zone 8B, that could not be bloomed in the zone 10-11 So Cal environment. Certain gingers, heliconias, vines, orchids, they will do so well here even if you have to stash them in a freeze, and they wouldn't do well in So Cal even in a "frost free" environment. I asked "Why?" many years later on a forum that was heavily weighted with West COast people, and the answer seems to be "heat accumulation". Even though So Cal where I lived was a zone 10-11 and rarely if ever actually freezes, its too cold at night most of the year, and too cool in the day most of the year, to afford the continuous heat needed by certain plants to thrive and bloom. So when I set up my greenhouse, I had to think, "How do I want to do this?" Because actually, In FL, its much harder to cool the greenhouse in summer than it is to heat it in winter. I decided that I wanted a "conservatory style" planted greenhouse instead of a greenhouse that had benches to set stuff on, and that if I was going to go to that type of setting, I wanted it to be a jungle with everything that I could never leave out all year here. So if I was going to commit to THAT, I decided, zone ELEVEN conditions were what I wanted. Anything that can take a zone 8B winter, even if it goes dormant and comes back as a "perennial", or gets leaf burn but survives, does not merit the zone 11 greenhouse. Only stuff that would never bloom or live in zone 8B, or is expensive of somewhat rare, gets to be in the zone 11 greenhouse. Maybe that's a simplistic attitude on my part. I don't pay a lot of attention to how much it costs to run the greenhouse. I only keep records for tax purposes, because I do run a small mail order plant business and have to report income and expenses. If I was a huge business entity I would probably think I needed to have a more formulaic approach to the greenhouse, but I'm just not. I admire people like you who have all that scientific stuff going for them. Its just not my focus. I'm more into just cranking up some Blue Eyed Christ, getting out the fertilizer and piddling around in my greenhouse. I don't like to think about it too much.

No, I don't do things the way everyone esle does. Everyone else buries their waterlines below the frost line. I run mine flush into the sod. This is easy to install, easy to modify, easy to fix. Most other people use PVC pipe. After looking at the environomental impact of PVC, I avoid it whenever possible. I use black poly pipe and by preference glass filled nylon joints. Most other nurseries keep bare earth. I keep mowed pasture. I use almost no herbicide, and zero pesticide, depending on the birds and predatory bugs to work for me. Most other nurseries put all of each kind of egg in one basket. E.g. a big one to the south of me has a quarter section of just shubert chokecherries. I try to have no more than a few hundred of anything together. This means that a bunch of mice who develop a taste for scots pine bark stop at the blue spruce boundary. As far as I know I'm the only guy in Alberta to raise trees entirely in containers. Means I can put a MUCH larger tree in a pot than the guys with field trees. (A 5 foot larch does quite well in a #2 pot.) I overwinter my pots above ground -- results are species dependent. Spruce do well if packed close together, willows are fine. White pine is unhappy. I'm moving to Pot in Pail. Rather than buy a socket pot -- with holes that line up with the liner pot, I salvage pails from the dump, clean them, and put holes in them that DONT line ukp with the liner pot. A #5 trade pot fits nicely inside. It takes me about 30 seconds each per pot to remove the lid, clean it, drill holes in it. So with farting around call it 30 pails an hour. Given that good #7 pots cost several dollars each this is good return on my time. (Right now the biggest issue is finding the pails) Rather than spend 30K per acre, putting in fancy drainage I chose a patch of land that has very sandy subsoil. A hole filled with water drains in 10 minutes. I mark the hole locations with survey paint, and hire a high school kid to auger holes in. He can set about 25 pails per hour. Works out to about 50 cents. So a row of 100 pots costs me 50 bucks of hired kid, 3 hours wear on my groundhog, 2 hours of my time processing the pots (also kid labour possible) and the time to scrounge 100 pails (typically an afternoon.) Every one else runs their greenhouse north-south. I plan to make mine east-west. Everyone else makes a separate head house. I plan to put an insulated wall 1/3 of the width from the north side. Paint it white. In spring here the sun is fairly low. (Its 36 degrees up at noon on spring solstice) So bedding plants tend to lean to the south. With a white north wall, I should be able to even out the illumination considerably, at the cost of 1/3 of the floor space. Insulate the north side too. Gives me a triangular space 1/3 W by L with a height ranging from 12 feet at the wall down to the bottom of the greenhouse wall. This space will be mostly filled with water barrels -- about 180 for a 60 x 30 house. 3 per foot of length The exhaust fans will pull air from the peak and run through the barrels, and exit the bottom of the triangular space. At night, the air goes back to the green house under the benches. I figure I can heat a greenhouse down to about -15 C in March for the price of running fans. Math: A double poly greenhouse averages R1 per square foot of floor space. If I want to maintain 50 F temps inside, I have roughly a 50 degree differential. So a 1 foot slice of greenhouse 20 feet wide has 20 square feet of floor space, which will take 20*50 = 1000 BTU/hour to heat. Or about 12000 btu for a night. For the sake of making numbers simple, increase that to 15000 3 barrels of water is 1500 lbs of water. So I have to raise the temp of the water by 10 F to have enough heat. Air has about the 40% thermal energy as water -- per pound. Air at the top of the peak is typically 20-30 degrees warmer than the ground level when the air doesn't circulate Daytime green house temps run about 70-75, so peak temps are about 100. To get 15000 btu, assuming only 30% efficiency in heating the barrels, I have to move 40000 lbs of 100 degree air to get a 10 degree rise. Air is about an ounce per cubic foot, so 40,000 lbs of air is about 640,000 cubic feet. At 8000 cfm that's about 80 minutes. Given that the bulk of the heating will happen in 3-5 hours in mid day, this is a comfortable margin.

My theory just keeps being proven "righter" all the time. There is a chemical, I believe, extruded by our worms that causes us wormers to become over-thinkers of how to take care of the wormies. This could be intentional on the worms' part as a way of being treated (pampered) WAY more than is required to keep them in ideal conditions. I have said here before, and it bears repeating, that the worst thing we can do to them babies is mess with them too much. Overdoing things causes most of the stress that causes them to vacate the premises or become disillusioned and distraught about life. Going into a funk and wasting away becomes their only alternative because we cannot communicate with them orally and we can't seem to see the writing on the wall. I have, over the years, "grown" identical worm communities side be side using completely opposite techniques including smothering, over-attentive, disruptive and incessant bothersomeness of one bin and minimal (almost non-existent) care for the bin next door. The differences of production and other desired qualities and results of what we try to do around here were always indistinquishable. Just saying..........again. Chuckiebtoo

First, I figured you would not answer any questions and about 8 years ago I did have a blower test and ESP test done and the manual J performed and none of them would show me the results except to say, I needed a 4.5 ton unit which is on the fence, right? And all said they would have used the same duct work and the blower test was 34 out of like 50 (whatever that value is, I just don't remember). He said not bad and usually sees a lot worse, but could be better and they wanted to gut my duct system and go to all metal duct and both companies pricing was about $6,000 to $7,000 again, about 8 years ago. I had other estimates too, but I don't trust most A/C companies around here as I used to do the repair business years ago and it was mainly window units back then and I know how this business overall operates and you and others online are the exception rather than the rule in residential work. Which is great, but surely you know how bad it is? It is way too competitive and other things I know, I'll just say is very embarrassing to say the least. So, as I do the manual J and D calculations myself I am coming up with between 4 and 4.5 ton system, which you are right, so I see it is going to be oversized. But, I will say we had upper 80 degree days last week and the humiditiy was in the mid 40 percent range in my home as did my 4 ton unit performed and was still comfortable. But, I understand the tighter I make the system, doing as designed will bring the temperature down more quickly and will not be able to control the humidity as well and may become more uncomfortable and cycle more often making it less efficient. Your link is what has made me do what I am doing so far and I thank you for sharing some of your knowledge to the public, I wished I had seen it before I made this move. I know this is not a good excuse, but we had two 14,000 btu portable units in the house this summer and still couldn't keep the temperatue in the house from climbing to 80 degrees during peak outdoor temperature and the central system still would run until midnight before it would shut down briefly. I understand between the leaks and being undersized on return I was losing ground from day one as we bought this model home new. It just seems these portable units would have helped a little bit in keeping the temperature reasonable in our home. I even had a third unit ready to install, but we sweated it out through the end of the cooling season and so, how many would it have taken, 5, 6, or 7 units? Thanks.