thank you for your input! It's nice to know I'm still "alive." Last year I wrote a note on this forum called "stopped dating." I really thought I had lost interest, then I met someone but that went to hell in a handbasket very quickly ...the "I dont get it, what happened" entry on this forum I wrote about 6 months ago. It's interesting, looking back now, at the personal growth progress I've made since that first entry. That is not to say that starting to date again is necessarily a "great personal growth" but rather all that happened inbetween then and now. I am not a fan of hidden agendas either. life is interesting, and is even more interesting when one realizes it really has a purpose rather than to simply endure the mundane daily routines.

I hit the jackpot on Craig's List several years ago. Someone was cleaning out an old dilapidated house and advertised canning jars. Pints, Quarts, Half's. 5, 10, 25 cents each. I sent them a note and told them I'd take all they had no matter how many there were. When they said there were more at the house, I offered to meet them there and they were afraid I'd get hurt so they declined that. They put a bunch in wood crates, fruit boxes, any other cardboard they could find. I think I ended up with over 1000 total for about $145. I gave them $160 for the effort and the wood crates that I didn't expect, and just because... And so they didn't have to give me change. It was so worth it. There are several charity thrift stores locally that sometimes sell them for 25 or 50 cents each. I've quit buying pints and quarts unless they're wide mouth. But I'll buy 4, 8, or 12 ounce for 50 cents or less. There are sometimes Classico jars or actual canning jars at the recycling stations that I'll collect if they're not too busy. Sometimes they have lids. I have also washed jars in the back yard a number of times before running them through the dish washer inside. Rather not have all that dirt end up in my septic tank. I used to not think about that until I started thinking about that. That dirt/mud does not go anywhere once it ends up there. I wash big dirt off of veggies outside as well. Chris

Thank you. I have been neglecting my gardens so much this spring lol. I am keeping all my roses but have been moving and removing alot of the livestock "toxic" type plants and replacing with non toxic and food/fruiting plants. So basically everything is a disaster haha. We also are expanding our veggie garden quite a bit so I can fit in a few more 4x8 raised beds. I have roses, bananas and other crazy plants stuffed in my veggie garden too now. We are also making new goat and pig pastures. Its been so hot & muggy that it has been slow going. I hope fall comes early!! Which rose society do you belong to? I keep thinking I need to join a rose society. I am almost out by Callahan. A tour might be fun if/when I ever get my stuff together, lol. I dont really have a fancy garden or anythibg just hodge-podge flowerbeds and pot ghettos with a bunch of farm animals mixed in Haha. I wish you were my neighbor! It would be a huge improvement over the ones I have now lol. We live in an area with lots of crowing roosters and people with llamas, horses, etc not everybody likes to be woke up at 5 or 6 am to rooster serenades. :) but I like it. We got these 2 little Nigerian Dwarf girls recently. They are so little, smaller than the bottle baby Lamancha doeling I have even though they are a few weeks older than her.

Amy ,here's a Dawn thread about keeping early tomatoes warm: https://www.houzz.com/discussions/3587435/tomato-varieties-dawn It's further down in the thread: "In addition to using floating row cover, you can use Walls O Water, homemade devices similar to WOWs, or even two-liter bottles or cat litter buckets filled with water to help keep the plants warm on a late cold night. In a year when the spring weather stedfastly refuses to warm up as quickly as I like, I put a cat litter bucket filled with water on the north side of each tomato plant. The water in the bucket heats up during the day as the water absorbs heat from the sunlight and the buckets keep the plants warm at night by releasing heat as the water cools. Using a combination of the buckets of water and heavy-duty frost blankets, I haven't lost a tomato plant to frost or freezing temperatures in the springtime since probably 2008 (the years are starting to run together in my memory, lol). It might have been 2007. Either way, the forecast low that year on the night my plants froze was 50 and the actual low at our house hit 32 on an early May night and I hadn't done anything to cover up the plants or protect them because, honestly, by early May, who thinks that a freezing night is still possible, especially when the forecast says "50"? That was the last time I flat out trusted the forecast low and the last time I lost plants. Now I watch my weather carefully and cover up the plants if I think they will need it, no matter what the forecast says. In the years when I set up the cat litter buckets of water (I didn't use them last year, but some years I just know that I need to set them up at planting time and so I do), I leave them in place until around May 5th -7th (because we've never frozen after May 5th-7th). For me, whatever work I have to do to get the tomatoes planted early is worth it because my yields can be 2 to 4 times higher from an early March planting than from a mid- to late-April planting. It is all about getting the most fruit set possible before the heat arrives. I cannot tell you when the heat arrives" Here's another one: https://www.houzz.com/discussions/2065568/possible-frost-save-tomatoes Here's what we did last April late freeze. with 5 gal buckets over the tomato plants inside the tunnels Don't remember what the temps were then but the tomatoes survived. Here's what we did spring 2020 for another late freeze in the spring: And another: https://www.houzz.com/discussions/2100369/fiber-row-cover-really-work-in-ok-tomato from the " Book of Dawn" Rick.