For a couple of years I had a garden spot away from my house, with no water supply available so if I wanted to supplement rainfall I had to haul gallon jugs of water. To make my watering efficient, when I planted my peppers & tomatoes in the spring, I dug down and buried empty gallon plastic jugs, one between each plant. I had poked 4-5 holes in the bottom of each, of course, and left the caps on until later in the summer. Once the weather warmed, and after a good soaking rain, I mulched the beds 4-6" deep with chopped leaves, being sure to cover the tops of the (so far empty and still capped) bottles to protect them from the sun since I had found that the plastic degrades and becomes brittle when exposed to the sun. (In previous years, just cultivating around the bottles inevitably resulted in my breaking the tops off by midsummer.) When the weather reached a point where I actually needed to water, I cleared the mulch away for the moment and poured a gallon of water into each buried bottle. I set the cap loosely back atop each bottle to keep the leaf debris from falling in and clogging the exit holes in the bottom, then pulled the mulch back up to protect the plastic. I did not care about how long it took for the bottle to empty-- it seemed like a gallon or two a week per plant was sufficient, and the best part is that by burying the bottles the water went right down to the root zone where it was most effective. As for using wall-o-waters, since I had gotten some free from a friend, I tried them last year with 3 really early tomato plants I started specifically to experiment with. While they survived a good bit of frosty weather, in the end the plants I had started weeks later and planted out a month after the first ones when the weather had warmed quickly caught up to the wall-o-water ones and all the tomatoes pretty much bloomed & set fruit at the same time & rate. So my conclusion is that it was satisfying to my eager gardener's soul to be out planting early, but it really made no difference in overall plant performance. I have found the same to be true with early plantings of such things as peas and salad crops, too. Early plantings may survive, but later plantings quickly catch up and may even surpass earlier ones that have been stressed by the weather.

One thing to be careful of... Ours are all on-center with each other. However, the soap dispenser, when pumped, drops the stream of soap down right along the back edge of the sink. If it were just 1/4 inch closer in to the sink, it would drop it into the sink, where it really needs to be... Lynn

These are my pics of my countertops placed Friday June 22, 2018. I cried looking at these seams. It looks so cheap. Fabricator explains that's the way it comes. I explained that I shouldn't be able to see the seams so clearly. It looks so unprofessional. They ended up taking them back to their warehouse. In hopes they say if it is quality control will try and fix it just to make it look better. Otherwise I will have to pay an additional fee for them to come out again to install. I just don't know what to do and if still looks the same. This is the first time I've replaced my counters in 24 years. I don't and can't live with it. looking at this for another 24 years. It looks so cheap and it really was not it's a lot of money to me. I hope fingers crossed that they will fix this problem. They never told me that there would be such seams. I thought the edges were done by a machine and it would be all one piece. I have read up on this and now understand there are seams. But now I do know that they should not look like this. If they are good fabricator you shouldn't be able to see them so clearly. I will find out next week what happens.

It is very smart that you are vetting the fabricators. Definitely seal the inside of all holes. A true quartzite will not etch but some are more porous and benefit from sealing. If you do a search above on 'quartzite staining' you will pull up numerous threads from posters that have had issues. Our quartzite was installed two years ago. We have two sinks each with three holes. One soap dispenser hole was accidentally not sealed and it developed a shadow around the hole about a month after installation. We removed the pump head immediately and when it dried out our fabricator came back and sealed the inside of the hole. Since then we have had no problems. Before choosing a stone I would read karin_mt's threads on here and the helpful articles that she has written. I would follow her recommendation and test the stone that you plan to purchase. In the tests that I did at home some samples that were marked as quartzite failed miserably with etching and staining. https://usenaturalstone.org/properties-of-quartzite/?utm_source=related-articles/ https://www.houzz.com/discussions/2438427/countertop-geology-part-5-marble-quartzite-and-other-favorites#n=165