Leava, What a wonderful harvest those butternuts gave you and Jeff. They store very well too so y'all will be able to enjoy them for a long time. Your experience with the plants that grew in the compost pile emphasizes just out how much we all can improve our soil just by adding compost every year. In gardening, it all starts with the soil, and compost-enriched soil produces high yields even in tough weather. After 14 years of adding compost to the veggie garden beds every year, the soil we have now bears very little resemblance to the dense red clay we started out with in the beginning. My experience with butternut is that the vines do run rampantly everywhere and the vines are very productive. I only planted a couple of butternut squash plants, a couple of Seminole pumpkins, and 1 Tahitian Melon, which actually is a winter squash (not a melon) that is similar to zuchetta, which normally is used as a summer squash. These vines took over every available inch of space, and beyond. All of them ran all over the ground, climbing trellises, fences, tomato cages, etc. and some of them escaped from the north side of the garden and grew out into the adjacent woodland. All three of these are on my list of favorite winter squash to plant because they pretty much won't die until a hard freeze gets them, and you cannot kill them. They laugh at squash vine borers, and while I have seen squash bugs near them, the squash bugs do not harm them enough to kill them or even enough to slow them down or hurt their productivity. If these particular varieties of squash are grown in poor soil, they still produce, but the better the soil, the better they produce. I can imagine that plants grown in a compost pile would produce huge harvests as yours did. What the butternut, Seminole and zuchetta/trombocino types have in common is that they all are Cucurbita moschata, and moschatas have solid vines instead of hollow ones, so the squash vine borers cannot easily bore their way into and through the stems as they can with other types of cucurbits that are C. pepo, C. agyrosperma and C. maxima. I've taken out my Tahitian Melon and Butternut plants in order to use those areas for the fall/winter garden, but the Seminole vine is still going strong, still flowering and setting new fruit that are not going to be able to mature before frost kills the plants. These two plants cover about 400 square feet and I didn't even water them in the worst of the summer heat/drought. Before I took out the butternut plants and the Tahitian Melon plants, they covered about the same amount of space that the Seminole does. The Seminole plants wilted when I stopped watering but they didn't die. When it rained in August they perked up and resumed their rampant growth. The other day I thought about taking out the Seminole plants and putting a winter cover crop in that area, but all the little flying insects love the blooms so I left it alone. Also, ever since late August I've noticed that the songbirds sit on the winter squash trellis and catch grasshoppers that flock to the plants' leaves, so I don't want to disrupt the birds' good bug-catching work. Lisa, When I first grew zuchetta about 20 years ago in Texas, I didn't consider the fact that its name is Zuchetta rampicante and didn't give it nearly enough space. That's a mistake I haven't made since then. It is such a huge garden monster, but in a good way. I wouldn't recommend it for Square Foot Gardening though! Dawn

I see your point and I was planning to do a raised bed but I needed to acidify the soil somewhat. No tree I've planted has survived our clay! I've always had to backfill some at least. I just needed to give the tree a chance to get it's roots going. Believe me...that hole is deep! Should be big and deep enough to give any water a chance to get out of there. Thanks.

What a putz. For $5 he can stick it in his ear. (Although I don't understand the numbnuts who don't put such basic info as dimensions in an ad anyway.) pharaoh wrote: "Although I am not religious I do believe in karma especially bad karma. That is why I am hesitant to buy used things such as this trunk that comes with the negativity(and what else) of that nasty man. Who wants to inherit that bad energy!" But by this logic, you would be able to purchase very few new items, either, since each would have picked up the energies of those who had made it (and especially in a factory atmosphere, that's not a happy place) and everyone who had ever handled it, nor lived in any place that you had not built yourself... Almost any object can be "cleansed" or returned to a neutral state, ready for positive energy to come in. Virtually every culture and/or religious tradition has some method by which it's done, either by blessing it (simply drowning any negativity) or actively casting out any negative whatevers. Smudging or censing with incense smoke is a popular method in many cultures, as is asperging or sprinkling with water (which may itself have been blessed in some form). A good cleaning has more effects than just physical removal of dirt, and bringing an object out into the sunlight for airing-out in a breeze does more than just dissipate musty odors. More than one of the houses and apartments I have lived in were very unhappy places when I took possession of them, so it has become habit to cleanse and bless it before I move in. I took a friend to see my last house just after we'd closed on it but before we had started any cleanup (of any type) and she wouldn't go more than one step inside. She did not know, although we did, that the previous family had been very unhappy there - they had been not-very-voluntarily relocated from another state with a very different climate and culture and hated pretty much everything about this new location, and their misery, anger and frustration seemed to have soaked right into the house. (We had noticed the weird vibe on our first visit to the house and asked the realtor what the story was on the family.) She came to our House Swarming and said it was like a completely different house after we had "done our thing". With this house I changed my usual cleansing routine to invite any "happy stuff" to stay and be welcome because I am sure that in this house's 109 years there has been plenty of laughter and love as well as sadness and anger.

Thanks for posting the list cynic. I work in restaurants and using barrier skin shields is very common. One of the bad things about washing your hands constantly is getting small open cuts on the hands that allow bacteria and viruses to enter freely. I am sure this is a problem in hospitals too. The skin shields are suppose to form a barrier to keep the germs from customers out of the small cuts. Handling utensils and glassware that people have had in their mouths, and handled with their unwashed hands is risky. It is impossible to wash your hands after touching something EVERY SINGLE time. The disinfectant pumps serve a good purpose to use constantly and resort to handwashing when you KNOW your hands are probably contaminated. Picking up and clearing a customer's cloth dinner napkin is probably the worse thing for transferring germs, worse than handling a used plate. When one has to go quickly from clearing a table, to setting a fresh table, the disinfectant pump is a good solution.