Everyone, you're welcome!! Glad you like the selection! Happy you are all happy with your cuttings. Good luck with all of them this winter. Many had a good start to rooting. Aboout the break-in- Our alarm was not on in our office! Duh!! Mostly the robbery just made everyone paranoid. My husband is still locking all our doors at home- a first for us, living out in the country with six noisy dogs to scare off strangers. Not too much lost but always brings a feeling of violation. This is a first for us in 12 years there and we are not in a good neighborhood, so we have been fortunate. BTW, the alarm is always on now when we leave! We have not caught the bums but that is probably what they are, bums, excuse me, not being PC here, homeless people, in the area. Thanks for all your support and concern. Well, I just dug a bunch of my brugs, with the help of my grandson, Nathan. I'm leaving Adeline to bloom, since I only had two so far, and she had 12 buds on her- getting some color today. I dug up Lucero- he is scalped!! I will post a photo later. Back to work! Brenda

Thanks for the suggestions. I wasn't able to get the spa heater to work, but thankfully the water coming out of the hose was pretty warm and the spa was about 90degrees. We tried the valves, but nothing worked. THe actuator valve automatically starts to move when you hit the EZTouch system for heater, so we're not sure. We also noticed that the pressure on the cartridge filter was a ZERO and it's supposed to be at 30 or 40. The pool people came 2 weeks ago to fix a leak on the filter, so this may be the problem. I've been trying to get them to come back since then, but will have to start getting more assertive. I wish companies would just do their job. THanks for all of your responses.

Sounds like a special pup. Are you sure you want to add in hours of cooking, calculating and general brain power when you have a new baby in the house? Even my adult rescues do a great job scrambling my brain waves...... See dogaware.com for a lot of information on feeding a dog fresh food. Good reading, books to refer to and so on. I've been feeding fresh food since 2007, that melamine scandal right when I had an elderly dog come up with kidney disease did it for me. I've fed cooked and I've fed raw. Raw is so much easier and you waste less - bone. I haven't fed a pup, understand you feed the same amount as you will the adult dog but divide the meals up so pup can physically take it in and digest it. I check the diet against the NRC numbers using a nutrition database and the calculator from Monica Segal's book 'Optimal Nutrition' and adding a bit of this or that to be sure it meets the goals. I did have success cooking a basic raw diet by cooking a whole chicken, removing skin and meat and cooking the bones in a slow cooker until the bones were soft enough to puree in a blender. Then I took double the weight of the raw chicken in liver, beef and pork cooked and blended/chopped that then mixed all the meats and the bone puree together. Any cooking liquid is part of the meal, keep it all. My raw fed dogs get a multi vitamin/mineral supplement, vitamin E and fish oil according to size as well. To feed I calculated 2% of the dog's ideal weight, conveniently was 10 ounces. If the raw ingredients weighed 300 ounces and the cooked 260 then I'd feed that dog 260/30 a day. You can imagine the mess doing all this but the elderly dog no longer tolerated a raw diet. Dogs need a lot of meat. You can add in 25% mushy rice or pureed veggies to the basic diet if you like. That dog that needed 10 ounces of raw? He needed nearly the same minerals and vitamins as an adult human but packed into 600 calories a day. Any recipe that doesn't have calcium added or isn't mostly meat isn't going to work for a pup. Or make up a tasty topper of meat/fish/egg/liver and substitute that for anything less than 25% of the total calories pup needs. No need to be so precise about how much bone and all that is in there if you do that but you still need to figure out the calories per ounce or cup or whatever the topper has.

Good morning Prairie Moon and others, now the snow is gone except for small ridges where it was plowed up or fell off the roof. My husband has taken advantage of warm good weather days to do some outside chores but I have not. I would have made a very poor farmer. I never planted my high tunnel last fall since I did a lot of traveling which included my first ever trip to Italy, mostly the Amalfi Coast where lemons were everywhere and it seemed every hillside was planted with grapes. We were there just before the olive harvest. A vineyard we visited had a 300 year old grapevine with a trunk thick like a tree. I'm embarrassed to admit it has been so long since I looked at my seed lists that I don't remember what I'm planting. I do remember a tiny pepper which some people had in one of their meals. I tracked it down to being available pickled in a jar and called Sweetie Drops and low and behold on the pepper bar at Whole Foods in Bedford. A few years ago I planted quite a few pepper varieties because I was trying to grow my own Aleppo pepper and why not buy other interesting sounding peppers while I was at it. The good news from that exploit was sharing plants with a neighbor who is a library volunteer and it seems we are going to have a small town garden club this year. I also like to grow Buran which comes from Pinetree Garden Seeds. It's a very large, meaty bell type. For some reason tomatoes like being under the plastic roof of the high tunnel which then disrupts plans for seeding fall/winter crops. I had an excellent tasting purple and yellow cherry tomato that I think I bought at Edgewater Farm in Plainfield NH. I hope to grow it again IF I figure out what variety it was. The planting label might still be in the ground. I don't think it was a Bumblebee type. Good luck with a couple of raised beds which are probably the best idea is growing fewer vegetables if you can only decide which ones merit the privilege. We have good corn stands and surly raccoons so I don't try growing our own sweet corn. Raccoons outwitted us 35 years ago and I haven't tried since. Surely you will grow a few tomatoes and at least one pepper good for salads and/or frying up for sausage sandwiches (I like Carmen for that but it's not meaty enough for roasting.) And basil. Cilantro self seeds in the high tunnel. Dill self seeds outside. They are easy enough to buy at the store. Last year the new asparagus beds did not get properly weeded so that will be a priority this spring. The beds are infested with Creeping Jenny. I think lettuce is difficult, bolting so easily. Do you have good farmers markets nearby? Sometimes I think I would be a lot smarter to do a CSA. I usually make at least one trip to the Norwich VT farmers market which I think is one of the best and worth the hour + drive especially since I can go to Edgewater at the same time and they grow a wonderful variety of annuals. The inexpensive huge plastic pots I bought a couple of years ago at Ocean State had to be thrown out due to splitting etc. A red morning glory waited to start blooming just before frost so I won't try growing again. But a holly hock was new to our narrow south facing garden under our kitchen table windows which provided a great opportunity to watch hummingbirds. I also like to grow Scarlet Runner bean for that purpose. If we try to grow a couple of cherry tomatoes to have handy, we also get to watch a chipmunk climb tomato cages to feast. Chipmunks don't usually bother the tomatoes in the vegetable garden which is quite a few yards from the house. I think it's because they don't dare be out in the open that long with hawks and crows around. But what about sugarsnap peas? After tomatoes and peppers I think they are our next favorite vegetables. They are also the only green vegetable one fussy granddaughter will eat although she only wants the peas inside not the tasty pods. Green beans are also a favorite and I'm surprised it took me so long to plant pole beans. Fortex is a favorite. I had good luck growing on a metal trellis made from concrete reinforcing wire panel and pepper plants along the base. Well, I'm good at typing about gardening even if I don't get chores done. Alas this week looks like a great time to get outside and I have meetings and seminars. I hope others enjoy some outdoor time this week and tell us about it.