Your wish is my command, Claire! :) The reason a dog has so many friends is that he wags his tail instead of his tongue. -Anonymous Don't accept your dog's admiration as conclusive evidence that you are wonderful. -Ann Landers If there are no dogs in Heaven, then when I die I want to go where they went. -Will Rogers There is no psychiatrist in the world like a puppy licking your face. -Ben Williams A dog is the only thing on earth that loves you more than he loves himself. -Josh Billings The average dog is a nicer person than the average person. -Andy Rooney We give dogs time we can spare, space we can spare and love we can spare. And in return, dogs give us their all. It's the best deal man has ever made. -M. Acklam Dogs love their friends and bite their enemies, quite unlike people, who are incapable of pure love and always have to mix love and hate. -Sigmund Freud I wonder if other dogs think poodles are members of a weird religious cult. -Rita Rudner A dog teaches a boy fidelity, perseverance, and to turn around three times before lying down. -Robert Benchley Anybody who doesn't know what soap tastes like never washed a dog. -Franklin P. Jones If I have any beliefs about immortality, it is that certain dogs I have known will go to heaven, and very, very few persons. -James Thurber If your dog is fat, you aren't getting enough exercise. -Unknown My dog is worried about the economy because Alpo is up to $3.00 a can. That's almost $21.00 in dog money. -Joe Weinstein Ever consider what our dogs must think of us? I mean, here we come back from a grocery store with the most amazing haul -- chicken, pork, half a cow. They must think we're the greatest hunters on earth! -Anne Tyler Women and cats will do as they please, and men and dogs should relax and get used to the idea. -Robert A. Heinlein If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you; that is the principal difference between a dog and a man.. -Mark Twain You can say any foolish thing to a dog, and the dog will give you a look that says, 'Wow, you're right! I never would've thought of that!' - Dave Barry Dogs are not our whole life, but they make our lives whole. -Roger Caras If you think dogs can't count, try putting three dog biscuits in your pocket and then give him only two of them. -Phil Pastoret My goal in life is to be as good of a person my dog already thinks I am. ------------------- The only one I don't care for is the Robert Heinlein quote, even though it's soooo true :) Jeff

Are you carrying them by the stems? That can cause them to snap off. So can pulling them from the vine. To prevent stem damage, I always cut them off the vines and carry them by holding their bodies, not their stems. There's nothing worse than harming your own harvest by damaging the stems. When the stem separates prematurely, bacteria and fungi can invade and cause rot. Sometimes green ones will color up after they are cut off the vine, but it largely depends on how green they are. For most pumpkins in general, earlier in their lives, the pumpkins are a lighter green, and then they get really dark green as they near maturity and then they begin to turn orange. Right? So, if your pumpkins are already at the dark green stage, there's a good chance they are mature enough to continue ripening off the vine. Keep them in a warm, dry location. If it is possible to put them out in the sun, you can do that. Having sunlight hit the greenest part of the mostly mature but still green pumpkin can help it ripen up. However, in our intense sunlight (which is getting less intense each day as we move into autumn), they could sunscald so I wouldn't put them in full sun for the whole day. If the stem is completely severed from the pumpkin, the poor thing is more likely to become diseased and to rot before it turns orange. With Seminoles specifically, I always have harvested all of the ones left on the plant right before the last frost, no matter their size or color, and virtually all of them went on to turn their mature buff color despite being stored in a cool, dry garage with no sunlight and moderately cool temperatures. In some cases it has taken a month or more, but then after they turn their mature buff color about 90% of them will store for many months. About 10% of them, however, generally begin to rot even though they colored up just fine. I'm assuming those were just less mature than the rest. Bindweed is subject to many diseases, which (sadly) don't seem to kill the bindweeds very often, but which insects transfer from the bindweeds to desirable plants. Even a type of fusarium can infect bindweed (I hope it kills the bindweed but somehow I doubt it). That's one reason to pull out bindweed when you see it. I'm trying to think of the word to use for it....I guess you could say it harbors diseases. Not much will kill bindweed, unfortunately. By the way, if you have some winter squash that only formed from a flower within the last day or two, you can slice them up and use them just like summer squash. I often harvest them at the end of their first day that they formed from a flower and use them as summer squash. The only difference between squash fruit that we use as summer squash versus winter squash is that with summer squash fruit, we harvest them when they are very immature and use them immediately, whereas with winter squash fruit we let them fully mature and then use them. So, almost any winter squash fruit can be harvested while very immature and used as summer squash...and almost any summer squash can be left on the vine until they get very large and their rind toughens....although their flesh is different and I don't use it as a winter squash because overly mature, hardened summer squash lack the quality of mature winter squash. With any squash, winter or summer, or pumpkins (remember all pumpkins are winter squash but not all winter squash are pumpkins) that are immature or overly mature and not suitable for us humans, I just chop them or slice them and throw them on the compost pile. The deer, rabbits, possums, skunks, etc. will visit the compost pile and devour every bit. At our place, they don't last long enough to decompose.

For years I made my own ironing board covers. For one thing, boughten ones don't always fit right. I just put on some old towels and blankets and then muslin or a sheet on top. Any fitting is confined to slapping the layers on the board and cutting a very rough outline of it so that the layers hang down for 4 or 5 inches all around. Then I use safety pins to shape it around both ends, and in the middle I use two or three of those elastic tape with clips or pincers on both ends to pull the sides of the layers towards each other. However, last time, I got lazy and was tempted by an ad, or maybe something I read online, that claimed a certain board cover would never get burned. I bought one. It truly doesn't get burned, but what I don't like about it is that it seems as slippery as if it were made of horsehair. DH's shirts and other things tend to fall off it. Pleated skirts are a nightmare. Probably it has some spun glass fibers in it. And at the slightest chance, the tip of the bottom blade of my fiscars catches in it and makes a slit. It cuts very easily. I think next time I'll go back to making my own cover.

Here is the list of tomato plants I transplanted into containers; (most only have one plant, but some of the containers had 2 or 3 plants growing together, so I just transplanted the whole thing and will remove the smaller plants as needed before they start putting on too many blooms. The few squash plants I have keep putting out blooms every day): Chocolate Stripes Dark Shekel George Detsika’s Italian Red Dark Star Pink Ping Pong (2) Hungarian Heart (2) Angora Super Sweet (2) Honeycomb Mortgage Lifter Giant Belgium (2) Black Cherry (2) Sweet Tangerine (2) Classic Beefsteak Black Beauty (2) Creole (22 containers used)-these were just the tallest tomato plants now. I have maybe 30 or so more 3 and 4 inch containers with tomato plants.