STOP - serious trouble on plant SFLR - sorry for late response WIP - water it please HT..GT - Here today, gone tomorrow SIS - succulent inappropriate soil For fun! Had a good laugh, thanks.

Thanks for all your thoughts! I do grow two types... I've refined this over many years. I plant an early, sweet variety really early, which we eat in early/mid summer. Then in late spring/early summer I plant my storage variety, so it'll be ready in September/October. I also plant a second crop of the "early" (non-storage) type in mid-summer, for fresh eating later in the season. My storage crop is Bolero, and I plant Mokum and Nelson for the sweet types. I've thought about freezing, which I may do this year to at least part of the crop... it's just that I do so much other freezing (beans, peas, corn, tomatoes, peppers, fruit) that I was trying to minimize that time-consuming activity :) I'm also GC-ing and DIY-ing the major house/yard reno, and trying to work too, so I don't have much extra time. And definitely not for canning, though I always love seeing macybaby's canning pics!!! I do have a remote temp/humidity sensor in my root cellar room. Temps in there -even in the dead of winter when its 0 degrees F outside- are never lower than about 45 F. I really think it's the water flowing beneath the house. You can see the path it takes across the lawn, underground, because the snow is always thinner there and melts very quickly in spring. Is the water warm? I don't know... One thing I may try is moving the ventilation tubes (I have two, in the proper high-low configuration, with blast gates and all that). Right now they draw air from the crawl space below an addition. In order to make them draw from the exterior, we'd have to drill/chip large holes through the masonry walls of the house. There's not even a wood sill to go through, it's all thick concrete :( However, I'm a little reticent to do all that work (and make big holes in the house) if it won't solve the problem. For instance: what about in fall when it's warm outside? How to cool the crops down in Oct, November? I wish I had a "cool" space, but the garage freezes solid, and I've no in-between zone :( And you guys are right, too... maybe I just need to adjust my expectations and decide that having our own carrots until early March is darn good enough :)

Another historian here, but ran away to a farm over 15 years ago. Lots of humanity on the farm and with three kids : ). Interestingly, I always considered myself a humanities type, but between the need to become an amateur biologist and botanist on a farm and our home schooling, I've found I'm much better, surprisingly so, than I (and my teachers!) thought in science and math. And if I had to do it all over again, I'd probably skip college and go work in a greenhouse! Becky

I've only read your first post so far, madtownwriter, so my opinion will only cover that. Not everyone will have to contend with a hard pan. (Are you meaning a hard pan due to machinery having driven over it? When a rotary hoe is brought in, as many are fond of doing, it crumbles the top layer and leaves a hard pan beneath that layer. This is not good at all.) So, where there is no hard pan, I agree with the link that says not to disturb the soil in the bottom of the hole. Info is often contradictory because so much depends on what is going on in the mind of the writer/talker, their imaginations running riot. Would you be keen on getting someone in to rip the area? This is a long, single thing that makes its way from the soil, rather deep, leaving a rather choppy mess I suppose behind it, but breaking a hard pan. Maybe it would be something that you'd rather not do as any neatness would be ruined. And you would have to fork over the entire area perhaps, afterwards, before planting. I've never had it done. I think the trees would love it though, when they find themselves in a garden which was ripped, then dug by hand, and lovingly planted. (Oh and you would have to know where things were underground. You don't want pipes and wires and other frightening stuff making an appearance.)