sorry about that guess i shouldve checked my e-mail 1st. thank you for the plants&leaves i hope i'll have room for them.

DH is keeping me busy being his Asst., plus I have all my own work to do. He did help me clean the veggie garden last Sat. and we ended up ripping tons of creeping fig off the garden walls and fountain where it had taken over like a jungle.... no fun! Not only do I need to get ready for the subdivision's annual meeting in a couple of weeks, but I'm the secretary/planner/treasurer AND the meeting is at our house. I just need the spare time to get everything organized. It's a bit too much.

trudi d and engineeregarden Do you both do wintersowing outside?? trudi d are you the same trudi d (Davidoff) on Wintersown.org? Just saw this. Yes that's me. I only start my tomatoes outside. I think I started WSing toms a winter or two after I started writing about my experiences, so that would be nearly seven or eight years ago. WS is based on any plant's ability to reseed. Because toms reseed in my garden I wanted to give it a try. Well, I did, and it worked like charm. I never went back to starting toms in the windowsill after that. You have to be smart in choosing what varieties to WS. If you live in zone five you're not going to get ripe fruits with a 90DTM tomato--it's not logical. So, for short seasons it's going to work better to choose tomatoes with names that sound acceptable to a cool climate or short-season garden like Speckle Siberian, Cold Set, Early Girl, Mountain Princess, etc. Look for varieties close to or under 70DTM. Yesterday was Winter Solstice and the beginning of the Winter Sowing season. I didn't do any tomatoes yesterday--just my Solstice Sow seed sets, but usually very early on in season I work with trees and shrubs, in January I do my perennials, biennials and hardy annuals, and then by the middle of February I start to work with frost intolerant varieties. WS tom seedlings can take frost down to about 27, 28 degrees which is fine by me as that's about the norm for February lows here. Well, though I didn't sow any, for Solstice I still did have a wonderful tomato experience here--the postman brought me a very fat mailer from Geneva, NY--it was from the Plant Genetics Resource Unit of the USDA/ARS, they granted my request and graced WinterSown another set of the most wonderful of varieties which I will Winter Sow, half this year and half next year. T Here is a link that might be useful: Solstice Sow

Test the raw water before the softener. Every result form the city will be at the treatment plant and usually only the health related stuff not the water quality data we need. By the time you buy the DIY tests (less accurate) you're better finding a local certified lab (much more accurate). Municipal environmental health departments can usually point you to a lab or a local university might help also. What size is your old 5600 softener? Model #? If you don't know the K then how high and what is the diameter of the resin tank?