I am with flora on this one, slugs are not as abundant or large here in CT as they where in the UK, and I have yet to see a snail in a year here...you watch, I'll go outside and find a hundred now! the Snails we had in Kent, where huge not as big as African snails but pretty big, I put it down to the lack of wildlife to eat them up. This is the beast, it says they are rare, but every garden I had on the Isle of Thanet and surrounding villages to Sandwich had hundreds of the things. that said it was a area of large Roman settlement! and my last garden was part of a Roman flint mine ;) so maybe not a surprise! 1 inch is approx 2.2cm. Here is a link that might be useful: the Roman snail, rare! my eye!

LOL Suzy. Yay for all the cooking. Way to go. Buttercream.......slurp. Good on a cake, better off your finger or a spatula or bowl, or beater. LOL. I'm overdue for some. Darn diabetes makes it a very infrequent addition to our diet. Good thing it freezes pretty well, since I usually freeze at least half the cake, sometimes 3/4. Robin, you did good to get your Sis to do that job. Grass that long is not for the beginner. Smiles. Even starting mowers that have been sitting since last season can be a pain and require a new spark plug at the least. LOL Lilo, Mowses. Love it. I love my lawn tractor. I call it riding the grass. It's my favorite. I often have people offer to do that for me. NOOOO. Use the push mower for the hill, weed, anything but ride MY grass. Even when I'm so crippled up I can barely get to the garage, that's my reward for making it out there. Krista, I have changed a radiator. Admittedly a long time ago. Not super hard but get ready for some swearing since it's in such a tight place it's usually hard to get at the bolts and such. Also, it depends on what else is hooked to it, like the water pump and such, how hard it is to get out... and in. I bought a rebuilt one so saved a lot of money by doing it myself. Then again, I've changed the heads on a car. That requires you to have a working torque wrench. Those darn bolts can be torqued right off. LOL..The guys at the parts store didn't believe me. Said they're hardened steel. OOpps.. I'm not big on shelled things like oyster, mussels, clams. Think I've only tried clams raw once. I'm told I prepare them all quite well though. I've never eaten sushi. Never rode a unicycle. Wink. Never been our of the contiguous USA. Never had a professional manicure or pedicure, nor hair dye.

Anna - I am glad that your garden is doing better and you are having some success, it is all good. The peas that I planted when I showed the coffee filters are up in my garden also, I have another problem with the beans and the peas, one of my little dogs is addicted to them, he can pull them and eat them when I am not looking, he is the one that likes tomatoes also. What I usually do is pick some ripe tomatoes and give him to keep him distracted from the beans. The other two dogs that I have are only interested in fruit, the little black dog goes for the blueberries, only the larger kind, she leaves the sunshine blues for me, lol. Ebackman - It is so nice to hear that you are growing lettuce successfully, consider how expensive and wilted are the ones at the store, if you sow every 2 weeks a little bit, you can have a good supply. Lettuce can be grown in different ways, any way that you prefer. Perfectly spaced in a bed or a container, just sprinkled and not thinning, use them as cut lettuce with scissors and will grow again. You can also transplant the thinnings to another place, I use a small spoon and keep it moist. You can also grow small greens for a mix in a salad, I found a spinack that I like the name is Bordeaux and has red veins, also growing a gold container chard with very tender leaves, komatsuma an oriental green is also good and mild for salad. Experiment a little to see what you and your family like, you can make some really innovative mixes that you can not even buy at the store. Silvia

You can go to the Harvest Forum here at Garden Web/Houzz to read all kinds of posts about the different brands of pressure canners and who likes which one best and why. That is the forum where all the canning experts hang out. Once you go the the Harvest Forum you can do a search and pull up oodles of old threads on pressure canners. One of the most important things is to be sure you buy a pressure canner, not a pressure cooker. They are not the same thing. One suggestion I'd make is that you buy one of the larger ones. Don't buy the smallest one available to save a few bucks because it will cost you more in the long run since it only will can very small batches. If you're having to do twice as many batches because you bought a smaller canner, it costs you more in time and energy costs in the long run. I have a Presto and have had it for decades. Before that I had a Mirro. However, most of the canning that I do is simple water bath canning because the foods I prefer to can happen to be the ones you can using a Boiling Water Bath/canner. I simply freeze (we have three deep freezers) the items that most people can in a pressure canner because we like the texture of veggies that have been frozen and then cooked better than those that have been canned and then cooked. With potatoes, I don't can them. I just store them in our tornado shelter and they last for many months that way. With each type of food that I preserve, I choose the preservation method that works best for the way we ultimately like to eat that food item. We like our potatoes fresh, so I don't can them. If we liked canned potatoes, then I'd take the time to can some of our crop. I use all the various food storage methods (canning, dehydration, fermentation, freezing and root cellaring), but not all methods for all foods. At the website of the National Center for Home Food Preservation, you will find all the government-approved and safety-tested canning and other food preservation methods. You should never deviate from the approved methods because that's a quick way to potentially harm or kill somebody with improperly-preserved foods. I cannot emphasize that enough. Safety always has to come first.