Kellogg's Breakfast 2 yrs ago edged out Brandywine as my favorite tomato and was the first tomato ever to be able to do that! Just by a bit, but edge it, it did! I had hoped to compare KB and KBX this year, but the "permanent" marker I used washed off every plant marker except Anna Russian, so I will still be left guessing at what the difference in performance might be for me. Must be I need to learn to relax about it, because I usually even use initials to label the fruit as I pick it so I will know which one it is and if I like it and how the plant does, but the fates are laughing at me this year. :)

we have been grilling, smoking or rotis every weekend since the last snow fall early spring. With a big wood fired side box we cook for the day, Saturday, and use the fire space for meals for the week. I don't consider them leftovers as they are part of the creation of various meals. Garden in full production now i decide what will become what...fresh corn and lots of it is grilled in husks at the far end and becomes corn salsa etc and enjoyed that evening...salsa for salads all week. Smoked or rotis chicken makes a great chicken salad either Asian with toasted sesame or lots of veg and grapes, apples, olives. I always add an extra salmon fillet when we smoke on cedar planks with lemon and dill for Sunday morning leftovers. Love it warm, love it cold. A mixed seafood grill, if a prepped lemony fresh dressing is ready for tossing and chilled, is a lovely cold salad. A classic Italian seafood antipasto. Our burgers have improved since grinding our own and i will grill 4 and prep two for 'leftovers'. Enjoyed cold the next day. (never thought they would be good) but delicious though different. A bit like a great meatloaf sandwich with fresh tomato salsa and i've been making my own mustards. I always re-heat in the oven, covered to braise, then open to roast things like a half rotis chicken. I have created some failures, but solved that by adding something fresh like lemon and fresh herbs or any type of moisture when re-heating. If i'm clearly cooking for a later meal for tomorrow or a day or two later, i take it off the heat early, the grill, smoker, rotis, ...get it chilled as fast as possible knowing it will get a full cooking later. Avoids the drying out and over cooking 'leftover' taste. A braised and lightly smoked pork tip becomes shredded and sauced for tacos... If i have no plan i foodsaver and freeze it for an easy meal some stressed work day dinner. Then those 'leftovers' become a decent lunch over some sprouted mixed grains i've been consistently making once a week. I suppose my point is...if you have oven or grill space and have an abundance of produce...go ahead and cook more than you need for that evenings meal, but take off half of it early and toss it in a fresh marinade or fridge it. For a cold dish or a re-heat in the oven will 'finish' the cooking time. A squeeze of lemon works wonders on many dishes. Steak or a pork chop left over i would slice really thin and toss in a cucumber tomato salsa with some basil or coriander and fresh corn cut off the cob. Over a salad of garden greens....yum. (a bit crazy garden year...just picked my last big fat pea pods and sliced them thin, pods and all, and into a salad 'pickle' for the next week of lunches. With lemon cukes and early carrot.)

Bon, I understand that gardening feeds your soul just as much as it feeds your body. I am the same way. Be kind to yourself and plant a few tomato plants to feed your soul (and body) and just let the others go. Letting go is hard, but you're super-stressed with the move and the need to fix up the new place, so be sure to be kind to Bon. I do hate it that you're having to leave a place where you've made such progress on the soil, but life is a series of new beginnings and I hope you can look at the old place as a form of preparation for the new beginning in the new place. Did I hate leaving my old gardens behind in Fort Worth? Of course I did, but I was all fired up about the challenge of starting over in a new place as well. Remember that you can plant new tomato plants (perhaps a couple of varieties chosen expressly because they were bred to grow in containers) in late June or early July for a fall harvest if you want to. That might make it easier to let go of your bountiful selection of spring seedlings that may not be able to go into the ground now due to the move. I am sorry y'all got involved with those fraudulent people. That is a terrible, terrible shame and it certainly happened through no fault of your own. Con artists are clever and can fool anyone. You're doing a good job of dusting yourself off and moving on. I applaud you for that. The new place sounds like it has wonderful potential and y'all will have fun making it your own. I do lament the loss of your potatoes----all those potato plants! That's a shame. I also hate you've lost the progress on the permaculture areas you've been building, but any improvement you've done to Mother Earth remains, even if you are not there to benefit from it. It seems to me like that achievement should earn you some good karma. On the bright side, neither your or Bill will have to spend a significant part of June and/or July digging potatoes in the heat. (Always gotta look for the bright side!) Remember with the new garden to start small and make it bigger each year so you don't exhaust yourself trying to do too much breaking of the ground and improving of the soil all at once. My original garden here was just two small raised beds built in what I roughly imagined as our back yard, and I planted it a year before the builder started building the house. I tended it on weekends when we came up here to work on clearing the forest enough to be able to put up a barbed wire fence to keep the neighbors' cattle off our land. It was an adventure---the only time I ever had to have a barbed wire fence to keep the cows out of my garden! For a few months, we had cow surprises every weekend since it took us a long time to clear enough old, dense, overgrown woodland to put up the fence to keep the cows out---we'd stumble upon cows in the oddest places, and just laugh and shake our heads. We didn't mind the cows being there, but we didn't want to have permanent grazing cattle that weren't ours, so once the fence went up, they had to stay on their place, not ours. Once the cows were gone, the house was built and we were moving here, we put time into building our first "real" garden, but even that was tiny compared to what we have now. After I would get one section fairly well improved and workable, we'd add a new section. We added something new almost every year, except in the worst of drought years, which are not a time to be trying to break up hard, clay ground. (See, I've learned something from living here.) My tiny little garden was jam-packed with flowers, herbs and veggies, and I used it for two or three years before we got the big garden built and ready to use. I learned a lot from those small beds even if they didn't produce gigantic yields. They did produce adequate ones considering how small they were. I learned about our soil, our rainfall, pests, etc., just on a smaller scale with a smaller garden. It was just important to me to have something---even just a couple of small raised beds. I hope you find a way to have something for yourself this year---whether it is a small raised bed, containers, or whatever. If all you have is one big container with 2 tomato plants and a marigold or something in it for color, so be it. At least you'll have that, and you'll know that next year you can grow more. Sending you hugs and best wishes on the new adventure upon which your family is embarking! Dawn

Yeah - I actually wound up buying 2 different brands of enzyme drain cleaners, used them several times in ALL the drains. I plan on using it again. At first I used the ammonia method, it didn't work either. And yes I did a LOT of online research and did read some statements that it's not good to do the caulking but we needed an immediate fix and will look into getting the toilet checked out by a professional. We did a lot of the things I mentioned previously several times, not just once, man what a nightmare. DH runs like a deer when anything is mentioned about DIY plumbing, very shocked that he even did these 2 things. He's a journeyman electrician and knows his way around that and a few other things but he has a bad phobia about anything plumbing-related. The gnats were either fruit flies or drain gnats (not drain flies) but they look similar, I tend to lean to the drain gnats though, but they do like vinegar, and they also like Kombucha and beer, too. I used them all 3 in the homemade traps.