Yes I do dry strawberries. I have about 5 kerr jars worth. I dehydrate them the same way I do all the other fruit. Just slice and put on dehydrator. Make sure that there is skin on the sides but not covering the top or the bottom. The strawberries are really good.

The concerns over the future of our website are quite understandable, and in reading through the comments and suggestions on this thread I think I've gotten some excellent ideas. I hope I can use some of these to forward the cause of keeping all of that information available. There are some factors that no one else will know about why we must close down our website. The key element is that Vintage Gardens is a publicly owned corporation. Many of our customers think that I am the owner, or one of several, but in fact we are owned by shareholders. In order to protect all of the interests involved and to minimize liability the commercial site needs to shut down. Our database is interwoven with our sales system, so we are unable to shut down the appearance of selling roses and still keep the database going. What is critical here is the saving of the data and getting it out to the world as soon as we can. That does require developing a searchable database, and The Friends of Vintage Roses have been looking for some time now for anyone who could help with that on a volunteer basis. For the short term, the Friends have a plan to upload, by class all of the roses from the VG website, and from our own database inherited with the rose collection. Our first effort will be simply to upload, class by class the information about the rose classes which I wrote and have updated many times, and will update again with new insights and challenges to my own past thinking. Along with these will go the class growth habits and the drawings that I developed in 1998-99. Included will be new versions of these growth habit illustrations, a taste of which some of you have found on the blog I recently started as Curator of The Friends of Vintage Roses. It's called "3000 Roses and Counting..." With each class upload we will include a listing of the varieties. More details will need to wait for a searchable format. In the longer term we hope that the Friends will receive enough support to build a searchable database, allowing for the sort of interaction that now exists on the VG site. The development of that database could happen very quickly and we've actively been canvasing donors to help with this, though so far we have not found the money. Kim raises a really good point, which is that the old site should somehow be archived online...at least the data part of it. If anyone has some knowledge about how to do that, we would be very grateful for assistance. Keep in mind however that the sales links would all have to be disabled, and all pages that involve the commercial entity. That old information is about to change to some degree. Though I do not expect that we will lose information that is valuable, there are too many references to "we" which refer to the old business, and so each description will be re-thought and re-written. One element that has not existed in the VG website is the provenance of each rose. This does exist in the VG Book of Roses, and I hope to bring this into The Friends' web database. Any attempt to pirate the information, however legal it may be, could be personally damaging to me, and I hope that folks will refrain from that, especially if they value this thing that I spent so long to create. I would be happy to work with anyone who has workable ideas for making an archived version of the VG website database. I will soon be archiving Vintage Gardens' presence on HMF. Simutaneously The Friends of Vintage Roses will upload their database of roses which will number about 5000 entries. This is the list inherited by the nonprofit, and includes roses that are no longer in the collection, a thing that I believe many of you will find worthwhile, particularly from a historic perspective. I am sorry that I have not been able to find the time to respond to the hundreds of emails I have received over the past year asking what will happen to our website. But, I've had a few things on my hands, and the next 10 weeks may grind me to a pulp. But, please believe that this is a top priority for me, because I know how important it is to so many people. First though, I have a few refunds to issue... Cheerily! Gregg (Vintage Gardens)

Howdy, eks! Have you looked in the forum FAQ yet? It is very handy, but not that easy to spot. At the index page for this forum, look up at the top paragraph or so. (Or use the linky I put in this reply.) Near the bottom of the FAQ is a subject on What Spacings to use. Here is a link that might be useful: The FAQ is our friend!

Marine (spar) varnish. Thin wood sections are always a problem to keep finished in an outside environment. There is to much movement and flexing of the wood to keep a good film finish intact. Once humidity can get through the finish (not even actual water drops) the finish will quickly fail.