To grow a bigger pumpkin you could cheat a little by doing this: Find a spot on the vine at one or two leaves distance from your pumpkin, dig a shallow hole at that spot, bury the vine firmly and water the spot. The vine will grow roots there, which you should fertilize them once in a while just like the main root, but the nutrition will go the your pumpkin much quicker without going through all the irrelevant vines.

Chandra, I've never used their products, never have and never will. Any company that does not list their product ingredients on their label and/or their website doesn't get a dollar of my money. I want to know what I am putting into or onto the soil where we grow our plants. Any tomato plant fed any decent fertilizer is likely to give significantly higher yields than a plant that is not fertilized, assuming the plants receive adequare sunshine and moisture. So their claim of 150% better production or more tomatoes or bigger tomatoes or whatever else they say is meaningless and is just ad hype. Any good fertilizer, applied properly, can give you similar results, and most likely for a much lower cost. I believe the reason they don't list their ingredients is because they want people to think there is something extra-special in their products so they'll be willing to buy them and to pay their prices, which seem high to me. Is there something extra-special in their products? My personal opinion is no, there is not anything there that you can't get in other organic fertilizers. Caveat emptor. Before I buy from a company that is new to me, I check their reviews at the popular watchdog site often used by gardeners. I can't name that website here because it is a competing website and you aren't supposed to mention it or link it here. (E-mail me if you don't know the name of that site and I'll tell you.) If a company has a lot of negative reviews, I avoid it and search for a company that sells a similar product but that gets better reviews. Larry, Thank you. You are so very kind. If eating real bacon is a sin, I'm headed straight for a very bad place! I love bacon. I'd eat bacon ice cream if they made it. (And, yes, I bet somebody does make bacon ice cream) Keith, You are so, so bad! lol I bet Peg has her hands full trying to keep you in line. Busy1, You win the "First BLT" prize! I can imagine it took a bunch of Tiny Tims to make one sandwich. Wasn't it yummy? Nothing says "spring" like the first delicious BLT with your own home-grown tomatoes. I don't know how you'll ever get caught up on planting with all the moisture now in your ground, but I'm sure you'll find a way. It is still too wet to plant anything else here, but not too wet for the weeds to grow, so I'll spend my afternoon pulling weeds. Thank you for your kind words. I hope you know that I appreciate you so much. Diane, I wish you'd been here to have a sandwich with us. I'm excited you're getting ready to plant. You know, once the plants are in the ground, they will grow like weeds. Your plants will be catching up with ours in no time at all. I really believe that. Erod, If I can't eat tomatoes from April through December, then (alas! woe is me!) life just isn't worth living. Well, that's a slight exaggeration, but only a very slight one. Some people here call me the Tomato Queen, but really I am the Mulch Queen. I mulch, mulch, mulch, mulch, mulch. I add mulch to at least one raised bed every week, sometimes every day. I mulch my paths. I mulch my flower beds. I mulch the 'pathways' in my dogs' yard so that they are walking on mulch instead of mud, since three of them get to come inside and sleep in the house at night. (The other three sleep in the garage.) I mulch my the soil surface in all my containers of plants. (They get bark mulch for aesthetic reasons.) I mulch my fruit trees when I have enough mulch to do so, and I mulch my shrub beds. If a dog or cat lies down in a shrub bed or flower bed and doesn't move while I'm mulching, I mulch them. (That does tend to make them get up and move!) When I am able to do so, I mulch the ground outside the perimeter of my garden fence to help keep down the grass and weeds so they won't sneak through the fence and into my garden. Last year, I didn't do a very good job of mulching around the perimeter, so I'm going to try harder to do a better job of that this year. Usually I run out of mulch inside the garden and don't have any for the perimeter fence. However, thanks to the bales of hay that were a very lovely gift from our friends, Jesse and Joyce, I'll have plenty of mulch this year. Mulch keeps the soil cooler which is very important once the temperatures are cranking up high. I think mulch is one reason I get high yields from my peppers and tomatoes. Mulch conserves moisture which also helps the plants. Mulches reduces the number of weeds. Most important in terms of having healthy tomato plants and good yields, mulch reduces soil splash which reduces disease. I start out with 2" of mulch on my beds, then add more continually. My goal is to have mulch 4-6" deep on all my tomato beds by mid-June. You don't want to mulch too heavily when the soil is still cold or cool because you want the soil to warm up to a certain extent. That's why I start out with a little mulch and then keep adding more as the ground warms up more. Some beds don't get as much mulch as the tomatoes. Onions, for example, do better if they are able to sort of pop up out of the ground as they bulb up. If they are able to do that, they seem to produce better bulbs than those planted or mulched so deeply that they cannot "pop up". So, I have mulch in the two onion beds, but it is on the soil between the plants and not necessarily over the bulbing part of the plant, if that makes sense. I would never, ever attempt to grow without mulching. Mulch is helpful in so many ways. Best of all, as mulch decomposes it turns into compost. Compost enriches the soil. Enriched soil grows better, healthier plants that produce higher yields. I give compost and mulch a great deal of credit for the very high yields I get in my veggie garden. It may seem like I'm always weeding (it is a very large garden!), but without the mulch, I'd likely spend 10 times as much time weeding the garden as I do now. Mulch also reduces erosion which is ultra-important to me because my gardens slopes downhill from west to east and from south to north. When I first started gardening here, my local rancher friend, Fred, who is a rancher, farmer and gardener himself, gave me tons (I mean literally tons) of hay in big round bales. I mulched heavily with it and it helped get me off to a great start here. I also use chopped/shredded autumn leaves that I collect and bag up in the fall, grass clippings from our own property, and hay or straw but ONLY from safe sources and ONLY after I test it for herbicide residue. I currently have 197 bales of hay undergoing herbicide testing so I can be sure it is safe before I use it. I used to have a compost pile far from my garden (it is still there and I still use it to some extent) but that means continually hauling stuff out to the pile, then after it has decomposed, I have to haul the compost back to the garden. For me, it is so much easier to pile up organic matter as mulch in my garden beds, pathways, and around the edges of my garden and let it decompose right there. In the spring, the decomposed mulch from the previous season is mixed into the beds as I plant. Then, after a bed is planted, I scoop up all the decomposed mulch from the pathways adjacent to that bed, using a compost scoop and put it right there on the newly-planted beds, and that's the start of the new season's mulch. Then I lay down cardboard in the pathways, and start layering on mulch. Otherwise, my pathways are just beds of weeds. So, my recommendation is to mulch like crazy, but not just around the plants but also in your paths. In addition to doing some weeding, I have two rows of tomatoes that need more mulch today, and I have a big pile of grass clippings with which to mulch them. It seems like all I do in May and June is mulch and pull weeds, but both are important to getting good yields. Dawn

2 cups japanese beetles, 1+1/2 cup flour, 1/2 cup white sugar, 1/2 cup brown sugar, 1/2 tsp baking soda , 1/2 tsp baking powder, 1/2 cup oil, 1 tsp ground ginger,one tsp vanilla extract and 2 eggs. Combine , fill muffin tins and bake 350 15 -20 mins. May substitute zuccini or other sqaush for beetles.

I think that your new resolve to let the pets sort things out is admirable, and a big, huge step in the right direction. If you can get your mom on board too, then you could both go off into another room to make coffee or fold laundry or occupy yourself in a similar way if a scuffle breaks out. (If there is a special show or movie on TV that you really want to see with no interruptions you might lock the cats out of the room while things are calm before the program begins so that no arguments occur between the pets while you are watching.) To the best of my memory none of my cats ever drew blood when smacking my puppies in the past. When I wrote in a previous post that they got their noses "shredded" regularly I was using imagery and exaggeration to make the point that these conflicts are normal and commonplace. One of my cats did claw the nose of a neighbor's German shepherd once who came up onto the front porch where my cat was sleeping and, judging from the yelps of the retreating dog, probably drew blood. Cats can distinguish between a strange dog who doesn't belong and a dog who is a member of the household, and the latter is treated with more tolerance and restraint even when the cat is meting out discipline to its doggie housemate. No dog or cat in my experience has ever had its eye clawed by a cat. All animals have a protective reflex to close their eye lids if an object approaches. The Siamese cat I had when I was a kid was quite a fighter and used to really get into it with strange cats in the neighborhood. I am talking actual real cat fights here, not a tussle between housemate kitties. He came home frequently with bite and claw wounds, some *near* his eyes, but his pretty blue eyes lasted him a lifetime unmarred. If one of your cats should inflict a wound on one of their housemates I'd recommend that you treat it with peroxide for a few days to prevent an infection, as you would with any puncture wound. But I really doubt that any of your pets will have skin broken on their noses, and having an eye clawed out is only slightly more likely than being hit with falling debris from a satellite. Unneutered dogs can be a bit more feisty, but since you plan on neutering Punkin this year anyways, it sounds like you have this covered. I've always fed my pets separately to avoid fights. I would keep on feeding your kitties separately from your dogs just as you are doing now. This is a good policy. Everyone deserves to be able to eat in peace. Food is a key thing that tends to provoke conflicts, and your pets are already in conflict over their own space and place in the household. Your pets need to sort out the issues of their place in the heirarchy, but there is no point in giving them something else to argue over. If prescribed medication helps you and your mom to overcome your anxieties then it is a good idea to take the medication according to the doctor's directions. If you have time amidst your school work to fit in a walk with your mom and the dogs everyday, I also think this would have immeasurable relaxing effects. Punkin might be aggravating the cat simply because he has excess energy to burn with no outlet for it. A tired dog is always a good dog. Anyways good luck with your college studies and try not to worry over the critters!