My opinion is that Smith is a very good guy and his Vegetable Gardener's Bible is pretty good. However, he is a die hard in ground organic gardener who had little to no container gardening experience when he wrote his SW container book. I don't really know why he went to that topic other than it is becoming very popular. He does what many coming from a ground growing approach have done for decades; he assumes that what works best in the soil will work best in containers. He hangs onto his in ground growing principles even though they don't continue to make sense in a container. Now, I am not going to tell you that you won't grow veggies in the mix he recommends or that you can't use pure compost in a regular container and get most veggies to grow. You can. Most veggies are more vigorous and tolerant of wetter, tighter soils than many other plants. They go from seed to table in a single season. That's pretty impressive. It doesn't mean soil and compost in a container is what's best for them, it means they are very vigorous and tend to produce even with a fairly poor planting mix. I have used the more organic soils in containers and for annual, fast growing plants (like most veggies) it works reasonably well. I have also used the heavier mix for succulents and other plants that really detest wet feet and they worked OK during the summer. It was the winter and early spring where the heavier soil combined with wetness rotted them. I have tried them with fruiting shrubs and again, they did OK in the warm weather, but suffered as temps cooled and the mix was still retaining excess moisture. It took me awhile to understand that during the prime growing season a lot of plants will appear perfectly healthy even in a lousy mix, but let the temps cool, the weather be overcast and rainy too long or the plant be one that detests wet feet and the limitations of the heavy mix become very apparent especially when comparing a freer draining mix to the heavier one side by side. The final thought I would leave you with is that reading responses on the forums and reading books is great, but can only take you so far. With that in mind, why not build Smith's mix and a freer draining mix like Al's mix and do your own comparison? There really is nothing like seeing to believe. The freer draining mix will need more attention in terms of water and fertilizer, but you will see a noticeable difference in the plants. From that point you will have a good frame of reference as you start making compromises to find the 'perfect' mix for you and your plants.

I'll bet it really is a pressure canner. I still have the one my mother used before I was born -- that was 1945. The original book that came with it shows pressure canning recipes as well as cooking, and, of course, it's a perfect fit for four quart jars. I know that steam canners are not recommended, but I found a recipe in the Ball Book (new one) that said Steam Canner. I'm sure it was a misprint, or something from an old book that just wasn't caught, but it's fun to think they aren't infallible.

I've been reading audiobooks almost exclusively since 1982 through the US National Library Service's Talking Books program, and all of their narrators are top-notch. Very occasionally there is someone with an accent I find harder to follow but the problems created by unusual accents are never so severe that I stop reading a book. My impression of commercial audio books is that they tend to be jazzed up with (a) background music and (b) narrators who assume different "voices" for the various characters. I prefer just the book, read in a straightforward way. But I do wish sometimes that the readers would make it clear where a quotation begins and ends, maybe by saying "Quote" and "End quote."

I rely on a variety of sources. I prefer to read opinions from all walks of life, rather than limiting to a certain venue, group or class of people. For ideas on what to read, I visit bulletin boards, a few bloggers and reviewers, and rely on word-of-mouth. I try to save critical reviews for after I've read a book; then I'll look for newspaper and online reviews. I find it helps to get some perspective and context on the reviewer. So when I read Amazon reviews, I look at the other books that person has reviewed to get a sense of what that person's worldview or personal slant on things may be. I much prefer an open-ended dialogue with other readers than critical reviews, though. I'm not a student anymore. I'm just a middle-aged woman in search of a good book to read.