Jaggudada, gotta put my 2c worth in. I always get a jump start planting warm season plants in the containers indoors. You can easily gain a couple weeks or more head start that way. When they are up, I take the lids off and put them in a protected spot with morning & late afternoon sun on the end of my back porch. The plastic jugs serve as mini-greenhouses in cool temps. I keep an eye on the forecast & bring them indoors whenever the temp is expected to drop below 32 at night. Our days now are 50's and 70's. So far I have only had to bring them in twice and take them out the next morning. I've got some decent sized plants coming along. I never follow hard fast rules when it comes to sowing, WS or indoors. I use the information on this forum that is applicable for my specific purpose & ignore the rest. For instance, I've read a lot about putting pots out because snow is expected or waiting to sow during the solstice & other general practices on this forum. Not saying its a bad thing but, we don't get much snow as a rule, so there you go. I have always "winter sowed" my shrub & perennial seeds that need a period of cold in early fall. Since we have mostly sunny days in winter, I grow other perennials on a big table by a large sunny window from seeds sown in fall. I am able do that successfully here, so I do. If I'd winter sowed them, they wouldn't even be up yet. I have 4" pots of agastache, Gregg salvia, Texas lantana, Salvia regla, Rosemary, Turk's cap and a few other hardy perennials with good root systems ready to plant. Basically, I treat different seeds different ways for reasons. I don't treat warm season seeds in the same way as those needing cold stratification. Spring sowing is not winter sowing by my definition. We get can hot and dry here as early as late spring so a head start is always a good idea. You really cannot set down rules that apply to all people in all places, so if you need an early start, go ahead & sow them inside in a warm spot & take them out when they germinate if you think your weather will work with you. Mid 30's haven't hurt me a bit here & I'm way ahead of the game.

Jeanne, South Carolina...nice win yesterday!! I used to go to Notred Dame / USC games every other year when ND was out here playing. The tailgating is a blast and I love the games but it became so much work once it was time to get to your seat. Of course, major changes after 9-11. The last time I went to a ND/USC game (after 9-11), after tailgating for several hours, we headed in to the stadium an hour and a half hour prior to kickoff and did not get to our seats until halftime. I am very BIG on security but decided tiz better to watch on TV...LOL! Jayeanne, your Crimsin Tide.....are you OK after that devastating loss yesterday? Great game...but that final second......oh my!!! And my beloved Fighting Irish.....they lost, of course, to Stanford, which I expected would happen. However, Stanford did not blow them away. Final 27-20. Turnovers, turnovers, get ya everytime!! Jeanne, thanks again for Football In The Garden...FUN! The FOTESSERS, great group! Happy Sunday!! Annie

Good Friday morning! Raeanne, bon voyage. I am so glad you got that package in time LOL! Have fun. John, see the effect you have on women! Sounds like you were the perfect gentleman. Good luck sleuthing, I mean babysitting! Hopefully they pay more for babysitting than .50 an hour that I was paid years ago. LOL Maddie, I am still trying to figure out how I can pull NYC off in December. I am in on the exchange too. Besh, have you given any thought to NYC? Good job on Dee's package BJ! Have fun at your planning party tonight. Planning is the key. Dee, enjoy all those lovely gifts! What a fun package to receive. Speaking of planning I have my carriage club's planning meeting tomorrow night. This is where we plan all the events for 2008. It's a pot luck (ugh) but I plan on being prepared for good eating with what I bring. I have to get a photo of this but will share so you can imagine what I am seeing: About 2 miles from my house is a lovely farm with big fields on both sides of the road and a lovely antique colonial home. The fields host flocks of sheep all summer and fall. On my way home Halloween evening someone had delivered to both fields huge piles of pumpkins for the sheep to eat. So I am driving along taking this all in. The sheep, some with black faces, eating from these huge piles of pumpkin, the setting sun filtering through the trees giving off this warm cast of oranges and golds through the leaves and a old man (presumably grandfather) standing next to this tow headed boy who is petting one of the sheep through the fence. It was all too beautiful. I will try to get a photo of the sheep and pumpkins but I doubt I the camera will ever be able to capture what is in my mind's eye. I hope you can imagine it.

Hi folks, I haven't been over on this thread just because it got so long before I looked at it, and I hate to comment on the end of a thread, only to learn that someone already covered whatever-it-was, up above! Right now my soil is at it's very best for clearing and weeding. I've been enjoying that. My wife commented yesterday, and at first I thought she was speaking facetiously, that I love nothing more than to dig. However, if I'm not under pressure, I suppose I really do enjoy cultivating. Maybe I was named "George" for a reason. (Geo=soil/earth, orge=worker/tiller). I WON'T be starting tomatoes until March. Don't know why, but since moving to Oklahoma in 2005, I have had a terrible time keeping seedlings alive. I think part of it is that my house has no good exposures for natural lighting, and part of it is that I struggle with seed starting medium. Seems whatever I get is generally deficient. In recent years I've obtained some from a friend who mixes her own, and uses it on a large scale. That seems to work better. But still, my seedlings never seem very happy until they go out in the garden. I gave up on fluorescent lights as I never found the right intensity/distance combo, and my seedling would often burn. Okay, anyway, I do alright. My seedlings are just on the small side when they go out. It has been extremely busy year for us, especially the last couple of months, with Jerreth's medical crisis. She's doing much better now, thank God! During our Christmas break I'm supposed to be writing materials for Homesteading Edu and we're in, what we hope is the final push to submit an audio book for publication. We've been over two years, now, translating Grace Plus Nothing, by Jeff Harkin, into Spanish (getting close to finished) and somewhere along the way we agreed to do the book as an audio book in English. Only after getting waist deep into the audio book project did I learn that I was going to have to learn basic audio engineering (yikes!). Oh! And Jerreth has launched into a masters program on instructional design, learning to design and engineer instructional videos. This will help with our website and is also part of her work. The long and the short of it is that everything we've endeavored had turned out MUCH MUCH more complicated and laborious than anticipated. We hope to finish with Grace Plus Nothing in 2017. I think we're close. Homesteading Edu, while up as kind of a blog, hasn't really launched. Hopefully that will happen soon. Writing for Homesteading Edu will be an ongoing project for... well, probably for many years. Currently I'm writing our materials on rabbitry and doing some experimentation on sourdough. Kim, it's a REALLY good thing you have a dog to guard those rabbits. Most folk have no idea how much wildlife meanders through their yards at night. Coon will tear a cage open and kill rabbits. Stray dogs will do the same. Here's last night's sourdough project, something I've worked on (sporadically) for nearly 40 years: French Bread. This was by far the best I've ever done.