Hi Steffie! Your experience with bermuda grass reminds me why I HATE bermuda grass. :) My brother put down black plastic (plain old black plastic like trash bags are made of, not the fabric mulch type) on a newly tilled flower bed and planted perennials right through it. When he removed that plastic FIVE YEARS LATER, there were still those long bermuda runners everywhere. I never try to make a new lasagna bed without removing the sod first, having learned the hard way. I found it interesting that your grandmother raised her crops in stages. I do the same thing, and have never met anyone here who does it in the precise, regimented way that I do. I'll use tomatoes as an example since they are the crop I grow the most of. I start my earliest seedlings, about 70% of my main season tomato crop, on Super Bowl weekend. Then, six weeks later I start the other 30%. I plant out in cycles, beginning in mid to late March most years, and get the late ones from the second planting into the ground by late April. Then, in mid to late-May I start seeds for fall tomatoes, or take and root cuttings in mid-June. I get the fall tomatoes in the ground in late June to early July. In late August I start seeds for a few winter tomatoes in containers, generally small-sized ones like Window Box Roma, Red Robin, Yellow Canary, etc. These tomatoes in pots can go into the garage or house during cold spells and extend the fresh tomato season quite a bit. I do similar succession plantings of most veggies, including beans (every three weeks), corn (every 5 weeks), melons (generally an early planting in mid-April and a late planting in late May), summer and winter squash, peppers, okra and black-eyed peas. I do the same thing with flowers. Take sunflowers. I plant different ones for each season. So, my spring sunflowers which will begin blooming in May most years, are some of the ones lightest in color like Italian White and Moonshadow and any of the ones with the lemon-yellow petals. The summer-blooming ones, which usually begin blooming in July, are the really golden-colored ones, of which there are many varieties. The late-summer to fall blooming ones are those in tawny fall-type colors like Autumn Beauty, Earthwalker, and any of the red-flowered ones like Chianti or Prado Red. So, I always have flats of replacement plants started and it is easy to put them in the ground and plug them into holes in my garden at any time. It can get rather complicated to keep track of what needs to go where and at what time, but by staggering plantings, I have found I can have a wonderful garden each and every week of the summer. Right now, I am starting flower seeds in small paper cups. These plants will go into the ground in mid-May. The first week in May, I start flower seeds that will go into the ground in June for blooms beginning in July. And so it goes, on and on and on. With all the stages of planting, I always have something new coming along and that pleases me. Dawn

zl700 I'm really wondering which brands/models you have experience with that are so noisy? Where does that noise you are describing originate? Are they vented through a flue straight up through the home or are they direct vent through a wall? We were thinking of adding a second tankless for a master bath expansion, but if the new ones you've experienced are so noisy, I don't think I want one located close to where I sleep. I've lived with a tankless for going on 14 years now, and have never had anywhere near the level of sound that you are describing. Mine is in my laundry room about 5 feet away from the washer and when I do a hot water only wash, the washer filling makes more noise than the water heater does. As I said, you can hear a soft "whoomp" as the burners light, and a bit of water flow noise through the pipes, but it's barely audible standing at the washer 5 feet away. There is no gas pipe noise. I've never even heard gas piping make any real noise and we've got gas heat and stove. In fact, my gas fired forced air heater in the attic makes more noise when the burners light than the water heater does---not counting the sound of the air through the ducts. My water heater is a Myson, which I don't know if it's still made as it's an old fashioned design without fancy computerized controls. But it's worked very well for almost 14 years now--and with very little noise. :) I'll probably do a search and see if I can find another one if all of the newer brands aren't as quiet.

I see. You will be fortunate if the commercial outfit can follow through if they are exposed to a wider variety of equipment. I guess that they will be installing, in contrast, residential equipment. The commercial stuff does some neat things, but it costly. It does variable refrigerant flow (VRF). That allows you to move heat from one place in the building to another. In a home, for example, if you have one room warm, another other cool, and you need a little dehumidifying, you could run one unit in cool or dehumidify mode and another in heat with the same compressor. The outdoor coil could be put out of the circuit. I think that as a schoolboy I was in Peru at least once. I grew up, however, on the other side of Fly Creek from there in a deep river valley in Chenango County. I tell people that it would be the bottom of another finger lake if the South end was stoppered up like some of the valleys to the West. It is a nice geologic perspective from a couple of angles. As you drive down them, you get a good feel of how deep some of those lakes are. In addition, how easily that particular and other valleys could have been lakes as you look at the river beside you and the hilltops high above. I guess the same thing could be said to the North and East where the glaciers scraped out valleys, but they look less like fingers.

Repeatedly cycling the mini split between the cooling mode (that is biased to dehumidification) and heat is not going to be an efficient dehumidification process. It will tend to re-evaporate the water from the coils right back into the room. I can summarize the situation like this. The basement needs dehumidification. If that could be done without adding waste heat to the space, it would work. If that could be done without adding cool to the space, it would work. The mini split does one, the dedicated dehumidifier does the other so you put them both in the same room and let them fight it out. The most efficient scheme to do this would be a system that does variable refrigerant flow so the mini split could switch between "rejecting" heat to the outdoors and inside. Commercial$$$ units do $this$ with at least two indoor units. A highly efficient dehumidifier will also cost less to run (Aprilaire etc.), and produce less heat, but the investment might not pay off. It depends on how much it runs and how much it costs to keep the temperature where you want it. You could also look into rotating desiccant disk dehumidifiers, but that will certainly be an even higher upfront cost. I did not have any problem with the suggestion that the new dehumidifier (smaller) could wait. That is wise for the frugal. My problem is that, over and over, marketers of mini splits imply that they act as dehumidifiers. People not familiar believe it. It really sucks for them so I tend to react strongly, no no no. Mini split air conditioners don't act like dehumidifiers . Dehumidifiers work by cooling air and reheating it with a net heat injection due to mechanical inefficiency and quite a bit of heat it is. Mini splits dehumidify air by cooling it. There is no reheat. All the heat goes outdoors, waste heat and the latent heat from the condensing water. The room that needs no cooling gets cooler. They don't make as cool as in full cold mode, but there is a lot of air cooling going on. P.S., the auto mode is going to toggle back and forth between heating and cooling. There are two more problems with dehumidifying like that. They are set up with enough differential between heating and cooling call temperatures such that there would not be much of either going on. Second, the cooling mode is not as good at dehumidifying as dehumidify mode. As my variable speed cooling system approaches set point it goes into a mode that is very much like or identical to dehumidify mode, the coil gets very cold and the blower gets very slow. When it is far from the set point, fan is fast and the coil is probably as cold as the system can make it at that blower speed. They cool first and dehumidify later. Old school single speed systems that i've had the opportunity to observe with instruments tend to dry first and cool later.