I hate to rain on this parade. It is very unlikely that any of your seed will grow. There is however a small chance if you will try the method below: How can I improve germination and "Wake UP" old or poor quality seed? Old seed gradually lose viability because of oxidation of the endosperm and loss of nutrients in the embryo. If the seed are dead, they are dead, no amount of heroics will make them grow. If even a few of the seed are viable, then here are some steps that may help. 1. The most important and essential item needed is water, but not in excess. The next most important is oxygen. Third most important is nitrate. Fourth is a source of growth regulators like salicylic acid. 2. Prepare a seed start tray with good quality moistened seed start mix such as promix bx. This MUST be sterile mix! 3. Get some miracle grow or peters or whatever variety available of water soluble fertilizer with a high nitrate content. Mix 1/2 teaspoon fertilizer with a quart of water. Alternatively, use "tea" made from oak or tea leaves as below. 4. Saturate a paper towel with the fertilizer water and then let just enough drip out to be thoroughly wet. 5. Loosely wrap a large quantity of seed in the paper towel so that the seed are not clumped up, but are in a single layer with each seed touching the towel. 6. Place the paper towel in a ziploc bag and drop it in the refrigerator for 16 to 20 hours. The bag MUST contain air, the seed need oxygen! See instructions below to increase the oxygen level if you feel that might help. 7. Remove the seed from the paper towel and carefully sow them on top of the seed start mix well spread out so that seed do not touch each other. 8. Do NOT heavily cover the seed, instead, gather a small amount of the seed start mix and dust it over the seed so that they can still receive light but have a light dusting on top. The easiest way to do this is by putting the seed start mix in a large mesh screen kitchen sifter/strainer. The seed must be spread out so they are not touching each other, otherwise mold will be a problem. 9. Place the seed start tray in an incubator at 85 degrees for up to 20 days. A chicken egg incubator works fine for this purpose. Humidity must be kept very high. If you are using a chicken egg incubator, fill the water tray and keep it filled. If you are trying to germinate them at room temp, cover them with a sheet of plastic to prevent evaporative cooling and to keep the seed moist. 10. check the seed daily to see if any are breaking the seedcoat and if so, put them in very bright light immediately. 11. Be patient. I have had seed take up to 7 weeks to germinate. 12. Old seed that manage to germinate may have a range of problems from stuck seedcoats to missing growing points. Stuck seedcoats are easiest to remove by coating them with saliva and waiting 30 minutes, then pinching the seedcoat off. If there is no growing point but the cotyledons are healthy, wait patiently, they will often generate an adventitious shoot which will grow normally. Increasing the oxygen content in the ziploc bag can help. I have done this by putting a cup of hydrogen peroxide in a pint jar and then adding a package of dry yeast. This releases a huge amount of oxygen which you can capture by holding the ziploc bag over the top of the jar. To make seed tea: Get some dry oak leaves, crumble them up, then pour 1 quart of boiling water over them. Let them steep until the water is cool, then pour the water through a strainer into a quart jar and add 1/2 of an aspirin (pure old plain generic aspirin is salicylic acid, a plant growth regulator) and 1/2 of a teaspoon of a water soluble fertilizer such as miracle grow. Soak a paper towel in the liquid and wring out most of it. This also works using ordingary "tea" leaves. The tannic acid from the oak leaves prevents mold and helps break dormancy. The salicylic acid from the aspirin stimulates growth. The nitrate from the fertilizer triggers the seed to initiate growth. But the magic secret is that it contains water. Remember, no matter what you do, you can't wake up a dead seed!

Hi romatravel - Depending on your zone ... if you still have time before Winter sets in, I think you might still have a bit of time ... Fall planting is always great for me. However you won't have time to ground-layer stems as I have done, ahead of time for insurance, in case digging & relocating fails ... you might be able to still do some stem clippings to grow indoors. As with this first attempt I did, it only took 2 weeks for the clumps to prove their resiliency & show survival from the assaults of the shovels & stress of the relocation. Knowing what I know now, in my zone I still have 'til Nov. I suggest you talk to a respectable/knowledgeable nursery, for their thoughts as well ... Good luck! Hi Madeyna - The pot-layering I did was basically similar & I think simpler, since I had to remove them from the, less than ideal site. I have another that I ground layered, an ES, in the mom's adjacent site, simply because the stem was naturally arching down on the ground. I did a shallow furrow, covered with soil & topped with a brick. I'll be checking in Spring. Several different H. stem clippings, I attempted this summer seem to be doing well ... will over-winter in the garage & plant them for my dil! Have a great Fall day!

Renovator 8, we are finishing a kitchen remodel and I have placed my wall oven at the same height as Kelrobin's. We don't use our oven very often any more because we are empty nesters. We have installed a speedcook oven just above it that we plan on using several times a day. Because I am so short, we needed to put it at a height that I could easily get in and out of since it has a drop down door and not a side opening door. That means the oven that I get into only a couple of times a month, if that, has to be low. So sometimes there are very valid reasons for such choices. Kelrobin, I think you should just get the oven that you want. Consumer reports rates Whirlpool, Maytag, KitchenAid, and Bosch all very highly. We just went with the white glass front JennAir that looks similar to yours. I am wondering why you are switching to stainless when stainless seems so much harder to keep clean?

I don't think the first photo looks too bad either, but the planting seems haphazard and leans toward smothering. It's confirmed by the aerial view that shows the depth of the bed. There it looks like the house is smothered up with a green, tumorous mass. Unless plants happen to be planted in the right position, it's seldom the case that they are worth saving. Sometimes smaller plants can be relocated but usually It's much easier to start over with new ones in the right place. I see only a single plant that interests me in that regard. It is the large deciduous shrub between the 2nd and 3rd window from the right corner of the house ... that is, if with different pruning practices it could be made into a larger tree. Since I don't know what it is, I can't know if there's any hope of that. I'm a believer in using plants with buildings as if one is architecturally adding on to the structure, but instead of with lumber, masonry & glass, with plants. It's my preference that the closer to architecture plants come, the more refined and cultured they should be. This is in direct opposition to the currently popular idea that plants are to be arranged in ways that replicate or are inspired by nature. To me, plants are just another building material and in general, I respect how man refines and uses materials. That said, plants themselves are natural objects so they do a nice job of making the transition from architectural to natural. The scheme I use is to coordinate shrubs with windows. In this case, from the perspective of the photo, the house looks a bit smothered with this technique, because there are so many windows. (I should have drawn it with a slightly smaller shrub, but not going back now.) In real life these would not get close to the walking space so would not have the same "pushy" feel to one using the walk. Instead, it would be an apron of low groundcover that guides the walk. Other than that there are small trees flanking the house, perennial masses at the building corners and color at the entrance. There could be an "accent" plant between the two rightmost windows and a taller bed of groundcover surrounding the tree that was made from an existing shrub.