Hi I had the same smell 2 years ago. It is rotten egg gas, the type of science experiment we annoyed our science teachers with. I had a Miele for 20 years and replacing it seemed logical after 20 problem free years. After going through all that everyone else has done with their smelly dishwashers i began my research into plastics, their interaction with chemicals and the results of the interaction with the components of dishwasher detergents. I came up with different kinds of polymers that are components of plastic. When certain polymers interact they give off rotten egg gas (Hydrogen sulphide). It stinks. Replacing the baskets stopped the odour, but the plastic water hole is another story. It is a haven for a fungus the likes of which I have never seen. Rinsing the filter after every wash is the only way out of that one. It is Miele's responsibility to have the components of their dishwashers manufactured under better quality control.

Well, that certainly changes things. Romper could still use a kitten her own size to play and socialize with, since the adult males may not want to play with her or may play waaay too rough. However, Romper will learn lots of important feline social skills from the adults, and that's a very good thing! As far as introductions are concerned, young kittens are generally very easy to incorporate into a household. You will, however, need to keep them under constant, close supervision until you are certain that the males have accepted Romper, because some males will kill kittens. Even with young kittens, some adults may get their noses out of joint for a while. They may even be afraid of Romper and hiss, run, and hide from her. But this will pass as they realize that she poses no real threat. If I were you (and I have certainly been in your position), I would just start letting Romper out into the rest of the house and stay very close by as she makes her own introductions. As long as neither of your boys make any physically aggressive moves toward her, ignore any hisses and growls and just let them do whatever they feel they need to do in order to deal with the "situation". If Romper is afraid, however, hold and comfort her. She's just a tiny baby, after all. Don't make a huge fuss over her. Just hold her so that she feels protected. If she'll play, try to distract her with some type of toy so that she can associate being in the boys' presence with a source of fun. If Romper is anything like the kittens who have been abandoned on my road and/or shown up on my farm, she'll be a lot more fearful of your dog than she will be of your other cats. But as she watches your cats interact with your dog, she'll quickly learn that the dog is no threat, either. Don't force interactions on any of the animals. Let them all figure it out in their own ways and at their own paces. Just keep Romper safe and separated from the others when you are not able to directly supervise until you know that they are all accepting and comfortable with each other. Having written all of that, I feel compelled to tell you a tragic story of a kitten who was briefly a member of my family many years ago. I had two adult female cats and three dogs at the time. The dogs had all lived peacefully and happily with multiple cats their entire lives. I adopted a young male kitten who was a real pistol, as male kittens will be. The adult cats would have absolutely NOTHING to do with him, so he had no same-species playmates with whom to expend his youthful energy. Of course my ex and I played with him as often as possible during daylight hours and before bedtime, but his need for play was insatiable (again, as if often the case with young male kittens). One morning I awoke to find the kitten with a broken neck, dead, under our bed in the exact spot where our old lab always slept. Since the lab didn't have a cat-aggressive bone in her body, all I could imagine was that the kitten had decided he wanted to play and pounced on the lab in the middle of the night. I'm guessing he woke her out of a sound sleep with all those little needles on his feet, and she woke up snapping without even realizing what she was doing. His death must have been instantaneous, because we heard absolutely nothing. Needless to say, we were heartbroken. The moral to this story is to keep your kitten and your dog separated when you're not around to supervise until your kitten is old enough to have learned some manners, because tragic accidents can happen in an instant. Laurie

The kitten looks very young and what's sad is it doesn't have it's mother and litter mates around to teach it social skills. For now, give the kitten some peace and quiet and don't place the older cat into the kitten's 'space'. He most likely sees the older cat as a threat, not a play mate, since he's looks too young to be dealing with anything other than his Mom, eating and cuddling with litter mates. Be sure you're feeding the young one a lot of soft food plus, I would give the him a soft stuffed toy to cuddle against.....especially when he's sleeping. Let them interact on their own and as he gets older and stronger he'll probably start to interact with the older kitten. I suggest you give them each their own bed and litter box and make sure the small kitten can easily enter the litter box. When I first got my kitten (rescued from a field) she was so small she had to use a baking pan for a litter box. Do you have another pic of the kitten? He doesn't look very well in the pic you posted.

So, I'm back now to read thoroughly and try to respond. Amy, I do treat lima beans pretty much like snap beans except for planting them slightly later since they are heat lovers and I'm using them to fill that legume role after the snap beans are pretty much done. I have tried planting lima beans at the same time as snap beans, and in my location it doesn't work out well. Maybe that's our cool spring microclimate getting a bit colder at night than the lima beans like or something, so I tend to plant them about a month or six weeks after snap beans. However, I plant snap beans sort of on the early side to beat the heat and the spider mites, so maybe the limas just don't tolerate being planted too early as well as the snap beans do. One thing I do ponder is this: if I have snap beans, the spider mites are going to show up on them...sometimes insanely early. Why, then, do the spider mites not bother the lima beans at all? Beans are beans, right? I wonder if anyone has researched this. We are not big fans of celeriac either. We have tried it, but about the only way I use it nowadays is chopped up in a big pot of vegetable soup. I don't blame you for being mad at Wal-mart. Ours never has enough electric carts for all the folks who need them, and they've taken out the benches they used to have at the front of the store. I guess the benches got in the way of one of the little banks, or the vet, or the hair salon or whatever that now populates the front of the store outside the checkouts. I fight the blahs in dreary, cloudy winter weather too. I need sunshine! This winter has been tougher than most because the sun has been hiding behind the clouds almost every day, and often (I blame the warmer temperatures for this) we have had fog until noon. I feel like we've sort of had Pacific Northwest weather this year with all the incessant fog, mist, clouds and drizzle and I have not liked it at all. Jennifer, In my garden, beans as a group are relatively pest free, except that the spider mites really love them. Some years the mites arrive early and are horrible, and other years the beans pretty much finish producing before any spider mites arrive at all. You might see occasional damage from Mexican bean beetles. I will see a little of that here and there, but not enough to worry about. Some years, if there is a heavy population of stink bugs (like we had last year), they will be on the beans. I have noticed that southern green stink bugs are more of a pest on beans than the brown stink bugs are. I run across the green stink bugs on the plants when harvesting beans so I try to always have my garden scissors with me so I can snip those stink bugs in half. (Don't squish stink bugs with your bare fingers unless you want for your fingers to stink all day long, even after you have thoroughly washed them.) Because you have coyotes in your neighborhood, I would not have a miniature cow unless I also had a guardian livestock dog (like a Great Pyrenees, for example) to protect the cow from the coyotes. Or, maybe a donkey. Donkeys are great at protecting livestock as well and even will take on large dogs and cougars to protect their herd. Okmulgeeboy, I have grown a gazillion types of beans over the years. There are hundreds of varieties available commercially and it has been fun to experiment with all the different kinds. If a person is going to binge on something in the garden, beans are a fun crop to experiment with. I do not grow dry beans. They are so incredibly cheap to buy in bags at the store, or in bulk at some stores, that they just are not cost-effective to grow in the garden by comparison. That's why I don't grow pinto beans or black bean, and I always harvest our southern peas green, not leaving them on the plants to dry. I prefer to use the garden for fresh legumes that I can harvest weekly, and then either snap or shell, and eat fresh. We just freeze the excess for winter when I grow more than we can eat fresh and that is possible because we have three freezers in the garage, though all of them are not full year-round....one of them usually empties out as we devour our fresh-frozen food over the course of the fall and winter months. Then, as soon as the harvest starts in Spring, I refill that big freezer with garden produce over the course of the growing season. It is a big chest freezer divided into compartments by blue plastic dividers, so I fill each section with a different veggie, which keeps it organized and makes it easier for me to find what I want when I'm removing frozen produce from the freezer to use in meal preparation. Larry, That is great cow advice! Rebecca, I have hesitated to try to put words to how I feel about this year's winter/spring weather because I am getting mixed feelings about it. Does that make sense? I don't have a strong feeling that we will have late cold weather. I don't have a strong feeling that we will have early warm weather. It all just feels sort of "blah" in my brain. Good heavens, I hope I'm not losing my garden intuition as I age! That would be terrible. So, my best guess based on my garden intuition is that we are going to warm up early in general, but need to watch carefully for late rounds of cold weather. We aren't going to warm up extraordinarily early. You know, there have been some years when January was so warm that I actually put tomato plants in my 4' round galvanized metal stock tank in February...around the third week of February, and I did so expecting they would do well and would produce early and they did, though I had to cover them up on 2 or 3 cold nights. Well, this is not one of those years. It doesn't feel the same as those years. This is more of a middle-of-the-road year. I want to believe it will warm up early and stay warm, but there is a little voice inside my head (picture a miniature Three Stooges type guy jumping up and down in my brain, yelling at me to get my attention) warning me not to get into too much of a hurry to plant too early. Do I wonder where that voice is coming from, given than the signs around me outdoors have been hinting at an early Spring since at least December? Of course I do. I've learned not to question the voices in my head (hope I don't sound like a schizophrenic here) because they are coming from somewhere I cannot explain. I just know that when I follow my intuition, things tend to work out well in the garden. So, I'm not getting in a big hurry with anything, but I'm also not going to drag my heels too much and start seeds too late relative to the weather we are having. I have wondered if my garden brain is being lazy this year because I'm not planning on a big veggie garden? Because I'm rotating my favorite crops, all the nightshades, out of the front garden and replacing them with a lot of flowers as a form of crop rotation, am I losing my focus and not listening to my usual garden-planting intuition? I suppose that is a possibility. However, I am strongly feeling the urge to plant veggies even though that really is not supposed to be a part of my gardening in 2020 since I want to focus on renovating our landscape. I'll talk about that more sometime this week in the Week 5 thread as there are some rational reasons for that, and maybe one irrational one. So, now I'm thinking the front garden won't be 100% flowers and herbs. Maybe it will be 60% flowers and herbs and 40% veggies. We'll see. I promise that when I am starting seeds and planting and transplanting, I'll say so, and just by my actions y'all should be able to see if I'm feeling an early spring sneaking into the garden...or not. Early for me is much earlier than early would be for those of you further north, so if I start things early or on time, you all still have plenty of time to start things early too (and Jennifer is ahead of me this year, I've noticed, and there is nothing wrong with that--I think she is listening to her intuitive garden brain too.) My biggest fear as an intuitive gardener always has been that my garden intuition will fail, one of these years, to send me the right messages and I'll plant too late, but it really hasn't happened yet, so I try to listen to the voices in my head and behave correspondingly. This year, as usual, I expect to start seeds on Super Bowl Sunday....which is next week! Yikes! In a way it is sneaking up on me, but I already have seed-starting supplies and seeds on hand, so I'm ready to start the seeds next Sunday even though it doesn't really feel to me like it should be Super Bowl Sunday yet. I have one plant shelf set up indoors (long story) and the actual light shelf is going to be set up, hopefully today, in the mudroom, so it will be ready for next weekend's activity. Jennifer, I will go find the outlooks and link them, but the last time I looked at them, which I think was early January, they were showing February warmer than usual overall, and were iffy on the rain---no real hint there. At the time I checked them, there were equal chances of us having above average rainfall in February, average rainfall in February or below average rainfall in February. When they put up the EC on the map to indicate Equal Chances, I think that normally means their models are in disagreement so they cannot conclusively predict what might happen. Let me go retrieve the latest outlooks now. This first link shows the quarterly climate outlooks for temperature. Essentially, the tan or brown areas are showing above average temperatures, white will show average or equal chance type temperature forecasts, and if they were showing blue, that would be below average temperatures. Is it scary to anyone else that all the long-term outlooks consistently show us above average? Seasonal Outlooks Now, here's the rainfall outlook. Overall, I find the temperature outlooks to be more reliable than the rainfall outlooks, but since they prepare the rainfall outlooks, I want to post them as well. I'll tell you in advance that there is nothing in the rainfall outlooks that strongly hints at a wet year....and, yet, many of us have had a very rainy January, so I feel like there are mixed signals here. Quarterly Rainfall Outlooks Okay, I'm out of time and need to go make breakfast before it ends up being brunch. I'll be back later to finish catching up. Dawn