I am sorry that this thread is going toward a direction that is not intended. It is almost funny to see how people would defend themselves over any gardening issues, which is a good thing actually. It is nice to see serious people giving their best to this thread. Thank you. You guys really know your stuff. First of all, I'd have to agree with pnbrown that, while being a good gardening practice, mulching is not for everyone in every situation. What I just said might sound redundant but if you try it for a few months in the place where I live like I did, you will come to the same conclusion that mulching is good for soil but does not solve my sandy crust problem at all. Soil crusting is a complicated problem(at least to me) . The crust on clay soil has very different behavior from a sandy soil crust. Clay particle is highly water absorbing and the crust on it just gives it more surface area for it to absorb and retain more water. If you mulch in this situation, the mulch will effectively reduce water evaporation from the clay crust, thus saving you a lot of watering in certain time of year. This is exactly what mulching is for imo: to preserve and reduce water evaporation in soil. Sandy soil is a water repelling in nature. Anything you put to cover it will add to the difficulty of it absorbing water. It is not a problem with water retention now. It is the problem of getting water INTO the soil. Mulch does nothing to help with this, and somehow makes it harder to water the plant. Even if you manage to soak a few inches on top the rest of the bed is still dry as hell. This leaves me no choice but to water my beds longer than usual during dry seasons which waste water. The breathe holes really stop surface runoff. The water disappear so quickly and not running down beside the beds like before. It is tedious job poking them every once in a while but at least they work. And if you apply fertilizer before watering the breathe holes it is even better as the fertilizer can go deeper and faster.

My story is a simpleton comparatively but it comes from my gardener's journal a few years ago. She was beautiful when she was young, the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. Her hair was raven colored, her cheek bones framed the most beautifully architectural face and her eyes were like chestnuts. In the picture I saw, her waist could not have been more than 18 inches cinched in a laced corset, no doubt, but she was young and though beautiful, the white blouse with its high collar and pearl buttons complimented the face already terse with tracking miles, but the long black taffeta-like skirt lent a beautifully elegant woman even more softness. Her fingers were long, as if manicured to give them a bony look so they accentuated the single gold ring with a lone diamond that adorned her left ring finger. The only other jewelry she wore was the single strand of pearls, a compliment to pearl-buttoned blouse. The picture in black and white was growing tired and becoming gray and yellow but it showed the true character of this beautiful woman, a young bride who had just finished breast-feeding her fifth child. Many miles, many Sundays and many hardships from that day, this woman who cuddled and cured sick animals, made sure every homeless person who traveled the dirt road to her door was fed a decent meal, breast fed her babies, hand fed her animals, milked cows, plucked eggs, wrung the necks of the chickens she loved so that her family might eat, suffered a depression, buried a child in the lonely cold January wind of a Texas snow. She was a midwife to many, a respite for all that came her way. She could bait a fishing hook and catch a meal, scale the fish and fry them up, and serve with style on an Army Navy tablecloth, a gift from a loving nephew who served in the European theatre. The blue and white China gave credence to a blue plate dinner. She watched the skies for clouds that might blow in and destroy the crops, the homes. She watched for homeless animals who needed food, and she fed them, petted them, named them and gave them a place to live away from harm, in the safety of her home or the now-abandoned horse barn. She lovingly fed and milked her cows, whose names were those of beloved family members. She shoveled manure to the plants she grew. Her gray washwater from the clothes she washed, starched and ironed was applied to the flower beds. The hulls from legumes she grew, the corn she shocked, all went to the large rows of flower beds of azaleas, spirea, daylilies, camellias, roses and all those who had no name or were passed along to her by her mother. The oldest of 14 children, and one of two female children, she knew her way around the kitchen, around the farm, around the neighborhood. She was the first to bring a meal when someone died, the last to leave the grieving family late at night. She was my grandmother, the one who gave me a love for gardening. Regardless of how we tried, we could never match her in humanitarian efforts. It seemed to roll off her like the sweat off her brow when she was preparing meals, not only for her family, but all the hired help on the farm. Her afternoons were spent cleaning up the kitchen, picking fruit from the orchards, peeling, seeding, and planning the next days meal. Her evenings were spent reading the newspaper and the letters after the long day was done. Her fig preserves, her peach jelly, pepper jelly, apple and plum jelly lined the walls of an outdoor building with wall-to-wall and floor-to-ceiling shelving. Blueberries and blackberries that she picked, while fending off snakes for the tiny rabbits or small grandchildren, adorned biscuits or scones that she made from scratch for breakfast. She learned to make tomato gravy, white gravy and hoecakes from the days in Texas when money was scarcer than loved ones. But gardening was her passion and she was very good at growing beautiful things, making them green, making them bloom, making them large. Of all the items in her garden, she loved bridal wreath the most. As her body became more bent with arthritis and her ribs began to collapse onto her lungs, she had asthma so severe that she could hardly breathe but she managed her way to the kitchen each morning to prepare breakfast for many, for more years than I care to think of, long past her physical ability to do that what she loved doing. She looked at catalogs and cut patterns from newspapers for the latest and most fashionable clothes so that her family members might dress with pride and glamour. She saved money to buy silk and lacy lingerie for herself and her daughters and granddaughters, something very few women could afford and certainly not in abundance. She washed and ironed handkerchiefs with little lace corners that she kept fresh and piled high for church and funeral attendance. The treks to the fields to gather brush to make brooms always occurred on Sunday afternoon once the family members and minister had left. Cool afternoons in the fall were spent sitting outside, rifling through the brush to remove anything that might be caught on the wooden floors that she scrubbed with a mop made of rags which she had saved from her sewing that were not "fit for quilts." Ah, Winter. Winter is when she made the quilts. She hand-basted her quilts and later sewed them together after the batten had been added for substance. If there was time of Saturdays after preparing everyoneÂs clothing for church the following day, she took time to teach us to embroider, crochet, knit and do tatting. There was never a shortage of pillow cases that she had made from bleached cotton fabric onto which we could embroider designs and sew our finished tatting. To this day, I still have a pillow case of crisp white cotton which I trimmed in the only tatting that I had the patience to complete, with a compelling blue bird I embroidered with red roses in its beak. I never completed the leaves so the rose is just that a rose with no foliage, not unlike my garden in the heat of summer. She taught me about cottonseed meal, guano, how to "drop" potatoes, sow peas, stake running beans, tried very hard to teach me about grafting plants, pick colors for a dress to suit my coloring and hair, how to clean china without eradicating the platinum band, how to clean crystal without pitting it, how to separate the clothes for laundry by color and fabric, how to love people who we find difficult to like, how to accept my children as individuals and to know they may not always walk with the right foot first but I must love and nurture them as best I can for what they become is more me than I realize, how to dress babies so that everyday is Sunday until they are weaned from public appraisal, to not concern myself with cradle cap as it is part of the human development, how to listen to doctors but cull the pep talk from the facts. She taught me to sit still in church, how to read the Bible with discernment, how to keep silent in the face of adversity but mentally make a plan to overcome it. She never was able to instill in me the importance of keeping my cards close to the vest as she did but she taught me (along with my grandfather) that women did not have the advantage but could take advantage of the opportunities that arose and how to make the best of the days when there was no opportunity. She asked me not to whine about the shortcomings in life but to understand it is not a perfect world. She taught me that my happiness rests entirely on my shoulders and that nothing else can make me a happy person and that how I deal with what life has dealt me will determine my happiness, and that there is no perfect world. I saw her shed her first tears when we had to remove the bridal wreath she loved so much, but we had to remove it because she could not breathe when her lungs became so tired from the compression of her ribs. Tears ran down her face, perhaps not from the bridal wreath but the memories attached to it. Her mother gave her that "first slip" to root and she had carried it many miles and on many moves and journeys. Now, the bridal wreath was a sign that her journey was coming to an end. ItÂs a beautiful day today, the sky is clear and if she were here, we might be out wringing chickens necks or we might be creating a beautiful doily for the hall table but she is not here and the nurseries are selling bridal wreath and I am going to pick up two and plant them at her grave site. She will not have to worry about the breathing thing any longer, she will not have to worry about it, becoming a thing of the past. I am going to give it a place of prominence and she can now have her beautiful bridal wreath with her through eternity without the concern for her health. I hope she knows that I remember the tears that day and am doing what I can to wipe them away. I surely hope she will.

Wetsuitor: The only ones I dug up this year were 4 washies and a sago palm, each of which would take considerable protection here including heat. I will be leaving those in when they get 2 big to handle, but the washies seem to take root distubance very well and overwinter well indoors. There is of course some set back and it is slow to get growing in the spring, however I'm not ready to get into an elaborate heating system yet. I'm trying to work out my kinks this year on a trachy. Plus my wife would kill me if I had Jim's setup! I live in maybe the coldest winter 6a in America. This will be my 3rd winter here, the lowest low each of the past 2 years is -2, and -8F, HOWEVER, it is the norm to go 3 weeks at a time never getting above freezing. Last December and January, we had 9 days that got above freezing during the day, and most of those were in the 33-38F range for highs. We also had 2 3-weeks seesions of consecutive below freezing weather. The other problem is that I generally don't see grass from Dec.1 to mid-March, it never gets warm enough to ever melt the snow. Last year I lost 2 decent sized trachies and a sabal palmetto, and my minors and needle that survived received considerable damage, the minors burned 98%, the only things left were the emerging spears. Needle had spear pull with surving pups. That was with frost cloth wrapped unheated leaf cages, which provided 0-30% damage and no losses the year before.

Your on vacation and your worrying about your tomatoes, hmmm, alot of people might think there is something wrong with you. Sounds like your really obsessed with this tomato thing. This is not normal for most people. Unless you hang out on the tomato forum at Gardenweb and your like most of us. Welcome to the club of "worrying about your tomatoes while your on vacation". Damon