mawmaw, Some people routinely "top" their plants. It will keep them shorter, and cause the plants to bush out. There isn't much point in a 9 foot plant that requires a step-ladder to pick the fruit at the top, especially if you are a short person. lelia, Tomato plants can be prone to fungus, particularly if your weather is both hot and humid. If you plant them close fungus can be a difficult problem, and pruning will decrease the density of foliage and improve the air circulation, thus lessening the chance of fungal growth. You can also spray with an anti-fungal of your choice. What you choose to do should depend on your weather conditions and your garden. Having faith in mother nature is a philosophy, and not the only one. At the very least, species go extinct, all by themselves. Not all species thrive in the natural environment. So much for the perfection of Mother Nature. Caging and staking, just like vegetable gardening, are constructs. They are not necessarily easier (catering to the human), in fact they can be a lot of work. They allow the gardener to plant tomatoes closer together, when space is an issue. More importantly these techniques keep the fruit off the ground, where it can rot more easily and may be vulnerable to pests like slugs. Mulching can help with the rotting problem, but will provide a wonderful habitat for slugs. Caging and staking will fix that, but may make your 'maters more vulnerable to birds. Once again it depends on your garden conditions. Petro

I actually use the hot & spicy oregano more than any of my other herbs in my cooking. Yes, you can dry it. But in the case of this particular variety, I am not sure I agree about it being better dried. The hot & spicy isn't hot, but it is stronger than Greek oregano, for example. And drying it seems to take away a bit of the flavor. But that's just my opinion and I've found that people tend to disagree over fresh vs. dried oregano. I find lots of uses for the hot & spicy oregano, including Italian dishes, most anything with tomatoes, egg dishes, and others. And of course, once I have more ripe tomatoes and habaneros, it will be going into homemade salsa too!

Kitchenmonkey -- in one of your other threads, you mentioned you had an existing stove with an 18.6k power burner and were looking at maybe buying a friend's Wolf AG range. Did you get a chance to check out using your wok on that range? If so, how did it compare to your existing range? That info might help us provide a better answer to your questions here because we would have a better frame of reference for how to explain this to you. Traditional wok cooking uses a rather narrowly spread flame. As lazy_gardens explained -- the idea is to aim the heat at the bottom third of the wok. You've apparently been using a major brand stove with an 18.6k power burner that probably throws the flames to a much wider area. (Maybe it doesn't?) Some folks will tell you that this is "all wrong" and that you are some kind of ignorant cretin for not doing it "the right way", but who cares about those kinds of opinions if you like the food you've been making? You asked what does open burner mean. Well, it can mean a lot of things, but not all open burners are created the same. What people are talking about here (in this context), they are talking about a burner that is in a star or ring shape that sits in a open well allowing air to flow up from all around the burner. This tends to give a more concentrated flame and, of course, means that stuff you spill can go down inside the range. (The brands mentioned above typically have pull-out trays to catch spillage and make it relatively simple to clean out the interior). There are, of course, other kinds of open burners that tend to look and work like the sealed burners you are probably used to seeing. A "sealed" burner sits in a closed well or pan so that spills generally won't go down inside the range. The flame spreads can wider to a whole lot wider. You asked about whether a 20k btu burner is hotter than a 15k btu burner. Well, undertand the btu-ratings just tell you how much gas is being burned. To figure out what is hotter you have to ask: hotter for what? A big tri-ring burner on full power can put a lot of heat into thebase of a big pot, like 20-quart canning kettle/stock pot with a 13" base. That is a lot of heat for boiling big quantities of water, for example. If you put a 3-quart sauce pan on that same burner -- which may have a six inche base --- most of the heat will be going outside the saucepan and around it. That 20k-btu burner isn't putting 20k btu into the smaller pan. The advantage of a tri-ring burner is that you can turn down the gas and maybe use the center ring to get the saucepan to boil, but you using maybe 9k-btu to do it. So, when would a 16K btu burner "outperform" a 22k btu burner for the wok cooking you want to do? Well, if you want to do traditional "bottom third heating" when the 16k-btu burner that puts the majority of the flames on the bottom third of your wok may be better for you than a 22k btu burner spreads it wider. OTOH, if you want a wider flame spread, as you likely are getting with the 18.6k btu burner on that major brand range, the the smaller burner may not be what you want. Some of these differences will vary with how big is the wok you've using to get the results you like. I believe you said something in your other thread about making smaller quantities of food. Consider that a 15k btu open burner on a Blue Star RCS range may give you everything you want where 22k btu burner might be more heat over a wider area than you want. If you've got a really potent burner, it can be a very short trip from char to charcoal. So, back to that Wolf range you mentioned in your other thread. If you test it out and like the food from your wok on its 15k-btu burner better than what you've been getting with that unnamed major brand range's 18.6k btu burner, you figured out something very useful to you. If you conclude that you don't like the results from that Wolf burner as much or better, then you've figured out that a larger sealed burner style range isn't going to give you what you want and you can start considering spending $3500 to $3800 for Blue Star or AR. Something else to consider. If you decide that you really do want massive huge amounts of wok cooking power, and your kichen has 240v outlet in it, maybe what you really want is a 3500-watt concave induction wok burner. When you factor in the relative efficiency of induction heating (84% to 94% of the energy goes into the pan) versus gas burners (only about 33% of the heat actually goes into the pan), the induction burner may be the equivalent of 36,000 BTU gas burner. Plus the induction wok burner is specfically designed to put a whole-lotta-heat on the lower third of a standard sized wok. Cooktek makes 2500 and 3500 watt induction burners. (Actual full-on commercial products if that turns your crank.) Last time I checked, I think the street price was around $1700 from the likes of Katom.com. A lot less expensive than buying a whole new range just to get one wok burner. This post was edited by JWVideo on Thu, Jul 24, 14 at 21:28

I rumaged through the attic of GW to find this thread about sinks. This was such a hard choice for me. I have had a Corian sink for 14 years that I have loved. It does get stained but it comes out and we are not hard on sinks really. We have the 70/30 split which I have really enjoyed. Sort of the best of both worlds. I don't often have cookie sheets, pans that are gargantuan or need to wash babies or dogs in the sink. I thought since I liked the split so much I would just go with another one. Was willing to go full out for something new like the Silgranite and they have a split one but I need a left small and right big bowl and they only have the opposite configuration. So, I moved on to look at stainless and I just couldn't make the change to stainless for some reason. In the end not wanting to finance a major plumbing redo to accommodate a new style of sink I ended up with the Kohler Lakefield. It was the only one I could find configured just like our old integrated Corian. I haven't had it installed yet as we haven't made an install date for the granite. The Lakefield sink is quite a bit deeper than my Corian and it weighs a ton. I hope the extra depth won't be a negative. I am nervous about liking it! I got the drain board thing for the bottom in white. It looks pretty in the pictures but I haven't ever seen one in person. I never knew sinks were such a big decision!!!