Wolflover. It is so wonderful to see you here! I know you're there, but you don't post as often as you used to and I miss you when you aren't posting. That was an important pepper tidbit I learned shortly after moving here, and I did find, too, that not letting the plants be exposed to cold temps below 50 degrees did make a huge difference in how well/how early they produce. I wish I'd learned it 10 or 15 years earlier. My peppers are a lot more pampered...carried in and out just like yours...but they don't seem to mind being planted later. Even though I plant them about a month later than I used to, they produce earlier than they used to. Seems odd, doesn't it, but I'll keep doing it since it works. I haven't tried Aji Dulce. I'll have to put it on my list. The habaneros I grow are for DH and his friends. I barely survive inhaling the fumes when I'm cutting them up, and I don't eat them at all except in pepper jellies. Aji Dulce probably would be just right for a 'pepper wimp' like me. You've made a lot more salsa than I have, but I've been bogged down in fruit. Now that the fruit is over, I can spend more time on peppers, pepper jellies and salsa. I canned about 85 jars of salsa last year and it wasn't enough, so I'm shooting for 120-130 this year. I still have a long way to go to reach that goal though. Adellabedella, I can see why several glasses of milk and lots of bread would be required. I grew a yellow habanero type pepper called 'Fatali' (beware any pepper with the word fatal as part of its name) for several years and thought all our friends knew it was really, really, really hot. DH gave some Fatali peppers to a coworker who took them home. Before he could even warn his wife "Watch out, they're really hot", she'd taken one out of the bag and popped it into her mouth. It made blisters in her mouth. Blisters! She could laught about it later, but she was in all kinds of misery at the time. She thought it was one of those sweet squash peppers or mushroom peppers and never dreamed it was a habanero type. Dawn

Okay, I will try to post again! I tried last week and when I went to submit, my screen went blank and then each time there was some sort of problem with trying to get on the Garden Web. Here is the big batch of pie dough. You will need of course a very large bowl and either a hand mixer or a pastry blender tool. In a large bowl put 5 pounds of all purpose flour. I take mine right out of the freezer and it is very cold. To this add 1 three pound can of vegetable shortening that has been in the refrigerator. Add the shortening in large spoons full and either use the mixer or your pastry blender tool or whatever you like to mix in the flour and shortening until it is fairly small pieces. When it is done add to this two 12 ounce cans of lemon lime drink. Let it soak in and then stir it well until it becomes a large lump! Then shape smaller portions of the dough in a size for a top and bottom crust. Wrap in plastic wrap, and freeze. Put the wrapped dough into a ziplock freezer bag. Put in the refrigerator to thaw when ready to use or put in the to chill refrigerator and then roll out for pie. Some times I add some sugar to the flour and shortening mixture and also maybe some vanilla if you wish a sweeter dough. This does not call for any salt. I don't know how many pies this makes as I don't use it all at once. It has always turned out well for me. Sue

Mary, I, too, was generally pleased with Mockingbird. Why do you suppose the critics have been either lukewarm or noncommittal? Do you think it's because it is an unauthorized biography? Good grief, the dime-a-dozen bios of dead people get more attention. Perhaps because I love To Kill a Mockingbird so much, I have found every tidbit I've read about Lee fascinating and I always wanted more; but maybe not as many readers have been as taken with either TKAM or its author as I thought. I think I was less surprised that Nelle was a tomboy. I always equated Scout and her creator in my mind. Plus I had southern girl cousins who never fitted in the stereotype of the "starched penitentiary" of southern girlhood. Such an upbringing existed for some, no doubt, but I've always figured it was less common than the popular notion of it. An aside: I visited my Alabama kinfolk several summers, running from 1956 to 1966 (some summers they visited us in Iowa). About the only thing different I noticed between my female cousins and me -- besides our accents -- was they had to wear shoes outdoors (Iowa kids went barefoot), though I had to comply with the shoe-wearing, too, when I was in Alabama because of the hookworms and pinworms that people could pick up from the ground through the soles of their feet. I got in fistfights with my boy cousins right along with my brothers, but that was mainly when we were younger. Looking back, I am always amazed at how little real supervision we had: the grownups turned us out of the house as soon as we finished breakfast, and we didn't go back in except at lunch and supper time -- often we stayed outside at night, too. Perhaps because TKAM evokes such strong feelings of nostalgia in me, I am more enamored than I should be. Mary, I think a lot of the success of TKAM had to do with the timing of the Civil Rights situation. Many non-southerners home in on the racial hypocrisy -- sometimes at the exclusion of almost everything else in the book -- and say, "Uh-huh, just what I thought," because it validates what they think they know about the South and southerners. I imagine Lee's story of small-town southern life wouldn't have impressed northerners in the book business without the racial aspect -- and thank goodness Lee's editor was canny enough to realize something was needed for a wider audience. Southerners would have found Lee's book interesting without the controversy of racial inequalities, but they would've read it, even enjoyed it, and then they would've relegated it to the parlor bookcase to sit along side the little-read and forgotten novels of Stribling and other southern writers of his kind. Stars Fell on Alabama, Tobacco Road, God's Little Acre, and of course Gone with the Wind, and maybe a couple of Faulkner's novels would have continued to be the most vociferously discussed southern books. Yeah, that was something: Lee's friends giving her a Christmas present of a "year off to...

To protect my minis in the 18" pot, I bought a small plastic "satellite" sled. Yep. That round plastic disc neatly fitted over my pot, anchored by small bungee cords. I made 3 equidistant holes near the edge of the sled and put S hooks in them. The bungee cords were anchored by large plastic hooked stakes stuck deep into the ground. The smaller pot was similarly covered by a large plastic bowl I bought at a 99 cent store. The worst winter preservation problem was keeping the "landscape workers" from throwing away the coverings on the order of the "I can throw my (considerable) weight around any time I want" co-op manager. He is a total idiot. As my neighbors are constantly pointing out, my garden brings happiness to so many people, from neighbors to people walking each morning on their way to the bus to students attending a local college---and I hear it from them. Why the co-op manager wants to be such a ____ is beyond them---and me. No, that rose is a full grown "Strike It Rich" beauty. The rose bands someone stuck into my garden are happily reposing in my friend's mudroom until next week, when he will transplant them outside into a vacant yard. If, by the time they flower (probably next year) I see something I like, I might take it home to plant it here. But most of the 9 bands will stay there. I have a teeny co-op garden, not the lush acres a lot of you Hostfolk are blessed with.