I advise a variety of plants. Seems like every year what did well last year fails and some new thing grows like a weed. Tomatoes in particular seems to be unpredictable for me... sun sweet yellow one year, early girls the next, romas another. I don't even know what survived this year other then I have a dozen tomato plants doing well. I planted beefsteak, romas, early girl, and a variety mix called heirloom. Whatever I get will be far better tasting then store bought. I plant 99% from seed. About the first week of March give or take some I start planting indoors. Pepper plants need the most time and tomatoes use up some weeks. Most seeds are good for more then one year so keep extras in a cool dry place for next year. Seems most people I know buy plants from a greenhouse so perhaps I doing it wrong... but then I don't spend a small fortune just to plant my garden. Peas go directly in the ground as soon as the snow is gone and the frost is out of the ground. It does not matter if they get some snow on them... won't hurt a thing. Plant a row every other week. I let the weeds grow up around them and they climb the weed stalks for support. Seems to deter the deer as they can't go down the row munching everything level with the ground. Onions don't seem to mind the cold either and I have 3 nice rows that were planted in early May. I have a hole in my garden where I dump all my organic scraps. Anything that goes bad in the fridge along with clumps of cat hair, coffee grounds (paper filter included), egg shells, vegtable ends, peels, hairbrush debris, grease from the frying pan... anything organic. I keep a bucket in the house and dump it every couple days. Have to cover the dump with a shovel full of dirt or the wild animals will come in to feed... they love egg shells. Nature wastes nothing! A side benefit is that I get volunteer plants. Last year I plucked out three onion sprouts to replant and this year I have a huge potato plant that sprung up from a hole I filled and moved on from. Free plants is free plants and they obviously like the soil they are in. Another benefit is almost nothing in my garbage bag can rot so my garbage stays stink free. If you can get someone to plow up your garden spot even once it helps. Once the sod is broken working the ground is much easyier. Lots of local people spray the top with a herbicide called roundup that kills all the grass and weeds. It breaks down in a few days and your vegtables won't be affected. I don't use it because I'm organic as possible about everything. It does really help with keeping weeding to a minimal level. For my garden I have a cultivator attachment for my heavy duty garden tractor. Most garden attachments require a 3pt hitch on the tractor. Tillers are an expensive attachment... the one made for my tractor is over $2k!... and I have to install a pto kit that cost $800 to make it work. Chump change to people like me that make $14/hr. ; ) The cultivator was not bad... the dealer screwed up when I bought a tractor and after several weeks he finally dropped it off at my home free of charge (book value is about $350). A single bottom plow is about $400 as was my 5' back blade. After the inital ground preperation I do most of my work with a hoe, rake, and shovel. After cultivating the ground I give is a good rake job to gather up all the grass and weeds that were uprooted. No point in pulling a weed unless you remove it from the garden... grass in particular can simply reroot stronger then ever. I rake them into a pile which seems to kill them pretty good. A good workout and I see why some people use herbicide for that chore. For tomato plants I dig a hole a foot deep and refill it with a mixture of compost and regular soil. This leaves a depression around the plant which makes watering easy. Squash has been a huge winner and almost work free for me. Last year a butternut squash plant just appeared in my garden... almost took it out with my hoe. It was huge and I had more squash then I could eat. One squash laid on the ground all winter long and this spring I ran it over with the tractor and let the cultivator bury the pieces. That created a whole row of squash plants for me. Summer squash I plant on filled in garbage holes which makes them grow to a huge size... they must like coffee grounds and cat hair. Probably obvious that I am not a master gardener. I just plant stuff and go with what comes up and does well. Finally got some asparagus to take root. As another poster mentioned some things like fruit trees only need one successful planting for years of produce. Rhubarb and raspberries are fairly easy to plant and produce year after year. I have enough land that I take advantage of natural "gardens"... black raspberries, wild stawberries, mushrooms that just spring up. I pile brush to create a home for wild rabbits then hunt them when in season. No garden grown or store bought stawberry will ever have the concentrated tangy sweetness of those tiny little wild ones.... and they is free for the pickin. Gardening for me is not just vegtables but an exercise machine, a place to get a suntan, an eco-friendly garbage disposal, and a puzzle to figure out. Hope you have as much fun as I do! A fair warning that the flavor of fresh tomatoes and other vegtables is highly addictive and life will never be the same without them. A happy discovery from these gw forums is that pepper plants live forever. I potted my cayenne pepper plants last year and was looking at the bright red peppers just this morning. My stupid cats will eat the pepper plants and bite the fruit so I keep them in an old rabbit cage in front of double glass doors for protection. Pretty much a constant supply of fresh hot peppers... soon as I pluck the fruit new flowers appear.... must self pollinate as most turn into peppers. One of my non-organic exceptions is that I stick a miracle grow spike into my house plants every three months. : ) lyra

No offense to AZ Wildcats, but Jock is way beyond starting small at this point! He is well into this process and has probably hit the limit. Jock, I think I was where you are now, back in 2005 when I tried to hire a designer or color consultant to work with. I knew an awful lot about what I liked, but I felt I needed the extra edge from a professional to get me the last few yards to the goal. As for finding someone to work with who has compatible style...you need to find someone who does not insert any of their own style into your process. That should be one of your first questions when interviewing people. Make sure you are not getting a look or a package or (heaven forbid) a formula. You need someone to help you find your home's own best design potential....a facilitator. I'm not sure where you live, but I would start with the IACC-NA.

Jynja, you're here!!! Oh man, you do such amazing work! Linlee, that project you've got going looks great-- so many little pieces! Thanks for the welcome back, Slowme-- I've missed this place. The inherent trouble with tutorials for mold making, as I am finding out, is that my hands are always goopy when a photo should be taken. This stuff is messy for sure. If I get to a place where something I am doing actually works, then I'll write out the steps. For now, if people are interested, there are about a gazillion tutorials over in the Hypertufa forum here and some incredible information over at the Garden Art Forum site. Check out this guy's site: http://www.concrete-art.com/. If you click on the "Direct Concrete Technique" and the "Works in Progress" links on his front page, you will find some awesome information, with loads and loads of photos to go along with it. Blows me away at how much he shares. Andree Le Blanc's "light-weight" cement could be because of a mesh armature of some sort, or it could be that she's used some kind of light weight material in place of some of the sand. Who knows? Styrofoam is what I'd talked about using awhile back-- you were afraid it would rot, remember? In any case, I'm still saving chunks I scrounge for maybe-someday. The wire mesh idea has been around for a long time, as far as I can tell. They called it ferrocement or something like that. If you google this, you can find articles about houses that were built using this method. In researching cement work, I've found tons of artists using variations of this idea. I think Jynja uses the lath (please correct me if I'm wrong about this), which I think is a great idea-- it makes a lot of sense, all those little "pockets." I also like her idea of using the spray foam insulation on the inside. Oh oh! I keep forgetting to mention one HUGE inspiration for me was Klinger's hollow sphere in a thread over on the Hypertufa forum (linked below). Oh man, what a wonderous thing it is! Nancy Here is a link that might be useful: Klinger's Hollow Sphere Thread

Jali, when I emptied my rain gauge on Wednesday it had 1.4” in it. When I emptied it yesterday morning it had another 2.4” in it! Flood of '65, indeed! I emailed Barb last nite to let her know I had arrived safely—tense, but safe—and I mentioned the Flood of '65 to her! She's not old enough to remember it, but I am! It rained, like this time, for a week or whatever and everything was saturated—and then, like you said, it DUMPED and that was all they wrote! All the bridges in/out of Denver on the west side of town but ONE washed out, including one that was just a couple years old and had been built for a “500-year flood!” I have pics of a span of that bridge laying in the middle of the Platte! Huge sections of I-25 and the train tracks between Denver and the Springs washed out! I still have the newspapers from right after it with all the pics! But I hadn't stopped to think that this was the 50th anniversary of it!!! Cherry Creek Dam was still new back then, and there was near panic on the news that it was going to break—they were releasing water as fast as they could. I lived in an apartment about a half a block from Speer and we were listening to the radio so we'd know when to RUN—and then the power went out! I'm still here—so, no, it didn't break! And 25th anniversary of the Limon tornado! Wow! Some years to remember! Guess you remember that one well! What I remember was I was watching TV weather and all of a sudden the radar went down! Switched channels, and no radar! Switched again—nobody had radar anymore! That's when we knew it was “serious!” If the Limon radar was wiped out—what else in Limon was wiped out! Wasn't long and the channels were picking radar up from the airport, and that's when most of them switched to doppler! Memories! I've been watching Denver radar today, and the forecast, and at least it looks like this is about the end of it for right now, so, hopefully, no repeat of '65! Thinking of you all down in the lowlands--make that WETlands--right now, Skybird