I don't think there is any advantage in waiting for the sake of waiting before repotting. It's one thing if you're waiting for a more opportune period in the growth cycle to repot, or if you're waiting to let the tree recover from recent stress strain, but if I were to purchase a healthy juniper today, I'd be repotting it at my earliest convenience. A pine, I would wait on until August, when most bonsai practitioners repot them in our neck of the woods. I think too, that it's not a no-no to move plants into bonsai containers, but most inexperienced growers are in too big of a hurry, moving trees to small containers when they should remain in large containers, or even in the ground to develop some caliper and in most cases, taper through a series of trunk chops. Once you move a plant into a small container, the rate of development is hampered specifically. Bonsai containers are for trees that have already been sufficiently developed & have something of a framework or basic structure, but are in need of refinement. While you can successfully use the 5:1:1 mix in deeper pots, like nursery cans, for growing material on, the material will develop faster in a soil like the gritty mix that doesn't support perched water. This is especially true of plants like pines & junipers that tolerate wet feet poorly. Everything I'm growing on as future bonsai candidates goes in the gritty mix at the first repot, and I've had excellent results with Foliage-Pro 9-3-6 supplemented with a little ProTeKt 0-0-3. How much top growth you can remove is very dependent on species, state of vitality, and timing, so there is no one size fits all answer. We aren't restricted in bonsai by the same rules that are applied to trees in the landscape, so the 10 to whatever %s we often see suggested for landscape trees are often very light. It's not at all unusual to see trees completely defoliated in June, or to have a nice fat trunk 2-3" trunk chopped back to a 2" stump in spring with nary a branch or leaf to be found. Again, what you can do or get away with depends on species, state of vitality, and timing, and a better 'feeling' of what's appropriate comes with time or the advice of an experienced practitioner. Joining a club will propel you along the learning curve far faster than you could hope to move on your own. Conifers are CAPABLE of carrying on a small degree of photosynthesis when soils are not frozen, but they don't need light. What they do need is cold. I over-winter a few plants on the bench outdoors, but most over-winter on tables in the attached garage or on the garage floor. You can also bury the pots in the ground, preferably on the north side of a building out of sun and wind. There are hundreds of potential species that will tolerate soils that are frozen solid. A copy/paste job from a previous post - forgive me if it seems to stray a little: Commonly, each species of plant has a general range of cold-hardiness. Within species and cultivar, cold-hardiness is genetically determined. That is to say that a plant that is propagated from cuttings or tissue culture will have the same ability to resist cold as the parent plant. Plants cannot "develop" a greater degree of cold-hardiness by repeated or prolonged exposure to cold, even after 100 years (trees). If we pick any plant at random, it may or may not be able to withstand freezing temperatures. The determining factor is the plants ability to prevent freezing of bound water. Bound water is the water inside of cells. There are actually three kinds of water to consider when we discuss "freezing". The water held in soil - When this water freezes, and it can freeze the soil mass solid, it doesn't necessarily kill the plant or tissues. Then there is free or unbound water, also called inter-cellular water. This is water that is found in plant tissues, but is outside of living cells cells. This water can also freeze solid and not kill the plant. The final type of water is bound water or intra-cellular water. If temperatures drop low enough to freeze this water, the cell/tissue/plant dies. This is the freeze damage that kills plants. Fortunately, nature has an antifreeze. Even though temperatures drop well below freezing, all plants don't die. In hardy plants, physiological changes occur as temperatures drop. The plant moves solutes (sugars, salts, starches) into cells and moves water out of cells to inter-cellular spaces in tissues. These solutes act as antifreeze, allowing water in cells to remain liquid to sometimes extremely low temperatures. The above is a description of super-cooling in plants. Some plants even take advantage of another process to withstand very low temps called intra-cellular dehydration. The roots of your trees can stay frozen for extended periods or go through multiple freeze/thaw cycles w/o damage, so long as the temperature does not fall below that required to freeze intra-cellular water. If roots remain frozen, but temperatures remain above killing lows, dessication is the primary concern. If the tree is able to take up water, but temperatures are too low for the tree to grow and make food, stored energy becomes the critical issue. Dormant and quiescent trees are still using energy from their reserves (like a drain on a battery). If those reserves are depleted before the tree can produce photosynthesizing mass, the organism dies. There are a number of factors that have some affect on the cold-hardiness of individual plants, some of which are length of exposure to seasonal cold, water availability (drought stressed plants are more cold tolerant), how recently planted/repotted, etc No one can give a definitive answer that even comes close to accurately assessing the temperature at which bound water will freeze that covers the whole species. Unbound water is of little concern & will usually freeze somewhere around 28*. Some material will be able to withstand little cold & roots could freeze/die at (actual) root temperatures as warm as 25-27*. Other plants may tolerate much colder actual root temperatures - as low as 10*. There's just no way of knowing unless you have a feeling for how cold-tolerant the genetic material the plant was derived from might be, and finding out is expensive (from the plant's perspective). ;o) Another example of this genetic variance is that trees found growing and fruiting well closer to the equator need no chill time, while other trees, derived of genetic stock from a more northerly provenance may need a period of chill to grow with optimum vitality in the subsequent growth period/cycle. It's wise to remember that root death isn't instantaneous at one particular temperature. Roots succumb to cold over a range of chill with cultural conditions affecting the process. The finest roots will die first, and the slightly thicker and more lignified roots will follow, with the last of the roots to succumb being the more perennial and thickest roots. Since any root death is a setback from an energy allocation perspective, and root regeneration takes valuable time, it's probably best to keep actual root temperatures in the 25-40* range as long as we can when the tree is resting, even though the organism as a whole could tolerate much lower temperatures. Even well established trees become very much like cuttings if all but the roots essential to keep the tree viable are lost to cold. Regeneration of roots is an expensive energy outlay and causes the trees to leaf out later than they normally would and shortens the natural growth period and reduces the potential increase in biomass for the next growth cycle and perhaps beyond. and We know that when trees are exposed to freezing, the finest hair roots - the ones that do the lions share of the work are the first to die. In many woody plants, these roots begin to die as soil temperatures drop below 30-32*. As temperatures drop further, larger and larger roots succumb to killing low temperatures. The point is - that many trees that SURVIVE are left with only the largest roots to support them because much of the rootage has frozen. These trees are slow to respond in the spring because they need to utilize stored energy to regenerate lost rootage before they can move sufficient water and the nutrients dissolved in water to support either growth or the flush of foliage that makes the food that allows the tree to grow (this, in the case of deciduous material). So, while trees might survive exposure to borderline killing low temperatures unprotected, we KNOW it is better for the tree, especially from an energy management perspective, if we give them protection that ensures actual root temperatures don't drop low enough to kill even the finest roots. For most temperate trees, that means we should strive to keep low root temperatures in the upper 20s at their lowest, and below 42* to keep them from growing until spring when we can get them into good light w/o worrying about frost/freeze. I think that Juniperus sargentii 'Shimpaku', aka Shimpaku juniper is the queen of junipers. You won't find it at nurseries, but it is worth ordering from mail order nurseries & putting in the ground. I have them growing everywhere (from cuttings) because it's such a beautiful plant and so forgiving - a joy to work with. That said, each of the junipers brings its own attributes and challenges to the table. J procumbens 'nana', aka Japanese garden juniper is probably the most commonly found beginner's tree, and is also pretty forgiving & malleable. Al

'Do you have a study that shows that this works though, outside of your own experience. Our own experiences can be quite misleading, because we do not set our lives up in order to study, we set our lives up in order to live.' Well, actually as a part-time social worker providing counselling services especially to the in-patients of the government-funded psychiatric wards and other special-care nursing homes (of my own home country which is less-developed), me as well as the others would quite often face some really difficult problems gaining the trust, faith and confidence from those people that we are trying to help, particularly the ones whose Tardive Dyskinesia syndrome, especially the rapid eyelid-twitching / eye-blinking symptoms have manifested for a long time (for months to a few years). Next, such people would tend to feel very much dejected, distressed and some times really aggressively frustrated over the physically incapacitating pains and afflictions that they have got no choice but need to live with to 'get on' with their miserable daily lives. So, out of the reasons of both sympathy as well as practical necessity to calm them down so that they will eventually 'listen to us', me and my other fellow social workers just recommend that suggested acupuncture method to them in the hope that it will ease their pains effectively. Luckily, the acupuncture technique that works out well for me actually turn out to be effective to them too and the successful cases just increase from time to time and these patients, having obtained reliefs from their Tardive Dyskinesia disorders (rapid eyelid-twitching / eye-blinking) also subsequently feel very much relieved and are willing to co-operate with us in the efforts of helping them to live meaningfully and more healthily with ever-greater levels of sanity. Therefore, it thus makes our works very much easier. So, by posting such articles about my / (our) healing experience from such debilitating disorder, I just hope that I can reach out to more and more people in need of that so they they will find reliefs through that technique too. One way or the other, I also wish to share my / (our) healing experience from such eye-related disorder with the intended readers / recipients so that they would at least get some additional cues / references about the causes and other alternative treatment for such disorder. Lastly, given that being merely social workers occupationally unrelated to the medical fields, and hence by no practical means that such a 'study' can be professionally and formally conducted by us to obtain duly accredited certifications and verifications, I somehow wish that a carefully-conducted studies will possibly be conducted one day by the related medical personnel / researchers to further explore the acupuncture treatment for full-findings of its other hidden therapeutical potentials

To all who have wished me a speedy recovery: Thank You! I am feeling steadily better (1 month out), and expect to be back to full strength shortly. @Alisande, If you think you may have babeseosis at the moment, then insist on being tested. Same with anaplasmosis, both are less-difficult than Lyme to diagnose from blood smears, I believe. (The issue with the blood supply, aside from the traditional head-in-the-sand attitude of the blood industry, and of course the cost, is that there is no rapid-enough test for babeseosis -or possibly the other tick-borne diseases -to work with the need for fresh blood.) But as I mentioned, anaplasmosis has distinct, characteristic, changes in routine blood work that are almost diagnostic. I can check next time I am in the medical library if there are specific changes in the case of babeseosis. I may have that info for erlichiosis, if you'd like to know it. Anaplasmosis has distinctive mullberry shaped artifacts (morullae) in the disease-specific blood smears (as does erlichiosis, I believe). Babeseosis is different but unless you, like I, have had malaria it's pretty distinctive in the blood test for it. The tests aren't inexpensive (the unadjusted street price for them is $500-$1,000 -each- but my insurance company whacked both of them down considerably. Since you're on Medicare, you'd only pay a percentage of the CMS-negotiated cost which is likely to be as aggressively moderated as that of my own insurance company's contractual rate. Since all three are bacterial, not spirochete, -caused it doesn't require the complex analysis of PCR bands that Lyme does. But frankly if I was on my second continuous month of Lyme I would have pretty awful constitutional symptoms from that lengthy treatment alone. I can barely make it out the 30 days of a single course before I have disturbed sleep, night sweats, muscle aches and pains, etc. Part of my fierceness about discovering ticks early is to avoid the need for the lengthy course of anti-Lyme doxy. Since doxy won't really do anything for babeseosis - and other drugs will - why keep taking what may be the wrong cure? I don't think you would experience symptoms from babeseosis or anaplasmosis (or even Lyme) infection before locating the tick. The incubation time needed to get sick from a still-attached tick would have resulted in a deer tick as big as a green pea, a nasty pearly-grey tight blob. It's hard to imagine you wouldn't have noticed it well before getting sick if it was still attached. Don't you itch like mad when you have a tick attached for more than a few hours, not to mention days? I'd be wild! BTW, the tick-hours-of-bite measurement has a built in problem: the aging relies on analysis of stomach digestive contents. But that assumes, and it is not always true, that the bite the tick was discovered making is the only bite, not a second one. Also you mentioned you squashed the critter in removing it. You might want to consider beginning more intensive searches for ticks on your body twice a day in order to not miss one. I have hair so long I can sit on it so I do realize it can be hard to check your scalp and hair. I have also found attached ticks under my breasts, in my belly button, on various unmentionable parts of my bottom, and even larval ones between my toes and fingers. I usually keep my long hair tied up in pigtail outdoors. I tuck the pigtail down the back of my shirt to minimize the likelihood of ticks getting caught in my hair. Of course I always have a hat on outside for sun protection, so my head and scalp are less-common tick areas. I do tick-checks at least twice every day of the year, unless I am away from home overnight in the city. It's just like brushing your teeth. I'm not convinced that Lyme "lurks in your body" but given that it is caused by spirochete I suppose it's possible. (Another spirochete-caused illness, syphillis, has a proven habit of lingering on and re-occurring, often despite treatment.) I know, for certain, that I have had Lyme (from clearly positive blood tests), been treated successfuly and subsequently had lengthy periods of profound physiological, and mental stress, without Lyme popping back up and adding to the problems. And I still have one band for Lyme on the latest PCR, which indicates an old, resolved infection, so there's no question it's still visible in my blood, but not thankfully making a pest of itself. I also still have serological evidence of malaria in my blood and I haven't had any illness from it in more than fifty years! But the bacterial diseases (anaplasmosis, babeseosis and erlichiosis) seem extremely unlikely lurkers and later-pouncers, especially if treated. What I definitely think they can do, however, is damage other organs and systems resulting in consequential, long-term problems (like the poor fellow described above who lost his spleen as a result of a babeseosis infection.) Your description of high fevers, muscle aches and pains, etc., sound much more like anaplasmosis than Lyme. Did you have any "regular" blood tests done at the time? The average time from bite to onset of symptoms with anaplasmosis is 8 days. I could look that time up for erlichiosis and babseosis, if needed. I don't know enough about Fibro, but aren't night sweats and aches and pains part of that, too? You may not need to go to any doctor more specialized than your primary care doc to check for the bacterial tick-borne illnesses. And then you'll be able to know, and treat, any that are there. I didn't get any hint that the tests for them lead to confusing, or contradictory results, as I know the Lyme test can, because it is a different, and more complicated test.. If you test negative for them, including having normal routine blood results, you can cross them off your list of worries and look elsewhere. (And get off the wretched doxy!) HTH, L.

It just screams "McMansion!!!". And "lottery winner!!" Why are you building a new one? The suburbs in the mid-Atlantic are filled to the brim with houses just like that that people can't sell for any price. New Jersey is overflowing with them, as is the Main Line and Montgomery County suburbs of Philly. And, seriously--what's with the powder room backing on to the "grand room"? The minute a guest flushes the crapper everyone on the other side of the wall will hear it. Not cool. That belongs out of sight and sound--off the kitchen/mudroom/laundry. This is a real schlock design from some web outfit cranking them out for a quick buck. And don't get me started on the Palladian windows and that enormous, out of scale roof.