naturegirl - thanks! but a lot of times all the data can be overwhelming and can get me into analysis paralysis! Being an engineer by profession I feel its my diligence to at least produce some chart or graph or data table that at least pretends to show me some sort of useful data. Its taking the data and then turning it into something useful thats the real skill. By the time I am ready to make that step on a project usually some other bright shiny object rolls by and I'm 'on to the next one'! In a lot of ways, I could have just walked out into the hoophouse and said "yep, that water's frozen!" and gotten the same results as what I have now lol!

Richard - That's a real bummer about the critters! I hope you can come up with a solution. I'm a LONG way away from having to worry about anything getting tomatoes in my garden. I did notice blossoms on the Bolseno plants this morning. Also have blossoms on Sweet Million, Sungold, and Supremo. When it comes time for me to have real tomatoes, I'll be harvesting at the first flush of red, which helps. Thanks all for the vote of confidence for my friend's bean planters. I have passed along your comments. The tomato plants I gave her are looking good - pepper plant too. I gave her a couple zucchini seeds to put in a little raised bed by her shed and one sprouted. She's thrilled. The onion sets which grew into nice little green onions are about harvestable size now. I may make her a gardener yet! This morning I picked my sugar snap peas. Nice harvest. I'm not sure I will be able to eat all these between now and when I pick again in 2 days. The good news on the pea front is that the snap peas are still blooming! The heat will start soon, so I may not see many more blooms, but I'll take what I can get. The Maestro shelling peas, on the other hand, are not blooming. They're about done. <Will edit to post pics from my phone> Look at this forest of onions! I have a little over 100 plants here in this 4-wide row.

Kevin You got me out of my element. From what I know grafting is done when the scion and the root are both dormant, which they aren't right now, but soon will be. There's a method of grafting called T-Budding which is done in July or August. I've repeatedly tried that and never had one take. It's done then, I think, because the bark is very loose and a slit is made in the loose bark and a bud from the donor is slid into the bark. So it can be done. Possibly because it's a small wound in the branch grafted to. When you're grafting a scion it compares to a leg transplant. That wound has to heal. Last spring I grafted a Keepsake scion to a young tree/rootstock that I'd grafted a Black Osford to the previous year. And I grafted a Cox's Orange Pippin scion to a year old rootstock that had nothing grafted to it. I also grafted a Golden Delicious to a Yellow Transparent tree that was at least a foot in diameter. I got that idea because the apples on the two trees look kind of similar. But all those grafts took. Next spring my plans are to graft three scion to the young tree with the Black Oxford/Keepsake combo. A Wagener, a King David, and a Fameuse. I would guess that if you graft in early winter after dormancy that it might take but that you're graft has to withstand the weight of ice and snow combined with a winters worth of wind. And I would guess that the graft union isn't as likely to heal. But that's just a guess. What you're going to receive is 2 scions about 12 inches long for each item ordered. You can easily make 4 trees from each item. Some people can do 3 or more from each scion. So you could try an early graft and then still do a graft in late winter. You're going to shortly get an e-Mail warning you that you need to order rootstocks, which I think is protection from script orders. I told them in my order that I had the rootstocks and or was prepared to order what I needed and still got the e-Mail. But, you have to respond.

Happy New Year to you also, Margi! And Happy New Year’s Eve to everyone! An update on the microgreens I started on Sunday. One of these is Johnn'y Spicy mix and the other is a Mild Mix (I added some red amaranth to both of them) And I started a few lettuces (I can't remember the variety right now) I have been trying Espoma's seed-starting mix. It seems to work well, but it has some larger chunks of composted material and isn't as fine as some of the other mixes. I have decided to follow in the footsteps of the rest of you and pick up a container of ProMix in a couple of weeks to use for some things. I still go back to Jiffy Pods for a lot of my seed-starting needs though. I know a lot of people hate them, but they are so convenient and work well for me. I'm at work for half a day today, then I am off for the Holiday.