Thank you, Jeri, for that positive note. For those in a wet winter area, my putting buckets (bottom cut-off) around roses, then filled with soil was a BAD IDEA, many branches burned black (rose stem canker). The only one without a plastic bucket around it is Radio Times, all green, and many leaves in early March. My two corkscrew willows are the last one to lose their leaves in late November. The wind here is strong so I winterize with branches on top. I won't make any plants out of the new rootings, since I have 25 mail-ordered roses coming, and I'm running out of space. It's nice that I found way to winterize so I get a full bush, with many shoots, rather than a one-stem wonder black with canker after a wet winter.

paulinct, I guess that the best place to start is with the statement that "nothing happens until someone buys something." Commercial agriculture is intensive (the greatest yield from the smallest acreage) and the demand for an agriculture (by)product will drive many diverse industries like plant breeding, chemicals manufacture and labor saving machinery- each with its own, and sometimes unexpected consequences. Sometimes we come a full circle and are back to the same point from which we were trying to get away. Take pyrethrum, an insecticide derived from a plant and having the three great benefits ie deadly to insects in small doses, with little residual and not harmful to mammalian life. The product is in heavy demand and has been 'tweaked' into pyrethroids - stronger, longer-lasting and consequently more harmful to mammals (the danger is in the dosage). Demand has brought on the development of products that exhibit the same undesirable properties for which others were banned. I have no doubt that the same fate is in store for the 'organic' concept in horticulture. Florida has committed to a facility for producing ethanol from corn but as far as I know the state does not produce the crop significantly. The demand will encourage more production, more fertilizer use and yes, more glyphosate use. Or there will be competition for the product and organic lawn care might be severely stressed. Has the price of corn and its by products gone up again recently? I am quite sure that I will not be putting down dried cow pats as fertilizer on my front lawn and I am equally confident that I do not have to apply synthetic fertilizers or combination products every eight weeks to have a presentable and acceptable 'front lawn'. But I do find myself redefining terms which I thought I had mastered long ago. What is a weed? What is organic? What is the difference between mutation and genetic engineering? Thank you very much for a thought stimulating post.

The reason one window in the bedroom is operable is in order to meet the code requirement for an emergency escape and rescue opening in all bedrooms. I have many times advised homeowners on the GW to not allow a builder to use the cryptic convention of using 60 to mean 72" or 6'-0" on the elevation drawings. (By the way, in my experience, 60 means 72" as silly as that seems) All window sizes should be dimensioned in rough opening feet - inches for the benefit of the framer. All windows should be specified separately for the benefit of the supplier in a Window Schedule that shows the manufacturer, model, rough opening, glass type, color, mullions, hardware, etc. Otherwise you are asking for mistakes. You might ask the GC where the horizontal mullion/sash rail is in the middle of the windows that were ordered for the front of the house. Something stinks; I think someone is making you take responsibility for their unprofessional mistakes. I not only provide clients with window schedules, I insist on reviewing the order before it is submitted which is a tedious and thankless job since all manufacturers use different cryptic conventions for their order sheets. I have never checked an order where there wasn't a mistake and some of them would have been very expensive to correct after delivery. Sometimes a window manufacturer will make a mistake with a correct order but that can be corrected at no cost to the owner. The issue here is documentation. If the correct windows were documented all errors should be corrected at no cost to the owner with no debate. I should also add that in the past 40 years I've known only one GC to order through a lumberyard/box store instead of a wholesale window supplier and the resulting mistakes in that order were the worst I've ever seen.

We are in the final decisions of our kitchen and have warm grey lower cabinets, white uppers and deciding on Florida Wave counters. How do you like your counters? Would you get them again? Any issues? Thanks for replying! I would love to see more photos now that you are done :)