Hi Verena :) Last year I tried sugar snap peas for the first time and was hooked. I love eating peas shell and all, and those snap peas really are a snap to grow. They're earlier than the shelling peas so it extends the pea season some. I tried two varieties and both were really good but off hand I can only remember one name - Sugar Ann. The year before I tried snow peas but didn't care for them as much - not sweet like the sugar snap. I'm with NAF about the pole beans, too. I grow both bush beans and pole beans, both Blue Lake varieties, with the hopes of extending that season, too - pole beans are a little later than the bush beans. They do need very good support - I use 10' lengths of rebar sunk deep into the soil on an angle and then bound at the top in a teepee formation. 3 plants at each leg are a bit too many - this year I will thin to 2 plants per leg. The pole beans don't go woody as quick as bush beans, I find. They're longer, too. I second Kioni's recommendation for SunSugar tomatoes. Wm Dam sells a cabbage - Tiara Hybrid - that they refer to as Lettage - a tender, mild and early cabbage that is just excellent. I absolutely love it for coleslaw and last year, trying to use it up, I made cabbage rolls which turned out really, really good. It really is a very good cabbage variety and if you try anything new this year, you gotta try this cabbage.The heads do have some staying power in a cold location after cut from the garden (spare fridge, cold room). Skyphos Lettuce is a really excellent variety well worth a try. My seeds for this year are still backordered and I'm hoping that they will be available Northern Supersweet Corn - yummmm!!!

Hi all, I'm just loving these posts, they really lift the spirits on these very dull days. We're still dealing with the fog up here, I've never known it to hang around for so long. Seriously now, I have another plant that I just had to have and I need some help on how to grow it. A few years ago I bought a rooted cutting of a shrub named Dichroa febrifuga at the U.B.C. plant sale. It 's evergreen, has lovely blue flowers,then berries, it growth, in opinion is like a hydrangea. I believe it comes from Asia. It doesn't winter well for me outside so I've dug it up, planted it a container and it's wintering in the greenhouse. I'm guessing it's marginal here in Z7/8. Any ideas out there? A......

Remember, all of these plants evolved to grow under "natural" conditions, aka the day/night cycle. During the day, the plant makes food for itself via photosynthesis. It puts most of it's effort into this during the day. During the night, when it can't make food, it uses it and works on growth and restoring nutrient supplies through the roots. While 24/7 light means it makes as much food for itself as possible, the plant is also programmed to focus on that as much as possible when it has light available, which means it won't grow as much. Plus, there is a limit to how much food the plant needs, which means that any extra time in the light is essentially wasted anyway. By giving the plants a night cycle, you give them time to rest and put all that energy they stored during the day to good use. Raising plants is sort of like raising kids. If you shelter them and pamper them too much, they'll never grow up to be well adjusted adults. I killed my first batch of bhuts by over-pampering them, actually. Had a small number of seeds I wanted to be sure nothing would happen to them that by the time they saw what the real world was like they just shriveled up and died (guess I should have spent more than a week hardening them off, but I digress). Yeah, like people, give your plants a good 8 hours of sleep at night and they'll be much happier.

A pair of Mallards visit our neighbor's pool every spring. I see them landing in the morning and evenings sometimes. At our old house, I was planting plowers one spring when Megan pounced onto a low evergreen bush. A momma mallard flew out of there! I have been withing feet of her for and hour and did not know she was there. We kept Meg leashed and asked the neighbor with the wandering cat to do the same (they let the cat out with and without the leash, not sure why). The momma had a dozen eggs under the bush, right under our bedroom window. I watched carefully, and one morning when I was getting dressed, momma and a line of little yellow ducks marched out of my garden, across the lawn and down the street! Later that year, we had the house sided and the crew must have dropped something or fallen onto that bush. It was crushed. Next spring I saw the mallards come and check out the site a few times, but their home was gone, so they found a new place to nest. It was so neat to see them come in for a landing down the center of our city street! It is too early for the ducks to be nesting here, but your reminder will help me to watch for them, Cindy.