thanks for the reply. quoted from my previous reply, >they are in e.b. stone "edna's best" organic potting soil. also some tomato tone fertilizer and worm castings in the hole when i planted them in. nothing since then (that was about a month ago). all plants have had blossoms for a couple weeks, no fruit yet. >i water by hand, when soil feels dry a couple inches down." re: temps - it's been in the neighborhood of 65-70 during the day and high 50's at night for the past week at least. before that...much the same, maybe a few days here and there of much warmer daytime weather. fertilizer burn would surprise me as i haven't fertilized except for a handful of tomato tone in the hole when planting, and they've been out around 6 weeks. i've been watering maybe twice a week, depending on how warm it is & how dry the soil feels.

We saw the problem (with the wet insulation) in two places -- one in a wall on the east side and one on the west side of the house (the roof slants towards these two sides). Both are places that we know get a lot of rain hits (one is where water falling off a porch roof hits the side of the house, the other is at a place where the house has sort of an "L" shape, so water splashes off one side of the L and hits the rotted side). The north side of the house has very wet and slightly rotted clapboards (even the trim is rotted), but we haven't dug in enough yet to check out the insulation. The painter is planning to check the rest of the walls tomorrow, so I can hopefully give some more information then. From what I can tell, the south side of the house is comparatively fine. The paint peeled less on that side as well (although it did peel some). There are pipes in one of the two problem walls, but not the other. I have to admit that I don't know what the moisture barrier would look like. There's some sort of clear plastic up against the sheet rock (inside the insulation), there's also something on the outside that looks like black woven fabric with a silver paper-like surface (the silver side is towards the outside of the house). I doubt we have too much insulation - we've done some work in other parts of the house and the insulation seemed correct for the age of the house (built in 1987), although it's a bit short of current standards. We keep the house really cold in the winter - generally 60 degrees - and we don't have AC or central air, so the summer temperatures are about the same as outside.

Picture of the home facing that direction would probably elicit more replies.

We had a stamped concrete walk, pattern and color similar to the lower pair of Beverly's picture above. After a gentle power-wash and resealing, the colors did look more vivid -- I'd say the before and after pictures are realistic. My understanding is that you should re-seal stamped concrete at least every five years. The lady at the concrete store advised us to mix some tiny pellet product into the sealant to help with traction. I forget the specific name, but it was a common item for concrete work. Incidentally, we had to "DIY" because the installer of our walkway went out of business and we couldn't find a company willing to re-seal someone else's work. Luckily it was easy. Our walk also had a compass medallion inset, which the installer hand-colored with blacks and reds. Our power-washing took most of this extra color off. It still looked nice after resealing, but all of the red and most of the black was gone.