Scott, Can you move them to a cooler location? The warmer their location, the faster they grow. You can slow them down by keeping them cool and also by not fertilizing. If you deliberately withhold fertilizer until they are in the ground, they won't get as big as quickly either. As far as not fitting under the shop lights, can you put some of them in a sunny window? A sheltered, partly shady spot where they can get sun part of the day and shade the rest of the day? It is hard to slow them down once they get going, but it is not impossible if you can manipulate their conditions a little. Of course, commercial growers use a growth regulator to keep them short, but we home gardeners don't have that option (and I probably wouldn't use it even if I had it). Are your shop lights adjustable? I can raise and lower mine so that they are as low as 2" from each shelf and as high as about 12" above the shelves. When I start my seeds, I keep the lights so close they are almost touching the soil....and the plants as they sprout. Once the plants are growing, I can slow down the plant growth by keeping the lights down low and close to the plant. For example, if the plants are 3" tall, then the lights are only about 1/2" above the plants. That keeps the plants shorter longer. If I raise the lights to where they are 2" above the plants, the plants almost immediately zoom up that two inches to be closer to the lights. Thus, by keeping the lights almost touching the plants, I keep the plants shorter longer. Because it is rapidly approaching the time when I can plant them into the ground here in southern OK, I am now carrying them outside for about 6 hours a day and they are almost giddy with the excitement of receiving that many hours of real sunlight every day. At this point they are about to outgrow the light shelf anyway, so pretty soon I will just start leaving them on the screened-in porch at night. They may get a little chilly at night, and that will slow them down a little, but that's OK at this stage. Our soil is only in the upper 50s and our nights are still close to freezing most nights, so I can't plant them out unless I use Wall-O-Waters, but it won't be long now..... And, we have all kinds of tomato plants in our Lowe's, Home Depot and Wal-Mart. All are fairly healthy, but I never think that commercially-raised plants look as healthy as those grown at home. Their color always seems kind of "off" and sometimes they already have foliar disease issues even though they are not very old or very large, and have been grown in controlled conditions. Sometimes the earliest plants in the stores don't look as good as those that arrive later too. I always grow way too many tomato transplants, but I love the luxury of having back-up plants in case my garden gets hit by a surprise storm....sleet, snow, hail, etc. I usually end up giving away a lot of the extra plants, but I always hang on to some backups until very late in the season. Some of the backup tomato plants will eventually go into the ground in oddball places where I let them grow away to their heart's content. They will be in semi-shaded out-of-the-way areas where they produce a decent amount of foliage but not fruit. I use them as 'trap plants' for the tomato hornworms. When I find a hornworm in the veggie garden, I transfer it to the trap plants where it can eat and grow to its heart's content. That way, I get to enjoy the sphinx moths later in the season without losing valuable tomato-producing plants to the voracious appetite of the hornworm caterpillars. Melissia, Nothing helps you select a garden spot more quickly than having plants just begging to be planted in the ground! It is great that everyone's transplants are breezing along. Now if only the weather would stabilize at the warmer end of the scale so we could get busy planting! Dawn

Yes, exactly. The term "white kitchen" has been around a long, long time, and when I was a kid, a "white kitchen" could include aqua Formica or floral wallpaper or red linoleum floors or whatever. Oh-kay. I'll get to work on the post. Oh, I was thinking of not specifying the house style, just specifying what it was not. When did the sanitary movement really get going? I want a house that is not late Vic, Craftsman era or early '20s--nothing near Edwardian.

I am glad I didn't see the hawk flying away with the screaming squirrel. I know that's nature, but that would bother me. Hopefully it wasn't "Nutty" and "Scarback." Popmama, I've lived in my house for over 30 years, and it wasn't until this year that I actually saw a hawk eating a squirrel in our backyard. The hawk saw us but continued to devour the squirrel until it was done. Keep forgetting to ask my neighbor if they found a tail in their yard. I found toughs of fur the next day. Got some great photos of the hawk and can post if anyone is interested.

Not sure about BIG graph paper, but I still have two pads of the 8.5x11 stuff that saw me through the early stages of my remodel planning. And somewhere, I have a bigger graph page pad too, but not sure if the squares on it are larger. I would like to see some graphs that are 1/2 inch squares, now THAT would be helpful. In our old house that was killed in Hurricane Katrina, we had the 1950s era real blueprints all rolled up, and countless notes about how they built it. But these days, the blueprint industry is a lot different. Nothing "blue" about it. Moving pieces of paper around is a big improvement over trial and error moving of pieces of furniture. I like to draw a floor plan. Then I like to draw the ELEVATION of all four walls in each room. It helps me to see how well the room is balanced. No "heavy" corners, no light-weight spots, so i don't feel like my "marbles' will roll to one side of the room. I think achieving a balanced feel in a room gives me a sense of comfort. And, I know that making the most of a view, taking advantage of a natural view, or maybe screening a disturbing view out the windows, makes me feel happy and content. While I lived at MoccasinLanding, I had a neighbor who parked a real Greyhound bus (yes indeed) right next to our shared property line. (I saw that bus the other day and it was totally covered by mildew in a parking lot!) so I put in a privacy fence along that line, and then I planted a living screen. I also put in some wind chimes and hanging baskets, to keep my eye close-focused, and not allow it to range across the fence. In my back bedroom, I had a view of the small bayou, and I kept that long look down the bayou open, not blocked, because it was so pretty. In those days I was home only 63 days a year, 21 days x 3 times each year, because I was working in south Texas or south Louisiana. I took pictures of the views from each window and then while I was a safe distance away, I indulged all sorts of imaginative plans mentally, which kept me from making the worst mistakes when I came home. But when I was headed home, I knew my mission and hit the ground running when I arrived. Until you put your hand on a shovel or a paint brush or a saw, no harm done to let your imagination run wild! :)