~ What are 'suckers' on tomatoes and what should I do about them? Suckers are the branches that grow from the crotch, where the leaf branches meet the main stem. These will produce fruit just like the main stem, if permitted to grow. What to do about them depends on a few factors: 1) what type of plant is it? If determinate DO NOT prune them. If indeterminate pruning is optional, but not necessary (see below). 2) what type of trellis are you going to use, and how much time do you want to spend on them? If you are using a heavy duty cage system to trellis like CRM, then you can let them go without any pruning. But, you will get smaller overall fruit than if you prune back to a single stem or two stems per plant. If you are staking, you want to prune everything back except the main stem. Then tie that stem to the stake (lots of information how to do this). If you wanted, you could put up two stakes and leave the BOTTOM sucker, but remove the others. There are a myriad of different ways of trellising, staking, caging, etc. tomatoes. Some people don't even do any of that, and let the tomatoes go on the ground like squash vines (of course, some people even trellis them!) Good luck....keep a journal of what you try and how it works. Make adjustments year to year and find what works best for YOU! You have to enjoy whatever you are doing! It is a HOBBY, and you should enjoy it. If it becomes WORK, then you are definitely doing something WRONG!

I have not tried it, but I have read that placing some window screen over the compost heap and topping that with fresh vegetable cullings will help hungry worms squeeze through the windows screen and into the food on top of the screen and make it easy to empty your bin. The key is to keep the worms a bit hungry for a few days so that they are encouraged to migrate.

IMO it depends on how and what is modified. Trying to make plants resistant to one companies pesticides and have that same company manufacture the seeds isnt really fair, as well as that company suing farmers for "copyright" basically because of nature spreading pollen. Now look at oregon and the fiasco going on about that GMO wheat that escaped. This is the last thing that should happen in regards to genetics, especially when the products are released without any viable long term studies. Im not saying GMO shouldnt be studied or that it doesnt open up a large window of advancement for us. So far it has not solved any problems at all, if anything its caused more problems. If it were used to created drought resistant plants, or help cold tolerance, yeild (not by surviving chemicals, i mean all around survival). Lets face it, being able to grow peaches in most of canada would make a huge difference on food availability, or even pushing it to the max, and using to to make cold hardy oil palms. The problems with all GMO, is the same problems monsanto is facing; How do we stop the plants from spreading, or contaminating natural stock? How do we stop those GMO genes from entering nature? I think thats the big problem - we would have to create 100% infertile plants, or pollenless plants (which can still revert), and in that case that basically makes doing this with fruit trees pointless. GMO foods are a long way away from saving us, or even bypassing evolution. IF anything it would be better to spend the time and money to better refining genetic techniques first, such as reviving the exting passenger pigeon, a bird that was extremely valuable to the eastern forests.

Go with simple and cheap at the start. I use hardware cloth to make a simple mesh bin. Can be moved easily, or make larger with another piece of material. If your location and regulations restrict what you can do, make one or two larger bins over many small bins. It was not hard for me to make my nine small bins into two large rectangular bins since they were all made of hardware cloth. In spite of our monthly government circular encouraging residents to compost, when the inspector came around (helps to have good neighbors), he told me I could only have two bins. Later, I checked their website on regs, and could not find any such statement. I like your idea of a planning strategy, rather than just asking 'what is the best composter?'. Because it depends on such things as your health, materials available, and how much compost you want or need.