I called the gentleman in charge of the farm equipment display and it is a Coldwell Mower with a Fuller & Johnson horizontal motor. He didn't have any pictures and I forgot my camera. Next year. Hit and Miss engines use an old kind of centrifugal governor that holds the exhaust valve once a certain rpm is reached. The intake valve is controlled only by a spring and cylinder vacuum and not a cam. The engine coasts (misses) with the exhaust valve open until the lower rpm limit is reached at which time the exhaust valve closes the intake valve starts working again and the motor fires (hits). It's a unique sound and the motor runs over a wider rpm range than we're used to. John Deere tractors used a 2 cylinder motor of that design resulting in the name Johnny Popper.

I am looking forward to the Spring Swap! I am a new gardener, last year was my first year at the swap. I met some wonderful, generous folks and collected a few nice plants to start my garden. I am still new at gardening and my garden is still learning to grow, so I don't have any plants to share, but maybe seeds. So, I will be bringing food! I am trying out winter sowing for the first time, too. Kay

FYI for next year, The National Arboretum holds a native plant sale at the end of March every year in conjuction with their Lahr Symposium. One of the vendors was Doyle Farm nursery. They are located in Pennsylvannia just over the Maryland border, above Jarretsville. Their website lists native plant sales in the area they will be attending. (It's on their "tours and open house" link, http://www.doylefarm.com/events.html) One sale is in Fairfax VA, Saturday April 29. Others are being held at Ladew Topiary Gardens, The Baltimore Herb Festiva, etc., While they sell by mailorder its nice to see the plants you're buying. The plants I bought from them at The Arboretum, White Turtlehead (Chelone Glabra) and Nodding Ladies Tresses (Spiranthes Cernua) are growing really well. If you find any other sales in the Maryland area please post them, I'd love to know about them. :) -Helen

Good read from our local paper last week: Domestic favorite cheeses of 2012 Janet Fletcher, San Francisco Chronicle, December 28, 2012 Looking back at a year of columns, I'm surprised by how many American cheeses I featured. Availability provides part of the answer. Americans keep opening creameries, and existing creameries keep creating new cheeses. Membership in the American Cheese Society has doubled in the past decade, and the 1,700-plus entries in the society's competition broke records again. Distributors and retailers do their part by taking a risk on these unproven new cheeses. It's easy to find buyers for Mount Tam or Pleasant Ridge Reserve, award-winning cheeses with avid fans. But how do you move a high-priced newbie with no name recognition? The brief life span of many cheeses puts extra pressure on distributors and retailers to stock only brisk sellers. That's all the more reason to applaud Cream and the Crop, a new Bay Area distributor specializing in American artisan producers like Fraga Farms in Oregon and Alemar Cheese in Minnesota. In that spirit, I'd like to return the spotlight to some favorite domestic cheeses I highlighted in 2012. They're not all new, but all strike me as having exceptional merit. If you haven't yet tasted them, put them high on your shopping list. Here is a link that might be useful: 10 Domestic Cheese in 2012