Thanks all, for your fine wishes and appreciative comments. We are still getting to know each other, but she remains a sweetie, with some spirit starting to show now that she is feeling more at home. On days when we have our grandsons here it feels now like we have three instead of two. It will be nice when we get a little training done and don't have to keep such a hawk-eye on all three of them. As MeMo said she has the softest coat - so silky! Annie - I'm looking forward to seeing her run, right after we get comfy with her coming when we call her. I hope you don't mind sharing your name with her. :-) TM

It's not so much "tidy" as I hate to lose all that other great info. ;) And P.S. Dave - to my defense, I didn't realize the vinegar issue until a couple of hours after my first post. I didn't see a way to add or edit a post, hence the second post. It isn't a question of editing a previous post. As medcave said all you had to do was just post the added the question to your other thread. That pops it right back up to the top of the list. There is a 30 min. time frame where the programing won't let you post again on a thread unless you change the subject line in that particular post - something like "oh, I also forgot to ask...". It is there to try to prevent duplicate postings. Dave

Annie, I just ran across a few new recipes for rhubarb candy. I bet similar to your zucchini candy. Martha has one she slivers into thin strips and curls while still soft out of a low oven. I dehydrated slices last year for my granola. One batch was rock hard but did better second try. And this year I will sugar or maple syrup a little. I'm getting fineCooking hard copy now. Just skimming the new one. Two rhubarb recipes. A rhubarb fennel apple strudel, and a few sheet pan tarts. A roasted tomatillo/poblano salsa. So similar to the one I just made but I added rhubarb. I was off magazines for a few years except for the NewYorker and NYTimes weekend, but this one has been a good run so far. Nothing like a rest in the hammock outdoors with a magazine.... The 'rock hard' rhubarb was a good replacement for citrus all winter, after soaking in a bit hot water for a few hours. I made a batch of ginger, apple, rhubarb, grapefruit juice Sunday. Frozen into ice cubes for my tea.

I know the area well, flowers! You might want to investigate if there is any kind of azalea/camellia mix you can easily obtain to help acidify the alkaline clay where you'll plant ALmD. Oak leaf mold, peat, that kind of good stuff, things you'd use to plant blueberries, too. If that kind of material can be incorporated in the top few inches so it breaks down and flushes through the alkaline soil, it will help make multiflora happier. You can keep mulching with whatever acidic material available to maintain those conditions. You wouldn't need as much as if you were trying to grow camellias, but just enough to help mellow out the alkaline clay. This area is mainly sand. The whole valley is pretty much sand. After the quakes and all the damage, the State instituted engineered soil to mimic bed rock. When we added the patio cover, Santa Barbara County required 25" cube concrete footers on each post to secure the thing against the constant winds. I warned the installers about the engineered soil, but they still sent two, young men with pick axes and shovels. There are three posts, each with a 25" cube of concrete and those three holes took those two young men nearly EIGHT HOURS to manually dig. Literally. Oddly, water began collecting in the bottoms of the holes almost as quickly as they finished digging them, but roots don't penetrate into the soil. I used to deal with the Santa Clarita Urban Forest for street trees. They would purchase 24" boxed trees, excavate matching holes in the engineered soil and plug the holes with the root balls. Often, the trees are replaced after three or four years because the holes filled with water and the trees drowned. The soil is manually, physically compacted to be bed rock. Anything built in the state after about 1980 is on some sort of engineered soil, unless it was built on bed rock. The older builds which didn't suffer extreme damage were all due to being built on sold surfaces. The Encino house suffered nearly no damage because the ridge was stone and it was seated squarely on that stone. The newer things around it lost chimneys, walls, garages but not that old house. Other than being seismically stable, the other main advantage to not being able to dig holes is gophers HATE it. They are everywhere there is loose soil, but not in engineered areas. The city uses its parks as rainwater collection and percolation pools so more rainfall is recaptured than runs off into the ocean nine miles away. Those areas aren't engineered so the water absorbs quickly. The gophers LOVE them.