7000ft, I am totally convinced you ought to write a book. Your family sounds very interesting and it sounds like you all work as a cooperative of sorts. How much of your food do you produce? The tomatoes that I grow are primarily for sauce, so I use Roma-type tomatoes. They are odd-looking, being long and quite large. The variety I grew this year was Super San Marzano. I've tried some others, but this one is the best. The sauce-type tomatoes are awesome for making sauce. They are very meaty with minimal juice and seeds. Making sauce is a breeze because you can skip the steps for squeezing the juice and seeds out. According to the catalogs, some varieties have pectin in them that helps to thicken the sauce. We ended up with 25 jars of sauce in the freezer. That is a record for us, so we are pleased! That's 25 dinners during ski season that I don't have to cook. :) I also grow a cherry tomato and some sandwich-type tomatoes. I've had good luck with Early Wonder, which is early yet tasty. (way better than early girl!) Inside the GH we enjoy our first tomatoes in mid-July. Without the GH we are lucky to get any red tomatoes at all. I'm sure it's the same for you. My gardening efforts are pretty much solo, but my husband was instrumental in building the GH and in helping look after things as needed. He is an expert at raising seedlings because I tend to travel a lot in the spring. He also built a root cellar and he is fully on board with our quest to grow as much food as possible. It's a bit of an oddball pursuit, so I'm happy that he's into it!

For a couple of years I had a garden spot away from my house, with no water supply available so if I wanted to supplement rainfall I had to haul gallon jugs of water. To make my watering efficient, when I planted my peppers & tomatoes in the spring, I dug down and buried empty gallon plastic jugs, one between each plant. I had poked 4-5 holes in the bottom of each, of course, and left the caps on until later in the summer. Once the weather warmed, and after a good soaking rain, I mulched the beds 4-6" deep with chopped leaves, being sure to cover the tops of the (so far empty and still capped) bottles to protect them from the sun since I had found that the plastic degrades and becomes brittle when exposed to the sun. (In previous years, just cultivating around the bottles inevitably resulted in my breaking the tops off by midsummer.) When the weather reached a point where I actually needed to water, I cleared the mulch away for the moment and poured a gallon of water into each buried bottle. I set the cap loosely back atop each bottle to keep the leaf debris from falling in and clogging the exit holes in the bottom, then pulled the mulch back up to protect the plastic. I did not care about how long it took for the bottle to empty-- it seemed like a gallon or two a week per plant was sufficient, and the best part is that by burying the bottles the water went right down to the root zone where it was most effective. As for using wall-o-waters, since I had gotten some free from a friend, I tried them last year with 3 really early tomato plants I started specifically to experiment with. While they survived a good bit of frosty weather, in the end the plants I had started weeks later and planted out a month after the first ones when the weather had warmed quickly caught up to the wall-o-water ones and all the tomatoes pretty much bloomed & set fruit at the same time & rate. So my conclusion is that it was satisfying to my eager gardener's soul to be out planting early, but it really made no difference in overall plant performance. I have found the same to be true with early plantings of such things as peas and salad crops, too. Early plantings may survive, but later plantings quickly catch up and may even surpass earlier ones that have been stressed by the weather.

I too have a Mendota so I know about the restrictions and it does get warm above the fireplace itself. I just laid a marble hearth but I am still uncertain as to what I am doing with the surround. I do have a somewhat tradional flammable wooden mantel with a 6' piece left to right (hope that makes sense)with two legs approximently 4' high. Whatever the exact measurements are, it falls within the acceptable guidelines. This of course, leads me to a decision as to what I want to put for the surround - as you said the area from the fireplace and mantel must be covered with a nonflammable material. I have yet to make up my mind but some of the things I have considered are 1)marble like the hearth - boring!, 2)a glass mosaic or possibly a stone mosaic i.e. onyx or soapstone that would compliment and not compete with the marble hearth. But that's just my personal preference and it may not apply to what you are trying to accomplish. The best advise I can give you is to google fireplace surround images and you will get thousand and thousands of images to consider. Good luck. Lynn fr CT

qtpi: This is likely to be quite involved and expensive. On the plus side, you apparently already have a chimney designed for solid fuels. Building a wood burning masonry fireplace is a highly skilled art but could no doubt be done utilizing the existing chimney. Keep in mind such a fireplace is extremely heavy and would require a subfloor foundation. A prefab metal fireplace might therefore be much easier. As far as the wood or gas option, I'm not sure this is possible or legal. If it were me, about the last thing I'd want in a place where I'm burning wood is an outlet for flammable gas. Also keep in mind your present wood stove is a far more efficient heater than any fireplace you could build.