Here is picture of my GH. It has an insulated north and northwest wall and an insulated north roof. The east and south wall as well as the south roof is twin wall polycarbonated. It has natural gas heating and a 50 amp electrical box. I thought it would take me a month to build and it took 4 months. Polystyrene insulates the ground to 2 feet deep. This winter I will put a pool cover on the south roof and it will come all the way down to the ground and cover the retaining wall on the south. I will leave some of the windows open to heat the retaining wall area but will keep it cool, just above freezing. Some citrus and avocado are planted in the ground there. Van

Both are new in my garden this year. Both are own root bands. No blooms yet on Gruss, but CV, planted in an urn, has not been without a cluster of blooms. It was near freezing last night which turned her blooms a deeper color - more like Alchymist. I'm sure I will love Gruss once she gets going, but CV has proven herself. I agree CV needs a little help dropping spent blooms, as do many others, including the lovely First Crush, but no problem pulling them off.

Sure, glad to be helpful! The pros of Paloma Blanca are rock-solid hardiness in my zone 4 pocket of the yard, blooms off and on all season, fairly large clusters of bloom, and a nice clean white color. I like the form of the rose in the early and mid stages, though it does open up like a lot of roses do once the blooms are mature. I don't see any particular disease pressure from blackspot on mine either, but I don't tend to notice blackspot sometimes. These photos are from various times of the year and I don't see significant BS on any of them. PB is a fairly compact bush and stays under 4', perhaps as low as 3' some years. Cons include a noticeable browning of the edges on this rose under many conditions. Mine is in part sun so it's probably not sunburned crisping, and I don't see evidence of thrips on my other roses in the area. Also, I can't detect any scent, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have one (I can rarely smell most roses). Here's the closest thing I have to a whole bush shot. You notice the yews to the right are trimmed off to about 4' and Paloma Blanca doesn't come close to the top. The dwarf daylily in the shot is under 2' high. This one shows the blooms a little more closely, in more or less typical form for this rose. Now here's the browning I was talking about on an otherwise nice spray. Obviously not all the blooms brown at the edges and back, but enough to be noticeable before the bloom is really spent, at least when you get the blooms close up. I don't think of PB as a cutting rose, for this among other reasons, including form. At its best, it can have a nice center to the bloom, with clean lines. Bottom line is I quite like this rose, but Cream Veranda still blows it out of the water for frequency of bloom, and both are equally hardy. If you're wanting the pure white tones though, PB is a good rose. Cynthia

I agree that there are some aspects of this house that look a little cheap and I would not personally want tile countertops in the kitchen (although the bathroom wouldn't bother me). Lots of houses built from the end of the Depression until the 1970s had a lot of cheap or modest materials even if they were essentially well-built house. (It seems like a lot of the houses built in the depth of the Depression were very well built because they were built by people who were not affected by the Depression) Anyway, I think it's possible to take houses like this and get some of the cheap out but still maintain the spirit of the house. That's what I am trying to do with my 1965 house: replace hollow core slabs with solid, do much better hardware and plumbing fixtures. It's pretty impossible to replace a lot of this stuff with exactly the right style because if it's still available it's usually the cheapest quality --because it's something that hasn't been redesigned in decades. This is where I differ from some real purists. I could replace the doorknobs with exactly what the house was built with (or almost, the "tulip" or "urn" shape is not nearly as sharp or defined as it was at one time). But I am not going to put a $10.00 knob back in the house just because that's what it came with. But some real mid century purists would.