Hi Pam! This year I grew: Sun Gold: Have grown this for many years and it still performs as advertised, huge plant and huge production, very sweet, fruits start to split late in season, no disease, still going strong on 10/17/12. Oregon Spring: Very early producer, very compact plant, has always been a winner for me, flavor is good, not great but it makes plenty of quality fruit. Bloody Butcher: first time for me, did very poorly, plant barely grew, produced some small but tasty fruit early on and then just sat there, there are three very small fruits on the plant right now. Moskovich: Have grown this many years also, I find it extremely tasty, plant gets huge, is slow to start producing but really comes on late. At least 10 medium sized fruits on the plant right now. Sweet Baby Girl (cherry): Was advertised as a compact cherry, the plant is nowhere near as huge as Sungold, so I guess its true, but it still grew quite tall, just not very broad or bushy. Fruit is red, tasty, tender, not as sweet as Sungold. Meager production, wouldn't try it again, have grown other red cherries that produce like crazy, but the plants also get huge. One thing that may be of interest to all of you PNW tomato lovers: I always plant my tomatoes in the garden from nursery starts on or around my birthday, April 30, and except for Bloody Butcher this year, they always grow and produce. This is in Edmonds .5 mi from the Sound, areas further out obviously will be more risky. I always chuckle at all the warnings "don't plant your tomatoes outside until we have some real heat!".

Good List. I see my favorite "The Secret Garden".

Amy, Thanksgiving usually is in Texas, as it was last year, because all my sister's kids and grandkids live down there and have to try to visit two (or more) families on Thanksgiving, so we go down there instead of all of them coming up here. In our early years here, we hosted all the holidays here, but then when my nieces and nephews started having kids, it became more convenient for us to travel down there instead of all of them traveling up here. I'm okay with that. I don't mind not doing all the tons of work involved in hosting a holiday. I'm glad you like the machine. I love, love, love mine. There is no way on this earth I would make all the salsa and other tomato products that I do if I didn't have it. When I made tomato sauce this week, I used it for that, taking great care to use the apple/sauce screen because I didn't want the sauce chunky like salsa, and I'm so used to using the salsa screen that my hand automatically brings it out of the cabinet and hooks it up....and then I stare at it and think "that's wrong, I'm making sauce". lol. I'm glad your latest gadget arrived. (grin) I purged so many gadgety things last year when we redid the kitchen and I do not want for them to come back. Every single thing I kept has one specific place it belongs, and nobody puts it in the wrong place or they face the wrath of She Who Must Be Obeyed. : ) Once you're used to putting things where they belong, they are always there when you need them. The hard part was training Tim and Chris to put things back in the right place, but once they understood the organizational system, they became better at using it and now they like it. I also love not having a drawer (or a cabinet) full of gadgets that I do not remember buying, do not remember using, and often....don't even know what they are supposed to do. I especially adore having one cabinet and one drawer for nothing but canning supplies. This is the first time I've ever had that and it is nice to not have to go from cabinet to cabinet pulling out canning supplies that were tucked away in all spots wherever I could cram them in. Both screens remove the peel. You just get bigger chunks with the salsa screen (which is important for safety reasons as it keeps the ingredients in the right density needed for proper heat penetration) and you get seeds with the salsa screen. With the sauce screen, the seeds are screened out along with the peel and a lot of the flesh. I run the 'waste' through several times when using the sauce screen in order to minimize waste. If I want a chunkier tomato sauce for fresh cooking for dinner I just use the salsa screen. Since I don't like seeds in spaghetti sauce, what I'll do is cut open the tomatoes and scoop out as much of the seeds/gel as I can into a bowl of waste destined for the compost pile. That will remove most but not all seeds. It also means you generally end up wearing some of those seeds. The kitchen and I are a wreck after an afternoon of tomato processing. I do the same scooping out of seeds/gel when making salsa. Some seeds remain, but I get most of them out, and this produces a slightly less runny salsa. I'm glad you got rain. We had a nice rain shower tantalizingly close to us....it missed us by about a quarter-mile. There are big puddles where and it looks like at last a half-inch fell, until you turn onto our road and there's just nothing. When I looked at the radar-indicated rainfall map, you'd think the blue blob was right on top of us, but it isn't/wasn't. There's the blue blob where the rain fell in our neighborhood on the map, then a tiny white area about the width of a human hair where no rain fell and then the river. We are in the tiny white area...literally our house, a handful of maybe 3 or 4 of our nearest neighbors, and no one else. Maybe 100-200 acres missed the rain. We are within that tiny 100-200 acres that was passed over. Everyone else got rain. If we hadn't had 3" of rain in the last week, being missed today would have left me wanting to cry.....but, we know that big girls don't cry and also there's no crying in gardening. So, I laughed at the way the rain fell on everyone but us. Laughing is better than crying. Tim says we are cursed. Some other areas that got rain (not our neighborhood or the area next to it where rain fell) also got fires probably caused by lightning but we didn't, so at least there's that. Something in the air has made me sneeze all day. Maybe some sort of grass pollen. I'm allergic to everything. I need a nap so I can stay awake later tonight and sleep in tomorrow since Tim's alarm clock won't be going off, but if I take a nap now, I won't be able to fall sleep later. I fed the deer squash last night. I should feed them more right now. Every squash I slice up and feed them is one less I have to cook or freeze. Hmmm. I believe I'll get off the computer, slice up some squash and throw it on the compost pile for the deer. Dawn

Did not work last night or this morning. Tried numerous times. Quotes Sept. 16 2018 Charlie Byrd Quotes American - Musician September 16, 1925 - November 30, 1999 A person should design the way he makes a living around how he wishes to make a life. Charlie Byrd And a musician has to learn to be frugal and to carefully manage financial affairs. Charlie Byrd A musician has to find a way to make his music mean something special - spiritually or however you can. Charlie Byrd We would play, then they would play a set, then we would jam on the last song. Charlie Byrd That jam was so much fun that by the end of the tour, we just jammed on all of the songs. Charlie Byrd B. B. King Quotes American - Musician September 16, 1925 - May 14, 2015 The beautiful thing about learning is nobody can take it away from you. B. B. King I tried to connect my singing voice to my guitar an' my guitar to my singing voice. Like the two was talking to one another. B. B. King Even now, at 82 years old, if I don't learn something every day, you know what I think? It's a day lost. Now, I don't practice every day. I just take the guitar, swear at it. But I should be swearing at myself. But I fool with music. I'm doing something musically all the time. And my ears are wide open for anything I can hear. B. B. King I was born on a plantation, and things weren't so good. We didn't have any money. I never thought of the word 'poor' 'til I got to be a man, but when you live in a house that you can always peek out of and see what kind of day it is, you're not doing so well. And your rest room is not inside the house. B. B. King I liked blues from the time my mother used to take me to church. I started to listen to gospel music, so I liked that. But I had an aunt at that time, my mother's aunt who bought records by people like Lonnie Johnson, Robert Johnson, Blind Lemon Jefferson, and a few others. B. B. King Sometimes I just think that there are more things to be said to make the audience understand what I'm trying to do more. When I'm singing, I don't want you to just hear the melody. I want you to relive the story, because most of the songs have pretty good storytelling. B. B. King My wife Martha used to call me Ol' Lemon Face because of my facial contortions when I play Lucille. I squeeze my eyes and open my mouth, raise my eyebrows, cock my head and God knows what else. I look like I'm in torture, when in truth, I'm in ecstasy. I don't do it for show. Every fiber of my being is tingling. B. B. King