FarmerDill- I suffer from cabbage envy now. :) I have tried two plantings every year that I have gardened down here: spring and fall. Transplants went out on March 12 this year in the spring (broccoli, cabbage, kale, cauliflower) and then mid-late August for fall (broccoli, kale, collards, cabbage, sprouts). My soil pH is 6.1 according to the soil test done in August- too low? It was also a bit low in Ca but I did add lime when I planted the fall crops. Perhaps too soon to see a change from that? No signs of root maggots when the spring plants were removed. We do get these awful harlequin plant bugs that have population explosions on anything in the mustard/cress family in the heat of summer, so I pull out anything that might harbor them in summer. Except the horseradish. Anyway, I tend to choose early maturing varieties to help me get around that little miracle of nature. It's hard for me to know what is caused by something I'm doing/not doing and what is a result of being at the new house with its different soil. I guess I wonder most of all about the cabbages that refuse to head. (They did that at the old house too.) What makes them decide it is time to head up?

What might be the moral to the story? This might be it: wait a little while if you are shocked when you read about a problem that sounds shocking to you. It probably also sounds shocking to everyone, but wait. Don't be trigger happy. Don't indulge yourself by typing out your feelings. Wait. Someone will post some kind of fact-based response within a few hours. Isn't there a Supreme Court Justice who subscribes to this theory of conservation of personal (his) initiative? He doesn't believe in "indulging himself" by vocalizing any thought processes, either. Of course, I don't recall his reserve having garnered him many plaudits for holding his curiousity or opinion in check. My initial position was paraphrased by marcolo several times. Several people have made a big ado about it. Marcolo pointed out why it is good to ask for information first. Wow. What a new idea. Ask around. Get new input. (MARCOLO! Paging Dr. Marcolo! Need Davidro-to-english translation help here, please.) Assuming I understood the point of the post, isn't that what a post on the Kitchen Forum is about? Airing personal experience, making correlations, getting opinions on similarity or dissimilarity of experience? I don't believe that posting is an automatic ticket to litigation-city. That said, while I don't disagree with David that the massive haemorrhaging of personal outrage on the KF can be a trifle wearying, the instances cited here that have apparently motivated this thread are ridiculous. For one thing: "exploding glass doors" vs "exploding glass doors that way". Yes, tempered glass explodes "that way" but to think that anyone should be expected to be blase and off-hand about the fact that their oven door blasted itself open in the course of its "normal operation" (I'll hold my opinion on self-clean in check here) is asking for the moon. It doesn't matter than tempered glass breaks a certain way - it does matter that it spontaneously imploded without a clear and discernible impact to trigger; that makes the data noteworthy and the event really should be publicized. Yes, perhaps the glass was subjected to stresses beyond normal range a while back - or even undetected anomalous events at the time of high drama: bird strike, pellets, surface scratches, edge impact - and now the smallest minor perturbation to the nominal took it beyond its elastic limit, so to speak. But if a certain product has a habit of shattering (multiple reported such outcomes) - well, the likelihood that there should be such a high correlation between purveyors of that item and 6-sigma beyond norm events that shattering glass should be an expected outcome, is statistically insignificant. More than likely then, there is indeed a manufacturing defect - either in the glass manufacture process, or planarity of the door frame into which it is inserted, its tensioning or some other assembly process. Tempered glass might shatter safely, but it doesn't have a habit of shattering so much so that anyone buying ovens or doors or whatever should expect that after the 3year/5year/7year window that they should expect to walk upto an imploded door. This is just silly. It is absolutely the right thing to do to air the fact that E'lux's oven door shattered in self-clean mode. If many E'lux ovens do that, it is likely an E'lux problem and won't be known until such complaints are aired, collected and documented. If many oven doors shatter in self-clean then either ovens will get to a point where they won't use glass in self-clean ovens or self-cleaning will be outmoded (yesssssss!). Whatever. (regardless that as far as I know, self-clean temps are well inside the tolerance regime of tempered glass). None of this happens until the user airs this. & others aren't edified until they happen upon such reports. The only factually incorrect, if that, information I ran across on the e'lux oven thread was the moral outrage about the health risks of someone walking into the glass shards. Fact is that shattered tempered glass is safer than regular shattered glass but it's no bowl of tofu, chaps. So, while I think that keeping a bit of a tamp on the emotional quotient isn't a bad idea, the motivating example has even me arguing against this thread and I certainly don't support the idea of filter's eliminating posts that exceed some imagined emotion threshold or pass someone's idea of fact-filled posts. If the last was the case, I doubt that the OP's post (top post, this thread) would have made the cut .... Hmmmm, come to think of it ....

morz8, while I'm sure my cousin was disappointed that Nyquist placed third in the Preakness, he's not a 'count your chickens before they hatch' kind of guy. As each individual race is completely different with changing variables, (track condition, posting position etc.) Exaggerator was clearly a better runner in thick mud and deserved the win. While it wasn't in the same race at the Preakness that my cousin's horse ran, I was so upset to learn about the horses that died in earlier races that day and the jockey who was injured. Sadly, my worse fears did occur, which is exactly why I feel how I feel about horse racing.

Dan. I think you are confusing SVB's with Pickle worms. Those jokers are the ones with drill bits. SVB attacks the vines. They may on occasion emerge from a fruit but not with the cute little drill holes that characterize Pickle worms. Pickle worms are a worst problem for me as they also attack both cucumis and cucurbita. Cantaloupes and cucumbers as well as squash including butternut. Pickle worms Diaphania nitidalis are a major pest in the south. http://entnemdept.ufl.edu/creatures/veg/pickleworm.htm