I don't even know what variety I'm growing but it's a hard neck. I garden in NH. Just follow directions planting in healthy garden soil. I top my garden beds with composted horse manure each spring. Keep the beds weeded. Last week, we harvested the garlic and I'm really pleased with the size. Enjoy garlic scapes from hard necks in the spring/early summer. Harvest the scapes when they make a full circle but before they curl any further (they are toughening). I read that when a scape points upward, garlic is ready to harvest and that is what I did this year. I recently read that each layer of browned leaves represents the paper layer on the bulb and that it is cured.

I will take the advice and add eyebolts to strategic places on the uprights for tying the canes instead of doing much weaving. If canes get as big as broomsticks, they won't bend much to create horizontals for flowering. Will they form secondary horizontal canes that will flower? Will long canes be limber enough to bend over the top of the arbor without kinking? Thanks again for the advice and compliments on the arbor. It took a fair amount of thought and design but I enjoyed it.

I like the overall shape of the mudroom/laundry, and it will provide a good flow to the house; however, I would make it into one long room, and instead of an L-shaped cabinet in the laundry (with the blind corner and loss of effective space), I'd open up the door between the two rooms and move the closet /sink to the wall that runs parallel to the stairs. You'd have a more open space, and just as much storage. The one thing I'd add to this family-entrance area is a pass-through between the mudroom and the pantry so that you could shove bags of groceries right into the pantry. Plan a little "landing spot" for them, and I'm sure you won't be sorry. Though I think it's a reasonable size, I'm not loving your kitchen layout. Your primary work triangle is interrupted by a door. I'd go with an uninterrupted flow of cabinets and lose the little coat closet (yeah, I know, easy for me to say here in the Carolinas, where it's currenly 73 degrees in January) to make a hallway all the way to the kitchen. Upstairs you have an unnecessary lot of space outside the door of the secondary bathroom. I'd make the hallway (to the future bonus room) more narrow and incorporate that space in to the secondary bathroom. It'd allow you to have the linen closet inside the bathroom -- in fact, you could have a larger linen closet, which is much more useful than a wide hallway in that particular position. I'm interested in the concept of a "kid's study". What's the thought process here? It definitely needs a window for some natural light. I suspect this door'll stay open most of the time, and I'd consider a pocket door. I think your dining room is a generous size -- and I like the concept of one large dining area -- and I like the window placement. I wonder, however, if the living room is "enough". Yeah, the numbers look good, but you're going to have to pull the furniture to the middle of the room to allow for walking space As for moving the master bedroom to the back of the house, I'm having trouble visualizing that -- at least, without significant changes. How about instead making that large bonus room into a master? Make the far end into a big walk-in-closet, and put a matching dormer/gable on the back side of the bonus room. That'd give you great natural light from two sides. A few small changes, and it'd all fall into place: The secondary bath becomes the master. The master bath is opened onto the hallway. What's now the master bedroom becomes your "future expansion" space. Keeping your plumbing close together is a money-saving technique. If you use the above idea, you could bump the used-to-be-master-now-secondary-bathroom to the left and move the two kids' bedrooms to the right, your bathrooms, laundry and kitchen would all be in the same general vicinity. Less money to build, fewer pipes to leak in the future. Are you sure you want the laundry room downstairs and the bedrooms upstairs? At the very least, include a laundry chute so that you don't have to carry the clothes downstairs. Overall, I like the plan. It does need some tweaking, but it has good bones.

My mother couldn't listen to audio books because she fell asleep every time and then couldn't find her place! One of her sisters (all four of them plus their brother had the disease) enjoyed the audios very much. I once heard her say to one of her sisters that if they had died as young as Papa did, they would never have known they had MD. I thought it was kind of funny at the time, because "Papa" was 72 when he died. Now that I'm 75, it doesn't seem funny at all! They all lived to be in their 90s. We did a number of things to prolong the vision she had. One was a magnifying screen that fit over the TV to enlarge the picture, another was a blueprint light clamped onto a table, and the last resort was a pair of the goggles the man in the stamp store she shopped at wore in order to see the tiniest print on postage stamps. Lemonhead, you are right on the money. My mother loved books, stamp collecting, crossword puzzles, and quilting. My sister jokingly told her she supposed if she couldn't see to do anything fun that she would just have to work all the time. I can't begin to imagine not being able to read.