Hello, everyone. Welcome back, Dave, and also a warm welcome to our new members -- tyrone26 and AaronHefel -- and to all of our visitors.

It's been quite awhile since my last post. The weather has been so nice here in Arkansas that I've been spending just about every minute of my spare time in my garden; it's close to 7,000 square feet, so it take a LOT of work. Replaced some fence and squared up the site, built some new gates so that I won't need to keep taking down my fence everytime I want to get a dump truck in there, and got many other things done, including finally getting six mounds of hops planted (cascade) -- so now I need to build an arber. Haven't gotten around to ordering the other four hop plants that I want.

The weather here has been pretty much consistenly in the high seventies to mid eighties for about the past month. Actually too hot to comfortably work in, and I've been sweating like a pig and getting a little sun burned. Unfortunately, the weatherman is now talking about a threatened heavy frost for this coming weekend. I knew I was taking a chance to plant early, but the hot weather fooled me ... and a lot of other folks. Now I'll need to un-stake my 24 tomato cages so I can move them and _TRY_ to fit gallon jars or something over my tomato plants (some are pretty big already). The bigger problem is how to cover eight 50 foot rows of corn that's about 4 inches tall. The peas, potatoes, and sugar snap peas should be okay. The pepper plants are still small, so gallon jars will easily cover them. I'm lucky that I have a couple hundred one-gallon jars in my shed.

Well, this was a lunch break for me, so I've got to go back to work. A big thank you to everyone for their crunching; please keep up the good work.

Cheers.

It's been awfully quite in our thread lately, but our team is still doing well -- still sitting in #66.

On Tueday I bottled an American Imperial Stout and brewed two new batches -- a pale ale and an ESB. Then I brewed a batch of IPA yesterday. Now looking at three carboys all bubbling away very nicely.

Just checked my hops garden, and I have sprouts up on five out of the six cascade rhizomes I planted; still hopeful for #6. Am still waiting for the arrival of my order of rhizomes from Freshops -- two 'magnum' and two 'sterling'.

Any of our team been doing any brewing lately?

Cheers.

Good morning to you, too, V_R ... and also to everyone else. It's been too quite around here. To update my last post, my last hop rhizomes arrived yesterday and are now planted, and #6 of my cascade has finally peeked through the ground. The others are up and showing good growth. I'm fortunate that the two days of frost that hit last weekend didn't bother them (it killed my 24 tomato plants, a nice row of green beans, some squash, and it looks like it seriously affected my corn, too. So anyway, I've been thinking of switching my crunching to a climate prediction group ... NAHHHHH! Just kidding. My gardening problems are nothing compared to the problems some people are having, so we continue to crunch to help cure diseases.

Thanks for visiting. Cheers.

Yes, ... especially when you have to plant more than half of it TWICE <sigh> ... the late frost really hurt me. Killed 24 tomato plants, some of my peppers, a row of green beans, some squash, and my 8 x 50' rows of corn, which were coming up nicely, were hurt so bad that I'll probably just replant the whole crop. The only thing that wasn't hurt was my sugar snap peas, green peas, and mustard (for greens); my potatoes, which were up about 6", died back to the spuds, but are re-emerging now. The problem is that it has been rainy and fairly cool since the frosts, so I still haven't replanted. Now it will be a relatively late planting here, and the problem is that the weather can get very hot and dry pretty fast in Arkansas -- something that I was hoping to beat with an early planting. Well, ... I took a chance. My hops are all up except for the last 4 rhyzomes that I planted; am going to need to build some sort of a trellis or arbor this weekend.

Cheers.

Bill Velek

Hi, 7cures. Thanks for dropping by. What's going on? Ever do any homebrewing?

Cheers.