A few items to mention that may help others in gardening.

This year has been an exceptionally good year as far as fruit and nuts
are concerned for me. It is the first year in which the apricots are
in full harvest since we
had no Springtime frost on the blooms.

And this is the first year that my hazelnuts are producing nuts. Now I
need to find out why some bushes yield whereas others do not. Is it
that some
are male and others female? If that is true, then I
guess out of my 75 bushes, that only a few are female.
I have to find out what makes a bush a male or female
and whether they can change sex?

Now I have some suggestions for a better vegetable garden. I have
concrete pavers, blocks that are 16" by
8" by 4". They are called concrete solids in masonry.
So what I do is plant my watermelon, cucumbers and
some tomatoes in a plot of about 30' by 30' and then in
between the plants I put these pavers so that the only
weeds are those that manage to grow between the cracks of the pavers.
And the added beauty of this is that the white surface reflects more
sunlight making the vegetables grow that much faster. The cucumbers
and watermelon love these pavers. And as they sprawl with their vines
out into the lawn grass, I simply add more pavers, even though it
kills the grass.

Now for my tomatoes this year, I have planted them in
a long row and then hammered in some T stakes and on the perimeter put
fencing around. So that I created a
cage around the tomatoes rather than those flimsy cages. I reach
across the fencing and tie the two fences together with wire and I
leave enough opening at the bottom of the fence to reach inside and
pullup any weeds around the tomatoes. Will see how effective
this method is.

Finally, my rock-elm grafts were unsuccessful. I found out that
grafting is done during winter and set over the
winter months. On all my grafts the parent tree shot up new shoots all
around the graft and never any viable graft itself.

Archimedes Plutonium
http://www.iw.net/~a_plutonium/
whole entire Universe is just one big atom
where dots of the electron-dot-cloud are galaxies