You're in luck. Cleome are easy to trasplant, as long as you work gently. When the seeds first sprout, they put out two baby leaves, which are not TRUE leaves: meaning they are shaped differently than the other leaves will be and they will eventually fall off. So, the true leaves are all the others that grow after the first two. They grow in sets of two, one on each side of the stem, so three sets of true leaves means the first two, which don't count, plus 3 more sets of two, for a total of six true leavss. OCCASIONALLY a plant will throw an odd leaf that doesn't have a partner. If it continues to grow, count the odd leaf as one set. By the way, once the true leaves start coming, cleome leaves grow in clusters of 3 leaflets. So, I suppose, you could say that one set has six leaflets. :) Since you planted so many seeds in one pot, I wouldn't wait too long to trasplant them. The more tangled the roots get, the more likely they will be to go into transplant shock. Once they have two sets of true leaves, use a soup spoon to scoop each plant out of the pot and plant it into previously well prepared garden soil. Water it immediately. Set your plants about a foot apart and they'll look very nice. When scooping your baby plants out, put the spoon halfway between two plants and push straight down so that it will break as few roots as possible and leave the longest possible roots to each one. Cleome are tall and they will get bushy on their own. I cannot think of any good reason to pinch them back (that in a moment). Do, however, plant them about one foot apart in bunches of at least 3, preferably 5 or more, plants. That way, you'll have a good looking mass of color. If you're planting in a bed, it will look nice to somewhat evenly scatter groups of plants evenly down the length of the bed. Not necessarily in a straight row, but still making a "line". Remember, they will get tall, so put them behind shorter plants. Pinching a plant back, simply means cutting off the tips of the growing stem or branches in order to force the plants to bush out. It's best done when the plant is young, and so most of us use our thumbnail and forefinger to cut the stem. It just takes a "pinch". See? When the growing tip is cut off, the plant will push out new branches from the places where the remaining leaves meet the stem. It's an excellent technique for getting the maximum look from your plants. You can often even take the pinchings and root them to make more plants. Coleus are a great plant to learn this technique from. You'll be glad to know that if your cleome are a success this year, you probably won't have to do this next year. They are heavy seeders and you will find lots of baby plants in your garden next year sprouting and coming up on their own. Be sure to remember what they look like so you don't weed them out! I love cleome. They are beautiful and easy to grow, and they don't mind extreme heat, humidity or drought. I don't mind their smell at...

I think a gallery of seedling pics is a great idea. Karen, Trudi does have a good gallery of them on her site and the seed site has quite a few as well. Problem is this. seed site doesn't have all the seedlings you might want to find and not everyone knows about the site. A gallery of seedling pics on the conversation side of WS forum, would have the pics right here for all to see and others can add pics to the thread. I will start a post on the gallery side with the pics that I have. Fran

I don't think I have any pictures of it, but I'm growing red cap zinnias this year. They have rather small flowers (maybe about 1 1/2" diameter), but the plants are big and healthy with a lot of flowers, enough to make an impact. I'll try to get a picture. My favorite red flower is Yvonne's salvia, followed by lobelia cardinalis. It doesn't bloom until around August, but what a beauty it is. The hummers go wild over it. Karen Here is a link that might be useful: zin red cap

Pug- What a gorgeous tree! Thanks so much for sharing!! Look at all those mangoes. Now, are those the kind that get really big or the little yellow kind? Bo- Unfortunately, I live in an apartment annnnnnd in Nebraska, so aside from dwarf citrus that can be grown indoors, there's a limit to how much I can enjoy such a crazily rewarding addiction. I'm stuck on the cherimoya bit, too. It goes without saying that we never see them in even produce-friendly stores around here. I've frequently thought about biting the bullet and just having one shipped to me. My sister is LA for work most weeks, so I've been trying to get her to bring me back one. I'll have to tell her that cherimoya season is nigh and hinthint about Christmas presents. Mitzicos- Neat plant!! It looks like something someone made up for a video game world. I think I'd fall over laughing if I saw one of those in real life and I wasn't expecting it. Apparently you can bonsai it as a houseplant, so maybe that should be the new playmate of my lemon tree. Beth- When you copy the html code from your host site, usually somewhere in there you can see where it specifies the height and width of the picture. You can manually edit the code and double or triple these dimensions, before pasting it here.