Debbie and I arranged a trade - thanks everyone for looking!

I used to live near Dayton, OH and with the soils we have in SW Ohio (very high clay content) its often difficult to get the drainage required to grow verbascum long-term, in my experience. They like lean, gritty, well-drained soil - they are great in rock gardens. In my garden our clay would just become saturated in the spring and winter months, which would kill mine off. The spot that mine thrived, alongside with lavender and thyme was alongside our front walkway and our driveway - it was hot and full sun there, and to make it worse - they backfilled with almost pure sand instead of topsoil!! I was pretty annoyed at first, but tried out the aforementioned species and they just thrived in the quick-draining sandy substrate. Verbascums don't like soggy roots - that'll be the death of them. If you want to grow them I'd recommend mixing some sand and pea gravel into the soil all around them - even setting the rootball on a couple inches of pea gravel for drainage. Give them full sun. Hope that helps. ~Mike

You need to be more specific about the huckleberry seeds. Do you mean "Garden huckleberry" aka solanum nigrum, aka chichiquelites? Or real huckleberries, hard to find and rarely grown these days? Maybe Google "chichiquelites" and you'll get a lot of info. lmk. I have chichiquelites, (aka garden huckleberry) seeds I can share. They are a couple of year's old but still good, I'm sure. I can send you a lot so I'm sure you'll still get some germination. (warning: they can be invasive.) I'd love to trade for a few varieties of heirloom tomatoes, especially "black" types, not a lot of seed from each type, just enough to get 1-2 plants from each one.

Where are you? We might have some stuff to trade. Jerry