Hi there! I'd love to trade with you :) I have onion seeds, crookneck and straightneck yellow squash AND Dill's Atl Pumpkin seeds, another variety of large pumpkin AND the lumina pumpkin :) I also have some great watermelons and unusual types of tomatoes. I would LOVE some of those ruffled daffodil bulbs, pink delight butterfly bush, small orange 'maple leaf' morning glory, candyturt (tuft? lol), purple columbine, white W/ purple center datura, and golden chain tree. Please let me know if you'd like to work out a trade. I'm sure I can come up with enough to make it an even trade, and throw in a few bonus seeds too :) Thanks, Wendy / sassybutterfly_2008

I have lots of moon flower seeds. I just harvested seeds from one plant that I have. 39 seeds pods and there is still that many or more on the vine. Each pod has about 100 seeds or more. Send me your address and I will put you some in the mail. Linda

Not stupid questions at all! We all want to get the most out of all our gardening and canning work. Tomato juice and sauce - I never strain my tomato juice. I pre-cook the fruit just enough to soften, run them through my Victorio and can all the resulting juice. It makes for a much thicker, richer tomato juice. Sure it separates in the jar over time but that is easy to fix with just a light shake. When we make tomato sauce we do the same things except we first return all the juice to the pot and cook it down to sauce consistency. When we want flavored sauce we first cook all the tomatoes with onions, peppers, carrots, herbs, celery, etc. and then run it all through the Victorio and cook it down to sauce consistency for canning. We also can 70-80 jars of just plain Crushed Tomatoes. That way they can be used for making all sorts of things during the winter - spaghetti sauce, chili, soup, casseroles, etc. We also can dozens of jars of the BBB recipe for Stewed Tomatoes (contain onions, peppers, celery) for winter use. We pick varieties for flavor and production numbers. Color is only a secondary consideration. Seed numbers I ignore as the Victoric takes care of the seeds. Small fruit varieties and colored types can be used to make all of the above just like beefsteaks or oxhearts. We plant very few paste types as they are never noted for flavor, just bulk. Why sacrifice flavor just for bulk? The only paste-types we grow now are Viva Italia and San Marzano and they are primarily for drying. Your experience with San Marzano is unusual IME. Mealyness is an inconsistent soil moisture level issue, not a variety issue. But we never make our sauce/juice/canned tomatoes using paste-types only. Opalka is another excellent paste-type but its production numbers are low by comparison. Hope this helps. Dave

Gary, One thing to keep in mind with orchids at the big boxes is many are, for the money, a better deal than buying cut flowers because they last so much longer. I do that, knowing that I know very little about keeping it alive or getting it to rebloom after it finally peters out. I just stick them in the boot of the palm tree out back and once in a blue moon fertilize them. And several have died out there, but one rebloomed for me recently. I felt like I doubled my money on that little very common purple and white dendrobium. I do the same thing with the little broms with the spectacular flowers (or whatever brom's non-flower flowers are called.) After several weeks, the flowers die and I plant them in the ground. I've had several of those rebloom too, and I'm even bringing pups and big divisions to the swap. They're not fancy, but for the $8 I paid, I got a lovely flower in the kitchen window for weeks, and if I get more, wow, yippee! I also think the orchids make much nicer hostess gifts than showing up with a bunch of cut flowers. If the hostess can't keep it alive to rebloom, he or she will at least get to enjoy the nice spray of flowers for much longer than cut flowers will last. (so when you see me at HD, don't bother to counsel me on my brom and orchid buys... just all the other stuff I might buy and potentially kill or hate!) As for the in-store kills, I saw a massacre in the making yesterday. Someone should go to the K-Mart in Miami Shores and convince the manager to sell them all the broms and orchids for cheap. They lost the shade covering in Fay and everything there is burned looking and won't last much longer. I thought about talking to him or her, but I don't know enough about orchids to think that even if they were heavily discounted, I could keep enough of them alive and get them to rebloom to make it worth it. susannah