Axel, I generally agree that nowadays no one goes to the expense of patenting and releasing a variety unless they're quite certain that they can consistantly obtain high quality in a wide range of climates, but that doesn't mean that they don't vary greatly in quality season to season. Goldrush was released as a commercial variety and it might just still make it (even if it's too late for royalties). The season before last my Braeberns were exquisite while this year they were completely worthless- really annoying because I had a great crop. The person here complaining about the quality of Goldrush this year doesn't seem to realize that we barely had a summer in NY last season, and in Z5 there just wasn't enough heat to properly ripen Goldrush. Of course I know I'm not telling you anything you don't already know.

Lot to digest there. The tree is in decline, and I don't do much any more with the apples, have never sprayed them, most are too high now. I do have an apple picker when the kids start climbing the thing, but the top half broke off so it won't reach as high as it should. All these years and I can't remember when the bigger, ripe ones start to drop, how dumb is that? I hear them at night here by my computer when the window is open. The green ones I don't bother about, just let them fall, may or may not pick them up depending on time & energy. Suckers are a problem in the other little garden near the tree; I'm always whacking them. Sigh, I never water the terrace so suckers have never appeared there. Maybe the tiller edger will go deep enough to sever the runner if they do. I can't grow any more trees, am out of room for them. The bottle business is on the other thread I started, probably on page 2 now, subject something like do these hostas look like they are going to make it, can't remember, am tired. It's a good idea, and when I'm not running to the hardware store for stupid reasons like I bought a connector for two hoses and could not turn the on off thingies, didn't want to force them with pliers and break them off or whatever, fingers sore from arthritis. The guy got them loose for me and I can turn them now. I buy a soaker hose for the front, start setting it up and ready to attach the laundry hose as an extender so it won't start the drip until it is in the garden. It's like two female connectors, and I need a female male on the ends because of the way the soaker hose is set up. I was so frustrated. Now I have to go back to the hardware store to see if there is some kind of adapter and return one soaker hose I bought for another garden because my neighbor loaned me his again, but I'm not enthusiastic about using it because it makes it much harder to weed. You partly bury a 2-litre bottle with a slit in the bottom and put water in the top to set up a slow drip, upping the chances that the water won't flow down the hill but water more deeply is essentially what that was about. Then I wrote what I did in this thread about putting the slit in the cap and opening up the bottom to make filling them easier. I forgot to water the hostas tonight. So much to do. Problems with everything, hard to stay on top of it all. They'll be fine. I want to lay a nice edging now that I have it cleaned up and am too tired to even think about it. Some kind of bricks, more work, maybe in the fall.

I only discovered it last year, because the issue had a painting on the cover that caught my eye; there was an article about the Gramercy Park Hotel in nyc, it was redecorated and it's amazing, have a look on their site; my brother dropped by to have a drink last fall and see the decor and you need reservations for the bar. I can imagine everyone wants to see, I know I'm heading there next time I'm in the big apple. Here is a link that might be useful: Gramercy Park hotel pictures

No, no, no, Caroline. It neutralizes all else in the garden. It is not a neutral color, purple in the garden but it serves to create unity with disparate colors in the garden. Try Fragrant Cloud for instance (red deep brick darker than Georgia clay but smellier than the Estee Lauder counter) mixed with Papa Meilland, the most beautiful and elegant rose ever to honor soil in a garden. The color is so crimson I understand that if one is pricked by a thorn in its vicinity, the human body is embarrassed to bleed as hemoglobin may pale in comparison to Papa Meilland and of course, there is no Estee Lauder counter fragrance to dear Papa, but a glorious combination of every light soft undertated fragrance one loved rolled up into one, a veritable phernomone, if you will, but these two handsome roess will only be able to reside side-by-side with the addition of purples and periwinkles of larkspur and delphinium, purples of foxglove and iris. Throw in a few purples and watch all those oranges, pinks and reds work together, like a school of fish swimming upstream. Hurvich and Jameson reasoned that when red and green are mixed together they produce yellow, not reddish green. Further when yellow and blue are mixed together they produce white and not yellowish blue. Red and green cancel each other as do yellow and blue. They further reasoned that if one started with a color such as bluish green it should be possible to mix this color with a unique yellow to cancel out the blue content leaving only green. This is the basic idea behind the hue cancellation technique. The first step was to identify for each observer their unique red, green, yellow and blue. Then monochromatic lights were presented one at a time and the observer's task was to cancel out one of the perceived hues if the wavelength was not already a unique hue. So at the shortest wavelengths the observer would add a certain amount of green to cancel out the redness. Then in the middle wavelengths unique red was used to cancel green, unique blue was used to cancel yellow and in the longer wavelengths unique green was used to cancel red. The amount of the cancellation color used was taken as an indicator of the strength of the cancelled hue. These data were then converted to produce the opponent processing curves. Although it is mentioned in the figure, it is worth repeating that the sign (plus or minus) attributed to these functions is arbitrary and chosen to represent the opposite nature of the opponent processes. Refilling my wine glass.