Raybo, Celery should be mounded up with loose dirt at least 6 inches on the stalks to blanch the stems. Celery is mildly poisonous and blanching helps reduce the level of toxins. The leaves make excellent flavoring for soups and stews. Celery is a cool season crop best grown either in late fall or early spring. It can handle short periods of sub freezing temps down to 22 degrees, but this seriously slows down growth. Do NOT grow celery in the heat of the summer, it will not be happy. Knowing your climate, you could probably grow it successfully from either December or January seed start. It is best started in cell trays with 2 or 3 seed per cell. The above tip about taking 12 weeks from seed to transplant is pretty close. I've managed to transplant at 8 weeks but the plants are small. My suggestion would be to fill an earthtainer 1/2 full of a very rich soil mix and set the plants to grow. When the plants are nearly full size, fill the earthtainer up with peat moss to induce blanching. DarJones

Edible poppy seeds ARE from the opium poppy, papaver somniferum. They have also been grown for the flowers for centuries and I am sure they are handed down as viable seeds in many places. I have also heard that they have naturalized in some parts of the Pacific Northwest. That said: It is also true that the poppy seeds sold to the baking and grocery industries have been treated by heat or irradiated to prevent them from sprouting. Additionally, if you are required to take drug test for your job, you will want to be careful eating poppy seed cakes, bagels, etc. They can cause you to test positive for opiates!

Hello Angelsmell, I'm reading all these posts with great interest. Cananga is a native here in northern Australia but I can't seem to find var. fruticosa anywhere but I'm not going to stop trying;). Perhaps I can shed some light from my experience. I tried for ages with seed from exchanges, clubs, trades etc. I was never able to get them to germinate. Tried scarifying, acid treatment, giberrelic acid, even tried feeding some to the chooks (sorry, chickens) to see if they would germinate in the droppings. No good. Finally got on to the bloke who is the head of the seed collection dept. for Queensland parks and wildlife. Turns out that seed is only viable for a very short time. I got some from him and planted it all into a large foam box, put it into my shadehouse and had seedlings on the warmer side of the box in three days. They grew very quickly but being an unnatractive seedling I had a hard time giving them away. Now that they are flowering everyone wants one!! I had no idea how long they would take to flower but was very pleasantly surprised to see flowers early in the second year from seed!! They are now three years old, nearly 20 feet tall and almost constantly covered in flowers. I will harvest my first seed from them this week. We had a cyclone (hurricane) through here about a year ago, it was preceded by three or four weeks of torrential rain which softened the ground around the tree's roots. The canangas were leaning over until they touched the ground in the wind. One was over the washing line so I tied it up using two strong ropes. This tree now grows extremely crooked while the ones I didn't tie up in the cyclone are straight as arrows. I keep meaning to cut the top 10 or 12 feet off it so it will grow straight again but I can't catch it out of flower for long enough. My wife and my neighbours would ban me from the chainsaw if I cut it while it was covered in flowers. I hope this helps a bit, we are pretty troical here and I don't know what your climate is like. Regards, Brendon

I built 2 raised beds and filled them up with dirt this spring. One was for veggies, and the other was an extension of my partly shaded flower bed. I was late starting my tomato seeds and then the near triple digit heat in May hit. I've picked one grape tomato so far this year. The rest were split or stolen. I had 2 large green tomatoes, and yesterday I noticed that the squirrels must have twisted them off the vine and carried them away. My squash produced a few blooms and then got scorched to death. I planted potatoes for the first time, and I did have a pretty good harvest. I also picked a few cucumbers. My cannas and elephant ears never did come up this year. I usually cut them off after the first freeze, but I didn't last year. My guess is water/snow/ice collected in the stalks and turned the roots into mush. It seems I remember it got colder last winter than it has in many years as well. I planted a bunch of lily, iris, and canna bulbs in the new raised bed. Maybe 4 lilies came up. I think the squirrels dug up the cannas. I'm too depressed to even try to see what happened to the irises. After languishing for a few years, it looks like the gophers finally killed off my rose bush. It has been a great year for them. They've been in my flower beds and another hosta literally disappears each night. They've been celebrating in my fescue lawn as well. I've been on vacation this week, cleaning up and assessing the damage in the early morning hours. By 8 a.m., my shirt is already sticking to me. I planted a couple of knock-out roses I got a good deal on. I wrapped poultry netting around the roots and flooded all the gopher tunnels I could find. I purchased about $35 of starter plants and seeds on eBay just now trying to replace some of what I lost. They'll have to be babied the rest of the year and maybe grown in containers and overwintered inside. It can't stay this hot forever, can it?