Thanks for the recommendations Stew, I'll be looking out for those varieties for the next time I buy, especially madame moutot. I have thousands of alpine strawberries lining my paths here and growing wherever they can, it not only pretties up the place but my daughter spends ages clearing a patch of berries then looking under the leaves for any she missed, there's always another patch of them she never found too ready for her next hunt. I'm thinking about how I can get them to bear more fruit at the moment, if there's a heavy bearing strain I can introduce and I think all mine are cloned from one plant. Apart from those I grow mostly cambridge favorite so I can see why you like them. To extend the season I'm trying calypso and judibell this year. So far I've only had 1 small calypso berry to try from these but it had a good flavour too. Hey, if you want to test out the variation in taste I'd be happy to grow more varieties here and send you some fruit. You can email me through GardenWeb if you want to do something like this, only too happy to oblige. :)

I'm not from hawaii, but it seems like it would work. Its a double potting method, kinda like using mulch to keep rose roots cool. When you return to Hawaii could you get a fridge to keep the plants in? Kinda like chilling daffodil bulbs? Depending on what strawberries you got they might not need a deep cold to grow right.

About 10% of my dishes are flops in one way or another. Fish course for SWMBO's surprise dinner was kind of floppy. Indifferent cod is not greatly improved with hollandaise sauce. Cooking bacon on the gas grill was a flop. Too much grease and flareups, result was 2 lb of bacon that tasted like a house fire. Come to think of it, much of the stuff I make on the grill is a flop. I just don't ''get'' grilling, and probably lack the patience for a two-level approach. My experiment with sweet sauce on halibut was a flop. Tried making a hazelnut sauce, didn't know how so ended up basically making a custard suitable for hazelnut ice cream. SWMBO said, thoughtfully and gently, ''well, this would have been really good ice cream . . . '' When I first started simmering fish for a Japanese-style dish, I thought that it was like meat - longer simmering at lower temperature would make for the tenderest fish. Silly. Ended up with fish-flavoured rubber. Learned that less is more. Now I simmer fish for at most 3 minutes. So far all of my attempts at xiao long bao (dumplings filled with broth) have been floppy. I don't have ''the touch'' when pleating the dumpling skins, end of pinching them too hard resulting in dense, tough pleats. The broth is tasty but you have to gnaw through the pleats to get at it. I am determined to persevere. Last holiday, I spent untold hours (days, actually) making aspic for a big dinner. I liked it, but some guests looked askance at jiggling cubes of meat jelly. Some of it ended up being recycled into soup broth, which is a disappointing reward for that much work. Along the same lines, there is a soup I've had in Taiwan which is sort of aspic, cubes of jellied meat broth that stand up in little piles on the bowl, but are perfectly calibrated to dissolve into scrumptious soup as soon as it touches your warm tongue. I've not succeeded in making that. I think I can, but will need to get the consistency just right. So far, I end up chewing my soup which is Just Not Right. I went through a phase of bringing home and cooking up various organs and other peculiar animal parts. Hearts, kidneys, tongues, livers, spleens, tendons, necks. Cost me the trust of my children that summer. For months they would interrogate me on the precise nature and source of any meat dish. You'd think I was serving the family cat or something. Oddly, I have a hard time making fluffy rice without a rice cooker. I know, it is supposed to be simple to make on the stovetop, but I get impatient and peek/stir/sample too much, resulting in pasty, mushy rice. The first time I made tomato pesto (pesto a la trapanese) I used a food processor. Results looked like stomach contents after a college drink-fest. I learned you have to hand-chop it, or have a much lighter touch on the button. Broiling is a fertile source of floppery. When 15 seconds makes the difference between perfect and burned, and you have to sit on the floor in front of an open oven door to monitor, well, sometimes I end up dumping a half sheet pan of stuff into the trash and starting over. And on and on. If you're not flopping, you're not trying!

We rescued a Cairn Terrier a number of years ago. By age two Cassie had been through three owners, all of which were frustrated with her skin problems (though we didn't know that going in). The first time our family vet saw her skin and the hot spots, he told me he would not hold it against me if I chose to put her down. That's how bad it was and it wasn't even in the typical allergy season. I felt there had to be hope (ha, silly me) and took her to another vet in another city who specialized in thyroid problems and was also knowledgeable in holistics. Many tests and treatments later, Cassie was no better so we went back to our vet who treated her with steroids when the spots got really bad. All the while I tried everything else imaginable (special foods, vitamins, sprays, shampoos, ointments, meds, etc.) to keep it under control because I knew what damage the steroids could do. Fast forward eight years, Cassie became very, ill and spend a number of days in the hospital. Diagnosis: Pancreatitis. The vet put her on a prescription low fat dog food. She recovered quickly from the Pancreatitis and much to our extreme delight her skin and hot spots cleared up. She had thick, gorgeous fur on her belly and back for the first time in many, many years. Jodi-