Dave, bait a trap with pecans, these guys will eat even the ones we'd put in the discard pile. Raccoons will do almost anything for a nice pecan, including come right up and take them out of your hand if you give it a little time. I have a couple of them on my property but they never bother my garbage cans because I don't put food waste in it until the actual day of pick up. I freeze all meat scraps, bones etc, and the big bonus is that my garbage men love me, lol, my garbage never stinks.

Try Big Thicket - Amy - I know she raises plants. Also Marilyn Stewart of Wild Things Nursery in Seminole Oklahoma is a great person for answering questions. She has a website. I'll post it. Sandy Here is a link that might be useful: Nursery

It reseeds just about as much as elms do, so I guess I am not surprised they are in the same family. Pretty much everything in our woodland acres provides shelter or food for something, which kind of explains why we have left most of it in place. Even with poison ivy and greenbrier, wildlife depend on the berries for food, so we only keep those plants cut back from the pathways instead of actually trying to remove them. We made an exception for cedars, and take out all we can, although a million new ones spring up in their place. They are just too big of a fire hazard to have anywhere close to the house or other structures. I don't mind hackberries in general. They aren't the prettiest trees, but they do provide shade and shelter for wildlife. It is just they can dominate in areas with plentiful rainfall and crowd out more desirable plants. I just don't like hackberries in a home landscape like ours where the soil, the climate and the annual rainfall encourage them to grow like weeds. In Fort Worth, they were in our neighbor's yard to our east, and long before we bought our place, the tree trunks had grown right around the chain-link fence and swallowed it up. It was just bizarre to see fencing come right out of the middle of tree trunks. We put up a wood privacy fence to screen off our swimming pool because the neighbors didn't want the tree-swallowing hackberry trees removed, so we couldn't remove the chain link fence. On the western property line, a hackberry would lose big old branches in severe thunderstorms and they'd fall on our shed, our garage or on our power line, knocking out our power. From our point of view from having them there adjacent to our property, there wasn't any reason to really like them or appreciate them. We have several dozen different kinds of trees on our property, and other than the cedars, the only ones we have deliberately removed are the honey locust trees. They sucker and spread so if you leave one alone and let it be, soon you'll have an entire grove that just spreads and spreads and spreads. If every honey locust and every hackberry tree on our property died tomorrow, I'd be thrilled. I wouldn't miss the cedars either. Once we remove cedars, we get oodles of other trees and understory plants that spring up where the cedars used to be and they offer a better variety of food for the wildlife and are less dangerous in wildfires. If I lived in a drier part of the state where trees are less common, I'd probably appreciate the hackberries more....but where I live they are as weedy as bermuda grass and almost as aggressive. At the southeastern corner of our woodland, the war for domination rages on between red oaks and hackberries. With a little assistance from humans, in that particular spot, the red oaks are winning.

There are several links if you google Hoya Red Buttons - this one has a good picture of the plant - not just the flower - it might be this. http://forums.gardenweb.com/forums/load/hoya/hpgal0411112728251.html?7