Hi Celeste, What a beautiful rose you have. It must be really fun to create something as pretty as it is. To my un-trained eye the striping pattern looks very similar to Moores Striped Rugosa, which it got from Ferdinand Pichard 5 or 6 generations back. So I guess it could have come from either one, since you have both. After doing a little research on Moores Striped Rugosa I found that in each generation the striping came from just one parent, usually the pollen parent (except for MSR where it came from the seed parent). This means that striping is a dominant trait and should show up in the offspring at least 50% of the time. So if you do decide to use it to breed with you should get a good number striped offspring. I used MSR pollen for the first time this year on several different plants and have a good number of seeds. After seeing your pictures it got me excited to see my seeds germinate and bloom to see how many striped ones I get. Regards, Paul

Hi Judith -- I take an empty plastic one-gallon jug, fill it with 1/2 gallon of distilled water, and mark the level with a black permanent marker, writing on the bottle that it is not to be used for drinking water. Next, I pour in the 6 tablespoons of hydrogen peroxide by way of a funnel, put the lid back on and shake well. I keep two of these jugs ready. Since they are marked, it is easy to refill them without having to measure out the 1/2 gallon of water. I have gotten lazy since I first posted this, due to many seeds this year. Now, I just change the water about every three days. I'm now in the process of transplanting the results -- 1,000 seedlings into our new field bed. I'm only about half-way through. They are responding almost immediately to their new environment. BTW, when planting the sprouted seeds, I've had better luck by making a depression in the planting medium and placing the seeds on their sides with the emerging root facing downward without covering them. Once they start growing, I just add a pinch or two of loose potting soil to fill the depressions and cover any roots showing. It's working out much better than covering the seeds. I think planting them directly into the ground is the way to go -- you eliminate all the back-breaking work of transplanting them. But I just can't bring myself to do that yet -- especially with seeds from valuable crosses. We have very hungry fire ants here, and they do like to carry seed back home to their nests. Besides, I like watching them sprout and grow -- great therapy for the empty-nest syndrome! Nancy

Hi everyone. Thanks for the help. Still have no clue what this is. Ah yes, important to mention that these things, whatever they are, are completely stagnant and unmoving. Otherwise I wouldn't take my sweet time to take pictures, they'd be in a few layers of plastic bags, stomped on, and promptly eradicated (sunflower included)! :P Here are the macros: These photos are in no particular order. See how they are somewhat porous?? Never have seen anything like it. As for the sunflower--I planted it in the last few days of February when we had around 3 feet of snow and I was begging for some early springtime. We've had record-breaking weather this year. I don't think it's a good time to put it outside yet--I'll do that in a week or so, or whenever I know the soil is above 60 degrees. That's why it's in such a large plastic jug that I can just cut away when it's time to plant it.

Well, that just figures. Sadly people do what they want to do very often and just totaly ignore the label directions. I don't know what is going on this year, but things just seem off. We have neighbors with ranches that usually are gorgeously green this time of year, and this year they just aren't looking that good. I don't just mean on our street, but all over. I sort of think the early hot weather was very hard on the cool-season grasses in late winter and early spring, but then the cool weather in May was hard on the warm-season grasses, so nothing looks good right now. Some people did have huge first cuttings of hay, but others didn't. At all. I've seen a lot of people out spraying the last couple of weeks, and of course, just from watching, you cannot tell if they are spraying herbicide or fertilizer, but Tim has watched enough that he thinks he is seeing a lot of herbicide being sprayed. I feel like there is a huge over-reliance on herbicides in this country, and every year we see more and more folks posting on different forums all over Garden Web, putting up photos of plants damaged by herbicide drift and other photos of plants damaged by herbicide carryover in manure, compost, hay mulch, purchased soil mixes, free compost and mulch from their cities, etc. Many people don't give herbicide drift or herbicide carryover a passing thought until it happens to them. We all need to realize it is happening to all of us more and more frequently. I guess there is nothing on our own property that we want to kill badly enough that we will use a herbicide of any sort. We just don't use them and won't use them, and haven't used them in years and years.