Robbie, When you prune it's normal for the stem to die back to the next bud where the new apex will start growing. Nothing in your photo really raises an alarm from what I can see. There will be buds starting to swell soon along the top of the stem. Depending on location, time of year, amount of sun, etc etc you might see buds in another week. Might take a little longer since they are indoors. randy

We have a 99 cent store close to my house,and it was the first one of those types of stores to come to our area several years ago.I go there before i go to the grocery store.We have a freezer section,fresh fruits and veggies and almost anything you can find in a regular grocery store,and name brands as well.There fresh fruit has been great,pints of blueberries for .99cents,as well as strawberries etc and most of it grown right here in Calif. They recently got a new bread vendor and oh what joy that is,sour dough,multi grain,and several other great brands.It's the only place we buy saltine crackers now,they are made by Harvest Table or something like that and are just as good as premium and the other. I have been going there for years and have never found any outdated stuff.Love that store!!! Kathi

Glenda, I see this is an old post, but I am doing some research for school and ran across it, but I will fill you in on the chicken situation at Walmart. They do not come in frozen, they come in on ice fresh from the packers. They are however, preseasoned. They are then put into the rotisserie and cooked. When they are put on the floor to sell they are freshly cooked, ok sometimes overcooked because of complaints of them not being done. However, they are temped before packaging and put on the floor. After that three hour time frame they are brought off the floor and put into a flash freezer to stop the heat. This does cause them to get frozen. They are then repackaged in new packaging and placed in the refrigerator at a low temperature to keep bacterial growth from beginning. The next morning, they are then put out in the cold section of the deli at a reduced rate. Since the chickens are a hot seller, usually by the time the new ones come out of the oven, the old ones are already gone. So what probably happened is you got one that was off of the last run for the night and that is why it was still frozen inside since it had not had time to thaw completely. I will say thought the best deal is to get there early enough in the evening for the last run of chickens that end up getting marked to half price if they are not sold by closing.

Well, I hope that someone found it, bought it and took it home with them where it hopefully is someplace warm and frost-free/freeze-free. My big tomato plant is happily residing upstairs in the spare room right beside a south-facing window. I talk to it, thump its blossoms and check its soil moisture daily. A couple of lady bugs that were attempting to overwinter by hibernating in a corner of the spare room woke up in Tuesday's hot weather and now are climbing all over the plants in the room. They must think it is Spring. I do hope the folks at Home Depot in Gainesville brought in all those plants from the garden center or covered them up with a very heavy-duty frost blanket row cover because they had hundreds and hundreds of plants in stock over the weekend. If they had moved the plants, shelving racks and all, someplace indoors it would have filled up an entire 2-car garage with little room to spare, so it was a substantial number of plants. . And, those are just the vegetables, fruits (strawberry plants) and herbs. I'm not as worried about the shrubs and perennials they had on display. On Tuesday it hit 79 degrees at our Mesonet station and 77 degrees at our house, and it didn't just feel warm, it almost felt hot. That sort of weather could give a person planting fever. The bees and the wasps were swarming all day. This morning, though, reality returned and it was 26 degrees at our house and 23 degrees at our Mesonet station this morning around sunrise. Gainesville is at a higher elevation so they might have been slightly warmer, but probably not by much. Our weather is nuts. We've had more than the usual number of grass fires the last couple of days, which is par for the course as winter deepens and fine fuels like grasses become more cured following freezing weather. I'm surprised how many plants have popped up in stores across the state this past week. Even some cool-season plants can freeze or suffer damage with temperatures in the lower 20s, especially if they just came out of a climate-controlled greenhouse before they were shipped to the stores. I just don't understand why so many stores so far north have so many plants. Of course, the stores are happy to sell the plants. And, for the folks who buy those plants and put them into the ground too early, the stores then will happily sell them replacement plants. It is a great business model for the stores---the more plants they sell early which then freeze, the more plants they sell later to replace the frozen ones.