I picked up 2 plants myself today. Not Aji Lemon, Not Bhut, not even a pepper plant. I picked up 2 Yarrow plants. Mark my word... I will conquer the pests with mother nature! Was real nice to see that Armstrong's had a bit of variety on the superhot front -- they had Bhuts, Scorps, Caribbean Red, and many other. Nice to see HOT hot finally going mainstream. I give credit to the younger generation! Thanks all you 20-30 somethings! Your choices in music suck, but thanks for the heat! ;) Kevin

Sey, "I did not get the eggplant connection" Anthocyanins and other flavonoid chemicals are concentrated in the peel of the eggplant (and the stem of tomatoes) giving eggplant in the common varieties the purple color. Native Mesoamericans may have bred anthocyanins out to domesticate the edible garden tomato, or it may never have been there; Indigo Rose may get some of its color from expression of stem skin on the fruit by some clever directed breeding that originally produced purple in the stem, either way, from anthocyanins. If you eat eggplant skins or tomato or eggplant stems you will get far more of the nutritional value which was the motivation of Indigo Rose in the first place. What is left for me is just the ornamental value of the plant and taste. The concentration of this class of chemicals is in the vicinity of 1300 ppm in eggplant peel and nearly the same in stem. Anthocyanins and related chemicals were most successfully introduced into tomatoes as a GMO in a joint Euro-British project in 2008. What is left is flavor... Anthocyanins and their related sugary bound forms are found in blueberries in a fairly specific profile, about 20x more concentrated vs. Indigo Rose. The indigo-blue tomato developed by the joint British/Italian group has about 100x the anthocyanin content by weight percent vs. OSU's Indigo Rose indigo-blue tomato! Anthocyanin containing wild Solanum berries (sometimes called wild tomatoes in the sense a chimp is a wild man LOL, as researchers argue evolutionary and reproductive similarities and differences) were first characterized as far as I knew around 1962 by Charley Rick, the Univ. of California Davis, humble guy who rode his bike shirtless around campus and was the original world tomato expert, and who was undoubtedly a resource in the early days of conception of Indigo Rose. A bright graduate student was responsible for beginning the project that led to Indigo Rose with his faculty adviser, and the student brought some seeds from Seeds of Change, a high carotenoid line, where he had worked when it was recently taken over by the Mars Candy Company. This complemented wild and hybridized lines from the Charles Rick Center at UCD, and the garden tomato variety chosen to carry the alien genetics (wild stuff) was the English heirloom Ailsa Craig. A generation of students later the project was finished, four years after the Euro-British team had theirs by express GE technology using two single snapdragon flower genes to get the far superior anthocyanin yield and alleged superior taste to conventional varieties, which is or was being commercialized in Canada to make purple tomato juice and pizza sauce last I heard. Micro-Tom, a 1989 dwarf red variety from Univ. Florida ( :-) ! ) was apparently used as their original variety to receive the snapdragon flower's two genes, though it appears to me that it might now be crossed. I don't know the current status since the entrepreneurial head of the Canadian operation, from Leamington, the tomato capital of Ontario, was murdered recently under unexplained circumstances in Brazil, where he might have been scouting down a lead for an improved grass that can produce high yields of ethanol that outdo corn. I went through this to simply explain my understanding of the two different tomato programs since then I think you can better understand my opinions on taste and why I'd actually prefer the European GMO blue tomato. The OSU variety so far contains large sections and genes from Solanum lycopersicoides, a wild Solanum that has no available information to show it is safe in our diets. Similarly, I'm not aware another of its parents, S. chilense, is even edible either. It is the contribution to flavor that all the alien DNA and resulting expression of wild biomolecules these alien or so called 'wild' genes have that I'm sure are responsible for the taste I find awful and don't really want to eat. A critical distinction is that the anthocyanins are not responsible for the off-taste themselves. On the other hand, the European variety only has the two specific alien anthocyanin (purple-expressing) genes from the flowers, a surgically precise trait without any baggage, in a completely otherwise garden tomato. I'm cautious about believing super-flavor claims but also see it is much more achievable. Bottom line for my opinion only, is that until Indigo Rose goes through many generations more of selective breeding for flavor, it is the only tomato I ever met I spit out and make a face :-(. For the minority that post they like it, I'm very pleased to hear it! lgteacher, As for the GE background of Indigo Rose, the brilliant developers of it are quick to point out that it has not been genetically modified, and I'd be ok with that it weren't being promoted as if the biotech techniques developed for making GMOs, which themselves require extensive production of research GMOs to elucidate all the gene functions they pieced together to make the final conventional product. Whether the OSU team did it or relied on others' research seems irrelevant to me. To get the accurate story rather than reading what are marketing (press releases etc.), I'd ask who funded the research besides taxpayers, and maybe the original grad student who worked on Indigo Rose who might now be a lead strategist at Monsanto for integrating worldwide Capsicum (Pepper) traits that Big Ag feels are important, you never know ... and if he talked, he might have a unique perspective on the history of the project! Don't get me wrong, OSU had a brilliant academic project, it is only the marketing...and poor flavor that make it a zap except for a nice ornamental until someone gets one of those deep, solid, vivid indigo British tomato nuggets to share, the only game in town for us so far. Cheers PC

Linda, thanks for passing along your experience. Same here with it dying. I also suspect too much water. I had a thick stand of the low growing one for three or four years in the "hell strip" and it disappeared after a wet winter. I went over to get some more from a neighbor's yard where I'd planted it and her's had died too.. The link above says it seems to be disappearing in many areas of the Texas Hill Country: "Jan Wrede writes that black dalea has been removed from much of its former range by cattle browsing ("Trees, Shrubs, and Vines of the Texas Hill Country"). The severe overpopulation of deer probably will lead to its elimination in many areas of the Hill Country. Reportedly, black dalea survives where it grows within the protection of sticky agarita branches in parts of Kerr County. If you find black dalea in the wild, it is worth protecting." It's a beautiful and very drought tolerant plant. I'll be careful to deeply amend the soil with decomposed granite when planting these in the back yard where the deer can't eat it. Any other suggestions to insure its survival?

The place I have the most multiples of roses is in front of my house where it's a virtual zone 4 (so I need really hardy roses) and my husband wants a relatively tidy and uniform look. So there I have: Sweet Fragrance X6 (love this rose) plus another one in the back yard Calypso X 4 Music Box X 3 OSO Easy Mango Salsa X 2 Alba Meidiland X 2 Lavaglut X 2 or 3 Mango Veranda X 2 Elsewhere, I have intentionally bought duplicates of the following: Soul Sister X 3 Campfire X 3 Francis Dubreuil X 2 Liverpool Remembers X 2 Sunny Knockout X 2 Caldwell Pink X 3 The Grayson Rose X 2 All the Rage X 2 Screaming Neon Red X 2 Golden Zest X 2 Laguna X 2 I also have some inadvertent doubles from mistakes in orders, free roses, or other such occurrences, with multiples of the following: Robin Hood X 3 Queen of Sweden X 2 The Alnwick Rose X 2 Blue Girl X 2 Delany Sisters X 2 Sophisticate X 2 Winnipeg Parks X 2 That's all I can think of off the top of my head but I'm sure there are others. Mostly I'm a collector and would rather closely plant three different roses than the same one three times. Cynthia