A genuine plant, Plant Book... Is the genre ro-mystery or fantasy. I'd bet after consuming plants listed, life would be fantasy. :) Purple, don't know if it's my computer, but two pics didn't display. Moonflower and Chicory. Glox..love at 1st site..Do you know how many people would run out an buy a Glox? lol. No need for online dating or bars. Is that a seed pod or flower on the Chocolate plant? If it's a pod, there must be hundreds of seeds per pod. How much does a Hershey bar cost these days? I thought pot produced white flowers? Or would that be the male? Lily of the Valley grows on either sides of our house. A pinch for sure. Too much and one will no longer worry about an ailing heart or any other problems. Mandrake. Thought I bought a teeny-weeny Mandrake. Does anyone know if Mandrake goes dormant, 'completely dormant' three seasons per year. I think someone posted pics of their own Mandrake on C&S last year?? Datura. If eaten, Datura would be a 'high' adventure, for sure. And dangerous. A few years ago, teens found by eating leaves, etc, it'd be similar to dropping acid. Some died, others were hospitalized. One boy will never walk again. Anyone want Dature seeds, ask next year. Purple, Datura is very, very invasive..unless you want one plant turning into hundreds, don't bother. Jodik and Karyn. I agree, Chalice vine isn't a plant that can be kept on a window sill. Although flowers are pretty, 'large/yellow,' CV eventually grows tree-like. After several years I no longer have CV...took too much room. Jodik..Unlike Clinton, at least you admit inhaling. lol. Is the disease you're thinking about, Glaucoma? An ex-relative smoked pot for Glaucoma... Boiling and smoking/drinking Coleus seeds have the same affect as Datura, and a few other plants on the list. I always thought since the gov couldn't tax pot, it remained illegal??? Just a thought. Toni

Oh Barbra, I thought you didn't have any more. For what I paid for those I hope they are big plants. I can't wait to see the rosary vine too. It sounds really unusual. If it is small I'll take you up on your offer. I got a oxblood lilly and some rain lillies yesterday. Now I need a naked lady one. I think thats why I like brugs so much I love all sorts of lilly flowers and they are kind of shaped the same with the large bells. I got some different kinds of lilly seeds too. Hubby said I couldn't buy any more brugs. He should have said plants, lol. Seeds don't count do they? Mike made me go look at that German guys seeds and I bid on 2. I got carried away and didn't realize Kylie had bid on one of them so I quit bidding. Sorry.

All right, you guys, keeping the water in the clay soil is easier than it seems......I HAVE CLAY SOIL. Heavy, red, thick, mucky, yucky, impossible-to-drain-when-it-is-wet and impossible-to-wet-when-it-is-dry clay soil. The issue for us, therefore, is not how to hold the water, but how to get the water to drain. So, the pond was impossibly easy to build. Our backhoe guy, Elvis, was here in the late spring of 2000 digging a hole in which to place our 6' x 8' pre-fab tornado shelter. I asked him how much more it would cost to get him to dig me a "little" pond for my water lilies and he told me that his hourly rate was the same no matter what he was digging. So, I asked him to dig me a more-or-less-round (but not perfectly round) pond about 15' in diameter, two feet deep, and with gently sloping sides (so turtles could wade in, etc.). It took him about 10 minutes! The dirt he removed was used to fill in a gully elsewhere on the property. After he dug it, we filled it with the water hose and of course, the water was about the same color as what you see in the Red River (we are VERY close to the Red River so that is not surprising.) We put the water lilies (in pots) into the pond although they eventually outgrew their pots and rooted into the pond bottom. Over time we added other plants like saggitaria and pickerel rush. Native sedges and other water loving plants essentially appeared out of nowhere and began growing at the edge of the pond. The first few months, it really wasn't 100% "waterproof" and there was some seepage. Over time, though, as decomposing plant material deposited on the bottom of the pond, it formed a layer (and that layer has a name and I remember seeing it in Tim Matson's book, but I don't remember what it is) that basically helped seal the pond. Once that happened, the water cleared up and has been pretty and clear ever since unless we dig and disturb the pond bottom. Even then, though, the water eventually clears on its own. In a rainy year, the pond stays full all on its own. In a dry year, I add water a couple of times a month to make up for whatever is evaporating out. The fish, frogs, turtles, dragonflies, water skimmers and other critters showed up on their own. I do think DS may have "saved" some small fish from the creek and put them in the pond during a drought year when the creek was drying up. Because the pond is close to the house, the wildlife don't bother it a lot although we'll see an occasional blue heron "fishing" in the pond, or find raccoon tracks, or (worst of all) see a water moccasin hanging out in the water. Because of the lay of the land, if the pond is totally full, the excess water during a rainstorm runs downhill to the north so there isn't too much excessive puddling around the pond itself. The thick, heavy, red, mucky clay is the reason we have five ponds. All you have to do is dig and wait for rainfall and you have a pond. POND #1: The oldest pond is in clayey-sandy soil and is probably 65-80 years old--no one who lives here really remembers how old that one is. Because of root infiltration from nearby trees, it doesn't hold water all that well so it is essentially an overflow pond that holds runoff during the "rainy season" here, which is roughly from March or April through July or so, at least in a non-drought year. This pond is fairly well silted in but still about 5'-6' deep and is about a half acre. It catches runoff in general, and specifically catches excess water from Pond #2. Pond #2 is the "old stock tank" that has been used to provide water for cattle on this land since about the 1940s or 1950s up until we built the house in 1998-99 an the cattle had to go. A lot of the locals here have told us stories of swimming as kids in that pond--it was a great place to cool off after a hard day's work. It is also pretty much silted in and is about 6' to 7' deep and, when very full, is about 3/4 of an acre. We have a fishing dock there, but it has dried up repeatedly since the drought of 2005-2006 and currently is empty. It will take a lot of rain to refill it. POND #3 is the lily pond behind the house that Elvis dug for us in 2000. POND #4 is the sewage lagoon, dug by Elvis and Ed early in 1999. When the perk test showed that we'd need hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of feet of lateral line to drain the water from the septic system, the DEQ guy recommended we put in a lagoon instead. So, it is about 150' from the house, has what is essentially sterile water by the time it reaches the lagoon and is a wildlife haven. All the wildlife prefer it. It never dries up but it almost did during the exceptional (D-4) drought of 2005-2006. POND #5 sits at the northeast corner of my veggie garden. The veggie garden is on a slope and we had Elvis put in this small pond (about 5' deep and about 13' or 14' feet in diameter) to halt erosion. It is essentially a wildlife pond and is usually full of frogs and such. One of our dogs considers it his own personal swimming pool when it has water in it. It has been dry for over a year now because too little rain has fallen to refill it since the heavy rains stopped in July 2007. I think it probably dried up about Nov. or Dec. '07 and hasn't had any water in it since then except for temporary runoff that soaks into the pond bottom within a few hours of a heavy rain. We also have springs in at least three areas, but none of those areas are suitable for a pond or we'd have put in a spring-fed pond. One spring does feed the swamp and the other two feeds the creeks. One dries up periodically and that creek has been empty for most of the last three years (since the 2005-2006 drought) but the other two have never dried up). If y'all had my heavy red clay soil, you could have all the ponds you wanted. The larger issue is how to garden in that clay. In the veggie garden, I have build raised beds, for the most part, or at least have really, really improved the clay tremendously even where I didn't build a raised bed (the corn and pumpkin patch are not raised) and neither are the flower borders). Around the house, it has taken tons of amending the soil just to be able to plant shrubs and trees that "tolerate" clay. I don't have anything in that area that "needs" good drainage. On the east side of the house, the clay was truly impenetrable. Couldn't dig it. Couldn't rototill it. So, while Elvis was at the house putting in Pond #3 and Pond #5 and the storm cellar, he dug out the clay for the east-facing shrub bed, essentially leaving me a 12" deep bowl that held water just like a regular pond. How did we turn that into a well draining bed? It took six years of sheet composting.....putting every compostable material we could get our hands on into the bed and letting it do its' thing. We also added back a small amount of clay over time, and bagged potting soil and lots of bagged soil conditioner (a humus/pine bark fines mix). It was not terribly attractive, but every spring I planted annual flowers in there and mulched them and no one knew sheet composting was occurring there. Finally, between the sheet composting and the action of earthworms, the clay bowl stopped being a mini-pond and became a well-drained bed, but it took forever. If our clay had refused to hold water (which I never thought was going to happen), we would have used betonite. In the rare exceptionally rainy year (2004 and the first 6.5 months of 2007), we have standing water everywhere. Since a rainy year is fairly rare, we don't have that too often though. And because we're on a slope, it basically runs off. Two books I read that I really enjoyed were Tim Matson's first book on building earth-bottom ponds and the late, great, Ardmoreite (that's a resident of Ardmore for all you new Oklahomans) Louise Riotte's pond book, which is called "Catfish Ponds and Lily Pads". Dawn

I'd love some of your pasion vine seeds. SASE is fine if notheing intrestes you on my list. I got some brugmansia seeds from you 3 years ago.I traded some of my seedlings off but keept one.was a butterfly something cross X with something I forgot,but when looked it up one was yellow one was pink.Its on its 2nd year blooming.got a pink flower with fabulous smell. I do have 4 pm seeds that are fragrant.