Hi Dana, that's weird. Earwigs are usually the greedy pigs who hang out and chow down in the middle of your prized bloom, much later in the season. Slugs would have been my guess too. I don't know if this will help you but several ideas to control them are at the link below. Good luck- save your dahlias! Here is a link that might be useful: earwig info

Check out all my pictures. The wife ordered lavenders and purples almost exclusivly this year. Hope to see many pictures from you next year. If you want I will post the web site to my photo bucket pictures and you can go nuts with all my shots this year. Most of the shots have been posted here and in the gallery so that may be easyer for you.

wow- so im no longer the only tropical fruit freak in NYC!!!!! WELCOME- GREAT PICS- we have many identical plants- i also have maha chinook, sweetheart, and tangerine and i used to have a guava. please keep us posted as o your progress. also highly recommend you buy a mauritius lychee. those mango buds look like leaf buds and not flower buds to me but hopefully im wrong (Harry?). your sweeteart is a really nice size for a 7 gal and is starting to flower very heavily just like mine. interesting how your brewster is several weeks ahead of he sweeheart even though it ripens several weeks later. I would recommend using a pair of tweezers to surgically excise the male flowers and then rub them directly against the appropriate area ( i forget the biological name) of the female flower- turns you into a pimp but cuts out the middleman brush. i posted some pics of me doing this a couple years back on this forum- if you search for lycheeluva and tweezers it should come up. also if you still have brewster flowers around when the sweetheart flowers are around, i would cross pollinate do you buy lychees and rambutan fruit in the summer? if yes, whats your source?

It's taken me a while to get around to reading this thread as we bought a new fridge last year and are very happy with it. It's an Amana bottom freezer, which replaced....an Amana bottom freezer. The new one does seem to run more often, and is VERY slightly noisier - I can hear a very soft low-pitched hum if I'm within one foot of it, when it turns on. If I am any further away I don't notice it. The previous one was so quiet I sometimes wondered if it was running! I love the Amana. Here's my take on the pros/cons: PROS: - VERY quiet. It's a sealed compressor unit, apparently. This has a definite "con" to it, mentioned below. - Holds a ton of food. I have never quite figured out how Amana does this. The shelves are adjustable, but they don't look any different than any other fridge model. Yet all I need do is rearrange a few bowls and jars, and I can slide in another 4-qt Tupperware, a dozen more eggs, and a dinner plate of leftovers. My original fridge was a Kenmore 22 cu. ft. Due to Energy Star/more insulation, I've had to drop down to the 18 cu. ft. Amanas. I was very surprised to find the Amanas seem to hold just as much as the old Kenmore did. CONS: - That sealed compressor is very sensitive to electricity fluctuations. We seldom actually lose power, but it turns out our power is very "dirty"; e.g., we do have a lot of power fluctuations. This is what killed the first Amana bottom freezer after only 10 yrs. I SHOULD have bought an appliance surge suppressor, especially since they're not that expensive! You need to keep an eye on it, however. Once it's been tripped, it's off and useless. Most of us don't have the fridge plugged into an outlet that's easily viewed, so this is something to keep in mind. You want to be able to see if that green light has changed to red, on the suppressor. - I have the 18 cu.ft. SS model, no icemaker. The SS shows every watermark and fingerprint. Definitely needs that new "no fingerprint SS" finish, instead. ==== Overall: only two negatives, one very small. HTH some folks.