Depends where your friend is trying to grow these. If he is near the coast they need full sun in order to ripen. If he's inland, they should be able to tolerate some shade. Also, what do you mean by "not ripen"? Do they fall off before getting ripe? could be frost and cold stress that is causing that. The banana problem is slightly different, if your friend doesn't cut off pups and focus all the energy into the fruiting corm, and doesn't fertilize, the fruit will stay small.

My gardening buddy across the street said he had some chelated iron he would share with me for those plants that are showing signs of deficiency - all this rain is washing lots of nutrients out of the soil. This may also help the tomatoes, Sheri. We'll see what Dawn says. The Husky Cherry Red tomatoe plants are doing much better than any other cherries I've EVER planted. The foliage is so rugose that I don't think much of anything is eating it at all. Good for the tomatoes, bad for the hornworms. They have blooms all over them, and every time I pass them, I give them a shake. I'm getting lots of tiny little green balls, about the size of a pea, all over them. YEAH! I will definitely plant these again. The fennel is growing in leaps and bounds now, and I have about 30 black swallowtail eggs on my 4 plants. I put my little Bordered Patch and Silvery Checkerspot cats in my pop-up butterfly hamper. Some of the Silveries are already starting to make a chrysalis, and they are SO TINY, that they just look like tiny black balls when they form a "J". I rescued them all, you may remember, because the wasps were hovering all around the sunflower patch. They love to suck them dry. There is this HUMONGOUS red wasp that keeps hanging around - what kind is it? A hornet? Ugh.....gives me the shivers! Dawn, a month ago I had tons and tons of ladybugs. Now, all of a sudden, I see maybe one a day. What happened to them all? I do have plenty of lacewing eggs all over, so maybe they will come along and eventually consume the aphids. I wish the ladybugs would come back. I'm afraid to buy any because in all likelihood something is eating them and I don't want to just release a bunch of food for whatever it is. The mosquitoes are just horrible! I sure wish I had that bat house. But, I've almost decided I'll have to get a 30' pole (bury and set part of the pole in concrete) to mount it on. My house is a small cottage and doesn't have a very tall roofline. The website Dawn referred me to suggests at least 20' off the ground. I tried washing those aphids off, but it is so hard for me to bend over and get them all. I think I'll take some alcohol and Q-tips and just go sit on the ground and swab them off. I don't think the power spraying is really killing them. While I think the aphids serve a good purpose (they are great for identifying milkweed in the field) or growing around the house (like I have cynanchum laeve, milkweed vine, popping up all around), they sure do cause the black sooty mold on the plants. In the past, I've never had to worry about it cause the ladybugs did their job. But, it looks like it's a "hands on" year for me. Does anyone know how long it takes trumpet vine to blooms from seed? I have one that is the peach flowering one that is now two years old and hasn't bloomed yet. I think I heard that sometimes it takes 3-5 years for them to bloom when grown from seed. BTW - I think we had about half an inch of rain yesterday afternoon. It was very loud, hard rain storm. Susan

Wow - I guess we have been very lucky with our pumpkins! We started ours on a whim (had a package left at our house by the former owners, and thought it'd be fun to see if they grew) by seed in small peat pots in the garage back in May, and they took off like crazy. We planted them in the ground sometime in mid-late June. They were the first of all our plants to really take off once in the ground as well. As far as I know, my husband hasn't done anything special to care for them. We have a soaker hose for the entire garden, so they get the same amount as all the other plants. He uses some kind of organic fertilizer for all the plants, but not sure if he's used that on the pumpkins since they have been so prolific on their own. Our garden gets sun for most of the day - about 9am to 5pm. And it gets the heat as well. Wish I had suggestions/answers as to why ours have been so successful. Maybe it's the wasps/bees we have - I have a bunch of bird houses that I hung on the fence behind the garden, for decoration. Couple of weeks ago, when my husband was putting some nails and strings on the fence for the gourd vines to grab hold of, he discovered that the birds didn't like them, but the wasps sure did - they started to swarm him as they didn't like him being so close to their "nest"!!! Needless to say, we sprayed the houses well with some wasp spray! Marj

If I had white or light furniture I would go darker! Right now the walls go really black at night. They are Cypress Green (Duron) I have dark Cherry rice bed and furniture. The bedding is light so that helps.