I had 5 seeds planted in a pot, two sprouted after about a month...They were about 2 inches tall when I watered them too hard and killed them both. (Ya, dumb^$&.....NEVER pour water over your seedlings!) Anyway, That was about 2 months ago and for some reason I kept watering the pot.....Wishful thinking, I suppose, but it paid off! I now have another little rose that sprung up. These seeds were from the very same pod. Don't give up! I've heard it can take years to get a seedling depending on the rose variety.

I can only comment on seed to fruit, which typically should be around 4-8 years, but I've heard some can take much longer. I know someone who grew Kay Sweeney longan from seeds from Fruit & Spice park, and it was the low end of that range. I have some seedling longans from China, we'll see how long they take, and trying some seeds from Jay too. Gary

Here is our story... We have owned a lot for the past six years, I worked in construction for eight years before going back to school and becoming a software engineer, i have been studying building costs ( http://www.nahb.org/generic.aspx?genericContentID=527 ) and the economy for the past nine years and was fairly confident that I knew what I was doing, I was wrong.... We started this March with a fairly large, house plan design shop (South Ogden Utah)...they do house plans online and custom plans. I would now be wary of any place that has aggressive marketing/overhead as they have to recoup this costs from their customers. I explained to them our budget (300K not including lot) after I had a copy of the initial concept plans I took to them to a my father in law's friend who is respected home builder, he said this plan is complicated and will be expensive to build, so we had them simplify the plans, but what we ended up with was something more complex and expensive to build...when the plans went to engineering the design place called and said that there were some problems that could be overcome but would cost more to build, I asked how much, they said call the engineer, engineer said 20K more, I said remove the feature to reduce costs, they put a large window in the middle of a set of stairs, that I caught at the end after their internal quality control review, Their solution was to delete the 6050 window, the problem was now the plan looks out of balance without a matching window..I had to come up with a solution of resizing and moving windows and gables around. When I started getting bids in May for our house I was quickly realizing that this house was going to cost at least 400K if not more...so I was quite dissapointed with my initial set of house plans. We started to think maybe we should bag the building a house and buy one but we own the lot and would take a loss if we sold that lot and we couldnt find any houses that fit our needs. So I found a small one man drafting shop whose father was a contractor and understands building costs a little more. At each step I stressed costs and had my new contractor friend review it....and we are now hoping to start building this fall...So life is full of lessons and I the big lesson, I thought I would be able to build the perfect house, what I realized is that that is not going to happen I will be able to build a nice house that I really like but not perfect..I also learned that once you get in the pipe (dig a hole, sign/pay house designer) there is no turning back and what you end up with in the end may not be exactly what you had in mind.

I don't know herbst to work for anybody. I take lorazepam every third night to get a good night's sleep. I'm just toughing it out for now. I use a fan and I drink a ton of water.