Sure ladyrose, I'll post a picture tomorrow. I agree with morz8 about the description. :) fyi, I transplanted the following today 1. petunia laura bush 2. salvia coral nymph 3. inula goliath 4. salvia lady in red 5. penstemon husker red last weekend, I transplanted 1. agastache sprite(I think) 2. salvia officinalis 3. catalpa 4. coleus 5. hyacinth vines(they look bad right now after our 36F last night! :( huhuhu 6. Lupines 7. Joe Pye Weed Remaining are 1. Wisteria Blue Moon 2. Soapwort 3. Lobelia something(can't read my handwriting, LOL) 4. Heucheras 5. Milkweed 6. I have another lupine 7. Ninebark 8. Siberian Iris theres's 3 or 4 more plants my visual memory can't recall

Lynn, I see that you and I still like many of the same tomatoes. LOL I think you will like Jubilee and Jaunne Flammee'. Both are really great performers in our heat, but your heat probably is worse than ours. Heatwave is iffy. It does produce in the July and August heat but the flavor is a little lacking (but you know that I say that based on my "heirloom-preferring" tastebuds). In your soil and your growing conditions, it may taste better than it did in my soil and growing conditions. I do think Heat Wave II tasted better to me than the original Heat Wave. Brandy, Sorry if I confused you by referring to seeds sown directly into the ground as wintersown. On GardenWeb, winter sown does refer to seeds sown in containers and exposed to the cold temps. To me, though, anything I plant in the winter in wintersown, which probably would drive the people on the wintersowing forum nuts! LOL If you want a good explanation of wintersowing, go to the wintersowing forum here at GardenWeband read Trudi's FAQ. It is very informative. I sow larkspur, poppies, etc. into the ground anytime between November and February, depending on when I get around to it. This seeds will sprout in the cold and form tiny ground-hugging rosettes. You won't see much vertical growth, but they are making roots all that time and, when the spring conditions are right, they start to grow like crazy. (Lots of cool season weeds, by the way, grow exactly the same way....germinating in fall or winter's cooler weather and flying under the radar until spring). Some plants don't like to be transplanted, and for me, poppies and larkspur are two of those. (I have transplanted poppies before, but they aren't crazy about it because they have long taproots.) So, wintersowing them in containers doesn't work because they get mad when you transplant them into the ground. As far as the purple coneflowers and hollyhocks....I tried numerous times to start them indoors under lights. I was able to do it with the hollyhocks pretty easily, but the coneflowers just didn't want to sprout. Yet, they would reseed readily in my garden. So, I wintersowed some a couple of years ago and had great results. As for the hollyhocks, there is no reason to take up a lot of space indoors under lights because I can direct sow them into the ground (if it is not a rainy winter) or in flats. They transplant easily and are pretty cold hardy. I seem to get higher germination rates with the ones sown outside than I do with the ones sowed inside. I love hollyhocks and have them every year. However, if a really, really wet rainy year, the seed often rots before it can germinate because I have horrible, slow-draining red clay soil. Your problem with hollyhocks last year probably had more to do with the excessively wet weather, the lack of sunshine as it seemed to stay cloudy FOREVER, and the late cold spells. Those three conditions caused lots of problems with plants here that are usually pretty easy to grow. Between "the cold" and "the wet", a lot of roots were stunted and the plants just didn't grow. I noticed this weekend that hollyhocks are already sprouted in my garden. They are small and low to the ground, with 2 or 3 leaves about the size of a nickle or so. You could direct sow hollyhocks in the ground now or wintersow some in a flat or other container. My main challenge with wintersowing is that the cats like to lay on any flat I plant anything in, even if I have lids on the flats! The dogs, of course, like to walk on the containers, and the wild things, like racoons and possums, like to paw through the soil looking for whatever. Also, if I am not careful, the wind carries them all away, even when I think I have them in places where they are sheltered from the wind. Dawn

My early, earlies will be the usual: Bloody Butcher & Kimberley with the golden cherry hybrids. Once again, I'm trying for some larger varieties with some productivity and earliness. I've grown Thessaloniki for quite a few years and don't see that as too much of an early variety - earlier than some. I am surprised that it was just a few days behind Early Girl for Taboule there in Massachusetts. It comes in only the last couple of weeks of my season here. Posted by seysonn ". . . I would like to know which one, in your list, will be your first one to harvest. I will also post mine. I will probably open a new thread then , like : First Harvest, by Zone and Variety: This way we can benefit from each others experience. But that is long way away. . . " Seysonn, I also will be interested how this comes out. I don't think you are going to be very competitive there in Heat Zone 1 with other USDA zone 7 gardeners. The hoophouse should really help but I doubt that you are thinking of this as a competition. In the '60's, I was gardening on the coast of northern California. I don't know my heat zones - maybe still zone 1? Anyway, the lack of summer warmth and the many days of overcast skies were only barely compensated for by the long growing season. Maybe gardening is a good patience-building experience everywhere. Steve

I try a new early tomato every year. This year, Glacier was my earliest. They're OK. Early tomatoes don't impress me much. The best early I've grown was Matina. It was better to me than Bloody Butcher or Stupice. Personally, though, although it may not be considered an "early" tomato Jaune Flammee is always less than a week behind my earliest tomatoes, but even the first Jaune Flammee off the plant is as good to me as the best late season tomato. There is no early tomato that can compete with it for flavor, IMO. I try one new early variety every year just to extend the season a week, but I'd rather have more space in my garden for late season tomatoes, which are far superior in flavor.