I don't have one either. But I'm paying attention to anything that can take a lot of sun, Gesila as I want to plant more hosta in the front bed. It gets all day sun and drying winds. So, when you offer pics of your hostas it is helpful to me when you (also in zone 5) add that it tolerates more sun. Thank you. :-). I have to pick up another handful of hostas from Hosta Fever and there is one among them that has similar colouring to the more subtle margin-less leaves of your very lovely and easy on the eyes Peter Ruh. When I bring mine home I will post it and hope you have it so I can get some feedback. :-)

Paul, you are giving me some education with your hosta info. Like, I had no idea what to expect of my Dark Shadows. I got it from Naylor Creek in 2012, as what I understand is a TC grown on by them for at least a couple of years. So I get it last year. And this is the picture I took of it May 2013. Does it have the irregular dark pattern you refer to in a MATURE PLANT. I'm getting a thought in my head, put there by someone also along the I-10 corridor, that maybe our climate can act on the maturation rate of hosta. It is something to think about, if we get regular indicators of maturity. But we have to know the exact age of the plant we're discussing. Which I don't know exactly. So what you say about the irregular streaks being a mark of a mature leaf, it perked my ears. Does my hosta look mature to you? Other than being still freshly leafed out and not toughened up to the heat yet.

Carol, I knew that if you were home, you'd be watching it. I watched it too. Early on, I thought it would pass to our southwest, but then it became apparent it wouldn't. So, I ran outside and dragged about 15 containers with plants (mostly peppers and tomatoes but also a few flowers and herbs) up underneath the patio cover. There were some I couldn't move because they were too heavy. Then I just made sure the pets all were inside and that the windows on the sunporch were closed. After that, all we could do was wait it out. The brunt of the storm hit about 2 minutes after I went inside. I was watching the radar like a possessed woman. One cell, which at one point had a tornado in it, was moving towards Granbury, and my cousin's family is south of Granbury, so I was watching it. Another severe thunderstorm was moving right straight at my mom's and brother's homes in Tarrant County, so I was watching it. Tim was on the way to work, so I was watching for storm development along his route, and then I was watching the storm that was headed for us. We got 6/10ths of an inch in the gauge, but a lot of the time the wind was blowing the rain sideways, so we may have had more than what made it into the rain gauge. Based on the large puddles, we might have had up to an inch. A storm spotter reported a tornado in the air near Thackerville, but no one else saw it and no one could see it on radar, etc. so most of us discounted the report as erroneous. There were tons of trees, tree limbs and power lines down in and around Thackerville so that community did take a real beating. Some power poles snapped in half. I'm inclined to think it was straight-line wind damage, and not the supposed tornado. After the main storm had passed, and all the cops and firefighters were out dealing with the damage, and the electric co-op guys were working to restore power, we started getting very, very strong outflow boundary type winds blowing back at us. Those winds did additional damage, especially in Marietta, which wasn't hit as hard by the earlier winds as the Thackerville area was. I think we sustained less damage than either of them since we're right in the middle. We only lost power because of trees in the Thackerville area that came down on poles/power lines. In our neighborhood, overall there was little damage. Even the pecan tree limbs that came down were dead wood with no foliage. The garden looks lovely after the rain storm. I think the moisture helped a lot since we'd gotten so very dry. I bet we have killer humidity today though. It seems like a good day to stay inside during the heat of the day. I am really concerned about how hot it will get, in terms of what the heat will do to the cool-season plants. Oh, and you know how sugar snap peas are in their growth habit--more leaners than twiners, so a lot of them were lying flat on the ground this morning when I went out to check the garden at daybreak. I picked up the vines off the ground and loosely zip-tied them to the trellis. For as strong as the winds were, I expected the corn to lodge and for at least some tomato plants/cages to be on the ground, but neither thing happened, so we were really lucky.

Love and Other Perishable Items -- Laura Buzo double points