Love the new pics. You know, I'm ashamed because I have no excuse for not growing figs or grapes. I know so many people in person and on our fun forum that have had great results for years. Great pics and information Queenie and all! Here's something looking good this morning, a first bloom on our native passion flower, Passiflora foetida. It's got a ton of other flower buds too. I bought it as a tiny seedling at the last AZ Rare Fruit Growers sale (always worth going!) and now it's got three or four stems each over 7 feet long. Fun! This stem/branch is climbing up and over an orange tree. Anyway, I thought folks might enjoy it so here it is. The blooms aren't as large as some of the more tropical types, but our good ol' native species is immune to anything our climate can give it. My little covered patio is looking good these days too. Nothing fancy, but it's a nice space where I sit with hot coffee and the newspaper (paper or iPad version if the paper version is late) almost every day of the year, prior to doing some *quiet* early morning gardening chores. Happy gardening! Grant Here is a link that might be useful: Pics from my garden June 2013

Hello everyone, This is Jeff Miller From Land of the Giants Hosta Farm. I just wanted everyone to know that I have a great friend that pollinates with me, her name is Terri Meyers. Terri and myself registered Giantland Sunny Mouse Ears. My wife Penny supports me and my hosta passion but does notÃÂ hybridize. Just wanted to give Terri Meyers the credit she deserves for this introduction. It is a special plant for Terri and myself as this is our first introduction. Thanks everyone. Ps my friends love kidding me as they know I love giant hostas and our first introductions are both minis. Lol

I saw this report a while back, read it, and shook my head. It is not the kind of news you want to hear. Having lived through the summer of 1980 in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, I didn't think any summer weather in this part of the country ever would be worse than that, but here at our house, 2011 beat 1980 by a fairly large margin. We had the highest temperatures at our house that we've had since moving here in 1999--with 113 and 114 degrees. I don't think our official Mesonet station ever went that high, but a friend of ours in NE Love County had 116 on his thermometer in the shade on the day we had 113 or 114. On that day, we were at a wildfire somewhat near his home most of the day and when we got home, 3 of our chickens had died. It was a horrible day in a horrible summer. I hope we never see its like again. The bad news is that March-May 2012 was OK's warmest spring ever since they began keeping weather records in 1895. That means this spring was even warmer than some of those horrible Dust Bowl springs, and that is disturbing to think about. The report detailing it is linked below. Of course the weather is why your garden wasn't happy last year. We all were pretty much in the same boat on that one, and I think overall it had to have been the worst gardening year ever here. My garden did fairly well until late June or early July, but once I stopped watering, it really struggled. Surprisingly, some plants held on until late summer/autumn rainfall arrived even after I had stopped watering. However, they weren't as productive as usual. This year's garden production already has surpassed last year's and it is only early June. I hope we all have a much better summer and much better garden production in 2012 than we had in 2011. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: May Ends Warmest Spring in History in OK

ARTHUR, Apologies from the colonies then. The last information I had was that they were selling only immature pods. Things must have changed. Note that I said, "independent verification". I could hire the same US labs that they CLAIM to have used, to get any result I want. Extraordinary claims call for extraordinary proof, IMHO. Their labs are NOT independent, (they PAID for the result they got), nor have they, again, to my knowledge, submitted ANY of their "claims" or paperwork to be verified by any other lab. They could have tainted their samples with pure capsasian prior to sending to a testing lab which would give a HIGH result, but we'll never know I guess, because they wont submit their lab testing procedures or paperwork for scientific scrutiny. Guiness Records are BASED IN England, are they not?? Seems a simple matter to me to have Guiness VERIFY their claim, since they are closely available.