Interesting. You have chosen the perfect variety to work with, because although Merit was bred by Asgrow and released in 1961, it is now owned by Monsanto. A re-selected strain will take a few years, but if you start growing a few plants just for seed and select for top characteristics, you can do it. Merit is a Golden Bantam type, most likely hybridized for earliness and rust resistance. Several seed companies sell improved strains of Golden Bantam, so you could even do your own crossing by interplanting the two varieties. Good luck!

I fired up 2003 Server in Virtualbox to do the screenshot above, so it should look like XP. Sometimes I do post screens using Linux Firefox. Not this time though. There's not much difference. Linux Firefox "Options" are called "Preferences" and are found under "Edit". So in Linux it is Edit->Preferences->General. In Linux in looks like this: The title looks to be the only real difference?

OMG, that's it!! It's amylville's kitchen. I can't believe you found it from my vague description. How did you figure out that was the kitchen I was describing? I spent about two hours looking through the kithen blog last night and never could find it. Thank you so much. Laurie

Maybe a photo of the room might help. I saw in a Berkeley bookstore that had this small 3x4' skylight in the middle, a Fiddleleaf fig that was in a pot and with just a single trunk- no branching at all- reached up to the second story. Amazingly that Ficus was coated in grey dust!. Almost more dust color then green.