In the American Hosta Society Glossary of Terms compiled by C.H.Falstad,III and published in The Hosta Journal Vol. 29, No. 1, page 25, you will NOT find any reference to the term 'eye'. Oddly though, if you follow Steve's link to the AHS Hosta Dictionary it is referenced, go figure. In common Hosta parlance the term is applied rather loosely to dormant buds as well as shoots, mostly shoots, which clearly is incorrect. They are only 'eyes' when they are dormant buds, which means the shoot has not yet begun to come up from it. In other words, you would only see 'eyes' if you were to dig up a dormant Hosta in the winter. As soon as the dormant buds begin to swell and start sending up cataphylls it ceases to be an eye, it is becoming a shoot, it is no longer dormant. So, odds are when someone says Nursery X sent me a 3-eyed Hosta, following incorrect, but common, Hosta vernacular they are telling you they received a plant, probably bare-rooted for shipping purposes, with 3 shoots on it and depending on when it was shipped, the leaves may have begun to unfurl. Personally I try to refrain from using the term 'eyes' on Hosta crowns, I prefer to use 'dormant bud' and 'shoot'. To me, eyes are what you find on a potato....but that's just me being pedantic. And I have to keep reminding myself that some Hostas do NOT exhibit a stoloniferous growth habit but a rhizomatous one. Stolons go above ground, rhizomes below. Pieter

Hi Anthony - I'm glad to hear that so many of them survived. I know you were worried there for a bit that you'd have few viable plants this year. Guess they are tougher then we give them credit for, tight? ;) Cagers often say that they don't prune and they get lots of production. QUESTION: Does this have many fruits ripening at the same time, are the fruits smaller that typical fruits for the variety? More pounds of smaller tomatoes is not something that I want. Hope it's alright if I restrict myself to just this part. As you probably know, I'm a cager and don't prune. But this year I also set up a Florida weave row to try and for comparison. Same varieties in each - Stupice, Bloody Butcher, Brandy Boy, Opalka, Black Cherry, Tappy's Heritage, Super Marmande, Marianna's Peace, and Sweet Cluster. We are eating the Stupice, B. Butcher and a couple of S. Cluster so far. I pruned all of them up to the first fruit cluster and then stopped on the caged ones but pruned the FW row to 3 stems each. Right now they both have just about the same number of fruit +/- a couple, with the exception of the Opalkas, Black Cherry, and the Sweet Clusters. The caged plants of those varieties are at least 18 inches taller and have 1/2 again more green fruit than the pruned ones do. On all the plants the fruit size is the same to the naked eye - I didn't dig out the calipers. ;) The caged ones are ripening from the lowest cluster up - same as the pruned ones - no faster, no slower so far. Don't know if this helps or not? But so far the only real advantage I can see is that the pruned plants are going to be a lot easier to pick the fruit on but I am also worried that I'm going to have more sun scald on them and less production. Time will tell. Hope this is of some help. Dave

I use noscript, adblock and adblock filter set G, as well as IE tab (very, very rarely use it but it's handy when needed) and the FireFox Google toolbar. I have browster but sometimes it's annoying and I really have my doubts if it's any faster than loading a page. I never get flash ads, so there is no need for something like Remove it Permanently, although it's possible I have flash turned off. I also have Fasterfox. Is it? I have no idea. There are way, way too many add-ons for FireFox. I just use the bare minimum of extensions to make browsing less annoying.

Jane you are correct W7 is a stand alone, but the foundation is Vista architecture. If someone wishes to avoid Vista that is their choice. I do anticipate anyone planning to upgrade a current XP system to Win7 to have some concerns. At this time unless dictated by some outside need I wouldn't replace XP with Vista either. However, it is my personal opinion that with the release of W7 users should be preparing to let XP ride off into the sunset. Once you get too far behind knowledge and experience wise its tough to catch up. I speak from experience as I loved Win98 and hung on to it for as long as I could personally. I obtained my hands on experience, though limited by the IT people, with Win 2000 and XP at work. By doing so I lost a lot of learning time which could not be made up by reading. DA