There's nothing quite as cool-looking(temperaturewise) as BLUE flowers. I grew Phacelia a few years ago, best blue i ever saw, next to cornflowers. The bell-shaped blue flowers with icy-white anthers were beautiful, and stirred up images of cooler weather. They do have a short bloom time, hot weather just about stops the show, cutting back helps somewhat. Give 'em a try, i believe there are 2 or 3 varieties. Good luck, and enjoy.

Generic replacement cartridges are as good as their counterparts as long as you know how to properly install and use them. Ive learned to bring them to the shops if it needs ink replacement, rather than doing more damage installing it myself. Here is a link that might be useful: cheap ink cartridges

I have an HP all-in-one printer with 6 cartrides. Sometimes, I do change when the low indicator pops up, but not always. I use the build-in features of the printer to see how low the cartridges are. I may print a report or just look at the printer's graphics display. If there is 8% to 10% left, I'll print a bit more; If its down to 5%, its change out time. I not sure how the modern printers manage the ink supply these days. Before I retired, I had bad experiences with early ink jets, noteable, a Tektronics printer. If this one ran dry and any air entered the supply side of the print head, the pulse pump would loose its prime and would not oeprate again until primed. It could not re-prime itself as it needed to re-establish surface tension with the ink supply. It required a service call to get it going again. Paying a tech over $200 just to prime the print head was too much. Obviously, this printer was replaced during the next office equipment upgrade cycle. These comments apply to printers with fixed ink jets and with cartridges that hold only ink. [On some printer models, each cartridge has the print jets built into the cartridge, and on these, you can run those to empty without any prine problem.] Because of past, but very old experience, I do not run a fixed print head dry of ink. I do not wish to take a chance of loosing prime and having to re-establish it, although, I suppose the new printers have addressed that problem - I simply do not know and it is not explained in the instructions that comes with the printer. The instruction is: Change the cartridge when indicated.

I print an average of 500 to 1000 photos a month so you can be sure I use a lot of ink and I am extremely critical of the print quality. I have a very expensive HP photo printer and when I tried the refurbished ink not only was the output quality terrible, the danged cartridge leaked in the printer and it took me a whole day to take the printer apart and clean that mess, I have used refilled cartridges in my cheaper HP, but that is only used for text documents because at best, it will never be a photo printer. Jan has a Lexmark printer and even with new Lexmark OEM catridges the output quality sucks... When I moved from Ohio to Massachusetts two years ago I inadvertantly left my good HP photo printer behind. When I discovered the problem I called my sister and made arraingement to have it shipped to me, but knowing how my sister procrastinates, I knew that would take at least a month and I had 400 or 500 photos that I wanted to print immediately. Now I could have put 50 or 100 on a flash drive and went to Walmart of one of them places to have them printed, but that seemed like a lot of messing around so Jan suggested I might buy another printer, perhaps not an expensive one, but one that would do a fair job of printing photos till my good machine arrived, so off to Staples we went. While looking at the new printers I also noted what ink cartridges they used and checked the ink price.. After looking at about 25 different printers I came to the conclusion that to get a printer capable of doing a fair job of printing photos it would cost $300 and up, not to mention that most of them use a special cartridge for printing photos which is priced out of sight. As we were leaving the store one of the floor clerks was arrainging a display in the isle of Kodak printers. As I read the specs it said the Kodak ESP 7250 was listed as a photo printer and Kodak advertises to have the cheapest ink in the industry. At first I thought cheap ink would mean the prints would probably fade in a short time, but as I read on Kodak says their ink is archive quality and will not fade, yea, right, I thought, and while I was standing there reading the specs the guy put a big sign up with the price. Can this be right? $99 for the hard wired version or $119 for the wireless model and the Staples price for the color & black ink cartrides was $21, a mere fraction of what Jan was paying for her Lexmark cartridges. Then I thought to myself, Kodak built their entire reputation in the photography business, would they advertise a printer as a photo printer if it didn't do a good job on photos? I was standing there debating whether I was going to buy it and finally Jan says, "why don't you try it, if it don't work like you want, I'll give you the money and hook it on my computer and get rid of the Lexmark" I bought it and ran home to try it. Hookup was about 5 minutes including loading the software, then I selected a photo from my files and hit print,,,I heard the paper load but then nothing,,what the heck..it don't work? About 10 seonds later my finished print popped out. This printer is so quiet I literally don't hear it printing, even though its only 3' away. I grabbed the print and looked at it with my critical eye, and boy was I amazed. That print looked better than any print I ever had printed at Walmart. I have now had this printer nearly 18 months and I could not begin to tell you how many hundreds upon hundreds of photos I have printed with it, and the quality right now is every bit as good as it was day one. I knew what the ink prices were at Staples and Walmart so out of curiosity I decided to check Ebay to see if I could save any money...all I can say is ...WOW I bought a two pack of the Genuine Kodak color cartrides for $12.95 and a two pack of the Kodak Black cartridges for $12.95 and all with free S&H. A couple months later I decided I might try the kodak remanufactured cartriges that at listed on Ebay. A two pack of the color for $12.95 and a two pack of the black for $9.04, again with free S&H and to tell the truth, I can not see any difference between the OEM's and the refurbished cartridges in output quality. One cavate though, For best results you have to use genuine Kodak photo paper, because Kodak prints a bar code on the back of the photo paper that tells the printer what the quality and finish of the paper is, and it adjusts the ink automatically not matter if I am print on Matt finish, gloss finish or Ultra gloss finish, but then, at Walmart the genuine Kodak paper is only $1 more than the HP photo paper. Now in regards to whether the photos fade. I have about 200 photos on the wall in our living room, most of which receive full sunlight during the day, yet in nearly 18 months we have not noticed even the slightest change in appearance.