sergnic - what part of Italy are you living in? Are you in the city or out in a rural area? I see mentioned in, "your page" that you are a botanist. I am very interested in more input from you concerning the types of figs grown in different parts of Italy. I have been there quite a few times. Many in the spring of the year when the figs where not ready to eat. I had to fill up on the Nespoli. My family has a farm in the Cilento, Campania area just south of Palinuro a sea coast town called Marina di Camerota, Italy. There are many different type of figs and other fruit growing there. This year we are planning a September trip. I should be able to get my fill of ripe figs during this seasion. I plan to ask what the names of the trees are take photos of them and also have a notebook to write down what my relatives tell me about the figs and other type fruit trees they are growing. My one uncle even has some sort of banana tree growing in his yard. How I wish I could take along home with me just small rooted trees of all sorts. Living in northeastern Pennsylvania Zone 5 makes it a bit rough but I still would like to try other trees I have seen growing there. I know other people using this forum would feel that way as welI. I have seen what some people have told me was a grape vine that they called a, "strawberry grape". Are you familiar with that type of fruit? I will be looking forward to whatever you can contribute concerning the questions I posed to you. Regards and thank you Tanti saluti Lou NE., PA

Personally, I really dislike those garbage to energy incinerators. It sounds smart, but it doesn't seem to work so well. Generally the things consume vast quantities of waste, and much of what they require to burn well is plastic and paper, things which are normally recyclable, but when the local council have to feed their waste to energy plant there's little incentive to promote recycling. If they were to achieve any successful levels of recycling the plant's fuel supply would dry up and the little remaining would be mostly comprised of random inflamable materials such as used electrical goods. You'll notice when looking at recycling statistics that areas with these plants have little or no recycling provision. These plants are just turning valuable raw materials like paper and plastic that can be used again and again in to a pile of toxic ash, thus we must chop down more trees and pump up more oil, all with various environmental and energy costs to replace what has been incinerated. Plus, the toxic ash still has to be disposed of, although I also dislike the term 'disposed' as really nothing is disposed of, rather it's dumped in to the environment. Landfills are the global equivalent of dumping our weekly rubbish in to a pit in the back garden and pretending it's vanished. It's not gone, it's in the way polluting the environment and costing us tax money to maintain the site. The only sustainable option is to keep reusing materials so that they're never landfilled. I really do believe that a closed cycle for almost all, if not 100% of consumer waste is possible. If packaging was limited to just glass, paper, metal and polyethylene (it's 100% recyclable with no loss of quality, unlike other plastics) then we could recycle just about everything. More re-usable containers would help as well, rather than the use once packaging everything seems to be provided in. If companies passed on some of their savings to consumers who bought back their containers for re-filling, then I'm sure it would become a common way to save money at the store. Equally importantly, I believe that large scale re-using of packaging would save vast amounts of energy, plus recycling where needed tends to use far less energy as the materials are allready refined and processed. I'm convinced that the end energy savings would far surpass the energy extracted from incincerating all waste in one of these plants. Waste to energy isn't a good solution to the mountain of waste we produce, places like germany are now averaging around 80% recycling, and potentially the percentage could be higher if the materials used in packaging were better regulated for recyclable content.

Boy that choc cake recipe looks real real good!

Hi hinchess -- I like that Website. I actually already had it bookmarked and refer to it occasionally.