Hi again, If you are interested in some of my seeds, please give me your trade list and your email address so that I can contact you. I am not interested in SASE. I donate most of my extra seeds to my "Seeds for Classrooms" program that I arranged with the local school board and schools (6,000 pkg a couple months ago). Other extra "useful" vegetable and herb seeds get donated to disaster relief organizations. Hope to hear from you about your seeds for zone 3 hardy and interesting perennials and shrubs. Happy Gardening

I just checked out the Official Job Description Manual listing for "Minions, Assorted & Various," and the Picking Blueberries portion is optional, Kate. So...I guess if it is going to cause dissention in the ranks, Marcia's Minions no longer have to pick blueberries. Seeeeeee...I'm a kind and generous SpiritGuide/ProcrastinationPriestess/Queenie! I can be MOST benevolent when I need to be. Therefore, no need to turn in your Minion Membership just yet. I rather enjoying having minioning going on whilst on road trips with you and Nicki. Makes me feel Queenly an' all! *waving regally, but kindly* Marcia (Who still has NOT planted a single thing...but who thinks having the excuse of not feeling well yesterday will get her off the hook. Going to do better today, for sure!)

Tom, those are beautiful!!!it is filling the arbor really nice. Bernie, I see that you master the photobucket and I can see some beautiful tomatoes. I already divided the tomatoes by taste, Willy likes black tomatoes and I made him black tomato salsa. Cheryl likes the fruity ones and I made her yellow and orange tomato salsa. And me, I like them all except very few. The jetsetters that I have were in the middle of the garden. About sun dry tomatoes in the sun I don't think is a good idea because of the humidity and the bugs, I used to do that in Arizona with apricots. You can roast them in the oven at the lowest temperatures for a few hours and they are even better, you can also add anything you like like spices, salt, pepper, herbs, olive oil, balsamic vinegar. Roast them for a few hours till done. Silvia

Thanks so much for your postings, everyone! I would like to try propagating from leaves that I saved from the stem cuttings...for insurance. Yesterday, a friend gave me a stem broken from a begonia I have admired since I first saw it in bloom a few years ago. He said I could probably get about 3 stem cuttings from it, which we did. We cut all the leaves off, leaving a small triangle of leaf on each petiole. We dipped the stem cuttings in rooting hormone, tapped off the excess, and stuck them in a pot of dampened perlite. We placed the pot in indirect light with a ziploc bag over the top. The pot had too little perlite for my liking (approximately 1", but it was very late at night...too late to get some from the shed...so my husband said it will have to do ("the roots will grow laterally", he says.) Today, we added some fresh perlite to the pot to bring the level up. I'm skeptical about the success of these stem cuttings. I'm not sure of the name of this plant...my friend only refers to it as "Ann's mother's plant". He propagated it from that plant many years ago. I haven't been able to figure out which subgroup it belongs to. Maybe it's cane-stemmed...but its leaves aren't assymetrical or deeply toothed to lobed, as cane-stemmed begonias usually are. Its leaves are green angel wings with white speckling, are smooth as silk but not shiny, and can be as large as 10" in length! My friend grows the plant tall and upright with supports, but the large clusters of deep red flowers are pendulous. So maybe it's a rex-cultorum and my friend just keeps it tall? His plants are probably 7 to 8 feet tall! If anyone can identify this plant, I would be interested to know what you think it might be. Thanks again for your help on leaf cuttings. Since I no longer have the stems attached to the leaves, I will try some leaf cuttings in water and some with scoring on underside of leaf at mid-vein/mid-rib pinned flat to vermiculite. (I kept the leaves in a platic bag.) Hoping for success!