Fellenberg, I believe, is considered similar to Italian, but as I said, I never have grown it. It tends to be rated a moderate cropper. I consider Italian here less than a moderate bearer so I'm guessing Fellenberg would likely be same. There's a lot of tricks I use to accelerate bearing so I'm not sure if Fellenberg actually can't be speeded up significantly. I consider Castleton a very flavorful prune plum but what makes it stand out is its reliability- it tends to set fruit in clusters almost like grapes. Some years other plums set little or no fruit but Castleton always seems to have a crop at all sites. It is also a natural semi-dwarf with a wonderful spreading branch habit. My favorite prune plum is Valor because it is very big and has that rich super-sweet quality and it can ripen from the last week of August here until the first hard frost. That is an extremely long picking time even for a prune plum. The reason I recommend Castleton over Valor is because of its consistency at many sites I manage. The funny thing is that at some sites plums are generally much more reliable than other sites for reasons I've never been able to decipher. That means that to really know what is best at your site you'd have to try several varieties and find out yourself but if you're just going to try one I think Castleton is your best bet. ACN carries it but you'd better order ASAP because the commercial growers are sucking it up.

I ordered 2 batches of 12 and got 29 cuttings! Not a bad deal at all. I did the first batch, from Aloha tropicals with eggs. The first batch from Derrick with no eggs. This last batch(from Derrick) did rootone, miracle grow organic 1:1 perlite and watered w/ dynapro. They are now on the side porch where they get no rain but afternoon sun. So far all of the ones from Aloha and the first batch from Derrick are doing great, no real difference, about the same number have claws, the same number leaves are already growing. Our humidity was lower for a couple of days, nights only in upper 70`s/low 80s and mid-80`s days. Back to hot and humid now though. Tally HO!

LunarSolarPower - Thanks for coming back to my questions, I appreciate your responses. As I'm probably overthinking the CEC impact in my intended use (vegetables in containers), but I do like to optimize systems for efficiency and highest performance, so it was a natural question for me to follow. I'm under the impression that by using CRF and a liquid solution, I'm in a good position to provide what the plants need with little regard for the CEC. My question about the zeolite was to raise the CEC, and in fact, you mentioned in an earlier post about ground basalt, so if I decided to go that route, I could always look more closely there as well. As to getting 10 years out of the media - I can always dream, can't I? :) It appears inefficient (on the convenience and labor sides) to mix new media every spring. It seems wasteful to the product as well - I have limited ground space, and who knows what I would do with the "old" mix. There is always the cost aspect as well. My primary thought was to go fully inorganic and have nothing that decomposes within 5-10 years. But, even if I ended up going with some organics as a fraction of the mix, I'm thinking that if I maintained a reasonable particle size with the inorganics (say Turface/DE/pumice/grit), AND as long as the combo of inorganics comprised the lion's share of the mix (say ~70%), then the organics would be free to decompose and disintegrate their structures without much harm overall. I could simply "top off" the organics (for instance pine mini fines) as needed to keep the overall volume of media to my liking. If CEC value is not critical in my specific scenario (vegetables in containers, using CRF and liquid fertilizers), and assuming I'm able to relatively easily adjust the pH as needed, then I would be able to design the mix primarily on water/air retentiveness. Do you see any faults in the logic so far, or glaring oversights with such a plan?

Another take on the induction question with a little sprinkle of humor. https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/induction-cooking-emf-magnitude-vs-other-things-missus-is-a-bit-concerned/  Tim says, Ugh... If she's worried about cancer... dump her now? There's no convincing someone like that, to understand statistics and significance. At least that I've heard of. If you're looking for the opinion of an EE, I would gladly give you my opinion on the subject -- if you'd like it in writing, I can even sell your wife a certificate saying as much! Maybe that wouldn't help. I don't know. What are we talking about, anyway? Cooktops aren't always-on. They're either off until turned on, or pulsing infrequently to check if a pot is present. The RMS EMF at the surface is not very large either way, when not actively heating something. When heating, it's only large under the work being heated. EMF drops off rapidly with distance. If your wife is so strange that she finds it enjoyable to read books while laying over the cooktop, I might be concerned, but only for mental health reasons, not for EMF reasons. Or if shoving her head towards a pot that's being heated, I would be more concerned for safety reasons, and then mental health reasons... There are biological effects of EMF, but not at these field strengths. Not by orders of magnitude. The primary effect is simply dumb old heating. Diathermy machines, microwave ovens, and the military's ADS, operate on this mechanism. There is no biological effect beyond heating (obviously, too much heat and you cause burns, but that's not unique to EMF). Strong pulsed fields can induce voltages in neural tissue (transcranial magnetic stimulation), which do have direct neural effects, but these are temporary. Anything that produces fields with too little energy to cause noticeable heating, or pulse peaks strong enough to cause noticeable induction, is completely and utterly inconsequential. Example: ESD can have quite large (peak) EMF, but is over very quickly, and delivers very little energy (on a human scale). (Anyway, sparks are well known to cause people to involuntarily jump or twitch. But again, that's just a neural stimulation thing, nothing more.)