Ahhhh, the lazy part - been there, do that too! Dance With Me - I've heard it is hard so I never got it. Earth Angel - grows like a weed, love it. Ice Age Trail - I had it, got it as a young TC and grew it in a pot but it didn't survive this spring. I've seen pics of IAT purchased from Jim's Hosta that were big and gorgeous. It also is a streaker plant and will produce other streaked plants from seed. If you get it, save me some seeds. Touch of Class - gorgeous, don't have it but have one of the look alikes named Dream Weaver. It does very well here and intro'd by Kevin Walleck, our current AHS prez. Jewel of the Nile - another KW intro and it grows like a weed here. Paradigm - a classic, yes to it. Liberty - a new one for me last fall. It almost didn't come back and when it did was puny. I dug it up and potted it - the leaf is 1" and probably won't make it back next year. I replaced it, it has only produced one new leaf - I hope it comes back next spring. Liberty is a sport, probably tetraploid of Sagae. I highly recommend Sagae for the look, the margin just isn't as wide. I don't have any of the others and have heard nothing about them. For a balanced hosta garden, make sure you bring in solid colors to offset the patterned cultivars. I didn't because I love all the same type. I then had to go back and bring in some solids and to move things around to please the eye. It is the same as the daylily addiction - we bring in our favorite colors, look around and it becomes blah, so we then bring in other colors to liven things up. Some good blues in different sizes I recommend - Abiqua Drinking Gouard or Love Pat - great color, upright growing. Small blues that hold their color late into the season - Blue Jay and Fragrant Blue. Dark greens - Fried Green Tomatoes, a couple of Lakeside plants that I can't remember right now. If you want big, try some of the sports from Sum and Substance - Sum It Up, Bottom Line and Sum of All. Big, fast growing, all with edges but not "clashy" edges. They are all dark green. Other must haves - June, Paul's Glory or St. Paul. I know you don't like the skinny leaves but consider Ginsu Knife, has a slight light margin but lots of rippling on the edge, Marilyn Monroe, lighter green with ripples and Queen of the Seas, big blue with ripples. These offset the big round leaves that I love. For golds, Choo Choo Train, Sweet Sunshine, I think, hybridized by Solberg and a couple more Lakesides I can't remember, really make the shady areas pop. Have fun as another addiction starts. Could I also interest you in orchids?????????? Brooke

Welcome, Joe! I'm about 6 hours north of you - north of Dallas, but have visited the San Antonio area several times. There are some good gardening links from other posters that will be very helpful to you. As far as the spiders, consider them friends since they will hopefully capture lots of mosquitoes in their webs. ;-) I've walked through my share of spider webs and it isn't fun, but don't get too upset since they're beneficial. I saw a nice size wolf spider making its way across my backyard this afternoon. Hopefully our dog didn't step on it and it made it safely to my landscape border. Right now I'm listening to our toad (thought it was a frog at first) who is sitting on our waterfall rock singing away trying to lure in a female toad. That's another beneficial critter in my yard. You will eventually find lizards around too, but I'm sure you had your share of those in Florida. Anyway, welcome to the Texas Gardening forum. We're all a friendly bunch of folks here who will be happy to answer your gardening questions and maybe you'll help us with some of our questions too.

You can't just grab a can of stain at the home (like the ubiquitous yellow can) and have it work. Normal stains need raw wood to soak in and either penetrate the cell walls (dyes) or settle in the crevices (pigments). You can use a product called a glaze to add color between coats of finish. Glazes are high in pigment and low in binder and are made with longer open times so you can manipulate around. Then you let them dry, usually overnight, and apply a coat of finish over them. Some people use gel stains, which are designed to sit on the surface, not penetrate, as make-shirt glazes. It's generally not a good idea to start mixing oil- and water-based stains and finishes. Too much can go wrong. But I would highly recommend doing what pros do -- since this is a new product or technique for you: run trials on scraps before jumping into your project. Even if you have to go buy some pine and put on a coat of tung oil, then try one or more products you are considering using and follow all the way through to final finish.

I think some of the vinegars used long ago (often even when people were making their own vinegar, which some people still do today) were much stronger. I believe I've read 40% in some cases compared to todays standard 5%. Even the horticultural-strength vinegars used as herbicides are only 20%. People have preserved food for centuries, including fermentation, pickling, dehydration and preservation by very heavy salting. I am not sure how long ago canning as we now know it came into common usage, but I know that some canned foods were developed in the USA as a way to feed the soliders in the Civil War era. The French were canning some foods as early as the very early 1800s. I think one of their methods was to can the foods and use them unless the cans started swelling, which was an indication the food had spoiled. To me, that seems a lot like Russian roulette. Catsup/ketchup and some other condiments came to us as a result of people trying to create sauces that would cover up the flavor of spoiled meat. Think about that one for a while. When you read through some of the old canning recipes, some of the things they did/used are just horrifying. I'm glad we live in a more enlightened age. Many previous canning methods once approved for use in the USA (sealing jams and jellies with wax, for example) have fallen by the wayside and no longer are recommended as safe processing methods. Some foods that could be safely canner in my parents and grandparents day no longer have approved home-canning processes for them. I bet that a lot of the methods and recipes once used by our great-grandparents, grandparents and even parents are not recommended for use today as research continually finds new ways to make the processes safer. I know that my dad's mother and sisters preferred pickling as much as possible way back in the early 1900s because if you use enough vinegar, sugar and salt, you can make safe pickles out of tons of different kinds of food. To me, that choice reflected some sort of knowledge about what worked best and seemed safest in their era. I do remember that a lot of the southern women I knew who canned in the 1960s and 1970s often cooked their canned goods almost to death after opening up a jar. Why? Because their mothers did. Why did their mothers do that? I think they were boiling the veggies hard for 10-20-30 or more minutes in order to possibly kill off any toxins that might have grown in the jars after the food was canned. They didn't have the extensive research we have today to assure them that they were using the safest possible preservation process, so they were extra careful to try to safeguard their families. I expect quite a few people died of botulism and other food-related illnesses back in the day, and am grateful that is a rarity nowadays. It still happens today, and the few cases I've read about in recent years seemed to most often involve green beans that accidentally were canned in a boiling water bath instead of in a pressure canner, and also some meat products where something went wrong. Mary, That's hysterical that the bomb squad couldn't break that seal on that canner, but I've heard other cases of canners sealed shut in such a way that nobody ever could get into them. I'm not ever going to suggest to my spouse that he and his bomb squad/SWAT team members try to blow up a canner to release the seal because I'm afraid the idea would intrigue them a bit too much and he'd want me to deliberately mess up my pressure canner just so they could try to get it open. I have a feeling I'd lose the pressure canner in the process. One of the most horrific developments in the last 10-15 years is that certain terrorist groups have used pressure canners to make IEDs. That makes a chill run up my spine. What a terrible misuse of a great kitchen helper. Dawn