GardnerDc, Where is there passionfruit at the local Stop/Shop? I thought Stop/Shops existed only in the Northeast. Have you seen any elsewhere? I'm usually grocery shopping over here on the MD side. What time of the year was it? I'm just over the border in MD. Having just spent a year in Australia, where they have many varieties of passionfruit, my son and I are craving them desperately. The canned syruppy stuff that I lugged back with us are NOT to be compared with the fresh fruit. I'm a newbie at all this gardening stuff. If I get a hold of some seed, can you tell me how you got it to germinate in your zone? Was it very involved? Did you try any winter sowing? I'm 6/7 MD. (I didn't think they'd grow here, but you've obviously been successful. I'll trade your germination tips for some yummy Aussie dessert recipes calling for passionfruit. They are also awesome just spooned out of their shells, a crunchy delight with an unmistakeable aroma! I don't know that I can stand to wait 2 years. I'd probably be more apt to buy the fruit if I can find it:) Meanwhile, I'll take a peek at that FL website mentioned above.

I'm one who would rather do anything than go shopping, grocery or otherwise. It occurred to me that if I used my head I could eliminate the backtracking that nearly doubled my time in the grocery store. Since I typically shop at the same store, I mapped each aisle and used the aisle numbers to organize the list of items I buy most often. I laid this out in Excel, allowing a few blank lines here and there. This list fits 2/page on letterhead size paper. The last section is dry cleaning/fish market/pharmacy/library/hardware so I can plan my route, save gas and reduce the number of side trips. I print 2-3 sheets at a time and post one on my refrigerator. Whenever I am low on something it goes on the list and it's rare I run out of anything. We staple coupons to the list and when it's time to go shopping, half the work is already done. Even DH, who is ultra disorganized, has gotten with the program. If he knows his errands will be near a grocery store, he will take the list or call home and I can rattle it off in seconds. Any store layout changes (a pet peeve) are easily updated in the Excel file. The 15 minutes this took years ago has repaid me many times over.

One of the reasons that Whole Dog Journal will not put a dog food on their "approved" list without the manufacturer freely giving out the name of the manufacturing plant when asked by a legitimate inquiry is that such full disclosure helps guard against the kind of accident that occurred in 2007. Many of the small dog food companies have their foods made at plants that manufacture for many different companies. Knowing that the precise ingredients that the individual manufacturer specified for their food were used in the manufacture of it is part of the trust that small companies must have in these "batch" manufacturing plants. At least one pet food plant used ingredients not specified by the pet food manufacturers whose food they were making, according to Wikipedia's article on Protein Adulteration in China Having the name of the plant that manufactures your food easy to look up in case of a food contamination event allows consumers to decide whether to buy other foods made at that plant. Given all of that work that WDJ does to get this info for us, it is pretty obvious that the plants that are making these foods are right here in the US and Canada. The protein supplement that was imported from China was criminally poisoned with the addition of melamine plastic in 2006 and 2007 and there is evidence that there was a similar outbreak in 2005 (see the Wikipedia link below). Chinese companies who participated in this in 2006 and 2007 that poisoned our pets were not immediately sanctioned, and the milk industry went on to commit horrific poisoning of baby formula and milk products in China that was not discovered until May 2008 and not made public until August or September. Milk products from China shipped all over the world were found to have melamine in them even into 2009. From Wikipedia: "Two people were executed, one given a suspended death penalty, three people receiving life imprisonment, two receiving 15-year jail terms,[6] and seven local government officials, as well as the Director of the Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine (AQSIQ), being fired or forced to resign. Yes, all that had to do with the poisoning of babies and others who drank the milk in China. It only came to light because a New Zealand affiliate of the Chinese milk company kept insisting that something was wrong and had to be investigated. Melamine can be manufactured from urea (a concentrated part of urine), coal, and other sources. Urea and other nitrogen sources are added to the feed of ruminants (multi-stomach animals, animals who chew a cud) to increase the nitrogen level because they can get protein's nutrition from these non-food sources due to their unique digestive processes. THAT is how melamine started being put into food - the waste from making it was used in cattle feed. when it was made from urea. A crude way to measure how much protein is in a food is to measure the nitrogen level. Melamine, urea, and some other non-foods increase the nitrogen level without adding to the nutritional level (except for ruminant feed). So now, they have to use more sophisticated testing methods to test foods for animals and people. Because people cannot be trusted, in capitalist or socialist countries, not to poison each other for profit or to make their expected output! This all goes back to my sneaking feeling that this planet can only healthily sustain a very tiny fraction of the people we have living here. If we can't eat whole foods, or feed whole foods to our meat livestock and pets, then we are going to have this kind of thing happen. I have been discussing the need to change our diets to "no processed foods" with my fellow chronically ill friends online. Most of us had no children. It is turning out that this is a good thing.

Anecdotes are not necessarily trends nor do they necessarily represent the aggregate of the data. Anecdotally, I never had a pro or con view of unions and I tended to view them negatively growing up. I'm old enough to have worked in quite a few union and non-union places. What I have observed is folks in union places work harder than non-union, as they are treated and act more professionally. But that's just my small life and data-set, no more true or relevant than anyone else's, otherwise known as having an official value of .02. And one need not need have a degree to be a smart or logical person. Plus, DePaul University is a fine institution, IMHO, and one does receive a liberal education in college, which should make one a good parser of information. He cites references better than some of my students. I'm not saying it's a good or bad defense of shopping habits and the ethics of Walmart, but neither is the defense that a cinema degree from DePaul University means your article isn't "good." If you check the usual suspect rating scores, DePaul is in the middle, but even that does not show the whole story, as there are many inherent biases in college rankings. I personally would prefer the musings of a hard working kid from the streets who worked his way through a mid range university with grit and determination over a "gentleman's C" student from Yale any day!