on the contrary artichokes are easy to grow. they love an organic rich soil and some water on hot days. You need to cut them back after flowering. After a couple of 3 you can dig them up and split them...If you dont split them after 5-6 years they have an "off" year where they will produce nothing, but will produce the next year. All this information I got from a guy at a seed savers meeting who orginally came from the artichoke capital of the USA!

Hmm, it's rated 575 lumens and uses 10.5 watts. That's about 55 lumens per watt. That's showing some improvement, but it's still well below a good CF in efficacy - and it's quite a bit more costly. By comparison, the low mercury 12,000 hour Neolite retrofit Edison base CFs I've mentioned here before yield 72 lumens per watt and cost $4.50 each. Compared to those, the Crees use 32% more electricity for a given amount of light, and cost 3.8 times as much per average life hour - and 11 times as much per lumen-hour. Ouch. On the downside, the Neolite CFs aren't dimmable. Also, if you're married to downlights, the Cree may make better use of its lumens since they're all aimed downward.

g'day paul, unfortunately at present there doesn't appear to be any container gardening web pages around i could refer you to so i'll see if i can help a bit? with capsicums or tomatoes (there are special hybrids now that are bred for contianer growing) for the main they like a bit of root space mostly latteraly, so you may need equivalent to say a container of 4 gallon capacity for each plant. with those styrene containers i try to get those larger deeper ones with all the slit holes in them, but those broccoli coller type boxes (the larger ones) can be converted by pushing some holes in the bottom i find using a section of 25mm electrical condute good, sit the container on the ground so it has basic overall support then just push through with the condute nice fairly neat holes appear. start with a hole in each cornere then say 2 more down either side and a similar pattern down the middle, then some alternate holes in rows between middle and edges. we then place some 3" stones around the bottom not covering the holes then using some old fly screen of shade cloth single layer cut a piece that will fit over that and to the edges, then lay you meduim around the edges and firm this hold the mesh from sagging too much. then fill the container compacting the medium a bit as you go you can add wetting crystals if you like or some slow release fert', we mulch around the top using that sugar cane mulch in the plasitc wrapped bales. we found a potting medium one of the cheaper ones at the nursery which is a very humnusy product so hoping this will do better than the regular mixes. enjoy len Here is a link that might be useful: len's garden page

The strength of the magnetic field of Mercury on a person on Earth, is significantly less than you experience from the magnets on your refrigerator. And the gravitational attraction exerted on you by Mercury, is less than that exerted on you by a truck driving down your street. The notion that any such infinitesimal magnetic or gravitational field could have any effect on a person is hocus pocus. The idea that this effect could be different in a predictable way based on what month a person was born in, is ludicrous.