It has been a long time since I have been there, but the Gene Boerner Botanical Gardens in Whitnall Park in Hales Corners/Milwaukee is nice. The rose garden is part of a larger display area. Whitnall Park has been on the list of the top 10 public parks in the country. Mitchell Park also in Milwaukee has domed display gardens also. If you are going to be in the Milwaukee area, Whitnall Park is a nice place to stop.

Christine - we still have green here but nothing is growing. The few mid-season tomatoes I tried have not grown a inch in the last three weeks, and the leaf lettuce seems to be in stasis too. Odd year, the oak trees here are usually full of green buds by now.... Sharon - it's definitely cool being on the lake. The storm drains lead from the lake to a bayou of Tampa Bay so we get otters coming through too. I had a pair here last week in the back yard and I saw them come up on my lower boardwalk in the garden. There are still a ton of cherry tomatoes on the ground down there so I was wondering if they were going after the tomatoes or if they were just catching fish and eating them up under the boardwalk, something they've done regularly. Tom

Hi Glen! Breeding potatoes is fascinating. I earned my Masters in plant breeding working with wild potato species. I screened various populations of Mexican and South American species for resistance to late blight (caused the Irish potato famine and new aggressive forms of the pathogen has emerged in the last decade or so). I then began to breed in the resistance to modern potatoes. True Potato Seed (TPS) is wonderful for especially developing countries because of ease of storage and being essentially virus free. For developed countries where great uniformity is necessary for processing it probably will never catch on. There is just too much segregation going on in TPS hybrids for most developed markets. Potatoes resist inbreeding (strong inbreeding depression), so it would be hard to inbreed parents to bring them to homozygosity so when two of them are crossed their progeny will be uniform. For countries where biomass and food is the major concern, TPS is wonderful. A great web site is the Potato Association of America. From that site you can get a link to the US potato germplasm repository in Sturgeon Bay, WI. You may ask for seeds of material you are interested in and typically they send it out for free. I was able to visit the center a couple years ago and greatly enjoyed seeing their facility and was impressed how much they accomplish with such a limited budget. Sincerely, David

My sister in law and I ended up stopping there and I really liked the guy. I would go back again as when I stopped I didn't buy. We rent right now and when we move everything comes with; I don't want to dig more than we already have. He had a decent amount of hostas there but yes it was different than what I was expecting. Hostalisa, I live near Wausau. I didn't get to experience Fox Fire but heard a lot about it. I'm always on the lookout for new places to go. Once we buy a house then I can do more buying. I did buy a Sagae earlier in the summer and it's taking right off. I did get a nice chunk though. Liz