lmao..I was surprised to see this come back up! Pikecoe, I am really lmao @ your experiment and the leech jerky!! Salt does def kill them, I have used it on them b4. If I flipped a rock and saw one I'd remove it, throw it on the ground and salt it..better than salting a slug! Of course my kids thought I was totally evil for doing it, but hey! let them get their legs sucked on and see if they dont salt the lil SOB's. I havent seen any this year so far. Mike, we have leeches all over here in NJ..they arent a foreign thing. I also learned that leeches can live out of the water, as well as in. Interesting creatures. Calamity, I wouldnt chuck the plants. I would keep rinsing them off and putting them in new water, till all signs of leeches are gone. As long as they are in totes and there are no fish to worry about, I say use the bleach!! Pikecoe..I HAVE to ask...what do you mean..'PP'??

They come from their mothers of course. Some mealybugs are born live, others hatch from eggs. Fossilized remains of them have been found in Hispaniola, so maybe they came to North American from there. Mealybugs are unarmored scale insects and are related to aphids and white flies. They generally are not that hard to control, and you have several options. You can swipe/dab their bodies with a Q-tip dipped in rubbing alcohol. You can spray them with insecticidal soap. You can spray them with a homemade spray consisting of 50% rubbing alcohol, 49% water and 1% detergent or soap. Ladybugs will eat them, and you even can buy a specific species of ladybug called a mealybug destroyer which can be used to control them, though usually mealybug destroyers work best in a greenhouse where they are a captive audience, so to speak, and not quite as well when released outdoors where they can move around and go where they want, which might not be where you want them to be. You also can use the standard remedy for scale insects, which is to spray the plants during the dormant season with horticultural oil often referred to as dormant oil. There also is a highly refined super lightweight form of dormant oil made to use during the growing season. It usually is referred to as a summerweight oil. If I was going to use that summer oil on a plant, I'd test it on one leaf first and wait 24 hours to see if it damaged the leaf before I sprayed it on the rest of the plant. In our climate, even superfine summerweight oil sometimes can burn foliage so must be used carefully and sparingly. Sometimes, after you've sprayed them, they die within a day or two but don't fall off the plant so you may have to come back a day or two later and wipe them off or wash them off the plants. Then, watch carefully for new ones to appear in case there were eggs laid someplace that survived being sprayed. I've had them on plants once or twice and just left them alone so the ladybugs would have the chance to gobble them up, which they apparently did. Within a week of me seeing the mealybugs, they all were gone.

The Labrador is the most over Breed breed of dog in the USA and it is also the Number one Killed dog here as well. I work for a vet and I can tell you "I have seen it all". If the dog is not going to be used for what they were breed to do. Hunting, Herding, Guarding, Family pet, ect.... and the puppies are not going to go too people that will use them for what they were breed to do then what are you breeding them for. All dogs make good pets not all people make good dog owners! Most people that I see got the pup because its "SO CUTE", until one day they come to the realization that it has now grown into a "Not so CUTE" dog. No one took the time to teach it manners or get it fixed no training at all really. Now they don't want it anymore! no one will take! the shelters charge a relinquish fee that they do not want to pay. So WHAT DO THEY DO WITH IT? They take it for a ride and "DUMP" it off someplace far from home. If it is lucky Animal control will pick it up and it will then go to a shelter, MIGHT get adopted!!! most often it will be EUTH. If it is not so lucky it will get hit by a car or shot by someone because it is not supposed to be there. If people would do a little home work, before they buy a dog the disappointment in there dogs would not happen as often. SO often they say to use"We had no idea this breed of dog was so hyper or got so big". We had one family that had 6 dogs in there back yard! All were related, all were unaltered, all had not had one bit of training. No rescue had room for them no one wanted to adopt them, the family had no other choice but to Euth. all 6 dogs, $300 bucks. It cost them. Now when they found the first dog and decided to keep her, a spay would have cost them $75 bucks. What part of that story do people not get?? Some days I wonder what the hell is wrong with some people. I go home some days with a very heavy heart because of the poor animals we treated or killed that day. So goes life for our four footed friends. I have 4 little dogs I took home rater than see them Euth. because no one wanted them! They are all AWESOME, LOVING, Family to Dh and myself.

Sure tornado, that counts. A lot of times plain seeds produce variegations. I've had several over the years. And when Sara says spontaneous mutations, those are buds on green trees or shrubs (or buds found on previous mutations that again spontaneously mutate) for whatever reason (environmental stress, other factors) & those buds may grow variegated shoots/other colorations such as yellow, bluish, or even differing shades of green. As Sara said and I'm too being very general in my writing, bud mutations are the most common. Dax