Hi matriarchy, I have been pressing flowers for a while now and can help you a bit. Using a phone book certainly works with a number of flowers and leaves. If using paper towels, make sure to only use Viva brand as they are the only ones without an embossed design on them (that could show up on thin petals. I usually use computer paper to dry petals like hydrangeas, pansies, leaves, etc. Rosebuds should be sliced in half first as they are too bulky whole, and you get 2 buds for the price of one! With full petaled roses, I take the petals off and press each one individually, then reassemble some to look the the original. The point is that the flowers must be pressed under weights until completely dry. Never press a damp or wet flower or leaf. Know that some flowers will change color during pressing. The fresher the petals, the better. Some people use microwave presses, solar presses,or air presses, but all presses require wiights of some kind to flatten out the piece. I have pressed many fall leaves, and most are just as bright several years later. Storage- you can store most dried petals in the phone books themselves, in baggies, between sheets of computer paper. At Michael's or AC Moore, you can buy cans of silica which can be reactivated as needed. Put some in the bottom of a bin, lay on the layers of computer paper with flowers, then put on a tight sealing lid. Moisture and light cause deterioration. I started making cards with pressed flowers, and still do, but also, I now use the petals and leaves as paint, and do many scenes. I will try to upload some later. There are several processes to seal pictures to keep out moisture and sun, but that's too complicated to explain now! What kind of projects are you interested in doing? jpressed

I've bought a few plants from Hydrangea Select and they are the best plants in my garden. Super healthy, overwintered with no care and no problems with disease. They are local to me, so that also may have something to do with it. For example, living in the northeast, I would not order a hydrangea from a dealer in the south because I would be concerned about whether or not it would winter over easily. Anyway, i'm including a link. Here is a link that might be useful: Hydrangea Select

Mar: You funny thing, you! You don't need tactics with lil' ol' me. :o) To download fonts, this is what I do (BTW, I kind of fumbled through it myself so I hope this makes sense). First of all, I went to the winzip homepage and downloaded the free trial version of winzip. Then I visited some font sites. Here are some I recommend: Font Freak and Font Face. But check out ScrapLink because there are more listed there. Anyhoo, you just click on the fonts you like and the downloading part kicks in (which you seem to have the hang of already!). Once that's done, click on your winzip program and it will prompt you through all the steps of "unzipping" the font. Then, it's a matter of "cut and paste". You want to paste it into your font folder (you can find that by going to "start", then "control panel", and "fonts" should be in there). Once I did this, I just went into Word and the font was there, ready to use! I hope that helps a little. Tammy: What a compliment that I remind you of your daughter in some way! Thank you! *warm fuzzies* I'm still trying to "convert" my mom into a scrappin' freak -- maybe you could talk to her and give her a little push, eh? ;o) Lore: Actually...*hee hee*...I've had to improvise a lot when it comes to my SB hobby. I'm limited to Michael's as my main SB supplier and although they have some neat stuff, in my opinion their 8.5 x 11 album selection isn't great (they had ONE in different colours and it was too expensive). So, I visited numerous photography/camera places and found an "almost no name" (because I don't even remember the brand) 3-ring photo album to use. It was something like 7 bucks. I just made sure it was archival quality. Reading Week (Canadian version of Spring Break) is coming up soon so I'm actually planning a road trip with the specific mission of crossing the border in search of SB stores! LOL! If you know of any in the Michigan/NY area, let me know! ;o) Thanks for letting me share with you everyone!

Hi Steve. It really does sound like you are trying to discourage people from growing their own citrus when you say things like: "6b "WAY TO FAR NORTH TO BE GROWING CITRUS" Steve" or "The vast amount of people that grow up north quit after a year or 2 when their trees die." In fact, statements like: " "We" are the small handful of citrus tree growers doing well with few troubles." are completely unfounded. Though I respect your opinion that growing citrus was the hardest experience you've ever had, it certainly wasn't for me. Personally I think that shoot tip micropropagation is complex, but not hard. I think that cultivating mycelium for master cultures is time consuming, but not hard. Basically, I think that all of the things you are saying are hard, are in fact easy with a little knowledge, which is the purpose of offering this guide. I don't think that growing citrus is "expensive, time consuming, and difficult". As a matter of fact as hobbies go, I'd say it can be rather cheap! To be clear that it CAN be rather cheap. If you want to spend a million bucks building a theme-park sized greenhouse then go ahead, but you certainly don't need to. If you want to spend $40 a bag on bark chips for your 5-1-1 mix then you can, but you don't have to. If you want to spend a grand on a fertilizer injector for your irrigation system, again you can but you don't have to. I'm sorry that you feel that this hobby is expensive, but I feel that you can keep you hobby on the very cheap side if you want to. That is to say that I managed to keep everything on the cheap side when tropical plants were not a part of my business and were just a hobby. Just for the sake of clarity, when you say that things are difficult to grow outside of their 'temperature zone', are you considering that every houseplant that you come across is being grown out of it's 'zone'. If what you said were entirely true then I don't think that I could grow the orchids, bromeliads, tree ferns and other wacky things that I do. You could even go so far as to say, that because these species are not native, they don't have anywhere as close to as many naturally occurring pests and therefore are EASIER to grow! I would like to encourage positive discussion, so if anybody would like to start a discussion about this elsewhere, please do. I would however like to hear from people who have something positive to contribute to the production of a citrus care guide, here. Thanks for the imput so far everybody. :)