Mantorvillian: I think i would prefer east window to the cool floros, they are pretty weak. The smaller colocasia I would not let go dormant, some colos cant be allowed any dormancy as they produce no bulb, most do tho but need a good sized bulb to make the winter stretch. A short dormancy wouldnt hurt them, maybe a month or less. Any EE's that fill a 3-5 gallon SHOULD be ok to let go dormant. Likly the same spot you had them last year, with the light OFF and let to go pretty dry, would be just fine. You can always wake them up a bit early if you think they are weak or struggling to make the dormancy. Be careful with chem for mites tho, u Must use a miticide or you are wasting your time, and exposure to nasty stuff... If you have mites again use a no pest strip, you can order them or get em at lowes, walmart etc. they work best in small areas and I dont like being around them. THEY KILL MITES. Full extermination. You can also make a nice spray with vinegar lemon juice epsom salt and and just a bit of baking powder and dawn soap. So satisfying to watch em melt, but u have to wash it off your plants. Lomodor: I wonder where in zone 6 you live. Theres many opportunities for naturalizing elephant ears in zone 6, colo. "pink china" is hardy here with no protection... Im in KY our winters arent the best for overwintering tropicals outdoors but its certainly not impossible, and quite rewarding when successful. I also like to mention that your storage method may not be the best for everyone. Honestly it just screams infestation to me. Clearly it works great for you if you are owerwintering thai giants that way. They are finicky. Bringing non-sterile material from outside, wetting it and containerizing it...Ewww...Sorry to pick on ya, but I would not feel comfortable packin my babies away that way. I used to store all my bulbs in large wooden gun shipping crates, gun stores get em from time to time and usually trash em. You can get em for free, and all sizes. I would first dig or unpot all the bulbs, clean them best I could and wash them, I always left the babys on if I could. Id let em dry a few hours layed on the shady porch or wagons. Id fill the bottom with some dry peat moss, lay the cleaned bulbs close but not touhing, and add more dry peat every layer, a few inches. Until its full. I kept them in a cold basement, It worked great for decent sized bulbs, smaller ones needed to not be cleaned and packed with some moist soil. Since then Ive become considerably lazier, and just dig and repot the ones in the ground, and just let them and the potted ones go dry and they stop growing. It turns out that works fine too, Now its all I do! Its so much easier. Once spring rolls around just add water and away they go. any I need to divide, are fully dormant when i repot and that part actually helps me and the plant too i think. Hope this helps :D

Actually the part that looks like it might be infected is the pimply part. You can have one part infected and another part clean. There was a regimen for killing off the pest on xeric world that I saved: "Wiping out aloe mite in larger specimens is easily accomplished with systemics, especially with Cygon. Sevin is also an excellent miticide, but do be wary of using the powdered form in the crowns of good plants, as with Tim's experience, it can cause damage. However, using the liquid form does not. On rare plants, especially those that rarely (never?) offset, letting the mites get a good foothold and producing an abundance of abnormal growth� and then treating with Sevin or Cygon or any other miticide will not only rid the plant of the mite problem, the undisturbed (not excised) area(s) will convert from a mass of warty tissue to one of several desired offsets. I have done this with several species and it has worked well on all. I now have a seven-headed Aloe comosa (endangered) specimen in my yard. And yes, Aloe reitzii is also susceptible to mite attacks. I have a two headed form of this taxon as a result of treatment for aloe mite. ... Eriophyid mites can migrate plant to plant via wind. However, as we discovered with our trial, often there is still monstrose growth occurring after no mite can be detected! This is due to the auxin like material that continues to systematically cause monstrose growth. We are not sure how long that can continue after the plant is no longer inhabited by the mite. We have also seen subterranean offsets heavily infested by the mite. Other materials that are efficacious for Eriophyids are Kontos (spirotetramat), Judo (spiromefisin) and Avid (abamectin). Auxin signalling goes all the way down to the DNA transcription level, and so can persist for weeks once started." I would for sure seal up that infected-appearing rosette and throw it in the trash. If the aloe is rare, I would isolate and try and save it, but if it is common I would just throw out the entire thing and buy a new one. Easy for me to say, they are relatively cheap here, cheaper than Cygon & etc.

Amy, All the removal of trees and those grapevines is regrettable, but I do understand why they removed them from the drainage ditch area. When you let trees and brush take over a drainage ditch, during heavy rainfall with lots of debris being washed downstream, that debris can pile up against trees and sturdy brush and clog the drainage ditch, which prevents the ditch from functioning properly. Then, all that debris builds up repeatedly with each successive storm and can clog the drainage ditch and lead to flooding of nearby roads or property. I don't think that the city is biased against trees, but rather they are using the standard methods that municipalities use to keep drainage ditches open and less likely to clog. I think that if you planted shorter plants that are annuals, biennials or perennials, they'd likely tolerate that. In our bar ditch area and in the utility easement area where trees and brush are not allowed because eventually the trees will get tall enough to impede on the power lines, I have sown wildflower seed blends. I resow every few years as needed--for example, I sowed wildflower seeds during the winter of 2011-2012 because the drought of 2011 killed most of the flowers before they could set seed. The two wildflower seed mixes I sow most often are from Wildseed Farms and are their Texas/Oklahoma mix and their Poppy mix. We just make sure that we mow that area only after the cool-season flowers have had time to make seed, and then we don't mow it again until the warm-season wildflowers have matured their seed as well. The county only mows the 3-4' right alongside the road, and the utility company only comes through about once every 4-5 years and cuts trees down, so we do our best to maintain that area the rest of the time. I'd rather have a 20-25' wide strip of wildflowers and native grasses growing in the utility easement and bar ditch than to have head-high Johnson grass which is what was growing there when we moved here. When we first moved here and planted the poppies alongside the road, I think I met almost every surviving military veteran who lived in our part of the county because they loved driving by to see the red poppies. They'd stop and talk, invite me to come over and see their gardens and landscapes and ask if they could come back and collect poppy seeds to sow on their place. It was a great way to meet all those older gentlemen who had served our nation in times of war. With the connection between the poppies of Flanders and the WWI military cemetaries where so many US servicement were buried, you could see the affection that military veterans had for the poppies. Nothing I've grown has given more people more joy than those red poppies. Sometimes teenagers stop and hop out of a car and quickly pick a bunch of the poppies. I have to resist the urge to run down the driveway and yell "these are not that kind of poppy!" because I grow field poppies and corn poppies, not opium poppies. Maybe, just maybe, they're picking my poppies because they think they are beautiful, but I doubt it, and I think they are hoping to find a way to use the poppies to get high. Tomato seeds are notorious for surviving compost piles if the pile wasn't kept hot enough long enough, and I think even if you keep it as hot as they say for as long as they say, there's still always going to be some tomato seeds that survive. I just yank out tomato volunteers because there's no way of knowing what variety they are, and I'm a picky tomato grower---I want to grow the varieties I want and not just whatever random seed sprouted in compost. However, some people will grow a few of those volunteers just to see what sort of tomatoes they produce. Millet is a two-edged sword. Yes, it is easy to grow and is very drought tolerant, which is a plus. Even in the hottest, driest years it tends to make some seedheads, even if they are smaller than the ones you get in wetter years. Unfortunately, it is a real stink bug magnet. You can think of that in two different ways: 1) A person should avoid planting millet because it will attract large numbers of stinkbugs, or 2) A person could plant millet away from the garden in order to lure stinkbugs to the millet and away from the garden. Some people use millet as a trap crop to lure those stink bugs away from the garden, and when used this way, it works best if you wait until there's lots of stinkbugs on the millet plants and then spray them with a pesticide labeled to control stink bugs. If you don't want to spray the stinkbug-infested millet plants to kill the bugs, then in essence that area will become a stinkbug mecca where they can meet and greet and breed.....instead of the trap crop it was intended to be. You keep a goat away from a garden (or a car or a boat) with a good, sturdy fence. My brother had to use a good, sturdy chain-link fence around his quarter-acre vegetable garden to keep his goats out of it. If the goats got out of their fenced goat yard, they'd climb up onto the top of his boat and play King of the Hill. People near us who have goats use electric fences to keep the goats where they belong, or conversely, to keep them out of areas where they don't belong. If goats can find their way into a garden (some people insist the goats learn to open garden gates), they will totally destroy it because they are not picky eaters---they are equal opportunity eaters who will eat anything and everything that appeals to them. Bon, With the bitter pears, I suspect you were picking them too early and their sugar components had not yet fully developed. Pears are a unique fruit, in that they are higher quality if you harvest them while they are fully mature but have not yet begun to soften. It can take a couple of years of experience to know exactly when to pick them. If you pick them when they are mature but still hard, they'll ripen indoors on the kitchen counter at average room temperatures in roughly a week, give or take a couple of days. If, by chance, you have a place to store them in very cool, but not freezing conditions, they can last a month or more. I think for this to happen you need something like a cellar where you can hold them in cool, moist, shaded condition with temperatures around 40 degrees or slightly higher. When you want to eat some of these, you bring them out of the cool storage area to the house and they will then ripen on the counter in a week or so. If you leave pears on the trees until they are softened up, then they will become magnets for bees, red wasps, yellow jackets, birds, etc. and you'll lose a lot of the crop to them. Also, if they are very soft while still on the tree, they are almost overripe and you have to use them up very quickly (think---pear preserves, pear jam, pear butter, etc.). You also can choose to preserve the pears by canning, but if that is going to be done, you should pick them mature but hard and then can them right when they start to soften so that you are canning them when they are fully ripe but not overripe. I don't know of anything that would give you bitter pears on a pear tree except that they weren't mature yet, particularly since that same tree produced pears that are perfectly fine this year. You could get permanently inedible pears produced from a volunteer type pear that grew from a seed that had reverted to one of the inedible parent plants that was involved in its breeding, or from a pear tree that regrew from the root system of a grafted tree after the main trunk of the grafted tree died. Dawn

As I mentioned in your duplicate thread, spinosad is supposed to kill thrips. The silver/white patches are the thrip feeding damage. The black specks are their feces. Only thrips leave damage like that. You may have aphids as well. If you see bugs like this (hopefully, your infestation is not as heavy as the pic shows) that are either peach colored as shown or light green, you also have aphids. Little white specks are usually the shed skins they leave behind as they grow. Aphids can be knocked off of a plant with a vigorous stream of water. Then you can spray spinosad for the thrips. Aphids can cause leaf curling and yellowing. And as Dave points out, your plants also likely have some nutritional issues. Are you fertilizing them? And obviously, as you had already planned, they need to be moved out of those pots. Those look like peat or paper pots, too, and if they are, that could be responsible for a lot of the water/nutrition issues that are evident. As for whether to return them or not, that's your call. They're already fruiting, and could potentially give you a decent amount of production if you fix their growing conditions and they haven't contracted a disease from the thrips. Personally, it would depend on their variety for me (fruit worth the effort or just middling-tasting standard red hybrids?) and whether or not I could keep them at a distance from my other tomato plants for a while while I try to fix the pest issues.