Right now my tallest jalapeno and sweet are 8" tall and my tallest habanero is about 3-4" tall. Last year I didn't have any germinate. The year before that I got a few to germinate, but they didn't fare so well. So this is the first year I've really got to see the habaneros grow from a seed. I've bought plants from a greenhouse when my own attempts to grow them failed and they were as tall and looked like most of the pepper plants they had. So I guess it never occurred to me that the habaneros might grow differently. I'm still a beginner at this gardening thing...I'm learning new stuff every year.

You all are awesome. I peeked more carefully at the salvias yesterday night, and despite their lack of impressive growth, they are still there and seem to have healthy foliage (for the most part). So, that much is good. I didn't know the orange oil drench could kill the plants, so it's a good thing I kept it away from the rose plant, and I guess I got off lucky with the salvia that I did pour it under. Someone asked how big my BD is, and it's about 2 feet x 2 feet right now. I would love to see it get twice that big, and hopefully in this second year, it will. All those are great ideas, and I even have a couple lime green sweet potato vines in pots right now that I should probably put into the ground if I want to keep them alive (I don't have a good track record with pots). Is there something I can add to the soil to encourage blooms on teh salvia? Are they maybe getting too much direct (afternoon) sun in the summer? I'm about to treat the rose with alfalfa tea next week and I suppose I could share that with the salvias, too.

Yumtomatoes, My eyes and my mouth suggest to me that all the tomatoes on one plant may not be GENETICALLY IDENTICAL!!! Furthermore, I have saved and kept segregated seed from two tomatoes sourced from the same plant. These were planted in rows side by side the next spring. There were observable differences in row to row performance, as well as plant to plant performance in the same row. Of course, there is the rare chance one or both could have been externally cross pollinated--not very likely. On only one occasion have I gone to the trouble of bagging a blossom cluster before they opened, then saved the seed for future use. Though I did not do side by side row comparisons from seed collected from more than one tomato I did see plant to plant variation from single tomato sourced seed. I have a suspicion that there are trivial genetic variations in all seed from the same fruit and major variations between some of the seeds. I can't otherwise account for what I have observed.

they help save electricity by using a transformer that converts higher voltage electricity into a 12 v energy efficient electrical current. Sorry to say it's not quite that simple. First of all, there's nothing magical about a transformer. Watts are Watts. With an ideal transformer, watts in would be exactly equal to watts out. But in real world transformers, watts in > watts out - always - because of the transformer's losses (inefficiency). So all other things being equal, a transformer wastes electricity. The evidence for this is that it gets warm. Heat == waste. But things aren't always equal. When you're talking about low intensity incandescent lights, a low voltage lamp can be (though it isn't always) more efficient than a line voltage lamp. This is because its filament can be operated at higher temperatures for a given light output. This is often the case with xenon undercabinet lights for kitchens, for example. I may have missed some, but regrettably I've never seen any landscape lights that appear to operate this way. Every incandescent landscape light I've seen has been a low output (and thus low filament temperature) lamp. So I doubt that you gain much, if anything, by using a transformer. There's also the greater losses in the wiring caused by the higher currents. By Ohm's law, current = voltage / resistance. So, for a given wattage, at 12 volts the current is 10 times as high as at 120 volts. The only real advantage that low voltage landscape lighting has over line voltage is relative ease of installation. That said, low voltage landscape lighting is a good application for LEDs. Even though they're not as efficient as their reputation would suggest, they're usually more efficient than dim incandescents. They're also right at home with low voltage. As a side benefit, they usually last much longer than incandescent lamps.