LocoGuy, welcome to Houston, where the winter is mild and summer is very hot. Only few days in winter will be under 30 degree, you could handle it without any trouble. Need tips for taking care plants, this forum is a good place to start. Marie

Carol, I bet it did grow well there in spite of the short growing season. I'm assuming they started their transplants indoors to get them large enough to plant out once the temps were in the appropriate range. And it is the exposure to sunlight that made the celery so green. Most commercially-raised celery is that whitish-green because the celery is blanched. I think the blanching is intended to keep the stalks tender as too much sunlight/heat gives you tougher stalks. Seedmama, Here's how Jeff Cox grows celery: GROWING CELERY: Several years ago I purchased a book by Jeff Cox called "Jeff Cox's 100 Greatest Garden Ideas". It is a terific book and I love it. One of his ideas is a way to grow celery even if you can't give it the marshy conditions it prefers. If I ever tried to grow celery here, I'd try Jeff's method. To start his seeds, he sows them 10 weeks before his last frost. He soaks his seed overnight before sowing them in peat pots and setting them on top of the fridge so the heat can help them sprout, which can take 2 weeks or longer. He digs a below-grade trench about a foot wide and 14" deep although he says you can do the same process with a raised bed if you'd rather build up than dig down. If growing in a raised bed, he recommends a minimum height of 6" and cautions anything raised any higher may get too hot for the celery. You still need 14" of depth, but with the 6" tall raised bed, you only have to dig down 8" instead of the whole 14". You remove the soil to a depth of 14" for the trench or 8" beneath the eventual raised bed and remove all the soil. Add compost and other organic amendments to create an enriched growing mix that will hold lots of moisure and refill the trench or, for the raised bed, refill the dug-out area and build the 6" tall raised bed above it. By the way, he recommends six celery plants per person. If you want, you can add tin cans with the tops and bottoms both removed or pieces of PVC pipe inserted vertically into the ground about to the same depth that your celery is planted, or a couple of inches deeper than that. To water, fill each can or piece of pipe with water and let the pipe carry the water down to the root level of the celery plants. In the illustration in the book, he has one vertical can or PVC pipe in between two celery plants in a sort of checkerboard pattern. (Texas tomato plant growers use this method to water tomatoes, only they use large flower pots or huge, instituitional-sized cans, to water the tomato plants...it is called the Texas Pot method.) After you harden off your seedlings, transplant them into the enriched soil which you've pre-moistened so it it nice and damp. He waters his transplants with an organic fertilizer consisting of 1 T. fish emulsion and 2 T. seaweed extract per one gallon of water. Mulch the top of the bed with leaves. As the plans grow keep adding leaves so the stalks are blanched. Blanching celery stalks (but not their topgrowth leaves which need sunlight to grow) helps improve their flavor and keep them tender. This is especially important in a hotter climate where heat stress can cause the stalks to get woody and tough. He recommends feeding monthly and watering as often as needed to keep the bed moist and damp but not soaking wet. His recommendation is that you harvest the plants roots and all before frost arrives in the fall. Store them in a box in a cool basement or similar area. If the storage area stays cool enough, celery will store for months. You also could store them in an extra fridge in your garage or laundry room or whatever. If you ever run across Jeff's book, it is a wonderful book with projects grouped by the season. Dawn

I am just starting to try peppers with a touch of heat, since I have small children and a DH that doesn't care for peppers, but I have decided my homemade salsa needs a little more kick, even if I have to eat it all, or send it to my siblings. Anyway, I have spent WAY too much time on this list, and I'm still unsure, but here is where I'm at now. (The more I work on narrowing the list, the more things get added!!!) Alma Paprika - this is a definite, love it! Anaheim Beaver Dam Boldog Hungarian Spice Botinecka Zuta Cascabella Chervena Chushka Chinese Giant Keystone Giant Feherozon Giant Szegedi Gourmet Healthy Lipstick Mariachi Poblano Patio Red Marconi Red Cheese Senorita - one of my favorites last year Soroksari TAM Jalapeno Sweet Pickle and maybe Tollie's Sweet Italian I'm sure this list looks wimpy to you folks on the Hot Pepper forum! If there are some flavorful, mild peppers I should be growing, I'd love to hear about them (even though I already have seeds for about 75 different peppers, and only room for around 18 plants). I've tried Pizza, and Fooled You Jalapeno thinking they were mild, but mine had no heat at all. Bonnie

I don't seem to notice anything one way or the other. Colors haven't been too dependent. I have had some blind shoots, and some of the roses are having buds die out before they mature into a larger size. This is normal to extent, but with so much rain it's noticeable....not a huge deal though. Evelyn has maybe 2-3 dead buds that were killed off during development, but not a big deal. Some of the cuttings I took don't have any blooms, but on the plus side I see new basal canes starting to come out from the base, so that's always nice. One of my WS2000 cuttings is putting out rather bizarre growth with far larger leaves and no blooms...yet at least, so I'm keeping an eye on that one. It's planted close to the parent plant that I got the cutting off that is doing fine. Could just be the weather, an oddity, or possibly a sport, but I'm keeping an eye on any traces of any kind of disease and/or virus just in case....seems fine though...just rather odd. I just dug up my Pat Austin cutting that I planted last year and seemingly wintered over fine and was putting out a lot of new growth then just died for inexplicably no reason whatsoever...this was the case for all of my Pat Austins, so I currently have no more of PA. :( I dug it up and the root systems was very dense and looked awesome...yet they still all died...clueless there. Everything else looks great though minus all the rain. I do have some yellowing leaves from all the water and some interior low lying blackspot since some of the roses are pretty dense right now, but it's nothing significant and I will thin them out somewhat after the 1st flush. Probably another week until I see a bloom, but I still expect a good show for the roses 1st flush inside the ground out of their pots...even my little Graham Thomas cutting in the ground has a bud on it so he seems to enjoy his environment next to his parent Graham Thomas which I didn't think would survive the winter after transplanting him into the ground later last September with a rather cut down root system. Big Graham Thomas is only about 2.5' tall right now, but looks awesome...still has those meaty canes from it's former self in Columbus, so I expect it to recover quite quickly and probably near it's former self by the end of the year.