If your plant was healthy when you repotted, it will have plenty of energy (especially at this time of the year) to push a new flush of growth, You have the right idea .... keep it barely moist & in the shade (outdoors if possible) and wait. It's probably transplant shock, possibly made worse if you didn't take pains to keep the fine roots wet while you worked on them. Sunburn (photo-oxidation) is unlikely if you're only concerned about the amount of time in the sun during the repot, but if you're looking for symptoms - leaves turn silver or whitish - never red. The sun releases a free O- radical (the same one that is so loosely attached in hydrogen peroxide) which bleaches (oxidizes) the pigments in the leaf so they turn silver/white. It can't turn leaves red. Al

Diane, To a certain extent, it comes from trial and error. Some people become pretty good at judging melon ripeness and it seems like others never do. The signs can vary by melon type. My old rancher/farmer friend Fred says he used to cut a plug from a watermelon, check it for ripeness without picking the melon, and then replace the plug and let the melon keep growing if it wasn't ripe yet. He insisted the ants and other critters did not get into the plugged area, which seems odd to me. Nowadays, he just waits for the coyotes to harvest them for him because somehow the coyotes always know when they're ripe and the beat the farmer or gardener to them. First of all, watch the size of the melons. If you're growing a watermelon variety that usually reaches 25-30 lbs., it likely will not be ripe when it is 12-15 lbs. With watermelons, you can usually go by the tendril nearest the melon...it will turn dry and brown. Some people have luck 'knocking' on the melon and not picking until they hear a dull, hollow sound instead of a sharper, higher-pitched pinging or ringing sound. I don't always have a lot of luck with that one myself. You also can keep an eye on the underside portion of the melon that rests on the ground. As the melon ripens, it will turn a dull, creamy off white to yellow color and often the texture of that ground spot will get a little rough. Usually, you use these clues in order: size, browning tendril, yellowish-white ground spot and THEN do the thumping test. If the thumping test is the only clue, your ears are like mine and you're hearing the wrong sound. Wait until all 4 clues are 'right' and you should be harvesting a ripe watermelon. With cantaloupes and muskmelons, there are lots of clues. First of all, the netted melons we commonly call cantaloupes are not actually cantaloupes as the rest of the world knows them. So, for muskmelons, here are the signs of ripeness to watch for: 1) Days To Maturity---even if you've forgotten the variety, most of these types of melons mature in 75-90 days. In our very hot summers, you may find melons ripening more quickly than their DTM indicates, but not weeks and weeks early....just days early. 2) Most muskmelons slip from the vine by themselves when fully ripe. They form an abscission layer where the melon stem attaches to the vine. If you check that area daily, at some point you'll notice a slight crack. As the days go on, the crack on the stem grows larger and completely encircles the stem when the melon is at the peak of perfection. When you tug gently at the melon, it will detach easily at that abscission layer when the muskmelon is fully ripe. Once that melon is fully ripe (known as 'full slip')it only takes a very slight tug for the melon to separate. If you are tugging hard and the melon doesn't separate, it isn't ready yet. 3) Most muskmelons go from a greenish undertint to their rind to an orangey/salmon one, except for the melons that have white or green-flesh. With most muskmelons, the color of the rind becomes almost a golden-salmon color under the netting. This color can be surprising to see because most grocery-store muskmelons are picked before they reach that color so we aren't used to seeing it. 4) Most muskmelons develop a delicious aroma when near ripeness that smell so good, you're looking around for a split-open melon because it is hard to imagine you're getting that luscious smell from an intact melon. 5) On muskmelons, the netting develops more and becomes more prominent as the melon ripens. A melon that has partial netting, or skimpy undeveloped netting is not fully ripe. Muskmelons don't continue to ripen after being picked, so take care to avoid picking too early. They will develop softer texture, but their flavor won't get any better than it was the day you picked it. With true cantaloupes and many other melon types, it is a lot harder to tell because they have a thicker dense rind more like a watermelon, so you don't have netting to help you figure out the ripening, and some of them (like the canary and casaba types) don't form an abscission layer either. The ones from the inodorus group don't emit a 'ripe' aroma either, making it even harder to tell. Some of them, like Collective Farm Woman, have their rind completely change colors as they ripen, which you may not realize if it is your first time to grow that type. For example, with Collective Farm Woman, you'll see it ripen from dark green to mottled green gold to mostly gold. I harvested my first Collective Farm Woman cantaloupe green years ago because I didn't know to wait for it to turn gold. Other melons have their rind change from green to either gray, yellow or brown. Marcy, Crenshaws, like the variety Crane or Sweet Freckles, for example, are in the Cucumis melo var. inodorus group, which I think is the group that gives the fewest clues to ripeness. They don't soften, they don't give off a ripe aroma and they don't form an abscission layer. I just wait for them to get to the right color and degree of freckles that I'd expect from that variety, if they have speckles/freckles. The Crenshaw types are late to ripen, and I usually use DTMs to help me know when they're ready. If in doubt, I leave them on the vine a bit longer because I tend to want to pick them too early. Do you know which Crenshaw variety you planted? If you do, I might have grown it before and might know what its rind looks like when it is fully ripe. Diane, I almost forgot to add that with many melons, you can judge ripeness by pressing gently at the melon's blossom end. When you press on that area, an immature melon will be hard and will not 'give' when you press and a mature one will. The melon is at full ripeness when the skin is fairly easy to depress, and the melon is overripe when there is very little elasticity under finger pressure or if your pressure pushes your fingers right through the rind of the melon. Unfortunately, this pressure test doesn't work with winter melons like Crenshaws or with watermelons. AFTER you pick a melon and cut it open, look at its flesh and learn to recognize how a ripe one looks. The melon flesh should be 'just right' as in not too hard or not too soft (mushy). Ripe melons will have conspicuous but tender fibers in their flesh. If you pick melons too early and they aren't ripe and they aren't very tasty, you can puree them, add the sweetner of your choice and make them into a sorbet, or you can make them into melon soup so the other ingredients make up for the lack of sweet flavor. Dawn

Let me be the contrarian here. If you need to cut back somewhere, the fridge is an obvious place to start. It's easily replaceable at a later date, and, as others on GW have observed, the fridge is the appliance that gives you the least bang for your buck. I see no conflict in buying an expensive range and keeping an old fridge. Our kitchen renovation ran well into six figures (not including appliances) and we spent another $14K on a Wolf rangetop, M Series oven and CSO, but decided to keep our 3 y.o. KitchenAid dishwasher, and 25 y.o. Hotpoint fridge. Both my wife and I think the kitchen looks quite nice this way. I'd be happy to post a picture if someone could tell me how to do it (I click photo and click on the picture, but nothing seems to happen). In any event, our new kitchen layout precluded re-using our old Thermador range (even though it was in perfect shape), so cooking appliances were the obvious area to devote to our rapidly-dwindling resources. My wife didn't think it was worth the extra $1,000 to get a CSO instead of a double oven, but I ultimately convinced her it was worth a shot. She still prefers the M Series, so the CSO is "my" oven and the M Series is "hers". The dishwasher decision came next. I would love to get a Miele Pro Series DW at some point, as it can do a load in 25 minutes, but at $5K it's pretty pricey. Our KitchenAid runs fine, so we decided to re-use it, but have a 220V receptacle installed under the sink. So, a future upgrade to a Miele will be pretty simple. Finally decisions had to be made about a refrigerator. Our fridge space goes into a cubby in the mud room, so we're lucky in that we can accommodate either a counter depth or a full-depth fridge. Neither my wife nor I could see the point in spending $8K on a SZ or other high-end fridge, when $2K will provide you with a fridge that works almost as well and has more storage space, so we ruled out a counter-depth pretty quickly. There were 2 main reasons why we decided to keep our old fridge, at least for the time being. The first is my concern about noise and reliability. Our 25 y.o. Hotpoint is very quiet and has had exactly one service call in 25 years (by contrast our 3 new Wolf appliances have had a total of 7 service calls in just 4 months). My perception is that newer appliances just aren't built as well as they used to be. We have to keep our GE washer & dryer under maintenance contracts, as they seem to crap out at least once a year, whereas our old Whirlpool ran over 20 years without a problem. Also after reading reviews of even highly-rated refrigerators, I get the impression that new fridges are much noisier than the old ones. Someone told me that this is because the new energy-efficient compressors make a lot of noise. On second thought, maybe I shouldn't be too concerned about this, as the fan on our Wolf M Series sounds like a jet engine once the oven gets hot. Most of our meals are spent with that thing howling in the background. Maybe the biggest reason for keeping the old fridge though, was due to a simple matter of aesthetics. My wife doesn't like having too much stainless steel in the kitchen, and all of the better full depth fridges only seem top come in that. Our old fridge is a nice cream color with black accents on the handles that perfectly matches our Kohler Biscuit sinks. The closest you can get to this color nowadays seems to be a "bisque" color, that is monotone and way too yellow for my taste. So we decided to keep our old fridge in the hope that something more to our liking comes out before this one decides to kick the bucket. We took a 3 week vacation during construction and left the fridge powered off and closed, which was a big mistake. We almost decided to chuck the fridge when we came back and discovered it was full of mold. It took almost a full day of scrubbing with Clorox, but it ended up looking almost new again. The same thing happened again, when the carpenters took the fridge out for the floor refinishing. They took the doors off this time and covered the fridge in plastic. We returned to find the worst of both worlds - the fridge was full of both sawdust and mold. In the end, both my wife and I are happy with our decision to keep the old fridge. We know its days are numbered, but will be sad to see it go.

Hi Al, I noticed that the bark of this ming aralia was getting very loose at the base of the tree for a while now, -couple of weeks, and some fungus gnats were trying to make a home in the soil. I was curious if it was still green underneath the bark so I pulled back a bit of it which came off easily and more than I wanted. It was black and fuzzy under the bark and then a bunch of clear worm-like (>1cm) squirming out of the bare trunk. I immediately covered with pesticide powder. The creature is less than a centimetre long; this one is close up of the creature and that just dark soil at the end.Removed more bark; more worm-like things squirmed out. I finally hit a green part (left trunk) and stopped. Found some rust-coloured bumps/spots on a section of the bark.I have resolved that I should just get rid of this plant. Even though it's really sad, I'd like to know what these things are. I googled but there were so many possibilities. Are they harmful to people, pets, or will the affect my other plants and how fast? Are these normal indoor plant problems? What could I have done better since the big "root-canal" to have prevented this? Many thanks on your guidance, Al. nY PS: Interesting observation, during the time I noticed the loosening of the bark, there was a strong almost sweet smell that came from the plant I can smell from a meter away. Definitely different front the mild turmeric-like smell when the plant was healthy.