Hi Mike!! Yesterday it was 80 degrees.. Then the cold front hit and it dropped the temps down into the mid 30's. mmmmmhmmmm , had to bring in 40 large Plumeria. All of the others trees and tropicals are still under the lights upstairs and in the greenhouse. I thought I could bring out the mature trees in the hopes of the temps being around the mid forties, but NOOooooooo! Wind gust up to 70... We had a huge coal ship break for its mooring and was adrift in the bay.. I have never seen weather like this. It's totally unbelievable. I'm really tired of this weather ... If I was in Florida.. I wouldn't be complaining!!! ;-). Lucky you!!! Hi Josh... I was thinking of you last night. My Squill needs to be repotted and I'm going to split them . How are yours doing? Happy spring to you!!! Laura

I usually pull them out and throw them in the compost pile, but I don't know if it really matters. I found some in the mulch nect to my daughters sand box that were rather phallic looking it was unlike any mushroom I had ever seen. I definitely felt I needed to remove it before my neighbors started making too many jokes about what I was growing these days.

I just kick them over with my shoe. By the next day they are brown and we just mow them and mulch them with the next mowing. They aren't harmful. Some of them are pretty cool looking. I was working in my garden by the front walk last weekend and I had 2 huge ones growing among the rain lilies. A lady walking down the street remarked how beautiful they were. She thought I was cultivating them. One persons unsightly could be another persons beautiful. Made me look at them in a new way. I let them stay till they turned brown, and then picked them out and threw in the compost.

That sounds like a great place, and very nice people, Beachlily. I bet they'd love to hear from you. There's a couple of videos out there (at least) showing some techniques to making risotto. One is by Mario Batali, (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/02/dining/02mini.html?_r=1) and he's making asparagus risotto. He doesn't actually stir all that much. The other is Tom Colicceo, making roasted tomato risotto. I made that the other night, and it was quite good. In this video he shows his way of telling when the risotto is done. The only change I made to his recipe was to use vegetable broth. I'll put a link to that video below, but I don't know how to do more than one link, so I just included the address for the Batali video above. ) (By the way, I stumbled across that website when I did a search for tomato risotto [I have an abundance of tomatoes right now]. It looks like a pretty cool website, but I haven't had or taken the time to explore it further.) Sally