Found it. Botanical name Erechtites hieracifolia, common names pilewort and fireweed (though there is another completely different fireweed). According to Peterson & Mckenney's 'A Field Guide to Wildflowers': A homely cluster of brush-shaped flowers with no rays. The white disk flowers barely peep from the swollen-based envelope of green bracts. Stem grooved, strong-smelling. Leaves 2 to 8 in., toothed, alternate; very variable. 1-9 ft. See also Fireweed (Epilobium), p. 224. Thickets, clearings, burns. Minnesota, Quebec, Maine south. July-Oct. I looked up the fireweed on p 224 and the flowers and leaves are entirely different. Forgot to retrieve the one from my compost pile, which I will do as soon as I get home, because one of our gardeners says they seed like crazy. Which, thanks to schoolhouse, we already know :-) ... anyway, I noticed one growing here on the grounds yesterday, so had a real live specimen to compare with the description and drawings in the book. Diane

I started on another bed today and this time when I saw the brown icky spots lower on the leaves I opened one (it wasn't a leaf, but the bottom of a stem I think because I could 'open' it - there was a space down the middle like it was a flat tube. And I split it open and there was a bunch of horrible-looking junk inside - I'm going to take a magnifying glass out there tomorrow (with my cheaters on) because I don't think it's eggs but what is it? Is it just the 'deposits' the borers make as they eat their way through? It can be scraped off...it's slimy but looks like wet sand plus slime all the way down - like six inches of it. But I didn't see the borer....is it inside the rhizome? And what is the squishy slimy rhizome about? The ends of some of them are orange like a sweet potato and gooey. Westy

plant some brugs, also known as bugmansia, the snails prefer them over the plumeria lol! Noone I know on the coast got a good bloom season this year. Trees on the island were hit and miss, one blooming but not a single on in the same yard bloomed. The house around the corner has 30 or so, only 2 bloomed this year and usually her yard is a riot of color. I blamed the fact that I actually fertilized them this year and the fact I had put a lot in the ground or repotted them. They all grew leaps and bounds but poor blooming. Stay warm! Tally HO!

Hi - this thread is a little old now so this might be too late, but I have some related Qs even after reading all this helpful advice. I'm starting gut reno of a 120+ year old townhouse in NYC and plan to install 36" bluestar with 2, 22K BTU burners (in addition to other smaller burners of course) which we'll use primarily for stir fry. We HATE grease smell in the house and cook all the time, so want to get what we need for the stove we have. So I'm fine getting major CFM, if that's what it takes, but my concern is the ducting. It seems we have 2 options - up an existing chimney (which we're having relined and is not used for fireplaces; fireplaces were all sealed up decades ago) - but that would be 3 stories or about 50 feet needed to get to the roof and I wonder if that's too far for it to function properly...2nd option would be to bring it down into a soffit on the floor below (a rental apartment that already has a dropped ceiling) and vent out of the exterior wall, but this would require making a new hole in our masonry, and would mean the venting would be just outside our kitchen, under a french door that we're likely to want to open often while we're cooking - so the smoke could in theory end up back in the kitchen, no? I am by no means an expert so forgive me if I'm totally off base here, but any thoughts/advice would be much appreciated. Thanks!