BKF is Bakersfield, CA. The airport disignator for all of you Aviators out there is actually BFL, not BKF. BKF is what you'd find on Man Hole or Sewer Covers and is the running joke as most people abreviate Bakersfield as BKF. Bakersfield has a lot of street gangs and some folks chide that Bakerfield doesn't know how to take out the garbage and would argue that BKF does make a better abreviation, even if at least one local news station has started putting BFL on their weather maps. LOL. But then we have to give the BPD ( Bakersfield Police Department ) and the Kern County Sherrif and Deputies some extraordinary credit. They have a tough ball park to work in ( I'm sure their are other cities that can lay claim to just as tough of tougher ) and these problems aren't easily resolved. I think BKF needs outside help or some of that Arnold Schwarzeneger money designated for this purpose to get more man power. Arnie also likes to send CA convicts to other states ( due to overcrowding ) and Arnie will definitely get my vote for another term. But I don't have too much faith in giving that Schwarzenegger money to the community program stuff as I've seen the criminals pose as organizers of such programms just to get the money. Posers make it a waste of resource and effort. I think I'd like to see Arnie pass legislation that if drug abusers or traffickers are apprehended and they have children, that it be manditory that social workers be sent to evaluate child endangerment and take the kids away. If we can do that because some idiot leaves a kid in a car on a hot day or unattended at home, then damn it all, we should be doing it when kids are growing up in a home where the parents are abusing drugs or trafficking in drugs - or are gang participants. It is imbecilic to do one, often for petty cause and not do the other at all. I think mandatory social worker evaluations for child endangerment would go a long long way to solving the problem. No parent except for the absolute worst would want their kids taken away. ARNIE - are you reading this? Hey Deb, get your friends together and write Arnie a whole mess of letters with this suggestion. Chain mail it all over CA. But so much for BKF. Yes, it's hot here. My Banana seeds are out on the concrete patio and are under a shade cloth to help with the temps. Banana seed however are a tropical equatorial plant and I figure the heat isn't going to be that detrimental. The seed packets did have a warning about over watering as too much water could rot the seeds. I don't think I'll see anything right away as banana seed are very hard and tough. Even though scarified, I suspect that it'll be a couple weeks at least before I see anything sprout. It sounds like you planted yours about the same time I planted mine. Keep in touch and share when yours come up.

KC, maybe you should come by when I'm in town. I'll know more later as I make my plans, and then you'd get to see Banana and Butterflymom!

squeeze....Your last line brings me back to another recent post of mine where I was lamenting that the worms seem to only care about the food that I put in the bin, as opposed to the bedding. I wonder if there is anything I can soak the bedding in to make it more conducive to attracting bacteria and therefore become more attractive to the worms. At the pace that I am going, it will take nearly a year for me to get finished vermicompost, which is odd since I have a lot of worms.

Oh it's definitely a chemical reaction with the saliva and the fruit. If you've ever made banana nut bread, after the butter, eggs and sugar is blended, and the mashed banana is put in, it tends to curd and turn brown. This is precisely what kind of stain that is being described here on the textiles. I really do believe the only cure is pretreatment as early as possible. It's binding with the protein and enzymes in the saliva souring it and creating oxidation. We do an extraordinary amount of cooking in our kitchen. We also use bar mop cloths in the kitchen from Sam's Club. These things are subjected to more slops, wipe up, clean up stains you could possibly imagine in the cooking process. I guess the biggest difference is when they're soiled I flush them and wring them out in the sink, hang them over a bushel basket and hold them until I wash kitchen. Then they're washed with the same formula I indicated above, and they come out impeccably white and stain free. Obviously the key process is the flushing with cool water and holding them to wash later.