If you shake the coconut you should be able to hear the liquid sloshing around inside. That means it's still good. If you don't hear (or feel) any liquid sloshing around then it can mean one of two things. Firstly, that it has already started to sprout and has used up that liquid. Second, that it is dead and that's the end of the story. If you check it out you'll see they have what you could call 3 sides. Not completely flattened, more rounded but still 3 sides. Lay them on the larger side (2 will be the same, smaller) on soil, no need to bury. They don't have a tap root, but a whole series of roots more like cables. These break through the husk and enter the soil. The shoot will come out the top and put out a few small leaves. They like good strong sunlight, and of course warm temperatures. They don't need seawater, but some people give them a bit now and then. Seawater contains a lot of minerals they would naturally get from being coastal plants. Not essential though. You've probably seen photos of them growing on beaches where they sometimes get waves breaking onto them and get salt spray a lot of the time. Good luck with it.

Sorry about the double post, I realized I didn't answer Honu's question. Honu, Aloha! Honestly, I cannot say I have had the pleasure of trying a Hawaiian chile. Someday I certainly will if I can get my hands on the seeds. Regarding your question; I will split it into two parts. First, as far as heat, heat is a somewhat subjective thing. Now, it's true that no one on earth would day that a bell pepper is hotter than a chocolate hab, but different species of capsicum have different types and ratios of capsaicin. Therefore, if someone has only eaten habaneros (capsicum chinense) their whole life and then bites into a manzano chile (capsicum pubescens) they would certainly find it hotter than someone who has been eating manzanos their whole life. For instance, I can bear habaneros but choke like crazy on jalapenos, which have lower levels of capsaicin but a type of capsaicin I am not used to. Capsaicin is a vanilla-like compound (no kidding) that binds to the pain receptors in your mouth. I'm not quite sure what happens to build tolerance (perhaps an increased level of some certain enzyme?) but something makes eating a certain type of chile more bearable after a while. That being said, I have read HPLC (high performance liquid chromatography, which involves the extraction of capsaicin from the sample pepper and the direct measurement of the level) reports on some of these chiles, and nothing compares to the amount of capsaicin in the capsicum chinense species. They have a very high level of capsaicin compared to other peppers and HPLC is a much more accurate and less subjective method of measuring heat than the scoville units test (a dilution test). The hottest capsicum chinenses that I have tried? Trinidad scorpion, chocolate scotch bonnet, chocolate habanero. I have a friend who claims the USDA datil is the hottest thing he has ever tried (out of I would guess hundreds of different chinenses) and another friend who swears by something called a trinidad 7-pod (also known as a 7-pot, the name being a derivation of the fact that one pepper will season 7 pots of soup, go figure). With that, we will see what comes for me in the future but I can say this: the red savina is not the world's hottest pepper. Regarding taste: that's a tough one. I like the more fruity, citrusy chinenses over the smoky ones, and don't like the taste of annuums that much. For annuums, pequins and long slim cayennes are nicely flavored and pretty versatile. My favorites are obviously the chinenses though, and if I were to pick the best tasting they would be, in no order, limon, fatalii, datil, caribbean red hab, chocolate hab (quite smoky but still very nice), billy goat, true scotch bonnet, devil's tongue, red hab (wonderful!), yellow hab (like an incredibly hot datil), grenada scotch bonnet, scotch bonnet, red (from tomatogrowers). Of these if you are looking for something a bit milder and not so explosive stick with scotch bonnet, red, yellow scotch bonnet, and limon, I think they are bearable. If you are looking for something mild but still good tasting go with aji dulce #2. I hope I didn't overanswer your question. To trim it down to five chinenses would certainly involve limons, datils, caribbean reds, fataliis and chocolate habs, but that does not do justice to the wonderful flavor and versatility of some of the others I have tried, which are just as delicious but not as brutally hot. Good luck with chile growing and if you have any other questions let me know. Mark p.s. we did have a humid summer this year, very humid in fact, and the chiles did well. I don't know if humidity affects them as much as heat, and certainly fertilizer and water level affects them as well. Basically, the more stress the hotter the pepper, but I am in NJ so we are not usually incredibly hot or humid. Peace!

ok, i think i am understanding now what we are doing. I took the time and am trying to write your names down and what you are looking for! what is hindering me from naming a garden is i am in the process of KNOWING what plants are named for, or even their name. I never realized that there was a coral salvia. I only knew salvia as salvia. Petunia as a red petunia or white. So i am in the process of knowing the names........sigh. Am excited though i love blue, not a pastel tone, but a vibrant one. I would love a blue garden. BLUE BLUE BLUE!!!! i love salvias of all colors. i love intense colors veru intensly! I love dark sunflowers, i love dark purples for the bloom of most any species. If i ask for daylillies, will i get seeds or small plants? I didnt think seeds was a logical choice, for wouldnt they take years to mature. Teach me! I have red fountain grass to trade, but that is bulky. I also have purple iris but they are also bulbs, not seeds.

@writersblock- ">Everyone will tell you that if you replace, you are REQUIRED to get impact windows and doors Hmm, I live on a barrier island off the east coast and I have never heard anyone say that." - If you're not in Florida, you may not have heard this. It may even be just south Florida. It seems to come up in discussion with Realtors, contractors, neighbors, etc, and thinking about it, just conversations with people who live here in St Pete or more south (Ft Myers, Cape Coral, Marco Island, Sanibel, Captiva, Keys, etc). And it's not just limited to windows - people just don't check the code requirements themselves - they rely on what some contractor told them or how their neighbor had to do it - I saw this also with building our pool (setbacks and such, which changed dramatically the year we built ours) and seawalls and docks and lifts (the major improvements we did to our house) One particularly opinionated neighbor even asked if we had talked to our insurance company before we planted our Royal Palms. ">since they were impact, they had huge frames and tiny panes Confused by this. It's true that the frame of an impact window goes further into the wall, but it should not make any difference at all in the amount of visible glass. There are places, like my upstairs sliders, where I couldn't use impact glass because there's not enough wall at the sides to anchor them properly, but if there were, the amount of actual window would be identical with regular glass." - What you describe is exactly the problem. It was a grouping of (I recall) about 4 or 6 separate impact windows where one would normally put a large picture window (I don't know if it was less expensive to do this way or why they didn't put in one window - but even they now admit that this add-on was a mistake). And the window panes are slightly smaller and the frames slightly bigger on the impact windows you buy here (Maybe just Florida? Miami-Dade code we all have to follow now). But if you can imagine the framing support requirements for each window, it put about, I don't know, 8-10" between the window frames (seems like more). The main horizontal support between the upper and lower windows is right at my eye height (I'm 5'7") and I can't see into the upper windows without hopping up, and have to squat a little to see out the lower windows. Remember this is the waterview side of the room. There are new tenants moving in right now, but maybe I can sneak over and get a picture from the outside sometime... Your neighbors' insurance story is awful. I can't believe they need certification for shutters, but I assume it's the insurance company inspector and they can do whatever they want. The city inspector didn't even look at the certification for our one impact window (for egress) because he was familiar enough with the PGT brand that he took one look and knew it was fine. For the front door, he just looked at the anchors around the door, and saw the shutters stacked in the garage, and signed off. I had pictures on my camera to show him with the shutters installed and he just waved me off. My insurance company hasn't even asked, and we have almost all original single-pane Miami windows (with no shutters) and we don't want to replace them because you can't get them here anymore (unless we do it unpermitted). But we are concrete block, didn't insure the carpet, and the rest of the house is tile, and we have a newer tile roof. Those are bigger factors here for insurance.