Well, I am still one of those without my personal e-mail addy listed on my member page, but can have e-mail sent to me through GW. In the past, I have had my addy listed and have had serious problems with spam mail that comes from other forums on GW. Since I post on quite a few of the other forums on GW, I found that some of them do have their fair share of spam type posts; advertising for various websites, products etc. When my e-mail addy was available for anyone to see, these posts would pop up on these other GW forums and within an hour or so I would have the spam coming to my e-mail box about the product, site etc. Once I realized where all this spam was coming from, I removed my addy from my member page, and that was the end of the spam coming from here. Hope you all understand why I no longer have my e-mail addy available to see, but as I said, you can send it through GW and I would say that 95% of the time I don't have a problem getting it. Fran

A lot of cross pollination questions on the site right now. Most years, I grow a pepper patch of mixed sweet & hot peppers - with the two often directly adjacent - and have not observed any heat in the sweet peppers. I don't entirely discount the possibility that crossed seeds might possess some heat... but sweet peppers are not generally eaten without cleaning them. If there were such heat, I would expect to feel it or smell it during cleaning, which has not been the case.

Norma, after you posted this I got in touch with her (I caution to publish her name). I was doing some traveling so contact between us was somewhat slow, but I ended up purchasing a very well-rooted 18' Hummel's Sunset. I was hoping to get my hands on a cutting and didn't expect to find something of the maturity available. It was $18.00. A bargain. I would have never found one of this size here and they're going for higher prices elsewhere online, so needless to say I feel very lucky. So thanks, Norma, for locating a source and kindly passing along her information. I received the plant today and it looks great. To those of you who are looking for a HS, I don't know if she has any more larger plants, but she did tell me she sold HS cutting for $0.75. I would assume those are unrooted at such a low, low price. My new Hummel's Sunset has two trunks.(I've included a link with a picture of it). I would like to separate these. They connect right at the soil line. 1) I'm concerned about cutting them in half and letting the 'wounds' callous over, because it's already been bare-root for a week and I'd like to plant it ASAP. 2) I'm concerned about cutting them in half in fear both plants will not heal properly/rot, since this won't be a relatively clean operation like pruning. 3) I've considered leaving all the roots with the dominate trunk, cutting the other half off above the soil line (so I could plant the rooted one immediately), and just trying to root the whacked off trunk in some grit. But I have trouble rooting leaves in this climate and really want to save both trunks. Any help would be very much appreciated! I know this information is all over these forums, and I looked for quite a while, but sometimes the specifics you need are buried in some seemingly unrelated thread. Thanks everyone. Gray Here is a link that might be useful: My Hummel's

Kitchenmonkey -- in one of your other threads, you mentioned you had an existing stove with an 18.6k power burner and were looking at maybe buying a friend's Wolf AG range. Did you get a chance to check out using your wok on that range? If so, how did it compare to your existing range? That info might help us provide a better answer to your questions here because we would have a better frame of reference for how to explain this to you. Traditional wok cooking uses a rather narrowly spread flame. As lazy_gardens explained -- the idea is to aim the heat at the bottom third of the wok. You've apparently been using a major brand stove with an 18.6k power burner that probably throws the flames to a much wider area. (Maybe it doesn't?) Some folks will tell you that this is "all wrong" and that you are some kind of ignorant cretin for not doing it "the right way", but who cares about those kinds of opinions if you like the food you've been making? You asked what does open burner mean. Well, it can mean a lot of things, but not all open burners are created the same. What people are talking about here (in this context), they are talking about a burner that is in a star or ring shape that sits in a open well allowing air to flow up from all around the burner. This tends to give a more concentrated flame and, of course, means that stuff you spill can go down inside the range. (The brands mentioned above typically have pull-out trays to catch spillage and make it relatively simple to clean out the interior). There are, of course, other kinds of open burners that tend to look and work like the sealed burners you are probably used to seeing. A "sealed" burner sits in a closed well or pan so that spills generally won't go down inside the range. The flame spreads can wider to a whole lot wider. You asked about whether a 20k btu burner is hotter than a 15k btu burner. Well, undertand the btu-ratings just tell you how much gas is being burned. To figure out what is hotter you have to ask: hotter for what? A big tri-ring burner on full power can put a lot of heat into thebase of a big pot, like 20-quart canning kettle/stock pot with a 13" base. That is a lot of heat for boiling big quantities of water, for example. If you put a 3-quart sauce pan on that same burner -- which may have a six inche base --- most of the heat will be going outside the saucepan and around it. That 20k-btu burner isn't putting 20k btu into the smaller pan. The advantage of a tri-ring burner is that you can turn down the gas and maybe use the center ring to get the saucepan to boil, but you using maybe 9k-btu to do it. So, when would a 16K btu burner "outperform" a 22k btu burner for the wok cooking you want to do? Well, if you want to do traditional "bottom third heating" when the 16k-btu burner that puts the majority of the flames on the bottom third of your wok may be better for you than a 22k btu burner spreads it wider. OTOH, if you want a wider flame spread, as you likely are getting with the 18.6k btu burner on that major brand range, the the smaller burner may not be what you want. Some of these differences will vary with how big is the wok you've using to get the results you like. I believe you said something in your other thread about making smaller quantities of food. Consider that a 15k btu open burner on a Blue Star RCS range may give you everything you want where 22k btu burner might be more heat over a wider area than you want. If you've got a really potent burner, it can be a very short trip from char to charcoal. So, back to that Wolf range you mentioned in your other thread. If you test it out and like the food from your wok on its 15k-btu burner better than what you've been getting with that unnamed major brand range's 18.6k btu burner, you figured out something very useful to you. If you conclude that you don't like the results from that Wolf burner as much or better, then you've figured out that a larger sealed burner style range isn't going to give you what you want and you can start considering spending $3500 to $3800 for Blue Star or AR. Something else to consider. If you decide that you really do want massive huge amounts of wok cooking power, and your kichen has 240v outlet in it, maybe what you really want is a 3500-watt concave induction wok burner. When you factor in the relative efficiency of induction heating (84% to 94% of the energy goes into the pan) versus gas burners (only about 33% of the heat actually goes into the pan), the induction burner may be the equivalent of 36,000 BTU gas burner. Plus the induction wok burner is specfically designed to put a whole-lotta-heat on the lower third of a standard sized wok. Cooktek makes 2500 and 3500 watt induction burners. (Actual full-on commercial products if that turns your crank.) Last time I checked, I think the street price was around $1700 from the likes of Katom.com. A lot less expensive than buying a whole new range just to get one wok burner. This post was edited by JWVideo on Thu, Jul 24, 14 at 21:28