Very good question, and interesting discussion. What I take out: quack grass, twitch grass, morning glory, anything that vines. What I leave in: Dandelions (cools the soil, sometimes I eat them, brings up nutrients from below and when I do pull them out, I add them to compost.) Dock (seems to be a catch crop for some pests), Queen Anne's Lace -- pretty, and tall, I like the way it looks, buttercups, daisies, yarrow, black eyed susans, pretty much anything that flowers, as they feed the bees and other pollinators, CLOVER. I am physically incapable of pulling up clover. It fixes nitrogen and feeds the soil, and also the bees love it. I have red clover, purple clover, white clover, yellow clover. I mulch with hay, so lots of interesting weed seeds plant themselves every year. As you might guess, my garden is full of weeds. I grow all of the vegetables and a lot of the fruit for 2 people (with some to give away) each year. So, if you have the space and the inclination to share the sunshine and nutrients with interlopers, you can have sort of a festival of things growing and still be successful. Of course, everything everyone said above is true, too. This is just one way to do it. My first year gardening I visited a friend's garden and was surprised to see lots of very happy dandelions and other weeds growing among her vegetables. When I commented, she said "I don't worry much about weeds." (Later she added: except quack grass--that I pull out.) She oversees the garden at a Zen monastery now. This post was edited by elisa_Z5 on Wed, May 29, 13 at 1:29

(I don't think there are any dumb questions.) ;-) I grow everything in containers in my greenhouse (cacti and succulents) but I've seen many pics of greenhouses that have plants in the ground, or in large community planters or bins on the ground, or up on benches. However, if you're trying to escape your high heat problem, I think you'll find the summer temps inside the greenhouse are always higher than the outdoor temps (unless you can equip the greenhouse with something like an evaporative cooler.) Greenhouses are really good at holding heat...even when we don't want it (our summer temps can be murder here too.) I have a little 10x12 greenhouse, with a pretty good sized exhaust fan, summer screens on the south side, and big sliding screened doors that remain open all summer. Even with this, it's always hotter inside the greenhouse than out, so my succulents just have to tough out the summer period. I guess it's possible to configure a greenhouse so it's cooler inside than out, but I don't think it's easy or inexpensive. We'll see what other folks have to say; I have no experience growing veggies in a greenhouse, so there may be something I'm missing!

That webbing is very distinctive of mealies. I've just recently had a few go-rounds with soil-mealies, and the best advice was to just throw everything away and start over after disinfecting and treating to kill the beasties in the area where you grow your plant. That said, I can also empathize with wanting to keep a plant for sentimental reasons. With foliar mealy bugs, getting rid of them is very very difficult because they lay their eggs in hard-to-treat areas of the plant. If you really want to save the plant, you'll want to get a strong bug-killer (work with it outside) with pyrethren or malathion. Treat the entire plant by submerging it. You'll want to repeat this one or 2 more time at least a week apart. The other way you can go about saving the plant is to clone it from a leaf cutting and treating the leaf cutting with the bug-killing chemicals. I'm sure there are other ways to go about killing mealies or controlling their populations, but this method I know works reasonably well.

Maybe I m not understanding exactly what you're saying, but---what you're describing sounds more like a side-shoot to me. The 'Y' does literally look like a capital 'Y'---the trunk forks into two pieces, at approximately the same angle as do the two sides of the capital 'Y' you see here. Once the plan has Y'd, the two sides tend to grow at an equal rate, but not always.