I took advantage of the great weather today. It is a bit breezy and not as warm as yesterday but I opened up any milk jug that had sprouts so they could "harden up" and I took some of the ones that had just a few seedlings showing and transplanted them into 4 in. nursery pots. I've gathered what I have left to plant out and if temperatures drop tonight, I'll put them in the garage and bring them back out tomorrow. We have had so much rain that so many of them look so spindley. I pinched the blue flax back and that about killed me to do that. If weather is again nice like 60 and above, I'll work on planting some more out tomorrow. Can the wintersown seedlings survive 44-47 degrees?

WOW--like I say I wasn't even thinking of HVX when I noticed this strange division on my MA. I had one hvx plant 4 years ago, so I thot I knew what it looked like plus that time the HVX enveloped the whole plant and not just one division. This case just affects one division plus it is very striking looking. Now I know why that one H grower saved his Leopard Frog H or whatever he called it. I truly appreciate everyone's input--all your replies are valuable and enlightening, and now I am in the "pondering stage". My first call was to order the "kit" so I will test for the disease before I make any other moves with it. I asked the phone person about just part of a plant being infected, and she said they are growing some H in the lab in which some divisions are infected and some are non-infected to see what eventually happens to a whole plant. I will keep you informed of my next decision. I keep asking myself how I could ever grow H anymore without all the help I get from this forum. :0) Mary PS this is the back of a leaf.

Update: Overall I've $#1+-canned only 2 of the puny survivors. 2-3 more died back in the nursery. Most eventually started to grow. One plant - I believe it was the scorpion in the very first picture above - leaped out of the pot in June and is now one of my three largest plants in terms of leaf mass. A poblano I gave up on and moved into the flower bed a month ago has more than quintupled in size and set pods. In no case have I been able to identify any one factor that caused puny runtiness. I do have to add something, though. As I have up-potted all these plants I gave up trying to generate enough 5:1:1 to keep up. A month ago I invested in about 4 more big bags of MGMC. The plants that were moved into MGMC are MUCH happier than they were in just the 5:1:1. To some extent that would be due to more footroom, but i am sure that the dirt has a lot to do with it too. In fact, with plants that are in 5:1:1 and aren't looking great and don't need to be in larger pots, I am dumping some of the 5:1:1 and replacing with MGMC and they do respond. Now, this isn't necessarily a condemnation of 5:1:1. With all the rain we've had this summer it's been difficult to fertilize because the rain comes along and washes the ferts right out of the pots. So a direct comparison isn't really fair - yet. However, at this point I'm leaning back toward MGMC as the preferred general solution. That and not giving up on runts. Dennis

We don't have much info to go on. We don't know what your needs are, what your wants are or what your budget is. All we really know is that you want gas in the event that the electricity is out. A tankless requires a small amount of electricity to operate - it would not operate if the power was out. A generator would solve that problem and provide power for other things as well. I don't completely agree with Dan, you can size a tankless to run more than one thing at a time. I sized mine so that in the coldest part of the year I could run the shower and the bathroom faucet - in the summer I can run about twice that amount. It works fine in my house, but if I had a larger family I'd go with a larger unit. There are also 50 gal Hybrid units - They store the water but have high BTU input and very high efficiency. They can produce a certain amount of continuous hot water as well. These meet the 30% tax credit requirements and vent with PVC pipe - making them cheap to install where long vent runs are needed. I have included an example - I'm not endorsing a particular brand. Note that these would not run without a small amount of electrical power. Here is a link that might be useful: State Hybrid