I do want to just mention that some colors are not as unusual as we tend to think of them. Just because the eggplants in the grocery stores are all dark purple and exactly the same size and shape doesn't mean they define the "right" color for eggplant. The varieties in the store are the descendants of the ones best suited to truck and plane shipping and mass agriculture, so they've become the iconic images in the minds of those of us who utilize grocery stores. Most of the so-called unusual colors are simply heirlooms; few have been bred recently. But I suspect plant breeders are currently actively working on more -- it's a hot trend in gardening. Just as some heirlooms are superior while others are forgotten for good reason, I would guess any new colored varieties will have to stand on their own two roots to pass the test of time.

Well considering I live down the street from the plant please do not insult my intelligence. Please do not interpret the word "should" as "is". In fact from what you say the only thing that comes out of those towers is steam. Who is living in a fairy tale now. Please do not add the word "only" into my sentences and then make fun of me for it. In case nobody has ever told you this, let me go ahead and do so: straw men are very annoying. Don't do it. Period. Oh yes the location Cumberland City, Tennessee, c'mon down and see us. That's what I requested; thanks. You could have simply said it without all the snark. This would be TVA's "Cumberland Power Plant" (CUF), which has one of the tallest chimneys in the world (which would explain why you can see it so well). In 1995, CUF installed a FGD (Flue Gas Desulfurization) system, which reduced sulfur emissions by a whopping 95% (comparing the two plume studies, TVA's 1978 study and their 1998/1999 study). According to TVA's most recent study, "In fact, it was difficult to accurately estimate Cumberland's contribution to particle mass in this study because it was so small relative to variation in the background.". Translation: there's more fluctuation in *natural* aerosols in the area than the power plant contributes. Here's some pictures of CUF from all over the net. I'm looking, and not seeing any yellow. Does it only happen at certain times? ED: Ah, this next article mentions it :) Now, let's look at this power plant for a comparison to the rest of the US. About half of the US's power comes from coal. CUF, in particular, burns a high sulfur coal -- 3% sulfur -- making it one of the dirtiest types in use. While 95% of the old emissions were eliminated, the scrubber encouraged the condensation of the remaining sulfur into just the right size droplets to refract light. In short, it cleaned up your air like crazy, but made what little pollution was left more visible. Why do you see so much smoke from CUF, then? Because CUF is bloody huge. It's two 1300 MW units. When operating at full capacity, 2.6 GW is the equivalent power of 3.5 billion car horsepower. That's the equivalent of 16 million hummer H3s driving around. I.e., if the entire population of New York City decided to drive a Hummer at the same time, that's what it would be like. For some reason you keep comparing the tiller to the car. Now if I rode my tiller to my office every morning I would be concerned, and have a sore backside. But I use it a total of about one hour a year. Line me up and shoot me, I am killing mankind and my family. One hour of mowing (same sort of engine as a tiller) releases about as much PAHs as 100 miles of driving, as per a reference I already supplied. Furthermore, you're not just releasing them into the air. You're standing right behind the thing breathing it in, and inviting the chemicals to settle on your garden soil. Yes, automotive gasoline consumption is worse than home equipment use due to how much people drive. So? Machine guns are much better killers than handguns. Should we hand out handguns at every street corner? What makes me laugh is how you want to preach to everybody about saving the earth and yet you profess to use non-renewable resources to achieve your tilling, with the brief introduction of solar wind or whatever is not cheapest. If all fossil fuels were gone and the grid had to switch completely to renewables, I'd be tilling my garden just fine. And still for cheaper per amount of tilling than you currently spend on your polluting gasoline tiller. Yes, it is still cheaper. Let's do the math. 1.44 kW engine. Till for an hour (let's ignore how much faster I can till with this thing than my old gasoline tiller). That's 1.44 kWh. Around here, that's about 10 cents of electricity. That'd buy you 4 1/4 fluid ounces of gasoline (not even counting motor oil). That's half the volume of a can of coke. Think you can till for an hour on that? Yes, we're talking about very small costs here. I never meant for this discussion to grow into such a big deal. The point, though, is that electric *is* environmentally better (far better with small engines), more powerful for the same size tiller, and cheaper. Leave it to a oil baron to want the people to use up all renewable resources Was that a typo? so they can get and stay rich as Hades. My father is well off, but not "rich as Hades". Annual income is in the "low to mid hundreds of k" per year (not going to disclose the exact amount), not the millions, tens of millions, or hundreds of millions that you're probably picturing. His favorite leisure activity is backpacking in the wilderness. My parents plan to retire to farmland in Indiana, where my mother wants to open up a shelter for abused animals. Not exactly what you were picturing from some big evil oil company executive, now is it? You probably didn't know, for example, that Shell and BP are two of the world's biggest solar cell producers and two of the biggest investors in wind. Shell is the biggest stakeholder in the London Array, too, which will provide 1/4 of London's poower when complete. They're also among the top hydrogen and carbon sequestration researcher funders, and two of the company's chancellors have publicly campagned to *encourage* global warming controls. Again, probably not what you pictured from an oil company, now is it? Have you ever seen a strip mine or the people it displaces? Or have you seen what coal mining has done to ump-teen thousands of workers? My grandfather and his brothers had to be raised in an orphanage because of coal mining. As though oil was some miraculous product that comes up and is refined without any harm to the environment. As a child, I lived for two years in Texas's "Golden Triangle" -- Beaumont, Port Arthur, and Orange. Port Arthur was, at the time, considered the most polluted city in the US because of the concentration of refineries and chemical plants, due to its abnormally high cancer rates. In Nederland, where I lived, you could walk out at night and, every other night, see the entire horizon in a particular direction lit up by the refinery flare towers, even though the refineries were dozens of miles away. The one memory that really stuck in my mind of the area was how few of the houses in our area had trees. Things hated to grow there, even though this used to be part of Texas's "Piney Woods". My family planted three; only one survived. Don't lecture me about living near industrial pollution. Why not spend your energy trying to get different sources of power, sources that are sustainable? Wind, wave, water, solar, algae sources, etc. Guess whose tiller would run off such sources -- your gasoline tiller or my electric? I am *not* trying to encourage the use of coal -- just pointing out that even coal, dirtiest of the fossil fuels, runs an electric engine cleaner than gasoline runs an ICE, and that the problem is worse on small engines without pollution controls. This is a widely accepted scientific fact, and I've provided references over and over for it. I, too, want renewable power. I even wrote a spreadsheet to calculate costs for different windpower configurations (sadly, it determined that the only remotely economical configurations required a tower taller than where I live allows). My point is that my use of my tiller for maybe one hour each year is not killing the planet. It infact produces far less pollutants per year than the TVA down the road. And my point is that your tiller doesn't have 3.5 billion HP, the energy production of CUF at full capacity. What it produces, the timber and environment can absorb and filter and capture that pollution. And hey if I eat it chances are I am going to crap it out. Or get a tumor. Because that's what carcinogens like PAHs do, and your standing behind a tiller for one hour means you're breathing as much as you would from leaning over the tailpipe of a car as it drives a hundred miles.

Mike thank you for your very kind words . Mike your at the top of the list for growing citrust in northern climates . I have seen pictures of your citrus in the past what can I say but truly amazing . You are the one we all go to for advice and you are always there like a true friend Thankyou . You helped me this year with my soil , you warned me i could run into salt problems and watering problems in the winter and as soon as I changed the soil my trees responded rapidly with all kinds of growth and flowers . Very important people to listen to good advice . My trees Thankyou . Mike I am 300 miles north of you the way the crow flies and what I think make my trees so healthy and large and the fruit taste amazing is the micro climate in my backyard . Truly I don't think I would have the same success in another backyard . You need lots of sun and heat and never let the trees dry out . My backyard has the heat just not tonight the sun and I provide the fertilizer and water . I never stroll to far from home for very long because I know my trees can only go 36 hours between watering . Doesn't bother me in the least because everything I love is at home . The GH makes a big difference I will never try growing citrus inside the house again . So many problems with bugs and sticky stuff coming off the trees . It's almost like watching something you really love die a slow painful looking death . Hats off to the people who have had great success growing them inside there houses these people truly are the ultimate citrus growers . Mike I know you grow a tree in the ground in the GH I think it is a Satuma. Do you have any problems with frost in the ground . How do you stop the frost from reaching the roots do you have a underground foundation under the GH . I would love to try something like that someday .

Actually, I would say that most humans try to do whatever they think is best for themselves and immediate family, without seeming to impinge too outrageously upon others. Just short of official censure, IOW. Obviously a significant minority are utterly selfish and do not stop even at directly harming others and/or their prospects. I agree that every bit of extractable fossil fuel will be extracted and used, presuming our capacity to do so persists long enough. I don't think it will, for a large number of factors: climate change, environmental degradation, costly conflicts over land and resources to name a few. These will likely reduce human civilizations to subsisting on annual sun-fall before we get to all coal and shale deposits. The richest societies will likely manage a partial shift to renewables via best technology but that savings will be engulfed and then some by the ravening horde. It's gonna be a wild ride.