You won't need to hand pollinate, unless you are saving seeds. If you have plenty of bees, they do a good job. You can also hand pollinate as well, if you want, in case the bees don't find the flower(or if you have a shortage of bees).

It definitely works as far as applying heat to food, but it is just impractical and tedious for me. The getting food out is a nightmare because the top rack uses three legs... if you take out some of the food, it will be heavier one side and that causes the rack to upturn and dump all the food in the grease below. If you're using both racks, to manipulate the food on the bottom rack, you have to remove every piece of food from the top rack, then remove the rack, then do whatever you have to and put the whole mess back together again. The surface of the glass is easy to clean as far as that goes, but the bowl is just so heavy and big that it is cumbersome. Not to mention the racks, I hate cleaning racks of any kind. And then there's the glass rim in the lid.... it gets dirty too, and can't be submerged. If you wash it with soap, how do you rinse it? Putting it in the dishwasher is impractical too... the racks don't come clean in there, and it the bowl only fits on the top rack (which it consumes entirely almost... I might be able to fit 2 water glasses behind it, but that's it). It does make a really crispy crust on breaded chicken. I've never attempted to melt shredded cheese in it, but I can understand how that would be a problem. Any time I've ever made anything with dried herb/spices, they are blown off of the food and swirl around the oven cavity like there's a tornado in there. Another thing I don't like is that the racks are awful... the slats are too large and things like fries fall through. You can solve that by using the bottom of a springform pan as a cookie sheet, but then the air doesn't circulate underneath very well. Johnliu, it heats with the halogen bulb (which it power cycles to maintain the temperature), and with infrared... they say the infrared cooks the inside while the halogen makes everything crispy. It also has a fan for convection. It does have a timer (which based on reviews I've read, breaks easily, you can't turn it down if you pass the time you want or it will break). It does cook pretty quickly and the nice thing is that you can see the food cooking right before your eyes. It is hotter in the center than on the outsides, and sometimes food needs to be rotated, despite the convection fan. However, flipping is almost unnecessary unless you want to brown the other side. The burgers were completely done when I flipped them, and I only did it to brown the other side just a bit. Here's a short commercial of the oven I have (it was 2 minutes long)... the same thing is the Flavorwave (which has Mr. T as the celebrity, not Mike Tyson... I was confused about that!) Here is a link that might be useful: Video of the oven I have

Nothing I didn't know....but for the actual numbers. Someone needs to show people how to make hamburger helper from scratch. I remember back when Sloppy Joe's were the hamburger helper of the day, people were amazed that I could make a sloppy Joe without canned soup! Or a chuck roast without a package of dry onion soup mix, or a chocolate cream pie without a premade graham cracker crust in a disposable tin and a box of pudding mix....oh yes and an envelope of "whipped topping". The pie takes longer but costs lots less....the rest is quick and easy. I took a shortcut through the "frozen entrees" section of the supermarket earlier this week...oh my...and there is another section for breakfast. Not long ago that contained mainly frozen juice, frozen fruit and Eggos. Now there's a whole section with sandwiches and who knows what else. I used to think I was a slacker if I made Bis Quick pancakes and bought sausage links rather than thawing some ground pork and seasoning it, now you can buy precooked bacon and precooked eggs!

I have a couple of big max pumpkins that are doing the same thing. But one set a pumpkin last week and it's growing pretty well, about the size of a baseball now. It's still yellow and shows no sign of changing color, but it's definitely growing and appears healthy otherwise. I asked my father (old gardener) about it, and he thinks that that's just how they're supposed to look. Something about how BIG squash are usually yellow looking and pumpkins are actually squash.