All of the seeds are organic, and were harvested this season. To trade, I'd like colorful, or eye catching tomatoes, peppers (peter pepper?) Rose clippings, or angels trumpet clippings (especially double!) Message me if you have anything unusual, or particularly beautiful, or delicious :) I have: Rio Grande Hot Chile RARE, Heirloom A prolific and colorful, versatile 3" garden chile with fruits maturing from yellow to red. Slightly hotter than a jalapeno. Early Moonbeam Watermelon RARE, Heirloom This melon is so sweet and juicy that you can eat most of the rind too. It is an icebox size 5-8 lbs with butter yellow flesh and colorful dark and light green exterior. The small size make it perfect for a one sitting feast. This melon is well suited to short season climates as it will mature early Oaxacan Pink Tomato RARE, Heirloom Beautiful, clear pink, flat-round fruits with character and good flavor. Originally from Oaxaca, Mexico. Best trelllised. Thessaloniki Tomato RARE, Heirloom Developed in Greece. Round red fruit with mildly earthy, slightly acidic flavor resists sun scald and cracking. Indeterminate. Sweet 100 Tomato This garden favorite bears 100 or more small, sweet red tomatoes in clusters on long branches. Bursting with sugary flavor, Sweet 100s produce scarlet, cherry-sized fruits in long clusters right up to frost. Green Tomatillo Tomatillos, a staple in Mexican dishes, are used for fresh or cooked green sauces. Fruits give a citrusy, tart and tangy lemon flavor when picked firm. Red Cherry Pepper The Red Cherry sweet pepper has small roundish fruits about 1.5" across. The peppers are delicious either red or green and go great in salads. Also a great pepper for pickling. Banana Pepper The famous "Yellow Banana Pepper" is a big favorite for flavoring meat dishes and casseroles. Tangy, but not hot. Great in containers and sunny flower beds. Full size peppers can be picked at any color, but are spiciest when red. Orange Bell Pepper Beautiful blocky orange bells with thick, sweet walls color up early under the protective plant canopy. Harvest early fruit to encourage additional fruit set. Red Bell Pepper Sweet, juicy, classic 3-4” bell peppers that ripen from dark green to red on vigorous, upright plants. Excellent fresh, roasted, sautéed or stuffed. Jalapeno Most familiar in their green stage, jalapeños are hottest and fully ripe when they turn red. Use fresh, pickled, or in sauces. Sparky Marigold Sparky is not your ordinary marigold! It has a very unusual flower form that is wide and wavy. The colors are vivid shades of deep orange and yellow. It will remind you of a sunset. Maximilian Sunflower Maximilian sunflower is a perennial sunflower mainly found from Manitoba to Texas but it is also found scattered throughout the tall grass prairie. The flowers run about three inches across but there are a lot of them. They start blooming as early as the first week of September and continue for about 5 weeks. At the peak the top half of the plant is covered with these flowers for about three weeks making a very spectacular display. Naturally the bees love them and monarch butterflys like to stop by them on their way south. Finally the goldfinches feast on the seeds from mid-October to mid-November.

Ctopher-- the packaging pouch containing the test components was very clearly labeled HVX. The sample extract bags and instructions were for HVX but the test strips they gave me were for cucumber mosaic virus. As I'm sure you know, the labeling letters on the strips are pretty tiny. I had never used this test before, nor is my eyesight that great. Only if the outer packaging pouch had been labeled CMV would I have noticed. On the plus side, Agdia overnighted a new HVX test kit at no charge (which arrived less than 24 hours after I called them!) and only one of the six hostas I re-tested was positive. Not much false hope given by those first six mismatched tests. Also, the buffering solution in the HVX sample extract bags is the same as the solution used for a CMV test, so I essentially got a free set of CMV tests out of it. Not that I was particularly concerned about CMV. If there are any hosta peeps in central VA who are, stop by the house and I'll hook you up.

The UMass people do seem to report unpleasant happenings, which I guess is the reason for the report in the first place - to give professionals a heads-up for problems they may need to deal with. I just went back to the Landscape Message to see if I could find any good news and I did find this: "Metro West (Acton): General Conditions: Finally, it rained! The area received 0.83â of rain and gained 61 GDD during this recording period". A little something cheerful, anyway. Claire

Hi Claire, Yes, after I read the UMass Ex letter I found the posting by ginny. We all seem to be having the same problems with our impatiens this season. I thought damage could be limited to only a few locations and that some pots may be fine. I then watched as a Hummingbird flew from one pot of impatiens to the next and saw the flaw in my thinking. I hate to lose impatiens, they are often the only color in my garden. sooey