Suetran, aren't you stilllllll popular,, its cause you have such good plants. i have cuttings of austriais hoya; baby lucnosa hoya[rooted] or obeta hoya; or zig zag epi; to trade for your orchid jewel & seeds for your wrightia religiosa. two cuttings for both. plmk,thanks ahead,molly

The nearby town has at least one of almost every National fast food chain I can think of. I think there are four or five sites of the bigger pizza chains, and burger joints. For all practical purposes, the manufacturing base is gone, gone, gone. There isn't much left to the area than hospitality businesses and retail chains, to take advantage of the close access of the city to the interstate. No skin off my nose, other than for some reason the smaller restaurants and larger independent restaurants are history and that's a shame. We used to have many mom and pops and a few buffets and several very nice steakhouses and ethnic restaurants. The prices were cheaper than fast food, the service was decent, and you'd have thought that the businesses would have had some sort of customer loyalty. I have pondered what brought the demise of the independents more than once.........and came to the conclusion it wasn't the chains directly driving them out, nor the price or quality, or advertising dollars the smaller concerns didn't have. It was a matter of city planning and location, location, location. IOW convenience. The heart of the city is empty for all practical purposes. The stores (and practically everything else) is located on one very ugly, very congested road what stretches on and on and on, ever gobbling up the rural edge of that direction of the city. When do you stop for fast food? When you are coming from or going to work or shopping, usually. So that's where you stop and eat, or get your bag of cholesterol to take away. Then there are the chains who took advantage of the exit ramp locations outside of town to catch the travelers, and when they finally smartened up enough to put motels at the in-town on/off ramps they sprung up there too. All of this is high priced real estate now and only a national chain has the backing to build on it and back it until the sites start earning their keep. I miss the little diners with the friendly, and slow paced atmosphere where you could chat with friends and read a paper at the table and nobody considered shooing you off to open up space. I really hate to think that what remains in our community are now low paying hospitality jobs and the bulk of the profit going out of town to some national headquarters.

That would depend on what plant you are growing. Depending on the source you read some say it is a Alocasia or Colocasia but the more authoritative sources appear to indicate it is just a small form of Xanthosoma sagittifolium. X sagittifolium is not called a Taro in the areas where it is eaten but has other common names including Arrowleaf Elephant Ear, Malanga, Yautia, Tannia, Mangarás, New Cocoyam, Tajer, Tanier, Taioba, Chou Caribe, Cascamote and many other names. Taro normally applies to the plants in the Colocasia esculenta species which has well over 100 known forms. Such is the problem with depending solely on a common name to try to learn about how a plant grows. If your plant is a a Colocasia or Alocasia it will eventually run, if it is a Xanthosoma it will produce offsets next to the parent. Sellers often just make up common names without regard to science and growers are then stuck with figuring out what they are growing due to all the misinformation found on the internet. "Mickey Mouse" is obviously a made-up name with no scientific background. As aroids mature they morph due to both natural variation and ontogeny (natural change due to growth). The link below will help you understand these processes. Here is a link that might be useful: Natural variation

Sounds like a really cool title for a children's book. I'd say you have VOLES, my dear. When you water or it rains, they will tunnel through the soft earth, munching on your plant's roots. Moles and gophers and shrews (and snakes of all kinds), use their nifty tunnels to get around your yard subteranean - like a handy-dandy animal subways. Crickets use them, earthworms, and slugs, too, and lots of other critters. Some good for your garden and some that don't seem to be so good. I've lost tuberose salvias and my favorite tea roses; tulips and petunias, even cactus roots. If its edible, they will eat it! I've tried various things, like tarpaper collars around my roses and concrete or rock barriers, even strips of sheet metal buried around them. The tarpaper worked pretty good until it disentigrated, but eventually, mice burrowed through it and then it rotted to dirt. Flooding does no good, as those tunnels are hundreds of feet long. Those holes will never fill completely up. I've tried it. :) If you have a serious vole (or other rodent) problem, like I do, your yard may be completely undermined with tunnels that links with your neighbor's, and their neighbor's, and so on...hence you may find a flower in your yard (or weed) that you didn't plant or never saw before. Birds can bring carry them in or deposit them in your garden, via their poop, that's true, but so can rodents. Rodents carry seeds back and forth through those tunnels to and from your place. Keeping things in balance with Nature is what works best for me. If we can stop fighting all the elements of nature and work with it, we will get better results and enjoy gardening even more. I sink bottomless buckets in the ground for barriers for my big lilies, around berry bushes and roses, and even some of my garden plants, like my tomatoes, and that works really great. For shallow rooted plants that send out roots horizontally, these don't work so well. Planting daffodils, irises, liriope (Monkey grass), garlic, zinnias and stinky marigolds around the borders of my flower beds and/or around blueberry bushes, roses and strawberry beds, even apple trees, is about the only things I've done that works relatively well for an indefinite period of time, without killing the beneficial micro-organisms in the soil and harming animals like shrews and earthworms and preditory insects and snakes. Garlic really does a great job warding off rodents from my roses and they both mutually benefit from one another. Daffodils, irises, and liriope are poisonous so rodents just don't dig 'em. I think we gardeners and farmers will always have our challenges, but isn't that what makes our successes so awesome! ~ SweetAnnie4u