Daisydawnny, hope you are feeling much better now! For katbird, terrene, mnwsgal and lois - I am so sorry for your losses. I was always more of a lurker than a poster, but I have so enjoyed this site and got alot of great plants by ws! FB is not the same - I can barely find new messages or postings on it, let alone do the searching that was so invaluable to me in learning about ws. I really don't even like it for socializing. Who cares if I'm going to the store? Does everyone really want a picture of my life every 15 minutes? No one wants to be that bored!!! I am one of the many who has not done as much gardening the past few years. I lost my mom unexpectedly in 2011 and my dad after a long bout of cancer in 2012. So what little attention and energy I have had have been elsewhere. While my flower beds are reasonably full, I do plan to ws a few things this year - annuals and such - to fill in gaps. I want to get back to digging in the dirt regularly and taking better care of them. I think it will make for a very happy spring and summer. :- )))))))

Sometimes all the threads are helenh so I have kind of stopped monopolizing things. I do have a new grass from Ozark Nursery. Jet Streams dwarf pampas grass. The tag says hardy to zone 6. I bought one for me and one for my neighbor. I am going to ask the neighbor to check on my animals when I visit my sister. My link shows it. I did not pay $30 like the link price. Mine were reasonably priced. Here is a link that might be useful: Jet Streams grass

"Large crops of pink, 8-10 oz that have a full, old-fashioned tomato flavor. Smooth, blemish free fruit are borne in large numbers over a concentrated time period, making this variety a favorite in Southern states for canning and eating. Strong determinate. 80 days, #4515 (30 seeds) $2.55" [Tomato Growers Supply seed blurb] My opinion is that description comes from somewhere other than a grower of Bradley, if you get my drift. I mean it seems to ape other seed blurbs for Bradley rather than the results I've experienced over the past 4 years growing Bradley. First of all, I agree with the 80 days to maturity from transplant. But I don't think I ever got a 10-ounce tomato off a Bradley plant. Maybe 8 ounces with plenty of them running 6 - 7 ounces. "Full, old fashioned flavor" maybe in a hot, dry summer but I'd describe it more on the sweet side of old fashioned and down right bland and watery if the season goes overly wet. Tends also to get soft inside with skin splits in overly wet conditions. I had some excellent results in containers, though, where I did get truly blemish free, 8 ounce, tasty fresh slicers. Concentrated set? Not so much. And surely not like many determinate canners that set one huge crop with maybe a second wind smaller crop then peter out completely. The Bradleys I've grown started yielding at 80 days from transplant and continued with reasonably generous yields until cool, low light conditions in autumn tended to shut them down or render the fruit tasteless. Bradley definitely is a producer though, and does have genes that are useful for increasing yield and standardizing fruit size when crossed with an heirloom like Cherokee Purple. I did that in 2007 and in 2008 grew the F1 that yielded more tomatoes of a uniform size (about 6 - 8 ounces) than any other regular size tomato in the garden ... like 8 - 12 fully ripe tomatoes per picking with two or three pickings a week at the peak season. Awesome. And in no way was the F1 Bradley x CP semi-anything. It was robust indeterminate and grew as long or longer than JD's Special C-Tex and Cherokee Purple as next door neighbors. Out produced them both, too. See below: Bradley x CP, one vine, one day.

Thanks, Jody. I agree, it is a nice bloom to have out - and one of my favourites! Anja, nearly all of my hippies are grown in pots undercover. I found they did very well in the garden, but were always knocked about terribly when we had extended periods of rain with red blotch breaking out badly every single time. So I moved them all under the cover of some very simple frames with greenhouse film. Once the water was off them, I had no more problems with red blotch. I water normally with the hose, but as long as they are not kept wet for days on end as they would be out in the garden, I have had no further problems. I have a few terracotta pots full of bulbs out in the back garden that are exposed to normal rainfall, and they seem to do reasonably well, but I still need to clean them up periodically to clear away any infected leaves and occasionally I spray for fungal infections. The terracotta pots do seem to help keep the bulbs healthier compared to the plastic ones. But for sure, I couldn't keep the amount of plants that I have if they were not undercover. Julie