You have 3 that I don't have!! I live in zone 4/5. Have lots of hardy plants. A white Daisy (not Shasta) Lots of hardy Geraniums, Columbines many colors, Purple Coneflowers, Hollyhocks, Pink Primrose, Hyperion Daylily, Brunnera jack frost, Brunnera false forget me not. I have Iris as well. What ones don't you have?

In my opinion, Fuerte is the best tasting avocado. Only reason it isn't seen in the stores anymore is that the Haas and its leathery skin make it a better shipper and the fact that Haas bears every year as opposed alternate years as does the Fuerte, but the texture and taste of the Haas simply can't measure up to the Fuerte. Have never seen avocados (except for the Bacon) larger than the beautiful Fuertes which grew in my backyard in Long Beach. My father had to do the graft several times before it took and he never lived to see the tree bear.

Lovely painting at an excellent price. (Artists need to eat and keep a roof over their heads too!) I'm a real fan of big artwork in small places instead of wimpy, timid little bits-and-bobs. Please consider having UV film installed on your skylight though - sunlight is extremely hard on artwork. Although oil paintings don't suffer as drastically as, say, watercolors or pastels, they still degrade over time. This goes double or triple if the area heats up from the sun coming in through the skylight. If you do add artificial lighting, use a more diffuse wall-washer type light rather than a tightly focused spotlight, with a color-corrected (neodymium) incandescent bulb. Regular incandescents cast a light that is too yellow for good color rendering, you lose the impact of the cooler colors and the painting can look dingy. The neutral white light of halogens is great for seeing colors but unfortunately they crank out a LOT of heat so they need to be situated well away from any artwork.

Ocean Green was my first until the fabricator couldn't make the template work and the second piece they had in stock wasn't a match. I was very disappointed, and had to make a second choice fast or I would have held up progress. So I chose AB, and do like it. But to answer your question -- I had a good size sample of Ocean Green and would smear it with butter, oil, etc. whatever I could find to see if it would stain and it wouldn't and I'd leave the butter on the stone for a few hours. So go for it, it's a fabulous stone.