Britta - I think you need to include tea and cookies in a shape of the leaf/flower, yeah - you are right - make them draw plants on a big roll of paper - like a wallpaper, if you still have time - may be you can order some dvd/slides from AVSA through your club or directly - they have nice materials. May be you can talk about Africa - what animals share the habitat - mountain forests - some rare mountain gorillas? The disappearing habitat in a wild - because of the humans cutting forests and turning the land into the fields - so no Avs can survive in a sun... AVSA encourages people to keep AV species at home to save them and invests in preserving habitat in a wild. Tough... Irina

Oh about 7 half pints. I was thinking of using instead of (or with, if you think it won't be hot enough) the Hinkelhatz I usually use in the Gold recipe. I just have to label that batch as the extra-hot version. I'm surprised that Southington farm does enough business to bother growing bhuts, though at $1/pod it doesn't take many to show a profit. I wonder how many takers they have? I sold 1 Hinkelhatz this year, a few years ago I had a young vendor boasting he could handle heat and I gave him a really small one, he cut off a piece with his jackknife and ate it, started gasping and sweating. People around here just don't know hot. DH shrugs at Hinkelhatz, I'm going to try the Aji Limon (if that's what it really is, it's Burpee seed but looks right) on him. I don't know if he could handle a straight bih but he might enjoy the jelly. I just made a batch of salsa, I usually put 1/2C of hot (serrano, jalapeno) and 1.5C of sweet peppers in a 6 pint batch, this time I put 1C of each and the jalapenos were hotter than usual, that should be enough for him but I think it's going to be too hot for me. It was very unusual this year, I had a ripe orange (?) jalapeno, even the green Jalapeno Gigantes seem extra hot, but this one almost blistered my lip when I touched it to it to see if it was a hot or sweet (my sweet orange minis are more flattened than conical though). I'm saving seed from that one ;-) As usual, I didn't wear gloves and the fingertips on my left hand are sill tingling though the lip/tongue aren't any more.

RSVPing for Ginny Barone 5/19. Originally RSVD 4/08. E-Mail: vl4725shisler@yahoo.com. Looking this year for 1 more plant of the Tall Purple w/ Violet Topped Bearded Iris (last year's is in bloom and beautiful right now). Bringing: Paper Plates Paper Napkins Cream Cheese & Choc. Cake Bars

"One last thing is for the student to know why their experiment is important in the real world." One of my problems with the original hypothesis of which kitchen scraps would a worm prefer is how that makes a difference. It's not practical to separate food scraps into separate components. You might show that worms prefer watermelon rinds to beans but have you ever heard anyone complain about the amount of watermelon rinds causing problems at the landfill even after the 4th of July picnic? In this world of 'going green', I think I'd look at items that do present problems at the landfill but should not. A recycling company wants the easy to recycle stuff like newspaper, magazines, junkmail and old telephone books. Even in our city where we now have an active recycling initiative for paper and plastic we have things that are routinely sent to the landfill. A couple things come to mind. One is the papertowels from a restaurant or airport restroom. You could probably even get the information from the airport to compute the tonnage of waste paper they deal with. Another is disposable diapers -even though human waste is probably not something I would think a young child should be exposed to. And I'm not sure how well the worms can handle decomposing diapers anyway. A better choice would be lawn scraps. Particularly now that this is the time of year people will sending tons to the landfill instead of composting it themselves. You could even separate the lawn refuse into pure grass clippings vs chipped shrubbery scraps. I am aware that these will heat up and all that but you can do a week of precomposting them all after innoculating them with a measured amount of casting tea before adding the worms. The experiment would then not be a preference study but rather one of efficiency. Perhaps a mixture as another variable. After a specified time, sift the vermicompost for castings and compare with unprocessed material. You can do both bulk and weight comparisons.