Dear Jane, Dear Gastil, First of all thank you very much, Jane, to have sorted out this large BX. Must have been quite a lot of work. I very much appreciate the new system with a deadline after some days. Gastil, Your remarks about Tropaeolum: I have not experienced any frost with my plants outside in my new garden in Portugal. But I find the information given on the website of Chileflora is very helpful. They describe the early morning frost phenomenon which occurs in many Mediterranean or semi desert climates even in the tropics. It is very different from the frost I used to have in my garden in Germany in the sense that it is only of short duration, mostly due to cold radiation from a cloudless sky and is quickly replaced by warm temperatures during the daytime. Most plants of these climates are fully adapted to a slight frost of short duration, the limit in my experience is at minus 5 degrees centigrade. Below that temperature damage or death of plants will occur. Last autumn I have sown seeds of Tropaeolum azureum, brachyceras, hookerianum and tricolorum, all from Chileflora, all have germinated readily outside unprotected and all have flowered. T. hookerianum was the only one I managed to hand pollinate and harvest seeds from. And this autumn all have sprouted with the onset of rain and cool temperatures. I have kept five seeds for myself which are germinating right now. T. hookerianum was the one that flowered with the highest number of flowers and was the last one to go dormant, hence a crop of seed ripened. The other ones were more sensitive to rising temperatures in spring and went dormant too early. They were repotted once into bigger pots after germination. I kept the tubers in their pots during summer in half shade. They became quite warm but not boiling hot and were watered with small amounts from time to time. Before the onset of rain I repotted them and found surprisingly large tubers for one year old plants. They were fertilized several times during growth. I quite like the idea of a chicken wire dome, I think I will try it because the shoots want to go high up right now. Bye for today Uli _______________________________________________ pbs mailing list pbs@lists.pacificbulbsociety.net http://lists.pacificbulbsociety.net/cgi-bin/…