Well, bad news today, Amazon is sold out of the Opalkas.. I will call Laurel later today and see if she has any. What I would do is do a search for "Tomato Plants for Sale, Bay are, or your city or a big city nearby. Why do I suggest that? Well I did a search for Tomato Plants "Orange County Calif". I didn't turn up any nursery that had the kind of maters I wanted, so I found Laurel and ordered them all from her. I had a dentist appointment Tuesday, and on the way home, I stopped at a local Nursery, (about 10 miles from Home). They had every mater I wanted, and nice size and price too!, GRRRRRR. I did not find that nursery when I did my search because it was in LA County!!!!! With Me, I want "Instant Gratification" with my maters, and had I done a better search, they would be in my garden now!!! I'm 70 and don't have the patience, time, or wish to take the chance on something going wrong trying to plant seeds, caring for them, light heat, water, etc, transplanting them a couple times, hardening off etc etc, so I always buy live plants. Hope you find your maters! Gary

It needs to be soap, not dish detergent. What we commonly call dish soap actually is detergent and detergent can kill or damage plants much more readily than soap does. he damage can be invisible and leave you wondering why your plant's health is declining, or it can be very visible, especially on plants with very tender foliage, like tomato plants. The foaming goat milk soap you buy would be great if you want to mix up your own. You always should test a homemade spray on a small portion of a plant first, wait 24-48 hours to see if damage results, and then use that same formulation on the rest of your plant or plants if it didn't do any damage to the test area. Any product that is a gentle soap would be fine. I use the Dr. Bronner's line of soaps that all are castile-based inside our house and I use the peppermint soap outdoors to make ants move a pathway so that it isn't running through an area where we walk. Right now I have his lavendar soap, tea tree oil soap and peppermint soap....the liquid versions, which are highly concentrated and last forever. For the garden I use a commercial horticultural soap. I always have and always will. These are precisely formulated and tested and, if used as labeled and with careful attention to ensure you don't use them in high temperatures, they will not harm your plants. Mixing up a spray or drench using a detergent is a little like playing Russian roulette. It might not harm your plants most of the time, but then again on any given occasion that you use it, it might. Why risk it? Soap sprays work by penetrating the insects' waxy cuticle, causing them to desiccate and die. Well, guess what? Plants have a waxy cuticle too (some types more so than others) and soap sprays can harm plants the same way it harms insects. With a commercial insecticidal soap products, the companies have done everything they can to precisely formulate the product so it kills the insects and not the plants. They've tested their formulations. They know how much soap is enough and how much is too much. All that is reflected in their label directions. When you mix up a soap formula at home that precision is gone. No one, including the manufacturer of dish detergents, ever has tested their product to see what ratio of detergent to water gives you a safe spray that kills insects and not plants, so a person is just "guessing" when they use a detergent or, for that matter, even when mixing up a homemade insecticidal soap using actual soap. I can't help wondering if those little insects are young aphids that haven't reached full size yet. Normally herbs are relatively pest-free when grown outdoors. That is because herbs don't have many pest problems and the few pests that show up are easily handled by the beneficial insects that are around. However, when you grow herbs indoors without any beneficial insects around, they are prone to being attacked by mites, aphids, mealy bugs, scale and whiteflies. I've never seen little bugs like you have in any of my containers, indoors or out, and I've been gardening all my life. They might be some little soil-dwelling pest that doesn't hurt anything, but it is hard to tell. If you aren't seeing them up on the plants themselves, then the only damage they might be doing is to the roots if they are doing any damage at all. Be sure you aren't keeping the soil too wet. Wet soil seems to encourage both pests and diseases. There are some organic products that can be applied to the soil as a drench to kill insects in the soil, but I'd hate to use them if I didn't know for a fact that the pests I was seeing were indeed doing some sort of damage. Spinosad is an example of one such product. I don't spray it on my plants as a spray because it is broad-spectrum but I use it in a pelleted form in two different products----one for snails/slugs.sow bugs and pill bugs, and the other for fire ants. I generally don't keep many insecticides around (or, actually, I keep them on a shelf in the potting shed but I rarely actually use them). Almost everything you could find on that shelf in my potting shed today came from Wal-Mart or Tractor Supply, or occasionally from Lowe's or Home Depot. There's only a couple of organic products I have to order online and have shipped because they are not readily available. Now, if you are seeing those little bugs that are in your soil actually move onto the plants, you'd have to do something because at that point you'd know they were likely to damage your plants. I just ignore insects if they aren't doing major damage. It is impossible to have plants that are insect free unless, perhaps, you're using heavy-duty systemic pesticides of a synthetic nature. I grow the herbs you listed (and many others) outdoors and most of them are in the ground and not in pots, and insects don't bother them enough for me to even notice the damage. Do I see insects on the plants? Sure. But I don't see anything other than the most minor damage. In fact, a lot of my herbs are used as companion plants to repel or confuse pest insects. I can't help thinking that if you could put the plants outside for a few hours a day, the pests might disappear on their own, but that's just a guess. Hope this helps, Dawn

Blight is probably what is making people recommend not to reuse the potting mix. The spores that cause tomato blight (the late blight that crawls up from the bottom and makes the leaves turn brown and fall off) live in the soil and are spread to the leaves when rainwater splashes soil onto the bottom leaves. I have reused potting mix for tomatoes by mixing in some fresh compost and using it in the bottom half of the large pot. Then finish with fresh potting mix on top. My theory is the plant is less likely to get those spores if the reused soil is covered. My tomatoes always seem to get blight no matter what, but it was certainly no worse than usual. Compaction is a real problem so if you try this, use very coarse compost or some shredded wood like you would find in coarse potting mixes. Any leftover mix from last year ends up in my compost pile to (hopefully) re-equalize the spore population. I also mulch around tomatoes as soon as they are planted to reduce the soil splashing.

Agree with greenman 100%. Fertilizer spikes of ANY kind are about the poorest delivery system for plant nutrients ever devised!! If already purchased, do you and your plants a favor and grind them up before applying.......at least that way you have some assurance that any nutrients are relatively well distributed throughout the root zone.