I don't put any sulfur in the holes of the roses pictured. The other holes with sulfur didn't bloom well. My heavy clay is very retentive, there is no leaching here. Here's a quote from Nutrient Stewardship site: "Phosphorus is the nutrient most affected by pH. ..Nitrogen, Potassium, and sulfur are less affected. At alkaline pH values, greater than pH 7.5, phosphate ions tend to react quickly with calcium (Ca) and magnesium (Mg) to form less soluble compounds. At acidic pH values, phosphate ions react with aluminum (Al) and iron (Fe) to again form less soluble compounds." It's good to test if one's tap water is alkaline, some cities add lime to water so pipes won't corrode. Calcium in lime will bind with phosphorus, and less is available. In my 12 years of growing flowers in pots, the year that I got continuous MOST blooms despite my pH 8 water was when I used high phosphorus SOLUBLE fertilizer, and low nitrogen. Granular phosphorus like bone meal and 46% superphosphate are useless in the planting hole here in alkaline clay. My results confirmed what University of Colorado stated "bone meal and rock phosphate can only be utilized at or below pH 7". My pH 7.7 soil was tested most deficient in phosphorus. Here's a quote from David Neal, CEO of Dyna-Grow Plant Nutrition in CA: "There is some evidence to believe that low N helps to convince a plant to stop its vegetative growth and move into its reproductive phase (flowering), but environmental factors are probably more important. P is typically 5th or 6th in order of importance of the six macronutrients. There is little scientific justification for higher P formulas, but marketing does come into play ...." He's right, just a tiny bit of SOLUBLE phosphorus made more blooms and more roots - but beyond that is wasteful. The site, Robert Morris NOBLE plant foundation, rated the mobility of NPK: "Let's compare the mobility of NPK on a scale of 1 to 10. Nitrogen is a 10 ... extremely mobile and can be lost to leaching. Potassium is a 3. It has limited movement in the soil. Phosphorus has a rating of 1. It is immobile in the soil and is likely to stay wherever it is placed." Here is a link that might be useful: Soil pH and availability of plant nutrients

Sheri, Oh, it is drooling time! I can almost taste the tomatoes now. Sungold, Persimmon, and Cherokee Chocolate: if you get ripe tomatoes from only these three plants, you'll still think it is the best tomato year ever, taste-wise! Dr. Wyche's has always done better for me than Kellogg's Breakfast, but then, I have grown DWY for 5 or 6 years and KB for only 2, so Dr. Wyche's has had more opportunity to excell. Dr. Wyche's is a pretty heavy producer, and quite tasty. It also shows great disease resistance. Black Zebra is a very attractive-looking tomato, but I think Black Pineapple (which isn't really black at all, LOL) tastes much better. I have found that every striped tomato I've ever grown has looked pretty, and tasted no better than average. (sigh) Well, I take that back--the one exception is Indian Stripe. Momotaro is probably better than Carmello, but then, your taste buds and your growing conditions are different from mine, so you might find the opposite to be true. I do not think you'll be disappointed in Momotaro though. I haven't grow Alamo. We love Sweet Million and Black Plum, which is our postal carrier's favorite tomato ever since I started sharing them with her several years ago. You're right--I wasn't wild about Japanese Black Trifele, but lots of people love it, so maybe it was just me. Your Mystery Surprise is probably either a tomato that "lost its label" during the seedling growing process, or is from a new grow-out that DJ is trialing and perhaps hasn't even named yet. (I think mysteries and surprises are fun!) Yellow Platfoot Brandywine is yummy, and so is Black Pear. Brandy Boy is the best. If I could only grow one variety, this might be it. There are a few that taste better, but NONE of them can match BB's heavy production and disease resistance. And, even though there are a few that I think taste better than BB, none of them is loads and loads better, only a little better. I don't think I have grown Black Pearl, but isn't it a smallish tomato, more like Black Cherry? I think it is the Burpee hybrid that is said to taste more like a Concord grape after it has been refrigerated? If it even comes close to tasting like Black Cherry, it will be a real winner. I can tell you are ready to get the plants going. Have fun, but be careful and watch the weather. I feel sure we have another freeze or two to get through before Old Man Winter departs and lets us have Spring. I believe you will have more tomatoes this year than last. Remember that so much of last year.....the excessive rainfall, the continual cloudiness, the cooler-than-usual weather all combined to severely affect tomato production. Conditions like that are beyond our control AND exceptionally rare. This has GOT TO be a better year, right? By the way, my little container-grown Better Bush tomato has now formed a second tomato--it is just about the size of an English pea. I am so worried that a deer or possum will get my first green tomato that I carry this plant inside every single night. (It is a very pampered plant at this point. Today I picked up a lady bug and carried her over to the plant and sat her on a leaf, just so she could cruise around and hunt for any bugs that might be lurking.) I am SO looking forward to the first ripe tomato this year. No matter the size of the tomato, we always make BLT sandwiches out of the first ripe one. I am going to order the world's best bacon from the New Braunsfels Smokehouse just so we'll have it for the first BLT of 2008. (Most of the time we eat healthy and watch our fat intake and cholesterol, but BLT time is special and calls for a total disregard of the healthy eating rules!) Keep me posted on how planting goes. I hope to be out in the garden a lot the next few days if the weather cooperates. We are under all kinds of storm watches today, tonight and tomorrow, but so far everything is going either a couple of counties west of us OR a couple of counties east of us, and that's OK with me. Dawn

Thomas Barret in Harnessing the Earthworm _____________________________________________ They are sometimes swallowed by birds and fail to digest and are then dropped in a new location, perhaps on a high mountain or on an island of the sea, or some other out-of-the-way place where it would have been impossible for a mature worm to find its way. _____________________________________________ Funny I just got to that part and when I had wrote it before it was more just intuition rather than gained from reading or experience. Something else that might fit into this thread well that has been gnawing at me a little is the remarks from Pete regarding the reduction of material on its way to becoming castings to the extent that maybe 10% is realized in the form of castings from a given amount of material. This has had me thinking and is somewhat confirmed in the above mentioned book though not really spelled out clearly, at least I have not gleaned it as of yet. My thoughts are that if we say an earthworm consumes its own weight in soil every day then the resultant excrement will much depend on how well the worm is able to reduce it on its fast path from one end to the other. A worm in rich material such as finely prepared scraps or manure would not need to consume as much material to get the nutrients it needs, eating dirt means very little nutrient so much more needs to be pass through the factory to support the same high standard of livin. So a fine dining worm can subsist with a lesser daily volume then one scraping along on inferior fare and would subsequently produce a smaller volume of castings where one that is choking down a large percentage of dirt is going to be passing more of that material and needing to run ever more through the mill to get the same nutritional value. Since a worm will homogenize mineral content from the soil along with the organic output the dirt part is a good thing as it adds these minerals to the litter in a water soluble form ready to be taken up by plant roots and they in turn bulk up the VC daily take (or I suppose that would be leave). Just some thoughts and not very organized at this point so take it all with a grain of salt or soil if your digestive tract can handle it.

Thank you all for your responses. I got a laugh from Otis11 and a lovely image of an acrobatic worm from FrancoiseFromAix. Well, I don't know what variety of red earthworms are in my compost bins, but I can say three things with great certainty: 1-I have thousands of red earthworms that hate light eating decaying matter in my compost bins. 2-I have red earthworms between the layers of my cabbages where there is no light that appear similar to those in my bins, although they are on the smaller-than-average side for the ones in the bins. . 3-These earthworms may be in some areas where there is leaf material that is dead as a result of the base of the leaf having been eaten through, but are also in holes in healthy leaves. My operating theory is that perhaps something else (slugs? a rodent? probably slugs) ate at the base of some of the leaves in the head of cabbage, then some of the Cirque de Soleil worms went exploring and found yummy dead plant tissue in a nice, dark place (inside the cabbage) and started eating. Your worms may not do this, but it's consistent with the idea that these worms eat decaying tissue. Then comes the controversial part: The worms moved on to eating live cabbage tissue. I don't know of any other way to explain all the worms sitting in the middle of holes in a healthy cabbage leaves. Maybe your worms don't do this in the conditions in your garden, but it certainly appears that mine have done this in my garden. Maybe my worms are a different species, maybe the cabbage was challenged by some other attack first, but I've got quite a lot of cabbages, each with dozens of red earthworms happily munching away to contradict any idea that no earthworm ever eats any living plant anywhere under any conditions. Here's a link to a video I just found that shows an earthworm (not the variety I have) pulling pieces of leaves off of a living plant. The video starts with it tugging on some dead material, but it yanks off a green leaf about 34 seconds into the video. Who knew they could do that? Whatever variety I have seems to have mastered eating live plants. I don't know if they can pull off pieces like that, but the video is very interesting. Here is a link that might be useful: Some worms attack live plants.