Just a quick update... First off, thanks again to everyone who posted here, your advice was very welcome. I had surprising difficulty finding some proper soil/compost/stuff/whatever for the house plants. All the local garden centres had sold out, and I still haven't got any. However, I cut back on the watering quite drastically, and now only water when the plants look like they need it. The plants look as fine as they ever did, my chilli plants are all flowering, and the flies have basically gone. We still get the odd one or two, but nothing that would make me think twice. We don't see them around the plants any more, which makes me think that the few we see are either tough ones that haven't had the decency to die since we dried out there homes, or ones that have come from elsewhere. I still intend to repot as and when I can get some soil, but it's a lot less urgent now. Thanks again.

Hi everyone, Thank you for your advice. I continue to spray with organocide. I used garden hose to hose the leaves and flush the soil. They look better. less ants still have some left though. Do we have to spray citrus regularly to protect all insects in the future? I really like the idea of coffee ground. I will try this method soon. I have another question... I'm not sure wheter should I create another post or not. I have a potted honey mandarin tree(dwarf, about 3 ft tall). This past summer, it had about 10 fruits. They looked pretty normal but when we cut them in half, we found out that half of the fruit had dry pulps and another half had juicy pulps. This happened to all 10 oranges. I don't know what cause this? less water?

I have used a Q tip with windex on each that that did it. Also have used other stuff that killed them, but they didn't fall off. You may use Alcohol as well, get them off now, then use a strong spray of water to wipe them clean. Watch for new one to hatch. Keep with it until, you don't see any more. Often when you get a plant like that, they are dead but just not removed. Be sure to also wash your hands so not to spread those babies around. Norma

I like High Country Gardens catalog but it isn't really suitable for our climate here. I live in the Oakland hills and found very few of their plants worked here. It's much better to stay local since we have such great nurseries here. Even the big box stores and some of the drugstores (like Long's) have fabulous nursery sections. Get a copy of the Sunset Western Garden Book; it's the Bible of Western gardeners and has all kinds of useful info in it. Remember you are going to have water in all plants, even xeric ones, until they become established, for at least the first year. Also, the better your soil, the better they will do. Then mulch, mulch, mulch. Soaker hoses work great in mixed plantings and waste so much less water. Use quick couplers to make it easier to switch your hoses around. A groundcover I'm surprised more people don't use is Convolvulus mauritanicus, a morning glory relative. It's amazingly xeric. Not the prettiest groundcover, but very tough and pest-free. Another groundcover that is xeric but won't look good during the winter, is lambs ear (Stacchys byzantia). 'Helen Von Stein' doesn't have the spikey flowers that some folks object to, but the color is a darker green than the standard variety. Any creeping groundcover will need some periodic maintenance to keep them from running over neighboring plants. It's just a fact of life here in the relatively frost-free zones we live in. I'm always fighting my evergreen vines because they keep trying to swallow their neighboring plants! Any vine that grows to 15' in other regions becomes a 30+' monster around here. Lavenders will be very happy with little summer water, as will tagetes lemmonii (bush marigold), hunnemania, dwarf Indian hawthorn, tibouchina urvilleana, any of the new pelargonium hybrids (people call them geraniums, which is botanically incorrect; true geraniums are less showy and thirstier), salvias, cistus (rockrose), roses (once established), artemisia, leptospermum (tea tree) Again, my soil is quite good - we replaced the first 8" of adobe clay with top-quality compost from the Davis St. Recycling Center - and I mulch every year. We like a cottage garden look, not to everyone's taste. I water every 10-14 days, depending on how hot it gets. This photo is from May, when the lavenders, nasturtiums and poppies put on the best show. But I have flowers all year long, actually.