Hi Al and others, I would appreciate advice on saving sick/dying Picea glauca, in pic.1, please. I bought it on post Xmas sale and it was ~50cm tall, looking healthy, with very bushy top. I repotted it without much root cleaning to keep most original soil with fungus, which I read Picea, like other pines, needs. I planted the rootball with old soil into gritty mix, mostly pine bark fines with seramice, with a bit of gravel, see in pic.2 very "gritty" indeed :); trunk is ~1/2" at the bottom). I used a biggish pot to let it grow freely for a year or two. I also cut the top to encourage lower branches growth but it never happened. Water it when the pot feels light, ~ weekly (it is early autumn here in Sydney) by bottom watering in a bucket, then drain well by keeping the pot at ~45 degrees for a while. Use diluted Nitrosol liquid plant food every two weeks. Keep it on sun for 2-3 hrs, then half shade. Despite all my care (or coz of it ? :), the picea never showed any new growth but started developing warning signs for last 2-3 weeks. Those few thin branches started dying. Their stem turns from brown to greyish-green and gets soggy before dying. See in pic 3&4, that branch in front which is dying now, with grey stem. Other branch died a few days ago. Only three normally looking branches are left. But I am afraid they are facing same fate. Anything I can do to rescue my future picea bonsai at all? Thanks and cheers, Sergey

I don't know where you are in Kansas, but maybe conditions are not too different from mine. I live in the NE corner of Oklahoma. In our climate three things are extremely important, soil, timing, and water. As someone told you above, it is the nature of the potato to die off. The plants will turn ugly and yellow, die back and fall over. That is when you know they have finished their growth cycle and will soon be ready to harvest. Onions are a very early crop here and I put plants in the garden near the end of February for bulbing onions. If you are planting from those little sets from the big box stores and only expect to get green onions, then you can get by with a later planting date. I would suggest looking at the Dixondale Farm shipping chart for your zip code to determine the date they ship to your area because after years of experience they know the best planting dates. http://www.dixondalefarms.com/shipping Onions are day-length sensitive so if you want bulbing onions, make sure you are buying the right type for your climate. I normally grow only intermediates and they have all been harvested and dried for a couple of weeks and I brought them inside today. This year I experimented with long day types and they are still in the garden and growing. We have had an unusually dry year and my onions are not as big as they should have been, so the ones left in the ground are being watered a little better. I start pepper and tomato seed inside under lights at the same time about the 15-20th of February. I put the tomatoes in the garden after my average last frost date, and considering the current weather and the forecast 10 days out from that. Sometimes you will still have a chance of frost after that, but they are still small enough to cover at that stage. It is important to get the tomato plants in the ground early so they have time for fruit set before our horrible heat arrives, but since they are sensitive to low temps you have to protect them from any chance of frost when they first go into the garden. Peppers - Although I start the seeds at the same time as tomatoes, I wait at least two weeks longer before setting out peppers. If exposed to low temps even for a short time they may be effected for life. They thrive in the heat and will produce heavy so be sure to cage or stake them at the time of planting or shortly after because a heavy fruit load may cause them to fall over, especially bell types. They can get heavy enough to pull the roots right out of the ground when they fall over. Most of the colored peppers grow as green peppers and it takes several more weeks for them to change to the ripe color. You will get more production if you use some while green because the plants will bear fewer peppers if they stay on the vine to the ripe stages, but that's your choice. Cucumbers are heavy drinkers and heavy feeders. I try to plant them in the richest soil in my garden. Remember heat eats compost, and heavy rains leach out nutrients so you need to feed the soil every year. When the weather is hot a leaf will sometimes look wilted during the day, which it does to protect itself from the heat. If the wilted condition remains after the sun goes down then they aren't receiving sufficient water. I plant both bush and pole beans and usually at the same time in Spring. The bush types will produce early and give you an early, heavy crop for a few weeks, but after that they aren't worth keeping in a hot climate in my opinion. By the time they are finished, the pole beans should be producing and if kept watered, they will produce until frost. Some years I skip the bush beans, but if you want to can or freeze for later, then they are a good choice. With squash, insects are frequently a problem, and they can be squash vine borers, blister beetles, or squash bugs along with a few others. This year I kept mine covered with row cover until they bloomed, and although I still killed a few squash bugs, and squished a few eggs, I still have plants. Most people plant every few weeks so they always have new plants coming on when the first ones die. For winter squash, try to choose the most resistant types, like butternut. I don't grow corn because I have only a backyard garden and not a field. I think it takes too much room for what you get from the crop. I know a corn farmer. LOL Flea beetles and Japanese beetles may also be a problem and, if so, you will begin to see holes in your leaves, so be aware of that. I usually have a very hard time growing eggplant, but this year the flea beetles haven't done much damage to it. So far, the JBs have not been as bad as they were the last few years. This fall, find all of the leaves you can carry home and try to cover your ground with chopped leaves for the winter. In Spring, pull them back and plant (if they haven't broken down), then after your plants are up and growing and the weather is warming, you can push them back toward the plants as mulch. Make all of the compost you can make. It sounds like your plants need more water, but their water needs may decrease as your improve the condition of the soil in years to come. If you think your soil is the problem then you might try buying commercial POTTING MIX and try a few things in containers. Use large containers if possible and be prepared to water often. I rarely use any fertilizer except in the planting hole when I plant tomatoes, but I feed my soil with leaves, mushroom compost, and the composted waste that comes from the chicken pen. I hope this helps.

It's hard to say because there are various attacks people make against CAFO's (confined animal feeding operations). Additionally large livestock operations are regulated mostly by the states, therefore there is some variability b/t regulations. When I was farming, I was very familiar w/ the regulations of AR & MO, which were rigorous. But even then livestock operations came under attack from people w/ an agenda. Since there were no regulations regarding air quality (people didn't want livestock farms close to their house) and no animal rights regulations, the point of their attack frequently was ground water contamination, since that was their only avenue. In those cases I found it hard to swallow that farms like mine were responsible for polluting ground water when we applied less N/acre than row crop farmers. The P that was applied was taken up by the row crops when they were harvested. In the states I'm familiar with, no permits for livestock operations allow discharge of effluent into streams or rivers. I'll also add our lagoon never ran over. This is very different from city sewage. I have a relative that worked at the main sewage "treatment" plant for Kansas City & Blue Springs (I've toured the plant). They have a discharge permit that allows them to discharge effluent back into the MO river. Someone may respond, "But it's treated." Their treatment essentially consists of allowing the solids to settle in a huge tank and sprinkling the remaining effluent over rocks to get the BOD rate up, then discharging it back into the river. However, during really heavy rains, the plant couldn't handle all the sewage (due to the old practice of hooking up storm drains to sewer systems) so the plant would turn "raw" sewage into the river because they couldn't handle the volume. Despite this, in all the attacks against CAFO's contaminating the water supply I never heard sewage from cities mentioned. In my opinion, it was easier on the conscience to blame agriculture than the flushing of millions of toilets.

The first one or two might have been some sort of a rescue. Loyal was from her '05 batch of puppies and she kept him. Read above in one of the posts. She's planning on letting Isis have two more litters before that dog hits RETIREMENT so she can maybe get a female puppy she can't part with to keep while the rest of the litters would be given away again. But then she might get Sagira back that could also have litters of more puppies but she won't know until February. A female puppy could keep her breeding program going since Isis will be to RETIREMENT age soon. I don't think any of her dogs are spayed or neutered. I guess with so many animals getting nuked because there aren't enough homes to go around why is anybody breeding hybrids OR making more puppies of any breed that need homes with all kinds of low cost spay-neuter programs out there? These hybrids aren't exactly great family pets and they do seem to bite and kill a lot so why do it? These hybrids don't have behavioral issues, those are their behaviors. Her own husband said she should have known better than to get close to the sharp end. HELLLLLLLLLLLLO! These aren't great pets, they even gnaw on each other.