I have read some of the other threads on this board, and the most common advice is to just add organic matter to the soil. The worms and microbes will then take the organic matter into the ground. Get comfortable. Here's an overview of Modern Organic Gardening. There's a little more specificity needed here. If you want to improve your soil, you should add food for the soil microbes to the top of the soil. There are over 100,000 different species of microbes living in your soil, but unless they receive real food at some point, they will not be in good health. You need healthy microbes to have healthy soil. The microbes living at the surface of the soil will eat anything dead that falls on the surface. Historically (and prehistorically) this included dead animals (dinosaurs, too), plants that either die or get trampled by browsing or grazing animals, and dung from the animals. This is the mechanism by which protein, carbohydrates, vitamins, minerals, and enzymes are returned to the soil for recycling. The surface microbes decompose the dead stuff and after that, subsurface microbes decompose the surface microbes and their waste materials. The food chain of microbes eating other microbes and their waste materials is so complex it is referred to as, "the soil food web." If you read the label on most organic fertilizers (but not Scott's organics) you'll find many ingredients in common. What they use most often is ground up grains like corn, wheat, soy, and flax; but you'll also find they use cottonseed meal, alfalfa, and a few more ground up grains, nuts, seeds, and beans. Rarely (Scott's products) will you find feather meal, bone meal, chicken manure, and blood meal in an organic fertilizer. The cost for most commercially branded and bagged organic fertilizers is about $1 per pound in bulk. However, you can visit your local feed store and find these same ingredients in plain brown bags starting at about $0.15 per pound in 50-pound bags. Any of these materials make great organic fertilizers - i.e. food for your soil's microbes. The next thing you can do to improve your soil is to set up an environment that favors microbial growth. In fact, this is really about 10x more important than the organic fertilizer, but I wanted to get you back on track with some preferred organic materials. To make your soil a good environment, it needs to have moisture. We just went through a drought of a couple years which made it very hard to keep the soil moist as deep as I would have liked to. So this spring I had pretty hard soil, even when it was very wet. In order to establish my microbial family back into my soil, I use a soaker hose. I put the hose on at a very slow trickle, day and night, for a week. Then I move it about 18 inches and continue with the trickle moisture. At this rate there is no runoff. If you try it and get runoff, you need to back off on the trickle even more. Then when I've finished doing the entire yard like that, I start over at the top and repeat the entire process. I do the entire process three times before my soil softens, but once it softens, it usually stays pretty good for a couple seasons with weekly watering. How does this work? Picture a loaf of bread just starting to get moldy. At first it has a few green spots, but if you leave it alone, in just a day or two, the entire loaf is completely engulfed in furry mold. Mold and fungi can grow extremely fast once it has the right environment. That same thing happens in your soil if you have the right environment. That fuzzy mold on the bread grows to several inches long if you let it. In the soil it can grow several feet and yards long - all underground so you never see it. What these long strands of fungus do is push the soil particles apart when they are moist. This forms an "open structure" in the soil. When the mold (fungus) dries out, it shrinks away from the soil particles leaving a gaping micro hole to allow air and the next rain to penetrate more easily. I refer it it as a sponge. The soil should be soft like a sponge when wet and hard like a sponge when dry. And the soil should absorb water pretty quickly once it is conditioned like this. When you put all this together in Mother Nature's way, the corn meal you apply to the surface of the soil will feed the beneficial soil microbes at the surface. These healthy microbes will die and provide food for the rest of the soil food web. Eventually some of the microbes will excrete Mother Nature's natural plant food, the same food that sustained life on Earth prior to us coming along to help things with refined chemicals. Is your head hurting?

Ginny, Waiting longer, but not too long, should definitely help; how much help depends on the climate. Next year, try sampling two oranges every two weeks starting late Nov. This is an educational step teaching you when to harvest the fruit. Although this can change from year to year depending on climate and care, at least you get a baseline regarding the progression from very acid to ripened sweet. For my area, late Dec is usually the ripest time, but I always go by feel to find them when heavy in addition to sampling. Regarding your trees: Chances are your soil pH will be at least a little high which means the tree can't take up the nutrients it needs -- even if they are in the soil in abundance. The long-term treatment is clear: 1) keep the soil pH around 6.5 2) apply a fertilizer with a ratio *near* 5-1-3 NPK. It must have micro-nutrients labeled on it. 3) once a year apply 1Tbsp/gal Epsom Salts dissolved in warm water (as very few ferts have Magnesium (Mg) in them). If it's an *organic* fertilizer, the NPK ratio can be different and it's probably OK. But citrus use lots of N, hardly any P, and K in about half the rate of N. The second #, P=Phosphorus builds up in the soil and is becoming taboo. There are a few ways of lowering your soil pH, with many good ideas on the net. If you go the Sulfur route, you can apply the sulfur granules once/year when warm in spring at the same time you apply the Epsom salts. As you've done a great job so far answering our questions, you may want more opinions on exactly what the tree is deficient in. If so, take several more photos of the sections that are yellow; take some closeup, some a few feet away. Use your highest resolution and largest image size and upload it to Photobucket (don't post the actual photo here). By examining larger sections of the leaves, we'll know better what you need. As ashley has stated, applying some iron chelate in vinegar water is a simple test to see if iron is all it needs. But honestly it's probably academic anyway, since the care steps I listed above should resolve any issues long-term. We've covered the sweetness topic. Regarding the dryness topic, if you get a year where the majority of them are looking that way, take some pics and lets try to figure it out what happened. As I said earlier, there are some known effects for causing that particular condition: excessive N, lower K, but it can also be caused by excessive watering. It also can happen when they are over-ripe. The internal cells will burst and dry out; in some climates this can happen relatively quickly after their peak ripeness. Chris

I bought some 48 inch florescent "plant" lights at Walmart. They have worked just fine, although I only bought them because they were out of the cheaper regular shoplights I think they were about $5 each. Make sure you read the label. I accidently bought a plant light and got home only to find out it was just to make my plants appear greener, not help them grow. I got a hanging shop light at Walmart for $8. It's quite small and doesn't take up much space. If you bought a 2-pack of lights, it would probably be under $11 total for the whole set up. I've had good success with 40 watt lights. Allison

I think you are also asking about the differences (pros and cons) between rangetops and cooktops, right? Surface area - cooktops have less real estate for your pots and pans because of the knobs. If you are looking at a 30" cooktop, this is really a problem (see Deeageaux's pic above), and I would not recommend a cooktop in a 30" size. Rangetops have the knobs across the front, like a range, but without the oven, so more surface real estate for your pots and pans. Aesthetics - cooktops are a more sleek contemporary look; rangetops are a more "professional kitchen" bulky look. A matter of personal preference. Power - rangetops tend to have more btu's than cooktops, though many find the cooktop's btu's to be plenty, so again, personal preference. Knob placement - for cooktops, some say they don't like the idea of having to turn knobs while a hot pot and flames are right next to the knobs. Also there have been reports of cooktops' knobs becoming damaged over time by the heat. Others say they prefer the cooktop's knob placement because it's easier to see them (vs. looking at the knobs on a rangetop), and they don't mind that the knobs may or may not be close to heat. Future replacement - if you need to replace a rangetop, it's a matter of simply switching out. If you need to replace a cooktop, you may or may not find another cooktop with those exact dimensions to fit in your counter cut-out. This problem has been reported several times on this forum and the Kitchens forum, with people having to re-cut counters or find filler for counters in order to fit a new cooktop. Expense - rangetops cost more than cooktops.