Thank you, Dave! I feel so dumb. I thought I had looked at the FAQ and didn't really find much info. Reason why? I clicked the WRONG link and was actually looking at something not related to the FAQ. I read through all the links. Very helpful, and thorough. One question: Can I use straight sphagnum peat as my growing medium? I also have some perlite if it would be better to mix the two. I will be using recycled flats, and prefer to keep the seedlings growing in this medium until I transplant outdoors in the garden. What do you think? I'm so excited to give this a try! I just have to rig up a shop light in the basement and I'll be set. Thanks for the help! Sandy

1) Liatris (spicata?) Butterflies use for nectar and birds can eat seeds on spent blooms. Groundhogs & deer love mine as much as I do so I don't often get to see blooms. Thanks for sharing yours...LOL. 2) Nepeta (one of groundcover types?) Attracts "good" bees looking for nectar. I have some 'Blue Carpet' new this year and I'm not impressed with them. Got leggy and browning like yours but they get cut back each year so next year's growth may be better. 3) ? Looks like something in the Rudbeckia family but I don't grow them because deer and other critters would eat them. I'm sure there are more experienced posters who can pinpoint exactly for you. Good plants to have!

Many tropicals flower best when outdoors so if possible you should keep them in containers and move them outside when its warm for the summer, and back in a few weeks before the average first frost. Some of my favorate tropcials are hibiscus (full sun), plumerias (dwarf if you dont have alot of room) mandevilleas (grow like weeds, but look better than most plants out their) birds of paradise (orange birds of paradise has the best chance of flowering in a pot) and many other flowers like orleanders, bougainvilleas, and heliconias. A lot of tropical plants like humidity and full sun so try to get a good spot for them. Until you get really good a regualr camera will do, but when you get good you may want some more expensive cameras. Artifical lighting is not usually nessesary as long as you have good light. Good luck

Dan, I've used a few different mixes in containers and I like the sound of your sea soil. The problem with containers is that the system is really too small to set up a true organic soil system in them. People do all sorts of things and may technically get away with it, but I my abilities can't do a completely organic soil and get reliable production, since any "help" and you kid yourself that it is "almost organic". That said, I had some luck with a mixture of 1/3 compost (Black Kow Composted Organic), 1/3 peat & 1/3 perlite in summer but you must watch it doesn't get waterlogged. I know it sounds strange, but raw perlite is "organic". You could put some of those fancy rock dusts in there and dolomitic lime and give it a whirl. Problem is at some point your plants will need the nutrient boost of something like Miracle Gro, which is not organic, but not as bad as some make it out to be, either! There are some Fox Farms hydroponic/organic and Dutch Master hydro organic ones, but these things are really cost intensive and there is no way I could afford to even evaluate them. Tomato-Tone is organic and you can use some of it (the affordable option I would use) but a lot of experimentation is necessary to get it right in a bucket. Those are the tools I would use. There are others that are more expert than I am in this forum on organic methods in a container, but the problem is that ingredients and climates can vary enough that a lot of experimentation is necessary anyway and it is a bit much to ask of a container considering the nutrient demands of a big tomato plant. And a bigger contaner ( say, 25 gallons) can be costly to fill with organic nutrients only. There are other much more economic ways to go if you drop the requirement of deriving all nutrition from "organic" sources, for example pine mulch, etc, is cheap but offers no nutrition so it doesn't get you anywhere nutrient wise, though it might help you save on perlite. I can't answer whether your tap is appropriate for your plant, even knowing the pH is 7.5. That's because it will be the interaction among the tap, soil ingredients and amendments that determine the pH of the container. For example, if your soil starts on the acid side which it likely will it needs to be neutralized with some lime, but you can do what I do ... put less in and water with alkaline water for a while. Clearly that is not an optimal situation but to be honest my plants do fine despite all the issues with pH, and my tap is pH 7.7. But this is a fragil relationship and the only way to now for sure is to pH test your soil while you grow toget the hang of what's happening, if you are really enthusiastic. Just because it works for me, btw, doesn't mean it will work for everyone. We get lots of rain here and that frequently washes trhough soil mixesand I purposely open the tops wide to encourage that. No residue builds up from the tap or any of my not-organic supplements due to the rain. The common wisdom of hydroponics of a vegetative and a reproductive period fertilization schemes doesn't seem very pronounced to me when growing the tomato for the long haul. To be perfectly honest, I think all these mantras about vegetative stages and drastic changes during flowering stages are geared towards high value crops LOL. Really with tomato plants you want to keep the nitrogen at a baseline, low in all of my scenarios. You are not growing vines, they get quickly unmanageable for indeterminates and make few tomatoes, and most everyone here seems to agree that being pretty stingy with nitrogen is the way to go. That's the opposite of what you've done. When I grow my tomatoes, my seedlings have only 1/2 to 2/3 the nitrogen the producing plants do, so my nitrogen rate actually increases for me. At the end I back off though because the plants get less productive and unmanageable so there's a lot of give and take. Hope that helps a little, because nothing is as easy as it seems, so most people find something that works and get pretty stuck to it. Cheers PC