Greetings Jenny! Its always good to see a fellow proponent of organic gardening. A few questions that may lead to possible suggestions: Have you taken full advantage of microlife? You are using organic ferts which is great, but to get the greatest advantage of organics over salt ferts you need to have strong microlife living in your growing medium (dirt). This includes beneficial aerobic bacteria (which you most likely have covered due to your ingenious oxygenated organic teas) and most importantly Mycorrhizae fungus. The fungus lives symbiotically with your plants by making a mycylem network throughout your grow medium and then fruiting directly on the roots themselves. The fungus chelates all of the minerals to make them more readily available to the plant and in exchange is fed with excess carbohydrates that are shed from the roots as a normal byproduct of their growth. The fungus also buffers your PH and acts as a front-line immune system. If you get a good and diverse set of microlife going it can even keep down multi-celled pests. Bugs like gnats, whitefly and the like all have a part of their life cycle where they fly down to the medium and plant some sort of egg. The eggs will be attacked and digested by particularly vigorous microlife before they get a chance to hatch. Getting this kind of microlife while heavily employing unnatural salt ferts is virtually impossible. If you haven't employed something similar already, I would highly reccomend Hydro Organics Rooter's Mycorrhizae Super Pack as a great source of dormant spores to give your micro-life a kick-start. A less advanced but easier to find alternative is Espoma's Bio Tone Starter Plus, which is an organic fertilizer mix (4-3-3) that contains a small variety of Mycorrhizae spores and dormant aerobic bacteria. You can find it at Lowe's, its great stuff. You also mentioned using an aquarium air pump and stone to oxygenate your tea which is an awesome idea, but have you considered that similar pumps and stones may work even better when aerating your growing medium constantly? This kind of setup supercharges your microlife and provides huge quantities of oxygen to your plants' root systems, allowing them to take up nutrients far more readily. Getting it right is a bit more complicated then an old-fashioned pot of dirt, but is nowhere near the complexity of hydroponic setups from which the concept is stolen. I've outlined the process to a fair degree of detail in my own grow diary over in the tomato section, I've included a link to it if you are interested. Oh, and one last thing. Something that gave me trouble and could be effecting you under that massive 1000 watt HID lamp: I found that my growing medium tended to dry out quite rapidly under these sorts of powerful lamps. A good way to lock in moisture and reflect a lot of that energy is to put a 1/2 to 1 inch thick layer of pearlite on top of the medium. However, your rapidly expanding foliage may soon make it a moot point :) Good luck and happy gardening! Here is a link that might be useful: My indoor tomato diary

My neighbor works for Ball International Nursery. They grew some of Yves Piaget's seeds in a 45% composted pine fines, peat moss, vermiculite, perlite, and gypsum. the pot was 1/2 gallon, but the rose had at least a dozen blooms, very impressive. That's the same way when I bought a gallon-rose from Home Depot. I pulled that rose out, and the soil was coarse pine barks mixed with peat moss, and osmocote fertilizer. There was at least a dozen blooms on that rose bush, way more blooms than leaves. The growing medium has an effect on flowering. The Russian Grower Gerda who posted the most-blooms roses in HMF told me she applied humus. Pine Fines break down into humus, and roses love that stuff. In my garden, there's a poor drainage clay spot, so I put tons of fresh pine mulch... the two roses Firefighter and Romantica Sweet Promise, both gave me 80 to 90 blooms as 1st year gallon-own-root. There's another spot which I fixed clay with peatmoss, thinking that would hold more moisture. However, Sonia Rykiel and Crimson Glory did bad, despite tons of rain, like 5 blooms for 1st year. I dug those up and found the soil was rock-hard like cement. Pine mulch (pH 4.5) works better than peat moss (pH 4) because it's a larger particle, which aerated my heavy clay. Roots need oxygen. Both Sonia Rykiel and Crimson glory were yellowish, due to soil compaction and less oxygen with dense peatmoss glue-up with clay. In contrast, peat moss worked great for Columbus Rose Park in Ohio ... they fixed their sandy soil with peat moss, with tons of blooms on Graham Thomas & others. Here's a horticulture research entitled "Rose-cultivation with coco-soil versus pumice". Here's the result: "As far as flower production was concerned, more flowers were harvested from plants grown on coco-soil than on pumice, independently of the planting density. On the other hand, stem length and weight were the same in rose flowers produced on both substrates. " See link below: Here is a link that might be useful: Comparative study of coco-coil vs. pumice soil This post was edited by Strawberryhill on Mon, Nov 25, 13 at 17:33

Have to confess that the 'gardener guy's' goofiness is a bit much sometimes, but his knowledge and enthusiasm are great. He really knows and loves plants and gardening, and gives lots of information between the occasional spasms. I don't care that much about some of his topics--I really don't care much about how to have a better lawn for instance--but I know lots of people do, and as long as he covers some of the topics I'm interested in I'll keep watching. I also agree with shows at 6:00 being awfully early for me, and I agree with what someone called 'moving the furniture around' shows. Some of them are more interesting now that we're working on a lot of projects around the house--or I should say my son is!--but they barely deserve to call themselves 'house and GARDEN tv' when they do so little with gardens.

Welcome to Garden Web, Starflakes. Correct me if I'm wrong: ZDnet is one of the places you can go to download programs like RealPlayer and Acrobat Reader. It isn't a little place which needs self promotion. Thank you for this tip. Some of us need all the reminders we can get. A diary with such features might be a handy tool. Nell