WOW - that doesn't seem like much water. Only relative to the amount you've been using. Question: Why do you feel obgliated to water so much? You have to let it dry out. The number one cause of death of house plants is over watering. It is also common with vegetable gardens. Over watering not only suffocates the roots, it encourages all types of fungus and disease problems. You're stressing your plants and making them weak because they literally can't breathe. People think they only breathe thru the top foliage, but they breathe thru the roots equally if not more. Think of how your skin looks and feels after you sit in a bathtub full of water too long. In your case, after your moisture meter test, here is what I recommend to you housemouse: Don't water for a week. Yes, an entire 7 full days of no watering by housemouse. Is it possible? it came out at 3-4 (on a 0-10 scale) at a depth of about 3". The deeper I went, the more moisture there was. This is why plants can survive in drought. Especially native plants whose roots can go down 16 feet. But if you water all the time then the roots don't go down and area spreading out near the surface making them much more susceptible to fluctuation and less stable in the long run housemouse, I don't think you should be so worried about the pH as much as you should be worrying about the N-P-K levels of your soil. But if the pH is varying so much perhaps your soil was not mixed well. Where are you located? What county and state? Then water deeply no more than once a day, preferably in the morning, on days when it is really hot and no more than every other day or even every 2 days the rest of the time. Still too much, especially with the recommendation to deep water that often. You should only deep water once or twice a week. If done properly, there will be plenty of moisture available to the roots even if the top of the soil is dry. Oh, and the plants sitting in the water in the greenhouse...please dump out the excess water. Seedlings should never be left sitting in standing water. They can't get air (just as important as water) and it rots the roots. Let them drink their fill and then dump the water that isn't taken up within the first few minutes. Yes. 100% agree. In fact, what are the seedlings? housemouse, How thick of a layer is that wood mulch? You wrote: " haven't added any fertilizer yet - maybe that's my problem?" Your plants look like they need fertilizer. Compost is fertilizer. The industry has everyone believing fertilizer is the answer to everything when the reality is that concentrated fertilizers cause far more harm than good more often than you think. Use compost which is nature's fertilizer and nature has been doing it for thousands of years. You can't burn your plants, it releases at the proper rate for the root systems, you can't go wrong so long as you use a blend of compost created from at least five different sources.

Hi, I quote your original post: "We took the energy and time to level the ceiling, put up new drywall etc... We then sealed it with an oil based sealer/primer. Waited a few days, then proceeded to paint on a laytex ceiling paint. " You directly state you used an oil based sealer primer. Show us a picture of the labels on the cans. There must be some product incompatibility going on. Rough texture shouldn't appear out of nowhere. When there's a problem I always suspect that the first coats were not allowed to dry fully, esp. if the primer was oil. If it is uncured it will cause mischief with the finish coat, esp. flat latex. Putting more coats on top to affect a remedy actually makes it worse. I'd let it dry a good long time and see what happens. Another thought: you absolutely never put oil primer over new plaster- the caustic components turn the oil in the paint to soap and it peels right off. If the drywall job involved a large quantity of setting-type joint compound, the house is unheated, and the work was finished immediately before painting, then that's a possibility; the moisture still inside the not-fully-cured Durabond is reacting with the oil primer. Casey

Okay, just reread my previous post and thought it might have sounded sarcastic or snippy instead of funny . . . which is what I intended!! It took me FOREVER to master posting pics, and still takes me a long time to actually do it if I have more than a couple or if I resize. You'll get it . . .

Other than the sunburned ones which are drying the leaves, having varied colors on the succulents is actually kind of interesting to some people. They change color slightly based on some stress factors. In your case, it was probably the direct sun without acclimating them.