you live and learn.... I grew up in a different part of world. Our soil was (still is ) volcanic, quite enriched with minerals. Our "fertilizer" means buying sheep manure and mixed on the ground before the season starts or place very little under the plants (your parent explain to you it will burn the plant if it is too much) If the soil has been used such a long time or hasn't been used for years we would just go and purchase "pine forest soil" (equivalent to humus). you leave the water hose on for a while and move it to the different part of the garden (water comes from the mountain for free. Ants are sacred (because those are so harmless and so hardworking) and you can play with them by letting them climb on your hands. If you asked me something about gardening my advices would be based on those experiences. I moved to houston and learned over the years that everything is different! I dug a little area in the backyard to plant some stuff. Most of them did very poorly. Aggressive St. Augustine grasses took over some garden patches. I have learned that ants bite and leave you with a very nasty bite. Hard clay is impossible to till, there are not many places you can get sheep manure, there is no definition of "one tractor full forest soil" etc. You PAY for the water and it is city water with chlorine! Eventually I started with one raised bed and grew giant tomatoes. I purchased "vegetable garden mix" from Lowes and mixed with composted manure ;voila! wonderful tomatoes. They stop producing around mid June and I tought " maybe they are big in size but small in production. It must be an American thing. After 10 years in U.S, several attempt to being a Gardner, We have let one Gardner to take care of the soil for the new raised beds and the result: enriched top soil is not for medium growing and soil needs to be replaced! With what? Exactly what we were using years and years ago in the other side of the world with new definition: Potting soil (70% forest material, nitrogen enrichment etc...) duh! read the label dumb lady! Isn't it similar to the "forest soil" Composted cow manure (isn't that the same thing placing manure in earlier in the soil) so there is not only good but easier to handle manure exist some peat most (I still have no clue what it is but I add 5% anyway since it makes the soil softer) Since taste comes first (at least for me ) I stop right there! no more addition. If it is not growing in there It is not meant to be for me. Tomato production stops around June not because those are American plants because of Houston HEAT. I just wanted to tell you what my story is. Overall everyone has a different experience. Unless you are with someone next door who is doing the most sustainable gardening for years you will make a lot of mistake and get a lot of different opinion from different experience. Spending money on gardening : Everyone spends their money one way or another. Some buy clothes, some eat outside, some upgrade their car, some does this some does that. SOme people see it a lot of money spend on hobby, luxury when it comes to gardening some like me think " I don't do this and that and gardening is my only hobby" I would love to purchase a block of land in the city and use it as a community garden with the community around but I cant. Since I can afford 4 raised bed and good soil in it, I will (have done already) do that.

4 Fan Aloes, 1 'Lavender Lady Passion Vine, 2 Choisya, 1 Kniphofia northiae, 1 4" Galvezia juncea, 1 Tecoma 'Sparky', 1 bromeliad, 1 coyote mint, 1 3" cuphea and 3 lemon thyme, 2 4" Iris confusa 'Chengdu', 1 Hymenocallis, 2 3" epazote, 3 alstroemeria, 1 clematis, 1 salvia and whatever else I cannot recall off the top of my head. Some other things are waiting for the bump-the-pot game. There are various reasons for the stall--some are waiting for bed prep or the end of vegetable season space, others are rarely offered plants I could not delay purchasing, some are stressed and not healthy enough for the ground transfer yet, one is on hold to make sure it has no systemic in its system before placement in the caterpillar food area, and many are just waiting out the summer heat season. I sleep fine. :)

Susan, The nice thing is that she can be whatever she wants to be as long as she's willing to work for it. When my now 24-year-old niece was 3-years-old, Tim asked her "What do you want to be when you grow up?" and she replied "Barbie!" Well, she didn't grow up to be a Barbie doll after all, but she is a mom herself now and that was her real dream all along. Chipotle heat varies depending on which kind of jalapenos you use to make them. Chipotles are just roasted jalapenos and you can roast them in the oven or on the grill. I freeze them but they also can be canned in adobo sauce. It sounds like you had an amazingly successful butterfly year. After having very low butterfly numbers in 2008, everything seemed to return to normal this year, and I still have tons of butterflies here in the first week of November. There are all kinds, but especially the sulphurs. In August and September, it was mostly swallowtails. If I pay attention to what is going on around me, I'll see butterflies here almost every month of the year....although not too many in January and early February. I am not sure about the grasshopppers for 2010. We saw their population make a strong resurgence all over Oklahoma this year but we won't know for 2-4 more months if their numbers will climb higher and peak in 2010 (likely) or if 2009 was a peak. A very cold and very wet winter works against them, so let's hope for 'cold', since the El Nino pattern more or less guarantees 'wet'. For us here in southern OK, there are years we start seeing grasshoppers hatching out at the very end of January or in earliest February. In a year when that happens, I make a mental note to buy one of the natural baits with nosema locuste (Grasshopper Attack or Semaspore or Nolo Bait) in it and scatter some once the hoppers are 1/4 to 1/2" long. It kills them quickly when they are in the younger instars. I only put out a little if I am seeing early hatchings, but I put out more every couple of weeks through about early May. If you can catch them early, they are easy to deal with. If I don't see a lot of grasshoppers hatching out until March or early April, that's a good sign and likely we'll have lower populations. So, by mid-Spring, we'll know for sure. And, of course, it goes without saying that there's not much we can do about the other grasshoppers that migrate into our yards during the summer since they grew up elsewhere, but I do think it helps if you've been able to keep the native population very low before the migrating ones arrive. Because grasshoppers were bad, blister beetles were bad too, although they were bad late. The blister beetles eat a lot of things, and I believe grasshopper eggs are one of their food sources. So, if we are seeing lots of hoppers, we'll have to brace ourselves for lots of blister beetles. We had prolonged heat in part of July and part of August which did make those water bills pretty high, but the rest of the year the water bill was just a dream. The important thing was that the rain came along every so often and kept the garden in heavy production a lot longer than normal. I can justify the high water bill if I'm harvesting oodles of produce, which I was. For once, I didn't have to just give up on watering and walk away and let the drought take the garden from me, so it was very nice. The amazing thing about our rain, Susan.....here in Love County we had 23" in 2008 and, so far, about 48" in 2009. I guess you can see where our average annual rainfall (36-38") comes from. I have to say that I prefer the 48" years to the 23" years. Grandkids are fun. We just should have had them first! Dawn

If you manage to get them out of dormancy let me know how you did it! I have two that always wait until April to bloom... which I don't entirely mind since there's nowhere good to keep them until they can go outside again, but still February would be nicer. I had so much trouble finding pots. Since I bought more than I had pots for I had to trudge up to the box stores. No fun during holiday shopping season and then to find all the shelves bare :( Tried the 25 minute drive backup hardware/garden store only to find a gated parking lot and for sale sign.... finally drove out to the last of the independent, all year garden centers in the area. Pots galore at a great price, finally! -and they were even friendly to me for once, something that hadn't happened before.