Howdy Neighbors! Thought I'd pop in from Oklahoma to see how y'all are doing over there. From ceresone's comments, I gather that some of y'all are not having a lot of rain? Well, you can have ours if you can figure out how to get it from here to there. I dearly wish we could send you the rain that is tormenting our state. It is flooding all over the place and many Oklahoma gardeners are deeply depressed as the continuing rain has wiped out many veggie gardens and is making normal gardening chores impossible to accomplish. While the rain has been beneficial in many ways....like refilling the aquifers after the 2005-2006 drought and, of course, refilling ponds and causing trees, shrubs, groundcovers, etc. to grow like crazy.....it has been harmful in others, including the flooding of agricultural fields, loss of crops, widespread fungal and bacterial disease, etc. etc. After the big wildfires of '05-'06, we all swore we wouldn't whine about too much rain ever again, but we've already had as much rain here in Love County as what we get in an average year (over 30" and more rain is falling right now), and the Red River is flooding. Vickie, I had never heard of the Rainbow people. How fascinating that some hippies are still around. When I was a child in the 1960s, we had hippies living in a local park near our house in Fort Worth. They were very peaceable and quiet, but law enforcement ran them off....saying public parks were not living places. And, I didn't know you had bears....but I haven't visited this forum in a long time. I am not terribly afraid of wildlife (we have panthers and mountain lions pass through our property occasionally and they DO scare me a bit, especially when they roar, growl or snarl at me) but I think I would lose it if I ever walked outside and saw a bear! In southern Oklahoma the plums and peaches have been wonderful, having barely squeaked by and survived the late freezes. The further north you go in Oklahoma, the greater the losses of fruit to those same late freezes in April. A lot of gardeners are having trouble with their tomato plants. Too much rain is waterlogging roots, even in normally well-drained soil, foliar diseases are much more prevalent than usual, and the darned green tomatoes just won't ripen for many people due to the constant clouds and a lack of sunshine all this growing season. My tomatoes are doing better than most, but I am very far south and may have had a bit more sun than most. Ceresone, I hope you get the rain you are praying for. Your garden sounds terrific, though, in spite of all the weather and wildlife. It was a great onion year here for us since they like all the moisture. Dawn

My tree-unfriendly neighbour cut today a big trunk of a Washingtonia robusta. I understand from this post that my chances of resprouting it in a pot are small but I think I'll give it a shot. Does anyone know which is the procedure with the root compound as tropicbreezent suggested on another post? Am I supposed to wrap it up somehow? Or perhaps put it in the compost mix? To be honest it's the first time I hear that such thing as root compound even exists.

TONI rub it in will you? Mine didn't make it and I used the vermiculite and bag trick this time! I did actually manage to get some sedum to finally put on some roots, last year I did my rooting in August with hardwood cuttings I am going to try that again this year and see how it goes. I have a purple butterfly bush, a honeycomb BB and a red bottle brush I wish to try this time. I SOOOOO hope the bottle brush takes it is sooo pretty. I do have a few hardwood cuttings of a smoke tree in water and I thought they were dead so I was going to through them out the other day and noticed some callousing and thought NO WAY is that root starts BUT I honestly THINK it is so I stuck them back in the water! I SOOOO hope those make it and are not just a false start LOL. Toni I think I am gonna send cuttings to you we can share my cuttings LOL. Thanks for the update, you know I really AM glad you are having so much success right? I really am, I think it is wonderful! OHH OHH OHHH, someone TELL ME PLEASE HOW I should do some Weeping Pussy Willow cuttings? Someone sent me a bunch and right now they are just in water is this good? OR what would be the best approch? They are hardwood from the base and from the limbs. ANY advice would be sooo much appreciated PLEASE. :) Fran

To help you figure things out ...... if you're watering when you can still detect moisture in the soil with a finger, you can't be under-watering. If you can eliminate under-watering based on the above, it pretty much leaves you with over-watering or a high level of dissolved solids in the soil from the fertilizer you applied. What did you use for fertilizer, how much did you use, and how did you apply it? Was the plant dry at application time? I don't know if I mentioned this, but it's easy to monitor soil moisture levels with a 'tell'. A wood dowel (from any hardware or home improvement store) about 5/16" in diameter works best. They come 48" long. Cut it in half & sharpen all 4 ends in a pencil sharpener. Push it deep into the soil and don't water until the first day it comes out clean/dry. Did you read the thread I linked to upthread - the one that focuses on how to deal with unwanted water retention? The best advice I offered was to concentrate on making sure your plants are in a soil you can water to beyond the point of saturation w/o having to worry the soil remain soggy so long it limits root health/function. That means you either start with an appropriate soil of find ways to limit water retention, which brings us back around to the link that takes you to the thread about dealing with water retentive soils. It's hard to tell you precisely what to do w/o you having a basic understanding of what plants require to remain healthy. Particularly important and a prerequisite to a healthy plant is a healthy root system. All of the information you need to be an accomplished container grower fits together like a jigsaw puzzle under assembly. Each piece is connected to the other pieces - either directly or extraneously, but they ARE all connected. You probably remember that it’s easier to assemble a puzzle when you work toward getting the outer 'frame' together first. The outer frame is analogous to an understanding of the basic bits knowledge required for your success. Of the basic knowledge, most important is an understanding of how the soil/water relationship works & how the individual soil components interact relative to the whole. Basically we need to understand that a healthy root system is a requirement if the plant is to be healthy. Then, and easier to understand are a very few additional issues like the importance of light to your growing experience, how fertilizers work and what fertilizer is most appropriate ……. We also need at least a very basic understanding of how some of the other cultural conditions might affect plant growth/performance. Once this basic but essential understanding is part of your skill set, that is to say the framework of the growing puzzle completed, assembling the rest of the pieces will occur at a rate exponentially faster than the rate at which you progressed at the outset of your growing experience. Unless this basic framework is complete, you’re essentially relying on trial & error, which is probably never going to gain favor as a short cut to success. Al