I'm not a pro at this, but I will try to help a bit. If you take a leaf and look at it, you don't (Maybe you do) but leaves are cast on the back side so that the 'veins' are 'embedded within the leaf. So you need to make a mold of the leaf, as if you were casting it the first time. I have used kids modeling clay, rolled out to about 1/4 " (small leaf) pressed the backside of a leaf into the clay, and carefully cut around the edge of the leaf. Then I carefully removed the leaf. I lightly -Very lightly sprayed the 'clay leaf' with Pam cooking spray. I then proceeded to apply my silicone in THIN layers. (You can smooth with an icecube) It tends to be slippery from the oil, but you can get it to work. IF the silicone sticks to the clay, it can be gotten off with a bit of dishsoap when you wash the mold when it is cured. Takes awhile for the silicone to set up, especially if it is too thick... OR If you have a leaf done, and painted, oil it up and apply the silicone. That works too. You really have to try and experiment.....making a POP leaf isn't the easiest thing to do......but it can be done with patience. spray your leaf with Pam then Brush on a thin layer of POP. Let it dry and keep adding layers. Removing the leaf from POP has always been my problem Good Luck...... Marcia

I see that this is a rather old thread, but I thought I'd comment anyway, since the topic is something I am familiar with. I was the sales manager at a local garden center for about 7 years. As such, I got to deal with the public when we had people walk in and offer plant materials for sale or as a donation to us. There are a couple of reasons why nurseries often won't buy plants from the "public at large." Here's sort of the scoop on this whole matter: 1) It is TECHNICALLY illegal in my state to buy plant matter for commercial resale from anyone other than another liscenced nursery. This is pretty typical in most jurisdictions, where an inspection certificate must be provided with any shipment of live plant matter. However, this law isn't really enforced, so it's often just an easy excuse to give to the person trying to sell you their 22 year old peace lily covered with mealybugs and with severe tipburn from being watered for years with flouridated tap water. 2) Plant matter grown by amateurs can vary from gorgeous and healthy to horrible. The real problem with this practice is that, all too often, someone will have an old, ugly, unhealthy, and infested plant which really only belonged in the trash, but which they would want us to pay top dollar for. Another common thing, believe it or not, was for someone who was relandscaping or doing construction to pull in with a broken up, overgrown yew or similar shrub in their trunk, with a few hacked roots sticking out from a tarp, and try to sell it to us. One time, a lady wanted to sell us a bundle of yew trimmings to sell for Xmas cut greens. I told her she should have come BEFORE we unloaded half a semi trailer of Oregon evergreen products the previous day. Unfortunately, because this practice happens quite often, most nurseries develop a blanket "just say no" type policy -- we did, it was just easier than dealing with it on a one by one basis. But, no matter what the situation, the rejection should always be made in a considerate and respectful manner. Even then, some people would be nice about it, others would become upset. 3) The nature of the business. Buyers usually have targets on species, quantity, size, price, etc. Quite often, people would try to offer something unusual to us which, while actually a nice plant, wasn't something which would prove popular enough for us to warrant actually trying to sell. Also, a lot of times, the people customers see aren't authorized to deal with such matters, and the person who is authorized isn't readily available, so it is just easier to, once again, "just say no." I always suggested that people try to donate their plants (usually houseplants or landscape plants for us, that was our main business) to a school, library, or other public building where it could be enjoyed by all.

Chandra, I've never used their products, never have and never will. Any company that does not list their product ingredients on their label and/or their website doesn't get a dollar of my money. I want to know what I am putting into or onto the soil where we grow our plants. Any tomato plant fed any decent fertilizer is likely to give significantly higher yields than a plant that is not fertilized, assuming the plants receive adequare sunshine and moisture. So their claim of 150% better production or more tomatoes or bigger tomatoes or whatever else they say is meaningless and is just ad hype. Any good fertilizer, applied properly, can give you similar results, and most likely for a much lower cost. I believe the reason they don't list their ingredients is because they want people to think there is something extra-special in their products so they'll be willing to buy them and to pay their prices, which seem high to me. Is there something extra-special in their products? My personal opinion is no, there is not anything there that you can't get in other organic fertilizers. Caveat emptor. Before I buy from a company that is new to me, I check their reviews at the popular watchdog site often used by gardeners. I can't name that website here because it is a competing website and you aren't supposed to mention it or link it here. (E-mail me if you don't know the name of that site and I'll tell you.) If a company has a lot of negative reviews, I avoid it and search for a company that sells a similar product but that gets better reviews. Larry, Thank you. You are so very kind. If eating real bacon is a sin, I'm headed straight for a very bad place! I love bacon. I'd eat bacon ice cream if they made it. (And, yes, I bet somebody does make bacon ice cream) Keith, You are so, so bad! lol I bet Peg has her hands full trying to keep you in line. Busy1, You win the "First BLT" prize! I can imagine it took a bunch of Tiny Tims to make one sandwich. Wasn't it yummy? Nothing says "spring" like the first delicious BLT with your own home-grown tomatoes. I don't know how you'll ever get caught up on planting with all the moisture now in your ground, but I'm sure you'll find a way. It is still too wet to plant anything else here, but not too wet for the weeds to grow, so I'll spend my afternoon pulling weeds. Thank you for your kind words. I hope you know that I appreciate you so much. Diane, I wish you'd been here to have a sandwich with us. I'm excited you're getting ready to plant. You know, once the plants are in the ground, they will grow like weeds. Your plants will be catching up with ours in no time at all. I really believe that. Erod, If I can't eat tomatoes from April through December, then (alas! woe is me!) life just isn't worth living. Well, that's a slight exaggeration, but only a very slight one. Some people here call me the Tomato Queen, but really I am the Mulch Queen. I mulch, mulch, mulch, mulch, mulch. I add mulch to at least one raised bed every week, sometimes every day. I mulch my paths. I mulch my flower beds. I mulch the 'pathways' in my dogs' yard so that they are walking on mulch instead of mud, since three of them get to come inside and sleep in the house at night. (The other three sleep in the garage.) I mulch my the soil surface in all my containers of plants. (They get bark mulch for aesthetic reasons.) I mulch my fruit trees when I have enough mulch to do so, and I mulch my shrub beds. If a dog or cat lies down in a shrub bed or flower bed and doesn't move while I'm mulching, I mulch them. (That does tend to make them get up and move!) When I am able to do so, I mulch the ground outside the perimeter of my garden fence to help keep down the grass and weeds so they won't sneak through the fence and into my garden. Last year, I didn't do a very good job of mulching around the perimeter, so I'm going to try harder to do a better job of that this year. Usually I run out of mulch inside the garden and don't have any for the perimeter fence. However, thanks to the bales of hay that were a very lovely gift from our friends, Jesse and Joyce, I'll have plenty of mulch this year. Mulch keeps the soil cooler which is very important once the temperatures are cranking up high. I think mulch is one reason I get high yields from my peppers and tomatoes. Mulch conserves moisture which also helps the plants. Mulches reduces the number of weeds. Most important in terms of having healthy tomato plants and good yields, mulch reduces soil splash which reduces disease. I start out with 2" of mulch on my beds, then add more continually. My goal is to have mulch 4-6" deep on all my tomato beds by mid-June. You don't want to mulch too heavily when the soil is still cold or cool because you want the soil to warm up to a certain extent. That's why I start out with a little mulch and then keep adding more as the ground warms up more. Some beds don't get as much mulch as the tomatoes. Onions, for example, do better if they are able to sort of pop up out of the ground as they bulb up. If they are able to do that, they seem to produce better bulbs than those planted or mulched so deeply that they cannot "pop up". So, I have mulch in the two onion beds, but it is on the soil between the plants and not necessarily over the bulbing part of the plant, if that makes sense. I would never, ever attempt to grow without mulching. Mulch is helpful in so many ways. Best of all, as mulch decomposes it turns into compost. Compost enriches the soil. Enriched soil grows better, healthier plants that produce higher yields. I give compost and mulch a great deal of credit for the very high yields I get in my veggie garden. It may seem like I'm always weeding (it is a very large garden!), but without the mulch, I'd likely spend 10 times as much time weeding the garden as I do now. Mulch also reduces erosion which is ultra-important to me because my gardens slopes downhill from west to east and from south to north. When I first started gardening here, my local rancher friend, Fred, who is a rancher, farmer and gardener himself, gave me tons (I mean literally tons) of hay in big round bales. I mulched heavily with it and it helped get me off to a great start here. I also use chopped/shredded autumn leaves that I collect and bag up in the fall, grass clippings from our own property, and hay or straw but ONLY from safe sources and ONLY after I test it for herbicide residue. I currently have 197 bales of hay undergoing herbicide testing so I can be sure it is safe before I use it. I used to have a compost pile far from my garden (it is still there and I still use it to some extent) but that means continually hauling stuff out to the pile, then after it has decomposed, I have to haul the compost back to the garden. For me, it is so much easier to pile up organic matter as mulch in my garden beds, pathways, and around the edges of my garden and let it decompose right there. In the spring, the decomposed mulch from the previous season is mixed into the beds as I plant. Then, after a bed is planted, I scoop up all the decomposed mulch from the pathways adjacent to that bed, using a compost scoop and put it right there on the newly-planted beds, and that's the start of the new season's mulch. Then I lay down cardboard in the pathways, and start layering on mulch. Otherwise, my pathways are just beds of weeds. So, my recommendation is to mulch like crazy, but not just around the plants but also in your paths. In addition to doing some weeding, I have two rows of tomatoes that need more mulch today, and I have a big pile of grass clippings with which to mulch them. It seems like all I do in May and June is mulch and pull weeds, but both are important to getting good yields. Dawn

I don't keep old herbs, but then I don't keep many of them, since I keep most of what I want in my yard. Basil won't last past January, and then I just buy it fresh until I can start a new crop. Spices do keep for quite a while, but I never buy them powdered, and I have a coffee grinder that I use for grinding them. I don't drink coffee, and so that is a good way to use the coffee grinder. Ginger I only use either fresh or pickled - I never used dried. I keep ginger root in the freezer, but I also have a jar of ginger paste that works well when I'm making Japanese or Thai soups. There are very few dried herbs that I like, but I do keep dried sage on hand, even though I could grow it. I also keep dried oregano and dried thyme, even though I have fresh in my yard at all times. Sometimes the dried versions suffice, and they do save a bit of time. Lars