Agree with 3 strikes and you are out ------ don't necessarily follow it. After 2 strikes I take pause and try to find out as much as possible about the natural environment of the failing plant. I also try to identify a grower who successfully grows them. I have tried over and over again with Dendrobium cuthbersonii and have always failed . So I finally talked to Tom Perlite from Golden Gate Orchids who grows these things like I grow Dandelion and got some hints from him. Now it takes me 2 years to kill them instead of one. I have finally given up on these little beauties. Dendrobium nobile is another example. No matter how closely I follow the instructions as to how to grow them, winter rest etc, I cannot get a decent bloom. Either they don't bloom or they make a few lackluster blooms. So I finally talked to the grower in Hawaii who is the source of most of the commercial nobiles you see on the market every spring. Success, last spring all 3 of mine bloomed ------------ with a few lackluster flowers! Enough, they went on the plant table of my society and I'm done with them. Miltoniopsis; Killed every one of them in the past. Finally talked to Theresa Hill form Hillcrest Orchids who grows beautiful Miltoniopsis. Her advice was simple, keep them cool in the summer, warm in the winter, they like to be within 5F of 60F. Doing this I am now growing them successfully, meaning the plant is increasing in size. Last year they even bloomed, one or two spikes on a large plant. That should have been 10 spikes or more. So I'm not there yet and unless they pick it up may also give up on them but not yet. Parvisepalum Paphiopedeliums: I just got started with these so have no failures to report. Go to the Gallery where you see an entry I placed yesterday of my first success with Paph armeniacum. They also have a reputation of being a little difficult and I had a discussion with Dr Holger Perner at the San Francisco show who thinks most people are growing them wrong. Most people treat them as cold growers. True in the winter but not true in the summer. In their natural habitat, the ones from China get treated to a bright, sunny, cold, dry winter and a shady, hot, humid and very wet summer. The result of the monsoon season there. So unlike Dracula who should be kept as cold as possible in the summer, these Paphs should go in the warm greenhouse and drenched every day. Since there are 35,000 species of orchids available, I generally don't mess with ones that don't like me. My greenhouse is full of robustly growing plants. Not because I'm a genius but because that is the price they have to pay in order to stay. If a plant lingers, grows poorly and fails to bloom, I will get rid of it. Visitors to my growing area think I do magic because most plants look very healthy when in fact it is a process of throwing them against the wall and if they don't stick, they don't stay. There are innumerable others to replace...

Hopefully for you guys where posting pictures is not something you understand, this explanation may help a little. HTML is something called a "tag language", recognized by browsers - Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, etc. Commands in this "tag language start and end with brackets: Where SBR (start bracket) equals the single character symbol: And EBR (end bracket) equals the single character symbol: > I'm going to use SBR and EBR because if I put in the real brackets the browser will get confused. The most important part of the command to allow you to post photos in a forum like this is: SBRimg src="http://some url address"EBR If the URL is the real URL of your photo, putting the SBRimg src = in front of it, then the EBR at the end tells the browser that what is between the tag is a photo, and it resides at that "http" url address. Simple as that. Most online photo holders have a button you can press to get the "html" code for your photo. I use flickr, and the button is "share". For the most part you should just be able to cut and paste the entire thing right into your text here, and it'll display the photo. Most often there are additional tags like:SBRa href = "xxx"EBR, which means - allow clicking on the link. Or height = "XXX", width = "YYY" which sizes your photo in "pixels" on the screen. But mostly, finding the place to get the "html" code for your photo and just putting it in here with your text, exactly as it is shown to you, should work. Good luck!

ccaggiano, Wow, I'm impressed! What an ambitious first year. And what fun to get your children involved---sounds like it's changing their whole relationship with their food! I was the opposite--started just with "throwing in a few tomatoes and herbs" like John. I was a bit leery that gardening would be way too much work for me to enjoy. But it turned out I really liked it and would rather spend my time on it than on a lot of other things. I started by concentrating on things I thought made the biggest difference to eat really fresh: tomatoes, OF COURSE, herbs, lettuces, strawberries, cucumbers, beans, peas, corn, peppers, summer squash. Some I've had more luck with than others. I still put in a little corn most years for fun, but like you I find good, local corn is so easily and cheaply available in season I mostly let the farmers do it for me. I had no luck with sweet peppers despite several years of trying, so I buy them, too. And cucumbers just don't seem to like me. Root vegetables, winter squashes, and things like broccoli that keep well I don't bother with as much. But I do make little experiments. Found that leeks are REALLY EASY and take almost no space or work, so even though store-bought leeks are perfectly good, too, to my taste, now I throw some starts in in the spring and am thrilled to harvest them in the late fall when everything else is gone. (I can use the garden bed as a leek storage bin, picking a few when I want them!) I grow a winter squash from time to time for fun---they grow so fast and huge! And I'm tempted to try potatoes some year. I find the fresh ones at the farm stands surprisingly superior to those from the grocery store, and am intrigued to try them at home. Sounds like you have done some good thinking about what works for you! I am sure you'll refine your growing list over the years and hopefully have a lot of fun in your garden with your kids for a long time. Zabby

Maddya, your "links" to your photobucket page worked just fine. Readers of the forum here only have to copy the above "Direct Link" and paste them into the web browser line and hit "Go" to "Directly Link" to your photobucket page to see the pics. If you are wanting to "put the pic right into your msg so you can see it at the same time while reading your msg" then you must "copy" the "HTML Code" on your photobucket page, come back to your forum msg, put your cursor where you want the pic to appear, go to the very top menu, click on "Edit" and scroll down to "Paste" and the HTML Code will appear where your cursor is. You can go back to your photobucket page and keep "copying" the HTML Codes of as many pics as you want and repeat the process of "edit" and "paste" the pics into your msg. It is when you "Preview Message" that you will see your pics inside your msg and then when you "Submit Message" the pics will be with the msg for all to see. For others that might be wondering how to post pics into msgs, awhile back I typed up instructions and posted them in the forum. The link to that msg is: (copy and paste it to your web broswer line): http://forums2.gardenweb.com/forums/load/junk/msg0709354613647.html?1 Anyone opening up the above "link" can "copy and paste" my msg into a "Word document" or other Word Program you have on your computer and save it for future reference. Note that when I wrote that msg, there were only three choices under the pics in Photobucket, now there are four. Remember, you can always do a search for anything that might have been posted in the forum previously. Type the words of whatever your looking for into the "Search" box on the front page of the forum when it first opens up. If something with those words was posted, it will come up. For example, "Bowling Balls" "BB's" "Garden Fairy," etc. Have fun posting your pics, you know we all love to see the pics. Sal