Sandy, there is no need to apologize. Dr. Earth products are based on the west coast and very common in CA, where the OP lives. Dr. Earth markets both blended organic fertilizers as well as the 'simples' or single ingredient materials like bone meal. The blended products are a mixture of various organic fertlizers which provide an assortment of various macro and micronutrients and trace elements specifically combined and formulated for specific plantings and growing conditions. They are no more expensive than buying the simples and far less work and actually save the consumer money than if they were to buy an assortment of the single ingredient products to achieve the same result. The OP is already using a Dr. Earth liquid solution of 3-3-3. Since she expressed a need for additional levels of P, I suggested a couple of the Dr. Earth dry products that would provide that nutrient in suitable levels, something that just an application of bone meal will not.

Gobluedjm, the landlady doesn't want to be bothered with fixing anything whatsoever unless it's an immediate emergency (and even then, only grudgingly, often after yelling at us that we ought to just fix things ourselves at our own expense). So unless the flooded yard starts producing toxic mold or something, we're out of luck there. Renee, your patios and paths are gorgeous! I'm not sure it would make sense to create a work of art like that in a rental, though; I might get halfway done creating it and then move out, and it would just be a bother for the landlady to have to remove so many pieces of rock and bricks that never coalesced into a finished pathway. Or even if I finished it, the landlady might still hate it and find it annoyingly difficult to remove. Sue and Renee, I'm definitely interested in improving the drainage ditch, including lengthening it, widening it, possibly deepening it (though deepening it is a bit more difficult) and turning it into a dry stream bed. I need some advice about how to do those things, though. Currently, mud tends to gradually fill in the drainage ditch over time, so I have to re-dig it about twice a year. That would need to stop before I could turn it into a dry streambed, or else the rocks would just end up buried under the mud, and it would be ten times as difficult to re-dig with all the rocks in it. I believe Renee has mentioned something in the past about using plants around the edges of a drainage ditch to hold the dirt in place and prevent the mud from filling it in. I'm interested in doing that, but I'm not quite sure where to start. Should the plants go on the walls of the drainage ditch, or on the flat surface right above the drainage ditch? Does it depend on the plant? I'm especially thinking of trying Carex pregracilis there, but I'm not sure whether to put it on the flat surface or on the walls of the ditch. Currently the drainage ditch is about 12" to 18" deep and 12" to 18" high. It feels like a little bit of a hazard at times, because I've occasionally stepped into it without having realized I was so close to it. I think that making it deeper would make it more dangerous and also more prone to filling with mud, whereas making it wider might make it less dangerous, more useable as a pathway for the dogs, and hopefully less prone to filling with mud. What do you think? I'm aware that the path should ideally be wider. I'm not looking forward to widening it, though, because to widen the path I have to move the drainage ditch over. The only thing more discouraging than digging a drainage ditch through icky clay is trying to move that drainage ditch later - building the soil back up on one side while removing it from the other side. I already had to move it slightly just to fit the path in at all. I'm having a hard time imagining how to fit raised beds into my very naturalistic garden design style. Renee, if you were putting a raised bed made from scrap lumber into my yard, where you place it? Sue's suggestion of berms seems more my style, but I'm not terribly sure where I'd want to put the berms, either. The soil is only very slightly sloped upward near the house as a result of my efforts last year to excavate the existing drainage ditch and mound the excess soil along the house. I want to make sure that any additional berms I might put in would not accidentally redirect the water back toward the foundation of the house again. I don't think I have the dedication to keep plants alive in pots in the summer. I lose too many plants to drought already every summer, even when they're planted directly in the ground. I'm definitely aiming to create the kind of garden where the plants are mostly self-sufficient and, though they might benefit from regular weeding and occasional watering, would not drop dead if I occasionally ignored them for a couple of weeks.

Actually, people did do that, but people will cook food on their engine blocks too. People do all kinds of odd things. I agree about checking the connection to the sink for the smell, unless the smell is just soapy clean locker room smell (which the escaping steam could smell like). The lack of adequate drying in DW's is one of my big bugaboos, but I agree that little pools of water in the concave bottoms of mugs and glasses, and the turned up edges of containers, is normal. I've never had a dishwasher that consistently dried these. I've seen some that have the cups on strong angles, supposedly to drain, but it just makes the racks hard to load, and isn't enough of an angle to really make a difference. Where I start I complain is where great big gobs of water stick all over the dishes. I have the GE Monogram, which probably isn't all that different from the basic GE. In order to get things really dry I have to use Heated Dry/ Added Heat/ Plastics Cycle. Some other combinations are adequate for some uses, but the glasses and plastics only get dry in the plastics cycle. If you have that, give it a try.

OliverTwist, Rinse aid is not a new thing to the automatic dishwashing process. It has been available for 50+ years. It was touted in the past as an optional additive to eliminate water spotting on dishware, but the parameters have changed. As other have advised, rinse aid is required for proper drying results in all dishwashers nowadays. They're engineered with the expectation that the consumer will use rinse aid. You can choose to not use it but the trade-off is much more residual moisture on the items. Many units now do not have heated dry, instead relying on heat retained in the items from the final rinse along with rinse aid to promote evaporation. Units that do have heated dry are running with lower-wattage heating elements, and the heat may cycle on/off during the dry period instead of remaining on continuously as in the past.