I wish I could figure out how to post photos here because I have a beautiful planting of various sedums (hens n chicks and others) in a large strawberry pot topped with a dwarf fountain grass. I just got it planted a couple weeks ago and the sedums are growing well but the grass seems to have slowed down a bit. Strawberry pots are time-consuming to plant- having to ease all those plants into small spots. If the grass works out it should be striking by August. In my area the sedums can just stay where they are all year long. I am less familiar with dwarf fountain grass. I might have to remove that next spring. If it needs to be removed I'll probably replace it with a geranium which overwinter outdoors for me fairly well. My intent is to have a container that lasts several years without replanting and that can stay outside all winter. I also have a variety of sedums in two wall-hanging baskets on my fence. These are wrought iron style containers with cocomat liners. The scrub jays just love to pull coco fibers off to line their nests with. I had to rework those containers this year because of all the bird damage done over the past three springs. Well, no sooner did I have them back in prestine shape and hanging on the fence then the scrub jays showed up. I thought I had chosen a sturdier, more bird-proof coco liner this time but they quickly proved me wrong. My husband, who I guess is smarter than a bird unlike me, suggested putting up some scraps of coco liner as a decoy. Worked like a charm. Lisa

Oh boy, we could swap failure stories forever, could we not? But that is part of the game of plant love. We try to grow the impossible, and even the nominally easy and things don't go as planned. We learn something each time but that school of hard knocks sure has steep tuition fees. Take heart though that many of us just have an irrational impulse to persevere through drought and flood, cold and heat waves, plagues and bad soil. And over time we (mostly) get something we enjoy. It took many tries to get my patch of lenten roses going for example. Now they are happily expanding on their own. I have never been able to get cyclamen to expand. But others have, including trilliums. And the stories go on and on. These failures and successes are one of the key reasons to have lots of gardening friends and to be generous giving away plants. Friends can give you lots of advice that cost them plenty to obtain and when your beloved plants die, you may (hopefully) be able to get them back if one of your friends has a propagated piece of it around. But enough philosophizing. To your question: the container gardening forum at gardenweb is full of recipes for good soil. I have found most of them work fine as long as you keep organic content below 40 per cent. More than that and the soil will literally disappear in front of you with age (it compacts to nothing as the plants and microbial life use it up). You need some of the soil to be inorganic so it will keep it's tilth/structure. Good loam is equal parts sand, silt and clay with 20 to 30 per cent organic content *which includes the worms, insects, roots and other microbes themselves*. All these measures are by volume. For your specific situation, I would use 30 per cent permatill, 30 per cent whatever organic material you have (manure, compost, humus or a combo of all 3), and 40 per cent of your native soil or if it is too clay-heavy then purchase a couple of yards from a local landscape supply store. I use the one near us on Norwood or Triangle Landscape supplies or whoever is selling good grade stuff. Watch out for reclaimed materials from human waste sludge that some people add to raise organic content - it is glue like in behavior and I suspect it carries some pathogens. Buying stuff in bags is too expensive - you can get 27 cu ft in 1 cu yd - at 24 dollars/yd for good soil (no.3 landscape soil fines in my supplier's parlance) or less than 1 dollar a cu ft and it's already 1/3 inorganic (sand mostly.) It makes sense to buy in bulk. Plus you can get it delivered. The down side is you have to shovel it to where you need it. I have had good luck using used up soil from repotting my containers, and from using old already-amended soil from my existing beds for the inorganic fraction. If I were pushed to buy stuff and I did not have anything handy near by, I'd probably use the "top soil" sold in bags at Lowe's and Home Depot for the inorganic component of my mix, with maybe 10 per cent sand added. You may be getting the impression that these proportions are somehow scientific. Nothing could be further from the truth. Plants are very adaptable as long as they have proper air and moisture levels at the roots. They'll even grow in completely inorganic mixes like pure turface if you can control the watering and feed them liquid micronutrients. That's the same as static hydroponics. My point is, don't worry too much about getting these mixes right. You are not baking a cake, more like seasoning a stew. Done to taste, with attention to what you are growing and how it responds, and then feeding compost and lime as needed. That is it. The rest is trial and error. If you have not gotten a hold of Elizabeth Lawrence's book "A Rock Garden in the South", go to your nearest library and borrow it. Also, the North American Rock Garden Society is a great resource as are the friendly folks at the local chapters. There's one here in the Triangle. A final note: all these info applies to open garden beds which have an underlying stratum. Gardening in containers is a whole different ball game. For those I use 60 per cent fine ground pine bark, 20 per cent vermiculite and the rest compost with some plants receiving a little sand and or granite dust. Because of the physics of small enclosed spaces, potting soil needs to be very loose and full of air pockets while containing billions of micro pores that hold moisture and air simultaneously. Once used up (after 1 to 2 years) these mixes are great added to your garden beds but even the best garden soil will water log your plants in a container because of the suspended water table dynamics even if you use a wick. More on this in the container and bonsai garden forums if you want to learn more about it. Part of the fun is figuring all the tricks out. I have been gardening since I was a boy with my grandma and I am still a newbie, learning stuff every day. Enjoy it. RJ

I can't get the link to work. I copied and pasted it, but it ran for like 20 minutes and wouldn't open. What does this look like? Tracy

Chantal I am close to Barrie now, so it is even colder than in TO. But even when I lived in TO, all succulents had to be indoors. I use supplemental lighting because there is never enough light. They will definitely freeze outside, unless you have hardy ones. Dasyphyllum is supposed to be hardy, but few ppl posted and said it died for them over the winter. I got mine just this Spring, so do not have experience yet - but I have now 2 pots and will keep one outside and another maybe in garage: cool/cold, but protected from strong winds and freezing rain. I live in the house, so there is the basement and the garage...I overwinter some other plants in garage - figs, brugmansia...they are too big anywhere else and I try to keep them sleeping: dark and cool, around 0*C.