To answers your question: The source are other insects, their parents. If you bought your soil it is highly unlikely your soil was infested with insects. If you dont want any critters in your soil, beneficial or not. There are a couple of things you can do. 1. Put your bed over lawn wire. This also prevents moles and gophers from getting in there. 2. Put a bird bath near your garden and a small bird feeder. But be prepared the birds may choose to eat your vieggies and there are several ways to prevent that. 3. Get diatomaceous earth and follow the directions. Less than 10% of the bugs you see in your garden are destructive. Identification is crucial. If they just gross you out and prevent you from enjoying your garden, which is the main point to all your work then get rid of them. Just keep in mind no insects at all = more work and less production.

For fleas you'll have much better results (at least I do) with beneficial nematodes sprayed on the soil. Best results occur when you apply after or near the end of a 4 day rainstorm - something that really saturates the soil. Here are my notes on the Houston area: Teas Nursery on Ballair Blvd. carries Bradfield fertilizer. You should call ahead because they occasionally run out. Southwest Fertilizer, 5828 Bissonnet, has a great selection of organic fertilizers and supplies. You can also check out their website: www.yardgeek.com Check out the links at http://www.ag-org.com/retail.html

Ciao ox, I should have worded my last post more indepth. I root them like everyone else in newpaper and bag, once they root, I put them in a LARGE pot that they will be in permanently for a few years or whatever then they grow and root in the pot. I use just Bought garden soil. Our soil is very clay In Pennsylvania and not good, surprisingly for being in the mountains there. I put them in vertically all the way to a couple nodes, almost cover the whole cutting about 75%. Thats all. I won't put any of my prize figs in the ground we have at home because we are planning to sell our home in near future, I don't want to leave any of the figs at the house. I want to take them with me, they stay in their pots until we get our more permanent old age home. We will be moving out of that City. My older relatives who are here now, do not even root in bags, they just dig a hole and lay them Horizon in the ground then water then they get their new trees, but they are all on our land and we don't intend to sell the orchards, they must stay int he family. They cuttings always root well, sometimes not, but the relatives almost have a 95% rate with this old method. It is the same as how Loslunas said to do it in the ground. I showed My Uncle's how to root them in the bags, they thought that was a very interesting way to root fig trees. I wonder if they will catch on. Okay, time to eat something, Ciao.

LunarSolarPower - Thanks for coming back to my questions, I appreciate your responses. As I'm probably overthinking the CEC impact in my intended use (vegetables in containers), but I do like to optimize systems for efficiency and highest performance, so it was a natural question for me to follow. I'm under the impression that by using CRF and a liquid solution, I'm in a good position to provide what the plants need with little regard for the CEC. My question about the zeolite was to raise the CEC, and in fact, you mentioned in an earlier post about ground basalt, so if I decided to go that route, I could always look more closely there as well. As to getting 10 years out of the media - I can always dream, can't I? :) It appears inefficient (on the convenience and labor sides) to mix new media every spring. It seems wasteful to the product as well - I have limited ground space, and who knows what I would do with the "old" mix. There is always the cost aspect as well. My primary thought was to go fully inorganic and have nothing that decomposes within 5-10 years. But, even if I ended up going with some organics as a fraction of the mix, I'm thinking that if I maintained a reasonable particle size with the inorganics (say Turface/DE/pumice/grit), AND as long as the combo of inorganics comprised the lion's share of the mix (say ~70%), then the organics would be free to decompose and disintegrate their structures without much harm overall. I could simply "top off" the organics (for instance pine mini fines) as needed to keep the overall volume of media to my liking. If CEC value is not critical in my specific scenario (vegetables in containers, using CRF and liquid fertilizers), and assuming I'm able to relatively easily adjust the pH as needed, then I would be able to design the mix primarily on water/air retentiveness. Do you see any faults in the logic so far, or glaring oversights with such a plan?