Wow, thank you everyone, the warm welcome brought me a much needed smile! I must confess, Im in a bit of a depressed state here of late as I just lost my baby brother to cancer in April. I am fighting to keep myself from going under and I knew I needed to reach out, meet new people and find some other connections. I am disabled due to my health so I donot get the chance to physically go out and meet and connect with others. I remembered the KT and made the leap to try and re-connect. Oh and how many pounds of chocolate shall I bring? I make some pretty delish choc covered pretzels :) and my coffee pot is always full and ready to share!!!

lafdr, Yes. Guilty! Hoarder of laundry products. I can't speak for the others, but it's my quirky little pleasure for some odd reason. My supply makes me happy :) My goal, is to get down to armjim's supply, if I could ever not have to try out the next one, the better one, the new one. I could easily (and happily) live with just Tide powder, stpp, oxygen bleach, Borax and dryer sheets (I don't use liquid fabric softener). Not pictured in my photo above is my supply of backup powder detergent in case of powdergeddon, which are extras of my usual powders like Tide, ALL, Mexican Ariel. There's been talk of manufacturers wanting to discontinue with powder detergent and give us only liquids to use. I could not imagine not having my powder detergents anymore. This possibility fuels powder hoarding.

Here are a couple rare trees, very seldom seen in collections on the east coast, especially this far north for the Cornus and (probably) this far south for the Asian mag hybrid. I missed their main fall sale a couple weekends ago. I still snuck into the "not for sale" area to see what was hanging around. If they crack the code to growing Gunnera on the east coast, that will be highly commendable, but I think it's telling I didn't see any of those in the garden. Makes me think these were recent imports from the faraway land of the PNW ;-) It's nice that they had a species camellia for sale, even if it's one I've never really seen the purpose of growing. I am _pretty_ sure the Udel gardens has one of these, and it does NOT have the commendable resistance to cold - with respect to blooming - that C. yuhsienensis has. That was blooming literally 2 weeks after single digit temps during the polar vortex winters. On the way back to I-97, I drove past Homestead Gardens without even meaning to. With the passing of Behnkes, this is now considered one of the premiere nurseries in the Maryland suburbs of DC, so I decided to stop. Look at that beautiful blue spruce out front: And feast your eyes on this dubious planting advice: but you know what? Their heart is in the right place. Homestead Gardens was the local sponsor of Victory Garden on PBS in the early 1990s, which is one reason I acquired my love of plants via the inimitable Peter Seabrook's travel segments. So here's to you, Homestead. May you live long and prosper. I bought a (surprisingly) rare shrub that was on 50% season end discount LOL. As for London Town...glad I finally saw it. I saw a staffer planting some Osmanthus x fortunei 'San Jose', which is exactly the sort of thing they should be planting to complement a garden like that. So, someone there seems to know what they are doing. My rating: a solid B.

@Al, I'll respond because I feel it necessary to clarify a few things, and because it does feel as though you have attacked me and tried to discredit me. If you did not mean to attack, I am sorry that I read it that way, but that is how it came across. My frustration is with going after a person for not expounding upon details when they have already stated that out of respect for an OP who has already said several times that they are getting confused by all of the technical information and want a simple answer, they were trying to avoid being too technical. I said already that if you would like to have a technical discussion, let's have a conversation about this, because I believe the confusion is in the two methodologies that can be followed in gardening. One is the organic or natural fertilizer method, the other is, for lack of better terms, the use of synthetic fertilizers. When you use synthetic fertilizers you need to be aware of the chemistry of your soil, you need to understand what's going on in the pot, and understand the specific NPK needs of your specific plant. You will also need to make sure that you know enough about fertilizing your plant to do so properly and at the right times, (I'm still trying to keep stuff simple on this, particular, thread) On the other hand if you are using "organic" fertilizers you need to be aware that these fertilizers need to be broken down by microorganisms to be available to the plant. These microorganisms need to be present in the soil and in the fertilizer (many are pre-innoculated) to be broken down over time and become available to the plant. If your soil is devoid of these organisms or otherwise imbalanced you will have nothing to break down your fertilizer and you are essentially just giving yourself problems. Hence my comment about treating the soil as an organism, you need to be aware that there are microorganisms in your soil that you need to maintain if you want your fertilizers to work (think fermentation, I won't get a good ferment if I have the wrong organism or balance of salts). Essentially, you need to understand the biological processes at work. The soil, in this case, is just as much an organism as the plant. I am writing this from a phone, and the interface is terrible so I can't expound as much as I would like but you get the gist. In both cases you need to start with the soil, make sure you have good soil and good growing practices and your plant will do fine. Ideally you can make your own soil, but if you can't there are a number of well draining bagged mixes on the shelf that work great. I personally like the G&B citrus soil as it is a very well draining mix with a good particle size, and I have found that bags that have shorter ingredient lists and have the ingredients I listed on the label (I could have listed all of the ingredients you want to look for but I didn't have time to list everything and still don't, so I listed the ones that are typically used interchangeably on the different mixes) are usually more well draining mixes, in addition others have already listed the ingredients in good soil elsewhere on this thread, and the ingredients on a good bag will be much the same. These well draining mediums help to avoid water collecting at the bottom of a pot which can lead to salt buildup, rotten roots, and all that fun stuff. Now some decorative plastic pots have a raised center and a donut shaped well around the base, a single hole is drilled in the center and water drains from that while collecting in the "donut" in the base (I apologize but it's the best way I can describe it) if you have one of these pots you will, essentially, have a collection point for water below the drainage hole which will not drain. If that's the case you need to drill some drainage into the plastic ring so that there is drainage where water is more likely to collect. I personally use terra cotta with a single hole in the base, and I've never had a problem, but I use a good and well drained mix. Unfortunately I've helped a lot of people who plant a tree in a heavy and water retentive mix, see problems, start adding a fertilizer per the instructions, see more problems, add more fertilizer, read that they need to use a different fertilizer, so they switch, but it has a higher NPK than the previous fertilizer and so they have more problems. THEN they decide that the inorganic fertilizers are too strong and maybe missing something so they douse their plant in fish emulsion or start applying chicken fertilizer to save the plant and don't understand that now they have a pot full of salt and totally dead soil and are now giving themselves more trouble. In THAT case this person needs to go find themselves a good bagged mix with simple instructions find a matched fertilizer that goes with the bagged mix, repot their plant and remove all the old soil, replacing with the new, and follow the instructions for some time. Stop looking at the plant, just get comfortable with watering properly and providing the right environment and let the plant recover. Once the plant is doing well and they've gotten comfortable with care, then, once they're comfortable and not jumping at every dropped leaf, start changing things to see if you can do better. The more factors that they control, the more possibility there is that they can make mistakes and have no idea what went wrong. In that case they need to use something that is known to work, take that off the table as a factor, and then learn the basics. All I was attempting to do was provide a simple path forward and a warning about trying to do too much when general plant care needed to be learned before diving into doing too much at once.