Nice that you are following in you dad's footsteps as it were. The plants are fine planted in what they are now. It is probably a bark, peat and perlite mix. Osmunda is too expensive now. If growing indoors, you may need to grow under lights (full spectrum grow lights: read up about growing indoors). Cattleyas do need a lot of bright filtered light to flower. Their leaves should be medium green. Living Florida, it all depends if you can grow outdoors. South Florida is fine. A shade house will work fine. From Orlando north, you will need a greenhouse for the winter. Winters can produce ocassional freezes at night. A cattleya can tolerate temps down to low 40s. But not freezing. If you do grow outdoors, you will want to change to a medium like clay pellets. Bark rots with too much moisture. Good luck and good growing.

well I decided I had a few hours to kill and thought I should post the huge amount of wonderful goodies because its going to take me that long to post all that Joan sent me. haha! I get the best partners in these swaps and its so nice to meet such sweet people in the process as well. For the goodies 4 live heirloom tomaotes. Rutgers and something else for the life of me I cant remember. They are in the green house and are soo far doing pretty good. It was good I recieved the varieties I did. My rutgers had a horible time germinating and the one other variety I have been looking for. 3 flower pouches - have not researched this thing but I told a local friend I got some of these and she about wet so I guess its pretty neat. adorable towel and pot holder set a few old seed catalogs NEAT Idea pair of garden shoes garden art sign yummy body lotion nail polish- love the color PURPLE yummy lip balm onion sets --- really needed these and I could not find the whites locally and I can only eat white onions go figure. She also sent me yummies that seem to have disapeared. Hubby and his sweet tooth. and then the seeds ohh the seeds piles of wonderful seeds. Lots and lots of basils and I really want to do a basil bed, tons of herbs and peppers and melons and egg plant and beans ohh my!!! then there was more herbs and more peppers oh wow!! cabbage and tomatoes and a few more herbs. Oh goodie!! Needless to say I recieved a packed box full of lovely wonderful things all of that I love. Thanks much Joan Acres/ Tracy

When I was little and Daddy was stationed in Indianapolis, Christmastime was always cold and snowy. A few days before Christmas Mom and Dad would pack all of us into the old Dodge and drive downtown. All the stores back then had big display windows along the sidewalks and for the holidays they had special displays. Some windows had the religious theme, with a Nativity that was real people. It was so exciting to see them bending over the manger and bringing gifts to the baby Jesus. Other windows had winter scenes with mirror ponds and little skaters on them. These scenes all had lots of interesting details, like a guy who had fallen on the "ice" and a dad lacing up his childrens skates, fires in tiny metal barrels and a band of people singing carols. Most of the scenes used doll sized people and were static. Some scenes had Santa's workshop or his sleigh being loaded with toys. We would walk from window to window, hanging on to Mom and Dad, pointing at each new display and yelling, "Look at that one Mommy", or "Daddy look over there!" My parents had the patience of Job to take five kids out on a frigid evening to walk two blocks at a snails pace, down and back, to look at window displays like that. And we didn't want to stay together either, the boys wanted to go into the stores, the girls wanted to go back to look at anything with horses in it. My parents must have felt like they were herding cats. Those were my most vivid memories of Christmas. Oh yeah, and the Christmas eve that my little brother ate a bottle of baby aspirin and we all had to go to the emergency room and watch him get his stomach pumped out through his nose. That one has stayed with me too. Ha! Cheryl

Download WhoCrashed See link below for whocrashed. This program checks for any drivers which may have been causing your computer to crash.... Click on the file you just downloaded and run it. 1 Put a tick in Accept then click on Next. 2 Put a tick in the Don't create a start menu folder then click Next 3 Put a tick in Create a Desktop Icon. then click on Install and make sure there is a tick in Launch Whocrashed before clicking Finish. Click Analyze It will want to download the Debugger and install it Say Yes WhoCrashed will create report but you have to scroll down to see it. Copy and paste it into your next reply. Here is a link that might be useful: WhoCrashed