"It looks like you switched to the Dyna grow 9-3-6 last year. Do you still use CRF in your soil mix if you are still using this fert?" Actually, I rarely use the CRFs at all. I like the near complete control the soluble fertilizers give me in containers. I'm pretty diligent about fertilizer applications, so I really don't need the CRFs to cover the 'in case I forget' base, or for any minor elements they might supply. I included them in the soil recipes to make it easier for others. As long as you're faithful to your nutrient supplementation program, you can easily do w.o them. If you think you'll be lax at times, I'd include them. 109 ppm alkalinity is nothing to be overly concerned about with fast container soils. It would be interesting to learn how the Ca and Mg levels are though. Alkalinity is related to pH because alkalinity (practically speaking and for our applications) determines your water's resistance to pH changes. If you have water 'A' at a pH of 9.0 with an alkalinity of 75 mg/L CaCO3, and water 'B', with a pH of 8.0 (a full point lower to begin with) and alkalinity of 300 mg/L CaCO3, it will take about 4 times as much 35% H2SO4 (sulfuric acid) to bring the water with the lower pH down to That aside - your water is better than mine, so I really doubt you'll have Fe/Mn issues if you're using either the 9-3-6 or MG. I will say though, that bark/peat soils have a potentially high Fe:Mn ratio, so applying Fe w/o Mn could easily create a deficiency of Mn. If I were in your shoes, I would do nothing until I actually saw evidence of an Fe deficiency. Then, I would acidify. Oh - the other likely cause of an Fe deficiency is too much P, which combines with the Fe to form an insoluble precipitate, so avoid the high P fertilizers - they are useless unless you are using them to supply the exact amount of P needed while intentionally (severely) limiting N. I used this strategy last year: I fertilized with regular dosages of 9-3-6 until the plants were well established. I then cut way back on the dosage and added ProTeKt to the solution. I rather like to envision that I used the added K (and got the benefit of the added silicon) to change the fertilizer ratio to 3:1:3 from a 3:1:2. This allowed me to reduce the dosage of N (reducing vegetative growth) while still having adequate P and K. Take care. Al

Sammy........ I am sorry you did not find more nurseries and gardens listed for your state. I think that is an indication that the site is under-utilized in your area or that gardeners in your state are not familiar with the site. HMF does not advertise and is not supported by advertisers, but is supported by site users through premium-memberships, nursery sponsorships and donations. People find out about HMF by word of mouth, mentions in articles as the references used for the article, by nurseries listing their inventories and pointing customers to HMF to find out more about the roses they carry. In my former life, I used to be a construction accountant. Every time I changed jobs, I had to learn a new accounting program. It's the same on the internet. HMF is designed to be a tool for research and an archive of information about roses that are currently in commerce or have gone out of commerce. It takes time to learn how to navigate a new site, but I do think HMF is worth it. Connie is correct, when people list their gardens, it provides more information to other site users about the roses that grow well in their area. When even small nurseries lists their inventories, it helps rose lovers find a source for roses that may not be readily available in your local neighborhood. When site users share their experiences about how a rose performs in their gardens, those COMMENTS are archived with the rose page. All of this information can be found without having to wait for a response from other site users. However, members of the rose community play an important role in answering questions on the Q & A, providing more information about a plant's performance and, yes, catching errors. As nurseries like Vintage close, having those gardens listed on HMF will create a valuable tool to help save the roses that are not easily found in commerce. Smiles, Lyn

"ANY machine you purchase WILL clean your dishes just fine if it's installed correctly, working as it should, and proper cleaning product and dosage used. Even cheap ones. Put it in the bank. If it doesn't, you're missing something." I am going to mildly disagree with asolo on one point, and that is the "ANY machine" part. My wife and I travel around to different parts of the state routinely. Our last stint was up in Fresno and we rented an apartment there equipped with a GE Hotpoint dishwasher. The performance of the machine was pretty sketchy. While it did okay on plates and glasses and so forth, it could not remove baked-on encrustations from our ovenware anything like our Bosch at home. I chalked it up to its being a loud, el-cheapo POS and thought no more of it. So now we are lodging at my sister's palatial digs on a contract near her home. Well, she has a 2006 or so vintage GE Profile and I am seeing the same lousy performance. The machine is very quiet, unlike the box we left behind in Fresno, but when it comes to cleaning performance it is the Hotpoint's twin. it will not remove any sort of baked-on deposits. French Onion Soup leaves the bottoms and sides of her Le Crueset festooned with a latticework of carbonized onion evocative of a Jackson Pollock print: after washing it in my sister's dog dishwasher. I have examined the spray arms and all inspect-able piping and galleries inside the machine looking for obstructions. It is not a temperature problem, the thing gets plenty hot. But I have a theory about it which I will illustrate for you by way of pictures. Take a look at the bottom spray arm of this machine. It looks nice and big, right? It's plastic, but so is the spray arm in our Bosch. No big deal, it seems pretty heavy duty. But now look at the underside of that same spray arm I have removed from the machine: Notice the water channel? It is simply a molded plastic gallery and it is incredibly small. Here is a closer look: The gallery is maybe an inch wide, at best, and it has two ports exhausting water out the BOTTOM of the arm! This is the highest pressure available in a tiny "pipe" and it is being used to bounce off the bottom of the machine. The metal shields you see are not forming part of the channel, they are simply heat shields designed to protect the undersides of the wash arm from the heating element. Dishwashers work because they pump lots of hot water onto your dishes at high pressure. I simply do not think that the volume of water this arm can deliver is adequate. The underside of the middle rack arm is the same story. It looks big from the top, but underneath it's just a tiny molded gallery, too. I did not remove it from the machine because it is a pain to get out, but here is a picture of the underside of that: It looks big from the top and dinky underneath. Just to get an idea how much water that lower spray arm can hold at one time, I taped up all the spray ports, tipped it over and filled it with water. I then dumped it into a measuring cup and got less than 3/4 of one cup. If GE got rid of that fake flange affair that makes the spray arm look big from the top, and actually installed the tiny little wash arm that lower spray gallery really equals, nobody would buy the machine. In my opinion, GE is trying to engineer their water-savings claims by using lower capacity pumps and cheesy, deceptively-molded spray arms to sneak inferior machines past consumers while making them pay high prices for supposedly upmarket gear. Yes, the stainless tub is nice on the thing, but I just don't think it's got it where it counts. In any case, my small-water-volume observations are still theory at this point. There could be something wrong inside the pump, which I haven't disassembled yet. But I look at the hot water flow inside the dishwasher sort of the same way I would view it from a circuit analysis standpoint: You need current to do the work. You combine high pressure with lots of flow in order to have lots and lots of hot water molecules striking the remnants of last night's tub of lasagna. If there is a design feature that restricts a robust flow then I cannot see how it will not impair performance. So personally, unless someone can point out something I am missing here, I am thinking don't buy a GE dishwasher.

No problem, Breenthumb - I was looking for a much simpler answer, anyway. On my old PC I could press Cont-Alt-Delete and get a list of what was running--maybe 8 items. Doing that on XP gives me a list a mile long. I was hoping for some way to figure out what was what on that list, and could "end task" whatever was going on that I didn't need at the moment. No big deal, I can out-wait the slowdown. It's just annoying. Cheers, J