There are three solutions to the shade problem: 1.) Plant things that bloom early. They will do their thing before the tree sprouts leaves. (Eg. Daffodils, Grape Hyacinth/Muscari). That's actually a major reason plants form bulbs...to get a head start and go through their entire life cycle before the trees shade them. 2.) Buy big bulbs and resign yourself to them dying in a few years...a big bulb has enough energy stored to survive a couple years with minimal sun. 3.) Buy bulbs that thrive in shade. Eg. Jack in the Pulpit, Lily-of-the-Valey (although that isn't a bulb), wild Ginger. It's a bit late to mail order Spring bulbs. You can buy potted plants at garden centers and plant them. What is your Zone? I make a point to not plant any bulbs that can't overwinter in my climate. If you are experienced with vegetable gardening, bulbs shouldn't be a problem. It's just like planting onions. (Actually, onions ARE a bulb, and the Nodding Onion is a relative) Yes, gophers eat tulup bulbs. Most animals will. You can ward them off by covering the tulip with hot pepper. Daffodils are less popular with rodents. I like Bluff View Nursery and American Meadows. Local Native Plant Societies and Lowes.

Hi - I recently seeded, and was told I needed to run my sprinklers every day for 20 minutes. So, rather than mess with my regular schedule, I decided to use program B. I set the program A start times to OFF for all 4, and set up program B, with one start time, but...on the "days to water", it shows every day as "blank". no rain drop, no rain drop with a slash, just blank. If I hit the up arrow, it changes to a rain drop with a slash and advances to the next day, and down arrow switches it back to blank. never get a rain drop. is this right, is this going to work as I expect? (the manual doesn't mention blank, it only mentions rain drop or rain drop with slash!)

"I'm curious to know what mechanism allows the soil to maintain that level of precision irrespective of water pH and the application of fertilizers." Well..soil is a living breathing ecosystem with built in buffering capacity... There are two kind of acidity which are important for soil testing. There is the "active" acidity which is the acidity which the roots "see". The active acidity is measured with litmus paper, indicator solutions or a pH electrode. This is the acidit y people refer to when they want to know their soil pH value. The other kind of acidity is referred to as the reserve or stored acidity. Clay and organic matter in the soil tends to store acidity. It takes more lime to raise the pH value of a soil with clay or organic matter present than it would for a sandy soil with very little clay or organic matter. Therefore, soils with more clay or organic matter have a greater ability to resist pH changes. The buffer pH is measured with a weak base that starts out at pH 8.00. Soils that will require lime and have an "active" acidity pH value of 5.8 or below are set aside in the lab to have this solution added. The more the solution decreases from pH 8. 00, the more stored acidity the soil sample has. The computer program will then recommend lime according to the determined stored acidity of the soil. As an example, a sandy soil from the central part of South Carolina and a a soil from the Piedmont with plenty of clay each have a pH value of 5.5. This would be the "active" acidity mentioned earlier. The laboratory determination of the buffer pH va lue of the sandy soil, though, could be 7.80 while the buffer pH value of the soil with clay could easily be 7.30. Since the sandy soil has decreased the buffer solution pH value of 8.00 less than the clay soil (7.80 vs. 7.30), the sandy soil will get a lower lime recommendation since it has a smaller amount of stored acidity. In this particular case, to bring these two soils up to a pH value of 6.5 the sandy soil will get a lime recommendation of 0.50 tons per acre while the lime recommendation for the clay soil will be 1.00 tons of lime per acre...twice as much lime, even though they both have the same pH value. If you DID want to conside application of fertilizer, you would see that through a choice of mineral sources nutrient solution buffering capacity can be engineered, or at least guestimated to great efficacy. Both chemical and organic fertilizers may eventually make the soil more acid. Hydrogen is added in the form of ammonia-based fertilizers (NH4+) , urea-based fertilizers [CO(NH2)2], and as proteins (amino acids) in organic fertilizers. Transformations of these sources of N into nitrate (NO3-) releases H+ to create soil acidity. Therefore, fertilization with fertilizers containing ammonium or even adding large quantities of organic matter to a soil will ultimately increase the soil acidity and lower the pH. NH4+ + 2O2-->bacteria-->NO3-+ 2H+ + H2O hope it helped

"I know that there are other factors that contribute to poor fruit set in heat stress, but perhaps this cross pollination technique will have a non-negligible effect .... Maybe some cultivars will be more amenable to this process than others? Anybody?" Definitely will have a non-negligible effect for the pollen, but as for fruit set, the issue will likely be 10 times more viability than zero may still be near zero if the rest of the plumbing isn't working. If it is the ovule that will not be receptive, then pollen won't help. Recognizing the differences among varieties is probably the way to go since each has its own particular physiology of what's going wrong. Varieties like Cherokee Purple hold together pretty well as do most Cherry Tomatoes. A combination approach will work best, but I tried a lot of things last summer including all kinds of manual + cross pollination and got about 10-15% set. I tried to give the pollen from the best setting (10-15% LOL) to the one that didn't at all. My biggest problem was not necessarily with the pollen, but rather the blossoms dropped off before they matured, and there is nothing I could do about that except play with shade, shade cloth and water to lower my plants' temperatures, day and night. The flower stem (pedicel) just begins yellowing before I get the chance and it is all over before it even starts. But your conditions and set failure will be very environmentally specific. Where high heat and humidity and night temp may be my problem, you may have high day and drying temperatures at times, etc., so focusing only on pollen viability would not be enough here, I can say that. PC