Lou, I think it's important to recognize, that while peat itself may be antimicrobial, it may not be significantly or substantially antimicrobial in all situations. Peat bogs are one environment, the european/canadian cold murky bog areas and those unique conditions lead to the breakdown of the plants that create highly acidic conditions. I don't think that dried out peat, mixed in to soil, in the U.S. or expecially the hot south is in an environment anywhere near the origional bog conditions. So I think it can be used as an organic amendment in certain situations, like growing or blueberries in Dallas. It's not fair to say because peat bogs don't favor a lot of microbial activity that a mixture of peat in alkaline soil presumably with compost and other amendments it is antimicrobial and therefore not organic because the conditions are just so different. I do think that the slow breakdown of peat that is added to soil is an advantage in certain situations, like the azaleas in Dallas. It is just like we say with all organic amendments, slow release. That's exactly what is needed in an alkaline buffered soil, the prolonged addition of acid to keep the soil from being to alkaline so that the plants can actually absorb the nutrients they need. Something that brakes down too quickly, especially in high heat, would only help the plant for maybe a season while I believe you get 3-5 years with peat. Oh,I looked up the meat preservation, which you and I briefly discussed in a previous post, and the articles I read said that peat plus salt was used; which is a really more like making jerky :) U5, urea doesn't come from blood and blood meal is not the exact same thing as sold in 'chem fert' bags. Blood meal does not equal urea from blood and Urea nitrogen does not equal nitrogen from blood; urea is not a protein. I think something is confused on this point. Urea is synthesized chemicaly from carbon dioxide and ammonia. Urea isn't obtained from blood. If there is anything more than small levels of urea in the blood then you have gout or kidney problems. Urea is filtered out by the kidneys and concentrated in urine, like you said. However, the blood is primarly protein so basically it would be like applying any other protein meal to the soil (ie soybean meal). Proteins are made up of amino acids many of which should be able to be directly taken up by the soil bacteria and plants. As you said, Proteins are broken down to urea but it happens as the protein is used up in organisms. Blood meal should contain other minor elements like iron that would be good additions to the soil. I agree that urea is naturally occuring, and I'm personally on the fense, I prefer not to use urea because it is highly purified and therefor doesn't have the potential to add as many components to my soil.

This is an old thread, ten years old, but I have finally solved all three mysteries. The white clematis was indeed Gillian Blades, as someone suggested. The pink-and-white one was Asao. The sometimes pink, sometimes blue one with red anthers was Ruby Glow. How do I know? A gopher ate the roots and it died a while back. Digging around in the ground today to put in a new plant, I found the old tag buried deep! I am feeling like quite the garden archaeologist today. P.S. added later, that dark purple one really is Gipsy Queen as someone suggested. Another found tag.

Okay, to get lichen to grow you get what's called lichen powder- it's a nutritional supplement. Lichen is a combination of a fungus, an algae, and something else. So you'll probably want to mix the lichen powder with spirulina which is also a nutritional supplement- it's like pond scum or algae. Mix them and paint them onto your invention thing. Moss grows from spores and you can get spores from a bonsai supply place but I couldn't get them to grow.

Thanks everyone. Mikie - I will try that link soon. I sort of agree that if everything's fine, don't go borrowing trouble. But my laptop isn't quite fine - and I don't know what's wrong with it. The past month it's been weird. When I unplug it (to move it to another room), it just shuts down. The battery was staying at 87% all day yesterday - while plugged in. Then it sometimes takes many, many minutes to boot up after it's suddenly shut down because it was unplugged. Sometimes I have to reboot a few times til it functions properly. I updated and ran Avast, superantispyware,malwarebyte and spywareblaster. All were fine - so I don't think I'm infected. I sometimes keep a lot of tabs open at once(I'm embarassed to say how many - but since it's relevant - perhaps 2-3 dozen). I'm comparison shopping and keeping open the tabs for whatever I'm currently researching or shopping for. I know this taxes the resources. When I shut the computer down, I run ccleaner to get all that stuff cleared up. Lately it's done something else weird. Sometimes when I click to open something up in a new tab (Firefox - which was like version 5 - but they recently sprung 9 on my which I never authorized - Windows XP). So I click open a new tab. And the tabs just keep scrolling across the top. As I try to click on a particular tab, the tabs keep scrolling to the left. This happens even if only a dozen tabs are open. And this doesn't happen every time but has become frequent. I have to let it scroll for 5-20 seconds before the tabs stay still - and I can click on one. I have no idea what's going on. At first I thought I had too many tabs open - and overtaxed my system. But since it's happened with closer to 10-12 tabs (and no other programs open), I'm not sure that's the problem. Is it Firefox? My laptop? driver? Thanks. Lynn. PS damccoy - they wouldn't let me print out the page. It kept disappearing - bc. of course they want me to spend money for their program to update - they don't want to hand me the list to do it on my own.