The variety of the gardenia makes the difference about bloom. The medium and small size type gardenia will produce more flowers. The large flower( three rows of petals) produce less flowers in the East of SF area. I had one week of most freezing temperature in my yard. To my surprise, all my gardenias including a large leaf gardenia stood well against the freezing. (I kept only one special gardenia originated from Taiwan in my warmer green house.) I know that commercial gardenia flowers are air shipped from warm and humid Central America countries to U S. I do think you can grow and produce nice gardenia flower in your house, but you shall figure out to develop the growing conditions favored for the plant. I hate to tell you that I paid least attention to my gardenias and they just produce lots of flower for me. Obviously the micro environmental elements plays a key role.

dnt1 said" john g you have gotten yourself stuck on the wrong area with your business. You have to show people something besides good work and here it is. People dont care how much you know until they know how much you care. Customer service good listening skills and lots of empathy man, now get on it and get that business growing as it should." Well if it was really only that easy. I repaired a Jeep Cherokee that had bounced around between 5 shops/techs. The problem surfaced alledgedly right after a major transmission replacement. The symptom was a surging/high idle speed, missfire/cutout when driving. The AC was inoperative, the clutch would not engage. The customer had already tried adding refrigerant with sealer himself, without gages. Plus the 4WD display was blank. The soultion was the computer had failed, but before the computer could be replaced, every possible reason that something on the car could be causing the computers microprocessor to continually reset had to be explored, and proven to NOT exist. Plus I also had to be sure that something else on the data bus on the car was not causing the reset to occur. There are no training manuals anywhere, nor is there service information/repair manuals written at this level. Guys like me are totally on our own with this stuff, and we often spend two times as much time studying the system at home to make each diagnostic move faster, and in analyzing the results to make sure we haven't overlooked something which would result in a customer potentially buying a part they do not need. I had well over eight hours time in this car, and ultimately billed three. The result had everything working, and I did notice some belt squeal, it was a newer, and properly tightened (within tension specs) serpentine belt. Now do you think this guy appreciated what I did? I did not sell any unneeded parts or service and I even cut him a significant break on the real amount of time required to do that. For my trouble I can tell you that I have 80% of the fuel injection wiring diagram memorized for a 97 Jeep Grand Cherokee. That's how close I had to study this system to be positive I was making the correct call. He went out to the Jeep after paying his bill, five minutes later he came back in and wanted me to go outside and hear something. He was concerned about the belt "chirping" when the AC was turned on. He was complaining that it did not do it before, well of course it didn't, the AC had not worked in the month and a half they had been fighting this. I told him shut the engine off, and went inside and got my laptop, and my belt tension gage. I showed him the spec, then I measured the tension on the belt and showed him it was in spec. The I showed him how the belt that was on the Jeep was one of the discount aftermarket replacement ones, that does not actually fit the pulleys correctly. He still insisted that I do something, and at that point I said fine, I'll take it to the maximum tension allowed on the spec, for a fee. At that point he balked, and said it's not adjustable, it has a spring tensioner, which I really got a laugh out of, because I asked him to show it to me. Then I showed him how the belt adjusted with the idler that is just below and inside of the power steering pump. I then asked him, who put this belt on? He said it was another shop he had dealt with recently, and I asked him why not go back to them and have them deal with it? His reply? Because he didn't pay them for it. I didn't press him for details at this point, but one way or another he managed to coerce them into doing it for free, or flat out managed to rip them off somehow. In the end, he paid me to adjust the belt. I refused to touch the rest of the AC system at all, because the sealers that he added have the potential of damaging my AC recovery/recharge equipment, and I'm not ready to have to spend another $4,000 on a new one. I also told him to the best that I could be sure, the transmission shop had nothing to do with the failure of the computer. Three days later the transmission shop involved called me up. He had not seen this guy and was glad that I had straightened his Jeep out. He was having trouble with a Ford tranny he had rebuilt and needed me to help him figure out what was wrong. He had one dissapointing thing to say. No matter what the outcome was, this guy with the Jeep would bad mouth me about fixing his car. It's just the way the guy is..........

Thank you all for your comments (except for vhehn - seriously, if you want to tell me I'm an idiot (or, conversely, that you are the smartest person in the world), why hide it, just tell me you think I'm a moron and be done with it. You don't know me, and you assume that I'm throwing away perfectly good (and hard-earned, mind you) money because I'm a d*mb*ss. If gloating in front of someone who's down is the way you roll, I'm so glad I don't know you in person.) - 15 hours after the initial discovery of "OMG, it's happened again" (and the resulting pit in our stomaches), our anger and sadness has mellowed a bit, abut we're both intent on salvaging this situation in a professional and drama-free manner. I probably haven't chewed on the situation enough, but after digesting your comments and putting all the pieces together, I'm inclined to do the following: 1) wait for her response (except I really really really want/need to know if we submitted, and/or if we're submitting on Monday, omg......), 2) unless there's a fantastic reason why Friday didn't go as agreed, request an off-site coffee meeting with the architect and synthesize your comments in to a conversation that says, basically: look, we think you're a really talented architect [she is!], but it's clear you're extremely busy, and maybe too busy to devote the type and timing of attention on our project that we need. It's causing us a lot of unnecessary stress and heartburn, especially this early in what we know will be a stressful year and a half [between the rest of planning and the build]. We see a couple of good solutions: a) now that you know how difficult the slipping of schedule has been on not only the timing of our project but on us personally, if you'd like to continue working on our project, we'd like to continue working with you, but we need hard milestones. [and then discuss the milestones, timing, etc....maybe these need to be in writing.....]. 2) if you're just too busy and don't see that changing, we'd be disappointed but would be willing to transfer the plans to another architect to complete - do you have any that you'd recommend? How do we properly transfer the plans? As you can tell, I do soft-pedal rather than throw blame in situations like this - I'm very willing to be firm, but it needs to be in my own voice, and unfortunately (I guess), that's my voice when dealing with people that I actually like (err, you "heard" my other voice above, when responding to others!). chisue - thank you for understanding, and yes, she's licensed, has a nice boutique business, and is actually really talented. she just sucks as client service. We found her as a referral from a neighbor who has (in our opinion) the prettiest new build in the neighborhood - we live in a 50's era rancher town on quarter acre lots in a part of the country where that's considered really big - most of the Bay Area is on 4000-5000 sq ft lots). To his credit, he DID warn us that while she's a terrific architect, she'd be "tough to get a hold of, as she's very busy" (maybe that was neighbor-code for "she'll miss every deadline"). dixiedoodle - agreed, I'm not planning on getting any $ back, so that's not what I'm after. Actually, for the $ we've paid thus far, we ((heart)) the house plan. Yes, in hindsight, the comments that translate to "they're more important than you" are, at best, inappropriate. At the time(s), it seemed more like casual chit-chat. feedingfrenzy, sue36 and sovra - thank you all - your comments and thoughts are the basis for the planned conversation. We actually *would* like her to see the plans through, just need to figure out how to tell her that we can't continue this way, it's too painful. I will go post this in Conversations to see in M-A has additional thoughts. What do you all think of the planned conversation, and how would you tweak it?

In order for the water to go out the backwash line, it has to go through the multiport. If you don't have a sight glass on the multiport or the backwash line, you won't see any water going through the valve. If you have turned off your pump and water continues to come out the backwash line, then it is siphoning out through the multiport. This would happen if the end of the backwash line is below the water level in the pool. You can either open the air relief valve on the top of the filter, unscrew the sight glass or cut the backwash line after the multiport to stop the siphoning. I am 99.9 % certain that the problem is with the multiport. The multiport valve is the one with the spring loaded handle that has different positions or notches that the handle fits into. The handle is the one you change positions to backwash the filter.