I add seaweed extract to most of my grape sprays. My grapes are doing well but I find it hard to say how much the seaweed is helping. I also use a small amount of organic 6-6-6 fertilizer (Plant-Tone) on all trees and small fruits to help them get micronutrients. Scott

Thanks for the replies Beca and Maria :) As the time goes by I am thinking about 2 ways to plant them. I am going to plant some in containers and I am planing a rock garden too. I have not bought the containers yet, still don't know if i should use the "paper" containers or wood ones. I already have the bulbs in the fridge, I think I gonna plant them around november, as i don't have too many space to store them in dark after planting. I need to put them outside right away. I bought fretilizer as well, I just don't know if it is necessary to prepare the soil 2 weeks before planting (mixing soil with fertilizer) or is it good to do them at the same time. I am going to put as many bulbs into a container as I can without the bulbs touching each other or the edge of the container. We'll see :) The rock garden is going to be a rock garden, I would like to plant real rock garden plants there, and have some space where I can put bulbs. I need to do the irrigation for it, I think that is going to be the most dificult part. I still need to figure out what kind of soil should I buy for the containers and for the rock garden. So that is my idea right now. Thanks for the replies again! Maria

Based on this thread alone (and the fact that my glassware and black handled utensils were getting all gross) I bought some Lemi Shine yesterday, and "used as directed." So I ran a load last night and just checked my dishes about five minutes ago. Wow--enormous improvement. The white cloudy residue isn't completely gone after 1 use, but it likely will by the next load. Even the weird rough feel to the utensil handles is gone. I am not usually impressed by new products (my reaction to the iPhone in 2008: "meh"), which is why I am enthusiastic about this. Lemi Shine actually does what it claims to do.

Still no cure, but we have had vinca minor (on purpose) in 2 large beds (60 x 12ft and 50 x 12ft) out between the sidewalk, a cast concrete wall, a concrete path, and 2 driveways for over 30 years. Obviously, the key is to make sure any bed it is in is surrounded by concrete or a road. We planted it along with a yellow daisy ground cover from South Africa - can't remember its name. In 30 years, neither of them has escaped into another part of the garden, and I must say that the daisies try harder than the vinca - we have to trim them off of the sidewalk once a year with an edger. Both of the beds had been used for decades to park cars, so they were full of old gravel and saturated with weed killer, and the soil, which was decent, was compacted and hard. I thought that these would be good places to try vinca and the daisies, since they both had a reputation of being unkillable thugs. We planted them without any amendments or digging to the soil, after just trying to rake up most of the gravel, to see if it would work. Ha! They loved it, and in 12 months had covered both beds, digging through the soil themselves. The two ground covers compete with each other, (the daisies like more sun, the vinca less, so the daisies predominate in the Spring, Summer, and Fall, and bloom then, and the vinca in the winter and early Spring, when they bloom). Between the two of them, they blot out almost all of the grass weeds. We DO have about a half dozen roses growing in these beds, but each of them is in an individual raised bed made of concrete tree surrounds, which make keeping both ground cover plants away from the roses easy. Tall and medium tall Iris also don't have any problem coming up through these ground covers, so I have planted lots of them in these beds too, as well as some tall South African bulbs such as ixia. Of course, the other unkillable naturalized plant around here, valerian (Jupiter's beard) has volunteered to also grow in these beds, and we just cut it down to the ground after it blooms in the Spring. Not a solution after the vinca gets somewhere you don't want it, but just wanted to say that it CAN be planted somewhere if you have an area where the hardscape already exists to contain it. We love it, and actually between the two "thugs" the South African daisies are much more in evidence most of the time, although that is probably because of our Mediterranean climate. Jackie