Hi. Stan here. All right, let's put this puppy to rest. First, if you want to keep one of the "resurrection plants" alive, you need to figure out which resurrection plant you have. Here, I'm going to address ONLY the resurrection plant from the Chihuahua Desert, spanning several states in the southwestern USA and adjacent parts of Mexico. (If you have one of the other kinds of resurrection plants, you're on your own.) Botanically, these plants are part of a much larger group called the club mosses. They fall somewhere between the mosses and the true ferns. They are a very old group of plants dating from the Coal Ages. Their scientific name is Selaginella lepidophylla. If you want to get it right, the "S" and only the "S" in Selaginella is ALWAYS capitalized, all other letters are lower case. And both words are italicized. (No italics on your typewriter? Then you can underline them instead.) Almost all other Selaginella in the world are moist habitat plants, living in deep forests, swamps, in or near streams and creeks, or among other plants for protection from direct, scorching sunlight and desiccating dryness. You would grow them the way you grow most of the true mosses. S. lepidophylla is a distinct exception, apparently surviving if not thriving in a desert, and a pretty severe one at that. I am trying to include several photos I took of them growing in their native habitat in western Texas. Note that they most commonly grow on the northern sides of hills and protected in the shadows of rocks or other plants. If they receive any direct sun at all, it's only for a few hours in early morning and very late afternoon. They tend to grow where they're in dense shade throughout most of the day. Note also that the soil in which they grow is comprised mostly of disintegrated, calcareous rock (i.e., limestone soil) with a little organic detritus (mostly naturally composted leaves, grasses, mosses, and other dead plants) mixed in. The limestone base is strongly alkaline, and the organic stuff tends to act as a hydrophilic buffer, holding water for a few precious hours or days after a dew or rain. The climate in which they grow is fierce. In Summer the daytime temperatures often reach 100̊ F. They may receive a few drops of rain from time to time, BUT while the Chihuahua Desert does not receive a lot of moisture in the form of rain, it is often blessed with dense fogs and heavy dews. And these are the resurrection plants' saving grace. Winters are a little less hostile. Nighttime temperatures often drop slightly below freezing, and light, freezing rain and sleet are not uncommon. For S. lepidophylla, life is a lot easier. S. lepidophylla, much like other Selaginella, uses a collection of tine hairlike roots to hold itself in place in the desert, and to absorb what little liquid water might be available, but it probably gets most of its water from the aforementioned fogs, dews, and occasional rains as the water is absorbed directly through the surfaces of its leaves and stems. It almost never sits in liquid water for more than a few hours. No, they are not immortal, and cannot survive forever in a dried state. In fact, if your S. lepidophylla isn't obviously fresh and alive when you get it, it probably never will be, regardless of what you do for it. All reports of them recovering after 50 years rolled into a brown ball are either circus hawkers' sales pitches, or statements by people who can't recognize a dead plant when they see one, and were fooled by the unfurling corpse. (At this point perhaps you should review the Monty Python "Dead Parrot" Sketch on YouTube.) How long can they survive in such a dried, dormant state? I don't know. Apparently no one has ever performed any sort of controlled experiments to determine this, and there is so much hogwash flying around about the matter that it's impossible to even make an educated guess. So, how might you try keeping one alive? I confess I've never been successful, and I've only seen one botanical conservatory with living S. lepidophylla on display. And, I know of a veritable garden of them growing wild in the Chihuahua Desert of west Texas. Here are some suggestions based on general plant care, plant physiology, Botany, and what I've seen in the wild: 1) Almost all plants in nature experience an annual growing cycle based on the change of seasons. This helps all members of a given species flower at the same time to promote cross pollination. It also prevents them from flowering in deepest Winter and trying to go dormant when they should be actively growing. If you try to get one of these to grow as Winter approaches, you're almost certainly wasting your time. Early Spring would be a much better time to try this endeavor. 2) Don't waste your time on a dead plant. If it isn't obviously alive, move on to the next hobby. 3) Soak your newly acquired S. lepidophylla in room temperature tap water for 2 or 3 hours, no longer. This is intended to just "top off the tank" of its water reserves. Soaking it any longer might likely afford harmful molds or bacteria a foothold. 4) Plant it by laying it, right side up, on a layer of barely damp soil. The soil should be composed mostly of a mix or limestone sand or finely crushed oyster shell mixed perhaps half and half with compost or garden loam. Do not use commercial potting soils because they are composed of either peat or composted lumber byproducts. All these things are acid by nature, and these plants have evolved to survive in an alkaline environment, the exact opposite. Commercial cactus soils might work. Maybe, maybe not. 5) Do not use a tall or deep container. A "bulb pan" would be much better than a standard 6" terra cotta pot. The entire soil must be kept only slightly damp, and large masses of soil are sure to develop pockets of wetness in their centers. If the plant or its roots are allowed to set in water or are too damp, they'll rot and the plant will die. 6) For the first week, keep it loosely covered with plastic to maintain a high humidity. Remove the plastic after a week, or as soon as the plant appears to be alive and growing, or begins to develop mold. Mold is a bad thing. Generally, a molding plant is a dead plant. Maybe you need to try a newer, fresher resurrection plant. 7) Give the plant the brightest light available that isn't direct sunlight, except that it can receive a little direct, early morning sunlight for 30 minutes, no more. 8) Do not water the plant like you do your geraniums! Instead, mimic a dew once a week by misting it. The plant itself should end up quite wet, but the soil should be only a little damp. 9) S. lepidophylla should be allowed to dry out a little more in Winter, and moved to a brightly lit but much cooler place for several months beginning in early Winter (November in the Northern Hemisphere). Remember that they routinely survive light freezing weather during many Winters. They may be taken out of their Winter rest period in early Spring (early March perhaps in the Northern Hemisphere) by moving them to a warmer room and beginning their weekly misting. Go easy on the misting at first, but resume normal misting after two or three weeks or as you can see new leaves and branches forming. 10) *USE DISTILLED WATER.* Not spring water, not softened water, not demineralized water, not baby's sanitized water, not holy water, not expensive French bottled water. Reverse osmosis (RO) water might be acceptable, but is a lot more expensive than simple, old fashioned, distilled water. All such water contains some level of dissolved minerals, important ones being lime and/or salt. As you water your houseplants with the wrong water, the water evaporates, but these contaminants merely accumulate. If you don't believe me, look at the mineral crust that's developing around the edge of the soil in your half dead geranium's pot! And before long your gorgeous plant begins to look tired and droops as it tries to fight off the doses of lime and salt that you've been dumping on its roots for months. Soon, it can no longer grow effective roots and it begins a slow, inch a day, march towards the waste bin. I hope this helps you when you try your hand at growing these most fascinating plants. Best of luck.

Greetings I am new to posting to this site although I have referred to it from time to time when I had a gardening question. I find that when several people corroborate each other on a subject it's usually the right answer. Very interesting. As to Ruth Stout, I read about her quite a while ago through Rodale, and I thought she made perfect sense. When I built my house here in Sacramento (shout out Carla) I started gardening in earnest. I started out using the Bio-intensive method because my ground had been scraped and compacted down to hard clay. I constucted a few beds with this method, but I always added mulch because I couldn't stand to see the bare soil getting baked. In bio-intensive the ground is supposed to be mulched just by the foliage of the plants close together. Problem is when they are small. Then a friend loaned me "Gaia's Garden" by Toby Hemmenway. I experimented with one bed using what he called his bomb proof sheet mulch bed. I was really blown away. I now have committed my whole garden to this method with some exceptions. It is the Ruth Stout method with a giant kick start. This web site details the process. http://www.patternliteracy.com/ I have added to the knowledge of this method by putting it to work on my 1/4 acres under Sacramento conditions. I generally do not need to water during the winter rainy season, but because we normally get no rain between May and November I add drip irrigation between the top two layers at about five inches apart. If I keep my top mulch at about 6-8 inches I only need to run the drip system every few days when it is 100 degrees F or over. otherwise much less often. This method requires a lot of collecting of materials but i get most for free. Sacramento is a tree mecca. Every late fall I go around in my van with large plastic bags which I use over and over again to collect the leaves which have fallen and people have been so nice as to have placed in nice piles. I stockpile the leaves because when it's done it's done. I don't have to go far from home to find plenty, much more than I can use. I like oak, elm, and just about any deciduous type. Avoid magnolia types. I avoid wood chips for the most part because they do take a long time to break down. I am able to find straw from ads on craigslist for free, and I have my own secret source for free spoiled straw and hay. Because I live in an urban area I use coffee grounds for my nitrogen source and it again is readily available from coffee shops for free. In fact you are keeping it out of the landfill. I supplement sometimes with oyster shell and greensand just to be sure I have enough P&K, but probably with the tree leaves I don't need it. Also I chop up my plants like tomato and everything not harvested and add that as well. I think that because P is supposed to help grow strong stems and stalks P must be in those stemmy parts. Incidentally when you remove your plants with this method you simply cut the plant off at the base level and allow the roots to rot underground. I never dig! Ruth would be proud. I did run into problems planting small starts so I got a few hundred clear plastic pint containers and cut the bottoms off. I clear some mulch aside insert the container and plant inside. When the plants are big enough I pull out the containers. I just keep reusing those containers. When I plant seeds like carrots I reduce the mulch layer down a lot and add it to another bed. When the carrots get big enough i start to add mulch back again. Slugs are an issue especially in a newly formed bed with things like lettuce and chard. I just deal with it by using sluggo and some hand picking at night with a headlamp and a bucket of soapy water. We have a lot of slugs here anyway. Pill bugs are shredders and they seem to go after the areas that the slugs have munched on, otherwise they are valuable for breaking stuff down. I think Ruth would approve because this method really gets thing off to a dynamic start. Afterwards you just do as Ruth does and just keep adding more mulch. I do continue to sprinkle coffee grounds with the other mulch materials. Normally I have to pull my irrigation lines up about two inches a year because so much new compost has formed. I do this when I am planting a new crop. The exceptions to the sheet mulch method is for potatoes and sun-chokes because you would have to dig up your bed to find them all. So for those I use a high-rise method in a wire composter. It works great. I guess that's it except that I wish I could have met Ruth Stout. She sounds like a fabulous person. Come on gardening in the nude! How great! I couldn't get away with that here.

I've been using Al's (gritty) mix with pines, junipers, yews, and myriad other conifers for well over 20 years now, and though I do do a lot of experimenting with soils, have yet to find anything that works better. ;-) I'm not self-promoting, just saying that I experiment with soils a LOT, and have yet to improve on the basic gritty mic mix. It holds LOTS of air, virtually NO perched water, ample volumes of water, is structurally very sound & durable, and it's adjustable for water retention to suit plants individually. Those are all the most desirable qualities you can have in a soil. I wouldn't use wood chips other than conifer bark as a primary fraction of a container soil for several reasons. A pH spike during the composting process is inevitable. Wood chips break down much faster than conifer bark, so when using them, N immobilization should be expected. Also. because they break down so much faster, they generate a LOT of heat during the composting process, often raising sol temps an additional 10-15* higher than similar soils with bark as their primary fraction. Of course, N immobilization with the gritty mix is insignificant and heat build-up due to composting is never a problem because of how slowly the bark decomposes AND the excellent gas exchange of the highly aerated mix. A 50/50 mix of a peat-based soil (like ProMix) and wood chips will yield a soil with the same drainage characteristics and perched water table height as the ProMix. Only when the wood chips (which are not a good choice for container media) are a very large fraction of the soil (about 80%) can you expect drainage & aeration to improve significantly. To get a visual on this, ask yourself how much perlite you need to add to a quart of pudding to get it to drain & hold air. BTW - most commercial cactus mixes actually drain poorly & support way too much perched water to be healthy for cacti, succulents, or conifers. All of the pines, junipers, and most other conifers I've grown would instantly rebel at wet media and the presence of significant amounts of perched water as the mix of ProMix and wood chips would be/have. They prefer a soil that holds little or no perched water and remains damp after watering instead of wet. I have 320 lineal ft of bench space like you see in the picture below. Most of the space is much more crowded with potential bonsai than you see, and conifers make up at least half of the near 300 trees. All are in the gritty mix; and I have no trouble keeping them happy & healthy. Al

First a little basic science -- from online sources: "At pressures less than 0.00604 atm, therefore, ice does not melt to a liquid as the temperature increases; the solid sublimes directly to water vapor. Sublimation of water at low temperature and pressure can be used to “freeze-dry” foods and beverages. The food or beverage is first cooled to subzero temperatures and placed in a container in which the pressure is maintained below 0.00604 atm. Then, as the temperature is increased, the water sublimes, leaving the dehydrated food (such as that used by backpackers or astronauts) or the powdered beverage (as with freeze-dried coffee)." The partial pressure of water vapor in the atmosphere is about 4.3 mm Hg at the freezing point. To evaporate, it has to barely exceed the atmospheric pressure of 760mm Hg. To do this, either reduce the pressure, or increase the temperature....or add other substances that can evaporate and contribute the rest of the pressure needed. This is where dry ice comes in. It will sublimate (i.e. -- go from solid to gas without first becoming liquid) at -78.5 C. A stream of CO2 flowing over a fixed source of ice will allow the water to sublimate. The key is to have the CO2 "flow." This is where a vacuum with discharge to atmosphere comes in, or a "sink" for the water, such as a dessicant. Clearly, a small blower will not come anywhere close to procucing a suitable low-pressure: It needs to be a pretty good vacuum. Even then, if the source of the CO2 is dry ice, you will need an awful lot of it. You can see why. Divide 760 mm Hg (total pressure) by 4.3 mm Hg and get the ratio 177:1. So if you have 0.1 lb-mole of water in the food (1.8 lb), you need 17,7 lb-mole of dry ice (779 lb). Alternatively, if you have a frost-free refrigerator, you can freeze the food and let the refrigerator do the rest. It will sweep atmospheric air over the food, drawing moisture from it in equilibrium with what is in the air. After a few MONTHS the water in the food will likely all sublime. If you have ever put a tray of water in the freezer, and left it, you would come back to find the tray empty, or mostly so. You can spend your money on freeze-dried foods made by someone else, you can run the refrigerator for months and pay the electric bill, you can buy dry ice and a decent vacuum pump (with other equipment), or you can do air drying or home canning. For emergency foods with long shelf-life and break-resistant containers, commercial freeze-dried foods are the way to go. For everything else, home canning and air drying is cost-effective and pretty healthful. As to the vitamins lost in processig, take supplements separately. By the way, these home vacuum sealers? Yes, they remove oxygen in the air that can otherwise react with food causing flavor and nutrient changes. They don't appreciably change the amount of water so if there are spoilage organisms (there usually are!) that can survive low temperatures in the absence of oxygen (anarobic bacteria), they will continue to grow. One "trick" I've taught is to take steel wool -- maybe a cigarette-sized twist -- and wrap it in a coffee filter. Put it in with the mostly dry food to be preserved, in a very tightly sealed container. The steel wool will react with the water and oxygen inside the container forming rust. The filter paper contains the rust particles so it doesn't mix with the food. As the water and oxygen react, the inside pressure drops. You can see this in a flexible container as it appears "squished." CO2 will not be removed, nor will nitogen or other fixed gases. Since all organisms appear to need SOME water, and that has been converted to hydrated iron oxide, this shouldn't be a problem