Good Morning! Two things: 1. Soil always needs to be amended with about 85-90% carbon compost (brown leaves, brown straw, wood chips and so on) along with about 10-15% nitrogen compost (kitchen scraps like banana peels, any peels, broccoli stems, uneaten vegetarian spoils, apple cores, coffee, and manure is nitrogen too). Egg shells should also be mixed in for calcium. This should be done in any vegetable and even flower bed at least six months prior to planting. If you haven't done this, you can go to Home Depot or your local garden shop and ask for balanced compost to mix into your soil (be careful not to damage roots) and layer on top so that it slowly goes into the earth with rain. Oh, and obviously it is cheaper to plan/more environmental too:-) 2. The person who mentioned weather is spot on too. Once you've given your plants food, wait for the sun, heat and rains. It's shocking how plants will all of a sudden just take off when everything is right for them! Hope this helps. p.s. numbers above can vary depending on what you are going to grow.

I haven't been online 2 c any responses 2 my blog entry for a while and i'm glad 2 c I've had some responses. I really appreciate any advice i can get. I'm currently growing my gardenia indoors in a window that gets great light in the morning and moderate thourhgout the rest of the day. I'm excited 2 say that i now have about 7 beautiful flowers in full bloom on my plant. Its funny how all the buds seemed to grow in at the same time and yet they appear to be growing and blooming in groups at different times. They are so worth all the work. I have some pictures that I'd love to post but I'm not sure at the moment how to do that yet. Its been so long since I've checked this blog but if anyone looks again I was wondering if the gardenia blooms grow bigger the older the plant gets or is the bloom size determined by the type of plant you have? Thank you soooo much

Not sure of which Sabal you have (S. palmetto, minor, or another). Assuming it's the standard Florida Sabal (S. palmetto). You do realize that Sabals (even in the tropics) are notoriously SLOW--ESPECIALLY WHEN YOUNG (growth seems to pick up once they are more mature). There are relatively faster growing Sabals. I find S. texana to be a much more robust plant (sorry Florida). Mine has maxed out in the largest container I have.--A wonderful species! (Sabal louisiana is also faster growing--compared to 'palmetto'.) A more tropical species, S. mauritiiformis is also relatively fast and attractive (but hard to find.) I got a little bored with the slow growth of my containerized S. palmetto so I planted it in the ground (my first Sabal experiment). If you think S. palmetto is slow try growing S. minor. I got so bored with this one I threw it into the compost pile!

In my own case, I've worked for years to amend my native soil, that I didn't want to just lose all that effort when I made my "Mel's Mix". So, I left the boxes open on the bottom, and just worked Mel's mix into my existing soil. This eliminated a lot of problems with Mel's mix not supplying enough nutrients in the first year. My native soil (primarily clay) is actually very good, especially after 5 years of amending and amending and amending with compost and other organic matter. My first year I had to look hard to find worms, now I need to only turn over a single trowel of soil, and I can find a half a dozen worms! It's a great thing! Secondly, I would be very careful with the heat down there in Texas. Radishes (and most root crops for that matter) are cooler weather crops, so they might have gotten fried in the sun.