Klehms/Reckamps- Most are slow growers but extremely hardy. Once establised they are simply gorgeous!I will be taking a handful of them to some of my new saturated colors this summer. I have a some new additions that I can't comment on yet but am excited about. Gossard and Norris. I've heard great things about Norris hardiness some I'm sure I'll be pleased. Kinnebrews do not do well for me and same for the new Stamiles. Dani

I don't agree with blanket statements that more sun is always better. While this might be true in places with high humidity and lower elevations, here in the hot arid SW at 5000 feet, there is such a thing as too much sun, and plants which receive a few hours of shade/partial shade always produce better and are less stressed. Plants here that receive 12 hours of direct sunlight will develop a blasted look in the summer where the color is more grayish-green than lush green. The lower leaves get leathery faster than shaded plants, and the leaves rarely provide a flattened surface to the sun, no matter how carefully you maintain moisture levels. At a certain point here, sun ceases to be a critical component and becomes a stress factor. Plants grown in buckets in these conditions do even worse. They dry out very quickly, and the buckets can get extremely hot when placed on surfaces like concrete, brick, or stone. To help, you can put a layer of mulch in the bucket to help retain moisture, and if your ground temperatures are high, you can place the bucket higher up on some type of stand. Regarding your plants, yellow pear does have thinner, more sharply jagged leaves. It's typical of that variety. Under the right conditions, they can become obscenely large. Since you only have one plant to compare, it might not actually be the conditions that are unfavorable, but it could be the individual plant itself. When you transplanted the yellow pear, was it still in any type of peat container?

Ok, I'm in California (Long Beach) ... Zone 10. I'm brand new to all this gardening stuff. This year was my first year ever to grow anything and I'm making tons of mistakes (but learning). The entire idea of even growing a garden was sort of a joking challenge on behalf of my wife. I did not trim suckers off my tomato plants at all until I read a couple of articles and saw a you tube video ... and this guy said, "I want to grow tomatoes, not tomato plants." So I started trimming suckers off my tomato plants ... to the point I was afraid I would kill the plant. OMG!!!!! My plants went crazy ... they exploded on me with the tomatoes, they are shooting out all over the damned place. In the picture below, that plant right there (and that's just one) is only about 4 feet high, its growing into my jalapeno plants, into my artichokes ... my cage can't support it (I got it tied off about 4 ways to Sunday) ... you can see all the tomatoes on the plant and that's just on that side ... and ... I've probably gotten 20 tomatoes off that plant already. I totally underestimated everything about these tomato plants! But regardless, I am a convert now about trimming suckers off my plant, if it doesn't have hair and its not growing up ... it gets pruned off. BTW, I'm using Ferry Morris Beefmaster, Hybrid seeds (my wife picked up on sale at Rite-Aid) that I grew from seed in a dixie-cup starting back in February ... and I moved em into the ground towards the end of March and just started watering. I didn't even think the silly things would grow, it was just dirt I scraped the grass off of and broke up (I did stir in some potting soil left over ... a little more then half a bag). We're getting tomatoes the size of my fist (some larger, some smaller). We already have had BLT's several times, gave away tomatoes, had em on our burgers and salads, and made a pot of home-made spaghetti sauce that fed 6. I'm like totally blown away ... its like jack and the bean-stalk!

@Nil13 made reference to the Whitcomb 311 mix, which is an earlier historical attempt to create a more coarse potting soil for container plants. I think it is extremely helpful to read a document written by Carl Whitcomb that explains how he came on this formula by accident. Essentially what happened is he accidentally left nine test pots under a bench and everyone forgot they were there. They had successfully nearly killed all of their test plants by watering in a normal potting soil mix and the unwatered plants started to do very well. What I have started to realize is that any plant can do well in many different soil mixes, if you are able to carefully control the watering. This explains why so many people on this forum claim gritty mix is not as good for their succulents as their (fill in some random horrible soil with lots of small particles) mix. Inevitably those people are growing their plants indoors. They have enormous experience with their plant type and they know exactly when to water the plant. So that is the case of a very skilled gardener compensating for a very bad soil. What gritty mix does for me is let me grow succulents outside in very abusive weather conditions, without the plant dying. A plant can get a week of rain and it will still drain well. During Summer, gritty mix will tolerate a bit of overwatering, although you still really need to pay attention to not overwatering. Whether you make your 511 mix with perlite/peat, or with two parts Turface, or with lava and pumice, is probably in the big picture not going to be the deciding factor in whether your plants grow well or not. Success can be add with any of those mixes because the size of the particles allows the roots to breathe and prevents capillary action of water from bring the perched water table to the top of the pot and drowning the roots. Fine-tuning how you make 511 is a question of matching the plant type to the moisture retention of the soil and to the watering habit and climate exposure. Any 511 variant is going to do better than almost any commercial potting soil because of the larger particles used in the majority of the mix.