You talked about everything (thank you) except water. Have you had a lot of rain this year? Did the grass sit in standing water for any length of time? The photo shows a diseased blade of grass. Question is how did it get that way? Organics may seem expensive, but in the long run, you'll save because you won't have the issues other people have. The grass will not have problems with stress from summer heat, winter cold, insects, disease, and weeds. Are you trying to translate pounds of N from chemical to organics? You can't do that. NPK is completely irrelevant in an organic program. With organics you're interested in pounds of protein. Protein contains the nitrogen element which eventually (3 weeks after application) gets turned into plant food. The organic process is biological. Some of the bacteria and fungi involved in the transition to plant food involves absorbing N from the air and converting that into plant food, too. But if those microbes do not receive food (organic fertilizer), they cannot do their job. So there is no apples to apples comparison between organic and chemical ferts. They both work. I happen to believe it is much easier and less hassle to stick completely with organic fertilizers and organic insect control. The organic solution to lawn disease is ordinary corn meal. Call your local feed stores to see if they have it. You want either whole ground or chopped corn. Whole corn (deer corn) will grow a field of corn, so that's not usually what people want. Apply corn meal at a rate of 20 pounds per 1,000 square feet. Apply now and again in a month. You don't have to water it in, but it helps if you moisten it right after you apply. Just wash it off the tops of the grass so it's sitting on the soil. Corn meal works by attracting a beneficial, predatory fungus to the corn. That fungus literally eats other fungi. The population builds up on the corn and then it launches off to kill the disease fungi in your lawn. Apply to the entire lawn so you don't miss any spots. If you miss any spots, you can always reapply. If you miss spots, they will show up as slightly yellow in about 3 weeks. That's because corn meal is also an organic fertilizer which greens up the grass.

Hi I have read most of this stuff before too. It kind of overwhelms you. I agree that you can read it and think you know what they are talking about but none of it stays in there!!I was a chemist as well and really never liked all that memory stuff. Even memorizing all those amino acids in Biochem seemed like waste at the time.I think my problem is more the botany than the genetics. I just don't know enough about plants period to figure out how the color stuff works. Larry - Here's my summaryThe Mahieu stuff about brown is pretty limited. I can only find 2 brown daylilies on his site that he has registered - Hooded cobra and Death adder. It sounds like browns are very unstable and blacks are better to work with. The browns are combinations of fulvous orange pigments with blues and purples. They are very sensitive to the temperature. He does mention one good point and that is it is important to get a good waxy coating or something like that on dayliles that are subject to water spotting. The water soluble pigments that make red and purple are in the upper layer of the flower and are easily spotted if there isn't something else protecting them. Maybe this would help with color fading in the sun as well. Tom Rood discusses many good daylilies to breed with but doesn't really go into detail about why. He does mention more about some traits being dominat etc than other articles I have found. His hybridizng basics ie the mechanics- are very informative.Harts articles are very indepth. It is very humbling to be having difficulty understading his material for "non scientists". The article on pigments doesn't really offer much basic color information mostly how the pigments work. Grenn melon and yellow pigments are produced by the plastics - a thing in the cell. These plastids are not passed on by the pollen parent which is very interesting and I wil have to think for a while what that means for color breeding. These plastids are also not found in the upper layer of cells - the epidermis and so those pigments make up the under color of a flower. Does this mean a yellow flower has all those pigments in lower layers and there are no pigments in upper layers? Blue and red pigments are water soluble and exist in the cell sap( the liquid that fills the cell and that all the parts float around in). It is concentrated in the upper cell layers of the flower. A cross section of a petal will show these layers. The color that results from these pigments can be affected be anything that changes the pH of the cell sap. I can think of the soil - any other factors you can think of? That is why they look different in different gardens. As we all know these are the colors red and purple that fade in the sun the worst and that water spot. It makes sense if they are just below the surface. Somehow environmental factors affect the behavior of the different enzymes that control the formation of the various pigments. I am still not sure how that works. I have read other places about how the sun can affect ruffling by changing the cells in the lower layer of the flower segment more than the upper layer and thus ruffling or puckering happens. I guess the genetics for that to happen are already in the plant and the different climatic conditions just enhance the phenotypic result. These environtmental factors are just one of the things I have trouble understanding as it doesn't seem to happen in people that I can think of.One thing I did get out of Hart's genetics articles was the fact that no one is growing long enough crosses to ever get the recessive mutation that it is going to take to get a blue daylily. It makes sense to me. It is really going to be a freaky thing if it ever happens. Somehow the gene(s) that cause blue to appear in daylily eyes needs to be mutated so blue can appear in the rest of the petal. I don't really get how eyes happen anyways and are edges just a mutation along the line some where? It is very complicated. I have read that if enough people are working on it it will happen but maybe there will never be enough offspring of one cross to see the mutation. That part I understand. Hope some of this makes sense to you. I think I really need to get a good botany book and learn about plant cells. Then maybe I will understand how diamond dusting and velvety finishes can happen when the surface cells change shape. I really tried to take Botany first year but had a conflict and ended up with Microbiology. What a waste that was on me. Plants are really cool!!Resting my brain now!!Debbie

Some ponds are never cleaned and the ponds and its occupants survive very well. However, a large number of ponds are created with high fish densities or are built in locations were the pond receives a great deal of debris over the year. Even if you start out with just a few fish initially, in a healthy pond they will breed to the point that the number of fish will push the environmental limits of your pond and biofilter. The debris may be the result of leaves blowing into the pond, the die-back of vegetative pond plants as well as fish wastes. It is these latter types of conditions that will necessitate you cleaning the pond eventually. The two most likely time points for cleaning are in the fall, to reduce the amount of accumulated muck on the bottom of the pond as you head into winter, or in the spring to remove material accumulated over the winter from leaves blowing into the pond, accumulated fish waste or catkins and similar materials shed by trees as they leaf out. Cleaning in the fall reduces wastes in the bottom of the pond which may turn anaerobic if sufficient oxygen is not available, creating a breeding ground for harmful bacteria, or which may decompose, releasing ammonia and other dangerous chemicals that can be trapped under the ice. The build-up of these pollutants can lead to fish kills over the winter months. While keeping a hole in the ice over winter will help alleviate the accumulation of gases, cleaning the pond before winter sets in will reduce the overall potential for problems. Cleaning the pond in the spring may help reduce diseases and parasites that often occur as the pond and its biology warms up for the summer, as well as reduce the overall availability of nutrients that stimulate algae growth. The following are a few approaches that have been successfully used to clean the pond. 1. If the pond has a bottom drain periodic changes of water (typically 10% per week) have been used to evacuate the accumulated debris from the bottom of the pond. This simple approach minimizes the amount of material that is removed at any one time as well as adds water to the pond on a periodic basis. Care must be taken when adding water to be sure that you have minimized the addition of chlorine and chloramines typically present in many municipal water supplies. This can be done either by pre-treating the water with dechlorination agents or by using a whole-house water filter with an activated carbon cartridge. 2. Using a net such as used in swimming pools is helpful for cleaning out large materials that have settled to the bottom of the pond. However, if there is a very large amount of debris in the pond you should be careful to either remove the fish or use supplemental aeration to avoid creating significant oxygen deprivation due to stirring up anaerobic or large amounts of oxygen-consuming muck. If you notice a rotten egg smell this indicates the presence of hydrogen sulfide. You should immediately stop stirring up the bottom and get the fish out of the water as soon as possible before continuing with the cleaning. 3. You can use a variety of devices for vacuuming the bottom of the pond. Some of these use a garden hose to create a suction through a venturi device. The potential problem with these devices is that the pond may fill up with too much water during a prolonged vacuuming and you may have a potential problem of adding chlorine and chloramines to your pond if you do not pretreat the water. Wet/dry shop vacs, specially those with an attachment for a garden hose to provide a continuous drain, have also been used. These devices may drain a large amount of water from the pond in a short time and therefore it is necessary to either replace the water or use the garden hose to add the water back into the pond through the biofilter. Care must be exercised in reintroducing water taken from the bottom of the pond in that it may be depleted of oxygen as well as have very high suspended sediment levels that may create problems for the fish. A third approach is to use a pump capable of handling a moderate level of solids (such as a sump pump) to pull water from the bottom of the pond and pass it through a device to strain out the majority of the solids and then recirculate the water back into the pond. Filtering materials such as old sweaters, panty hose, etc. have all been used with some success in this approach. In any of these approaches, if using an electrically powered device running on house voltage make sure that you have it plugged into a GFI protected circuit for your own safety. Ronaye, Steve and David

Hi, I've posted on Alsions website too, but for those of you who haven't seen it, I did contact froglife and they replied to say that they had had a 'flush of emails' about this recently but don't know what it is. They are sending my pictures to the Institute of Zoology to see if they can help work out what it is..... I have to confess I haven't felt the bumps - I figured the little guy had enough problems without me grabbing him! He's the worst, the rest seem to be less affected or not at all - but as I said before, he seems as happy as Larry, so no obvious ill-effects! I'll let you know if I hear more......