I am baffled because I have the opposite point of view entirely. Has anyone ever thought about what your ancestor Gunter in Germany was eating a thousand years ago? Probably cabbage, cabbage, cabbage, onions, garlic, barley, cabbage, pork, and turnips. How about Earnest in England?... pretty much the same. Far from food going extinct, I think there is tremendous diversity now in food production. Industrial production might require GM and capitalization of research through protection of intellectual property, but the fact remains that you are eating tomatoes, kohlrabi, six kinds of lettuce, two kinds of carrots, brussels sprouts, etc. All of those are robust and are grown as millions of mini varieties in gardens all over the world. I mean EVERYWHERE. Seed banks, seed companies, and people's dresser drawers hold huge stores of DNA, all slightly different. In five minutes, I could buy 100 different packets of seeds at the hardware store. Was that even possible in the 50s? And that is F1 or F2. Some okra farmer in Alabama has seeds produced through 50 crosses. People can and do create and study their own cultivars of darn near everything every season and then trade them internationally. How will that change? Activism is all well and good, but GM and Mxxxxxxo are small in the big picture and probably getting smaller. Remember that they have to invest millions in a cultivar just to get it to a commercial seed stage. How many cultivars can they do that with? And they and their timing are going to be wrong how often? Monsanto is not a juggernaut, it is a riverboat gambler. The bigger it gets, the bigger it bets. For better or worse, some gardener in China has a seed that is better than what Mxxxxxxo has got, and it is only a matter of time before the rest of the world finds out about it. In Japan, a single pumpkin seed can sell for hundreds of dollars. Mxxxxxxo has not moved in on that action, and it never will. The market is fuelled by enthusiasts and connisseurs. If the market gets cornered, people will immediately lose interest. Viewed in terms of sheer greed, it is in Mxxxxxxo's interest to maintain wild type specimens in environments all over the world. Even if Mxxxxxxo could sell one type of tomato seed that would make all others extinct, it would not do it. Has anyone considered that? Well, I guess that is enough. I could give 20 more examples. Viewed from a wider perspective, food diversity has never been better. And I will not be buying Mxxxxxxo stock. I should watch more TV, it sounds very entertaining.

Thank you, Martin. I consider that a compliment. This thread is a little confusing because in places we're talking about container size and how tight the roots are, and in other places, we're talking about nutritional issues. Let me start by saying there are several kinds of 'slow release' fertilizers. When we talk about these types of fertilizers, we usually are talking about how they deliver N, because N is most used by all plants. Slow release fertilizers may be either organic or inorganic. They are simply fertilizers that are characterized by a slow rate of release, long residual presence in soils, somewhat lower low burn potential, and low water solubility. FWIW, they cost more per volume of N than water soluble fertilizer. Several categories of slow release nitrogen fertilizers are commercially available, including: Urea-formaldehyde, sulfur coated urea (release rate controlled by coating thickness), plastic or polymer coated, (release dependent on temperature and coating thickness), and natural organics fertilizers/soil amendments. There is some confusion throughout the industry because of terminology. Many refer to controlled release fertilizers as slow release. Indeed they are slow release, but I think it tends to help avoid confusion if we refer to the coated prills as CRFs and the granular fertilizers and organic soil amendments as 'slow release'. I realize a case can be made for using 'controlled release' and 'slow release' interchangeably, but I think the term CRF sets the prilled/coated fertilizers apart and puts them in a different category. I'll let you guys ask your fertilizer questions, because I'm unsure exactly what they are, but in the meanwhile, I'll talk a little about vigor and vitality as it relates to root congestion and potting up vs repotting. I'm going to try to use a numbered scale to illustrate approximately what happens to a trees vitality and vigor in a container over time. I know I've posted the next paragraph here before, but I think it's important to understand the difference between vigor and vitality, and how each relate to the growth.health of trees. Some might have noticed my regular use of the term vitality when I write. It is actually a plantÂs vitality that we can have an impact on, not its vigor. ÂVigor is constant in trees and other plants. Mother Nature provides every plant its own, predetermined level of vigor by building it into each plant. Vigor is the genetic potential every plant is encoded with, and its measure is the plant's ability to resist stress and strain. Vitality, in contrast, is variable - a dynamic condition that is the measure of a plant's ability to cope with the hand it's dealt, culturally speaking. A good way to look at the difference between vigor and vitality is to look to genetics for the level of vigor and to things cultural for the plantÂs vitality. It's up to us to provide the cultural conditions that will ensure our plants' vitality. Vigor and vitality are distinctly different, and a good case could be made that they are unrelated, but there is no need to delve deeper into that point. A plant can be very vigorous and still be dying because of poor vitality. Far more often than not the term 'vigor' or 'vigorous' is misapplied, where in their stead the terms 'vital' or 'vitality' would have been more appropriate. Poor vitality is what we witness when our plants are growing under stress or strain and in decline. (My appreciation to the late Dr. Alex Shigo for his works, which have helped distill my understanding of stress, as opposed to strain, and vitality as opposed to vigor.) Let's assign a tree a level of potential vitality of 1 -10, with 1 being a dead tree and 10 being a tree with perfect vitality and achieving its maximum potential growth. Right off, from a practical standpoint we can eliminate the possibility of a tree being a 10 in a container. It's just too difficult to get everything perfect and have it remain perfect all the time. I'll assign a level of 8 as the best we can hope for in a container. Since we're looking at repotting, potting up, and root congestion, let's imagine that all conditions are perfect except the idea we're focusing on for the moment - roots. In order for your tree to continue to at a level of 8, root congestion has to be kept to a minimum. Research shows (not mine) that at approximately the point where the root and soil mass can be lifted from the container intact, growth begins to be negatively affected. This means that if we want to maximize growth and keep our plants growing at that illustrative level of 8, we need to pot up as soon as the roots/soil can be lifted intact. Research also shows that trees allowed to become root bound beyond this point will show their growth to be permanently affected. The reason this has been studied so carefully is the nursery trade has a vested interest in seeing their woody material gains caliper as fast as possible. Larger trunks mean more $s. Setting the scene here, we have a tree in a pot and it's becoming root bound. When first potted as a cutting and while growing under our imaginary perfect conditions it grew at a level of 8. It's becoming more root bound now, and its vitality level is declining. It drops from 8 to 7 to 6 to 5, and you start to really notice it's stopped growing, stopped producing inflorescences, all the interior foliage is dying back ...... it's just generally declining. Here is where you decide whether to repot (which includes bare-rooting and root pruning) or simply pot up. If you pot up, you see what you THINK is a big growth spurt, but in reality, we KNOW the tree cannot grow any better than 8. What you actually see is your tree changing from a level of 5 to a level of 7. You allow it to grow in that pot for another couple of years, over which time it declines to a level of 4. If you only repot, its growth improves with what you see as another spurt, but this time your tree only reaches a maximum vitality level of 6. Two years later, it's declined to a 3, and potting up brings it back to a 5. After 5-10 years, your tree is so weak it's attacked by insects and/or disease and dies. You blame it on the insects or disease, but really it was the condition of the roots that was the actual cause behind the slide into oblivion. Now, let's look at what happens if we do a full repot. Your cutting starts out at 8 and declines to a 5 over 2 years. This time however, you decide to do a full repot. Your tree sulks for two weeks, then takes off. Soon, it's growing at a level of 8, with plenty of room for roots. It declines to 5 over two years, you do a full repot, and the tree is restored to a level of 8 again. This can go on for as long as any of us are alive. This attention to roots is what allows bonsai trees to grow with near perfect vitality for hundreds of years and be passed down from generation to generation, while most of us struggle to keep trees even as genetically vigorous as figs happy in containers. Figs and mulberry (same family) are probably the two easiest trees I've worked on, as far as roots go. They tolerate practically anything if you pay a little attention to the timing. I heartily suggest that you learn how to tend properly to the roots and do a full repot every 1-2 years - 3 years at most. Are there any questions about repotting or specific questions about fertilizing? Al

You can use fertilizer at any step, but whether the plat and/or soil needs it before you leech it away with following waterings that matter. I'm in the camp that uses a little fertilizer to sprout seedlings in the soil mix, but I rarely use any more fertilizer more than once in my plantings before moving them outside, and never just before going outside. Everyone does it differently it seems. Long story short, chances are you wont kill your plants and the worst that should happen is you'll waste fertilizer or send your seedlings into abnormally fast growth rates under your lights. The seedlings, themselves, are quite capable of "feeding themselves" for a little while off their first set "food leaves" provided by the seedling and you want a lot of your initial growth to happen below the surface not stalking up toward your grow/sprouting lights weeks before they should.

Hi akrauss....Yes, R-422 is officially Dupont's R-422b and it has a capacity loss of about 15% over R-22. Heat Siphon is likely telling you R-422 is higher efficiency because they do not have any 410a product to offer yet and can offer a "green" solution by simply changing the refrigerant in their R-22 systems to R-422 as both are compatible with mineral oil that is used in R-22 compresors. My guess is heat siphon will have 410a a year from now due to the higher R-422 expense when compared to R-410a. This gap in refrigerant price will only widen as R-410a production ramps up and R-422 production dies a natural death due to low demand. Related to #3, R-410a is a genuine Dupont refrigerant that is not a drop in for anything. It is a stand alone refrigerant that was designed from the ground up as a "green" refrigerant in the early 90's that does not contain hydrofluorocarbons. R-410a can not be dropped into an existing R-22 unit, because it runs at considerably higher pressures that would damage the R-22 compressor and other components in the system. Also R-410a is not compatible with mineral oil that is used in R-22 compressors. The R-410a compressors are charged with POE oil which is compatible with R-410a and are designed for the higher pressures. R-410a is a more efficient refrigerant than R-22 due to it's lower viscosity and therefore lower pressure drops in the system. I do not doubt that Heat Siphon is selling R-422 units overseas. This is because Europe mandated "green" refrigerants years ago and the only way Heat Siphon could sell product to them is to use a green refrigerant such as R-422 or another refrigerant that is used widely in Europe which is R-407c. R-407c requires POE oil just like R-410a so R-407c systems require special compressors that are priced accordingly. Heat Siphon is using R-422 because it is a direct drop-in and they can still use the R-22 compresors and other components as-is, all they have to do is change refrigerant if the unit is destined for Europe. Unfortunately, these Europe units are not as efficient if they have R-422 due to the capacity drop I mentioned earlier. In the pool industry though, I find that there are no efficiency standards and there are lots of false marketing claims out there...mostly heat pumps and pool pumps from what I'm learning from being an HVAC guy who is also a pool enthusiast. Sorry for the long winded message, but I think you were asking for this level of detail. Lastly, I would definitely chose R-410a over R-22 or R-422 units. It will offer the best life cycle cost. Both R-22 and R-422 will be expensive in the near future as the life of both refrigerants is limited. R-410a's life has just begun and will likely not be short-lived. Hope this helps!