James, I have no issues with the heat because they grow inside my house. I never put them outside, even for a couple of minutes. I grow them in a spare room that has a large window that gets early morning sun. I also have them under cheap grow lights that clip onto something that's near the plants. The grow lights take an ordinary grow bulb or you can use those long square grow light bulbs. Either type will work and the total cost is really cheap. Ever since I found out about the water my plants are growing fast. I use only organic fert. since the other types of fert. can burn the roots. The organic can not burn the roots. A guy that I purchase miltoniopsis plants from told me that since most tap water is purified to get rid of bacteria and other things most tap water contains chlorine and chorline burns the delicate roots. I never thought about this before and since I found out about chlorine being in most tap water, this makes sense plus you can smell the faint odor of chlorine in the tap water. I can't tolerate the heat so I stay inside and I set my thermostat at 70 degrees. If I'm happy with the temps. the plants are probably happy too. I almost forgot one important issue. I have a humidifier working 24 hours. It's a real cheap humidifier that I purchased off of Etsy. The humidifier looks like a fat white stick. I stick it in an old plastic water jug and you can see the mist coming out. Apparently it works real well. I can't tell you the brand because it came in a company box and everything is in Chinese including the instructions. I think that the humidifier cost me around five bucks. My set up is cheap but I haven't killed any plants. I currently have about seven plants putting out spikes. I have about twenty plants and I don't want anymore. I'll probably get another one only if the flower color appeals to me or if it's a cross that I don't have.

Probably a little of both... with more being just their cultural situation. My neighbor is a professor and curator of herpetology at the main State University here. Herpetology is the zoological study of reptiles and amphibians. He has identified my aquatic garden's toads as Eastern American Toads, the most common in the US. He also told me that it isn't uncommon for two or even three to latch on to one another in a mating-game and actually drown one another. It is a chemical within the toad, can't remember what he called it, but I guess it is a lot like human testosterone in as much as it gets elevated and causes all sorts of behavioral mishaps for the toads. He has told me that it is not uncommon for toads to have an 85% mortality rate the first year... hence why I guess nature has them laying so many eggs. We too have had weather that went from a hard winter to a quick two weeks of summer-like, only to flash back for prolonged cold/cool spells. The toads were active during the warm spring weather and now they are quiet and haven't laid nearly the level of eggs that I'd consider "the usual." Any how, I find a few dead or drowned toads each spring... but one particularly cold morning I went out to the skimmer box for a quick leaf pull... I had 22 in there! Good luck with your toads!

Ezzirah, I often recommend the jar soil test to new gardeners, using an article from Fine Gardening magazine that described it and soil improvement really well. We have highly variable soil here, so I did a jar soil test about every 20 yards to figure out what sort of soil we had in each location before I began doing soil improvement and planting. Then I tried to amend the individual areas based on what I learned from the jar soil test. You can have really hard compacted sand and if it is dry, it will seem like it is clay until you get it wet and break it up. As long as it remains compacted, water will roll right across the surface of it or will bead up on it like water beads on a tabletop. We have one big pocket of sandy-silty soil that cuts across the property from south to north. Well, it isn't that big compared to the size of the property. At its widest point it might be 40 feet wide, and it runs about 130' long, but the part of it that runs inside the west garden fence is only about 8' wide. Everything I planted in the sandy area struggled in the summer until I'd been amending it for 6 or 8 years. I just couldn't put in more organic matter than the heat could decompose in a year. It still is not as good as the well-amended clay because it still drains too quickly, but it is a lot better than it used to be. Four o'clocks grow in the improved sand like mad so I've let them spread and naturalize themselves all around that sandy area outside the garden fence. Inside the garden fence I grow rhubarb, herbs, some flowers, beans and early tomatoes in various parts of the sandy western edge of the fenced veggie garden. I used to grow great sweet potatoes there, but the area has become too shady from the nearby pecan tree for them to grow there any longer. The rest of our sandy-silty soil is mostly in the woods and the creek bed, so I mostly garden in clay. As much as I dislike clay, it is very rich and fertile. All you have to do is add organic matter to improve both its ability to drain and also to hold moisture properly, and it is great soil. With sandy soil, it is lower in fertility so you're not only having to add organic matter to help it hold water but you also have to fix its fertility issues. My friends here who garden in sandy soil have a lot of trouble with watering in summer because the water just runs down through the sand. Some of them also have root knot nematode issues in their sand. I've never had RKNs here, although of course they could pop up in the sandy area at any time. I'm just lucky that they haven't. In a good year when the grass is growing, we mow once or twice a week, catch all the grass clippings in the mower's grasscatcher and add grass clippings, as mulch, to the garden beds every week all spring, summer and fall. Every bed won't get clippings every week because there's not enough grass clippings to cover the entire garden every week. We often overseed the lawn grass with winter rye grass and that enables me to mow in the winter and add more grass clippings on top of the beds all winter long. It doesn't matter how much I add---the soil always needs more, more, more. Larry, Silt has been the hardest thing for me to learn to recognize. Our really silty area sits at the downhill side of my garden and prickly pear cactus love growing in it, but that makes some sense because the garden slopes and the silt is at the bottom of the slope. I've long wondered if the area where I garden now and the area where the sandy-silty soils are found on our property used to be a slough or creek bed that filled in because that's what it looks like--a sandy, silty river bed that cuts through otherwise impossible red clay. All the trees that existed on the upland part of our property when we bought it were found in 1 location----in that sandy-silty river of soil. Elsewhere in the upland clay we just had mixed prairie grasses and wildflowers. In the lowlying areas we have the thick woodland and what used to be a spring-fed swamp. The spring quit running during a previous drought year and I still call it the swamp, but it only is swampy after heavy rainfall. The best solution when you cannot find organic matter to bring in is to use cover cropping to grow your own organic matter. I've been working with winter rye, spring clover and summer buckwheat to try to improve the area behind the barn where I'd love to put in a fenced area for more veggies or fruits. It is slow going, though. The clay there is just really, really dense and while the cover crops are improving it, it is a slower process than I thought it would be. It is harder and harder to find organic matter here too. We are lucky to have friends who give us their old spoiled hay, but I doubt they'll have any for next year because I think they'll feed it all to their cattle this winter. I'm going to have to be really diligent about gathering autumn leaves this year. My compost pile currently is about 30' long, 6-8' wide and 4' tall, but by the time all that stuff breaks down into usable compost, it won't cover 10% of my garden's raised beds. By the time it decomposes, the volume of it is reduced to about 1-3% of what I started with. That sort of drives me crazy. Building good soil takes a really long time. We've been here 14 years and I'm just beginning to feel like the soil in some places is getting to be "good enough". In other places, it is nowhere near good enough and I don't know if it ever will be, but I keep plugging away. Dawn

Hi Susan- Are you talking about the floor dimensions? They range according to what style of box you have (from 4" x 4" up to 5.5" I think). My other house is also decorative with a tin roof (smaller floor). That roof can definitely cause the heat to soar. My bluebirds used it before I got a proper bluebird box. Now, they definitely prefer the bluebird box. I'm going out of town for a couple of days, but would be happy to measure for you next week. In the meantime, ask on the other forum. There is a guy named Fred on there that is a total expert on bluebird box dimensions. Earlier in the season, there was a post about this that you may find helpful there. Is your hole diameter 1.5"? As you've read, there's not a lot of nesting going on right now. Nicole