I agree that it depends entirely on the store, the manager, and to a lesser degree, the rest of the help. My local HD is above average for both selection and plant care. (Meaning they generally keep them watered and looking reasonably healthy until they are sold.) Labels are another matter. MOST of the time they are accurate, sometimes not so much so. But the Lowe's is worse. I have been in there when fully half of the perennials were sitting under big signs announcing annuals for sale. This included Mexican sage (salvia leucantha) and Mexican heather (the cuphea). Now most of you know that these are grown as perennials down here, though I suppose it is possible they might be annuals way up north. My local Lowe's DOES have a much nicer selection of garden art, pots and birdfeeders, pond supplies and the like. But it's catch as catch can on how the plants might be looking, and as I say, the labels are usually WAY off. The SuperTarget near me does an above average job, too. They insist on labeling ALL salvias as salvia coccinea, even the little squat red bedding salvias (which I think are salvia splendens or maybe elegans?) and are guilty of other mislabeling, too. But their plants usually look really healthy, and they often have good buys on things like salvia guaranitica and other less common annuals and perennials. They have gorgeous begonias (the fancy leaved ones) and last year had fantastic coleus. The perennial kind. Our WalMart needs Dustin Hoffman in his Rainman role out front...he can just substitute WalMart for K-Mart and be right on the money, if you remember the line. I hate that store. Crowded aisles, messy displays and poor labeling...and that's before you get to the Garden Center, which is worse. That about sums it up for the big boxes in my area, as far as I'm concerned. I shop HD & Target for bargains and/or common plants, since I'm in those stores often anyway, and then I hit the local nurseries for more interesting (and more expensive) things. Marcia

Gary, One thing to keep in mind with orchids at the big boxes is many are, for the money, a better deal than buying cut flowers because they last so much longer. I do that, knowing that I know very little about keeping it alive or getting it to rebloom after it finally peters out. I just stick them in the boot of the palm tree out back and once in a blue moon fertilize them. And several have died out there, but one rebloomed for me recently. I felt like I doubled my money on that little very common purple and white dendrobium. I do the same thing with the little broms with the spectacular flowers (or whatever brom's non-flower flowers are called.) After several weeks, the flowers die and I plant them in the ground. I've had several of those rebloom too, and I'm even bringing pups and big divisions to the swap. They're not fancy, but for the $8 I paid, I got a lovely flower in the kitchen window for weeks, and if I get more, wow, yippee! I also think the orchids make much nicer hostess gifts than showing up with a bunch of cut flowers. If the hostess can't keep it alive to rebloom, he or she will at least get to enjoy the nice spray of flowers for much longer than cut flowers will last. (so when you see me at HD, don't bother to counsel me on my brom and orchid buys... just all the other stuff I might buy and potentially kill or hate!) As for the in-store kills, I saw a massacre in the making yesterday. Someone should go to the K-Mart in Miami Shores and convince the manager to sell them all the broms and orchids for cheap. They lost the shade covering in Fay and everything there is burned looking and won't last much longer. I thought about talking to him or her, but I don't know enough about orchids to think that even if they were heavily discounted, I could keep enough of them alive and get them to rebloom to make it worth it. susannah

"(I don't know what this "wetting agent" might be; I thought it was probably polymer gel but they list both the wetting agent AND polymer gel for their #7 mix, so apparently not!)" The "wetting agent" is just a surfactant that allows the peat to soak up water more easily--rather than to repel it like dry peat does so very well! For all practical purposes, it SOAP! When Zach posted that he got a bale of pure peat and talked about how hydrophobic it is, I almost posted (but the Nasty, NASTY has been preventing me from reading so I've just been x'ing out when it appears most of the time!) that all the peat-based soils/mixes must have a surfactant in them, because even when they dry out ALL the way, they're quite easy to re-wet to make them "usable" again. Without a surfactant they'd take hours and hours to moisten well enough to be able to use them! Polymer, in my opinion, is entirely unnecessary for growing things in pots or in beds that are regularly watered and taken care of. When I was getting started buying the seedling trees that are being planted on the mesa top just south of Mesa Verde I thoroughly researched the stuff, and I found comments by people who were putting it in their "hanging baskets," and "when they watered their plants the soil was all falling out of the top of the basket!" Polymer E-X-P-A-N-D-S! I did buy some to be used where the seedling trees are being planted--in a situation where they get maybe a gallon of water when they're planted, and then they're 100% on their own, but to be using the stuff in an urban garden makes no sense whatsoever to me! When I bought it the first time I wanted to see "what I had," so I put a level teaspoon of the dry polymer in a water glass and filled the glass half up with water. After an hour all the water was GONE! I wanted to see if it would soak up more, so I added more water! Hour later the water was GONE! I dumped what I had in a clean (regular size) peanut butter jar and added more water! Kept adding water till it was up to the top and left it sit! I wound up with a jar filed up to the top with "expanded" polymer---from ONE LEVEL TEASPOON OF DRY POLYMER! The stuff is intended to be used in situations where plants will not be able to be watered, where they need "the extra stored water" for when there's no precip. And, clearly, the people who were using the stuff in hanging baskets and "small" pots didn't have a clue what they were doing and hadn't taken the time to figure it out! My guess is they were taking a half a cup or a cup of the stuff and mixing it into the soil in their 8-10" pots--and then they were wondering why the soil was all falling out of the top of the pots when it started to expand! Virtually everybody with an "urban" garden waters--except for those who plant true xeric gardens, and polymer in the soil would kill xeric plants real quick! For me, if I had polymer in my "potting soil" I'm sure I'd promptly rot off all the plants--the same as I do with vermiculite--and vermiculite holds far less water than polymer does. As I see it, polymer is a Buzz Word these days, so the companies put it in the mixes and sell it for twice as much as the stuff without it--and since "everybody knows how good polymer is" everybody falls for the "Pintrest Wisdom" and pays for it! "Good" is relative! What's good for something can be very, very bad for something else! Having said all that...... Try whatever you think might work for you and see if it does work or not. If it works, keep on keepin' on! If it doesn't, try something different! If you try something with polymer, or add polymer to something, remember! One Level Teaspoon absorbs enough water to fill up, to the top, a 16 ounce peanut butter jar! It may have soaked up even more water, but I never took the time to put it in something bigger to find out! Mycorrhizae! Some of the sunshine mixes have mycorrhizae these days too! And ProMix (the stuff my brother uses), like Sunshine, comes in ALL different mixes. Mycorrhizae is something else you don't need for growing things in your Urban Garden! This came up on B2's "evergreen tree garden" thread last year, and there's a whole buncha links about the stuff on that thread if you want to read more. http://forums.gardenweb.com/discussions/3117113/my-evergreen-tree-garden-2011-2015?n=9 Sunshine #4 must be the one they had out when I saw the pallets of it out front that one time--that cost more than #1--and I couldn't figure out why! Still don't know why! It sure looks to be the same as #1 to me! I buy "the cheaper" #1!!! And I prefer to stay out of the "organic" brouhaha! As far as Sunshine #1 goes, the Canadian peat is organic, the perlite is organic, and the dolomitic limestone is organic! That's 99.9% of what's in the bale, and that's good enough for me! Skybird

Ha, ha! Rootstock will outlive us all. I'm currently trying to track down a Purple Splendour rhodie. Four other favs of mine are Blue Peter, Blue Ensign, Sappho and Mrs. Furnival. Oldies but goodies! :-) Carol