Please read my thread to the bitter end, would ya? I want to report the following: I am sure that by now, me being a newby, I've gotten on everybody's nerves regarding my brug: I bought a Candia Double White. Its blooms were gorgeous, I want to say voluptious!! and I'm not kidding. Then the great heat wave came about Souther California and my plant dropped most of its new buds. But a few more buds developed into blooms, say maybe 12 altogether. And guess what: All the new blooms from this second "flush" are no longer DOUBLES. They are just SINGLES. How is this possible??? What is gonna happen next year??? (Why do I deserve such a disappointment??? eh, this is supposed to be a joke...) Ingrid.

Chandra, I've never used their products, never have and never will. Any company that does not list their product ingredients on their label and/or their website doesn't get a dollar of my money. I want to know what I am putting into or onto the soil where we grow our plants. Any tomato plant fed any decent fertilizer is likely to give significantly higher yields than a plant that is not fertilized, assuming the plants receive adequare sunshine and moisture. So their claim of 150% better production or more tomatoes or bigger tomatoes or whatever else they say is meaningless and is just ad hype. Any good fertilizer, applied properly, can give you similar results, and most likely for a much lower cost. I believe the reason they don't list their ingredients is because they want people to think there is something extra-special in their products so they'll be willing to buy them and to pay their prices, which seem high to me. Is there something extra-special in their products? My personal opinion is no, there is not anything there that you can't get in other organic fertilizers. Caveat emptor. Before I buy from a company that is new to me, I check their reviews at the popular watchdog site often used by gardeners. I can't name that website here because it is a competing website and you aren't supposed to mention it or link it here. (E-mail me if you don't know the name of that site and I'll tell you.) If a company has a lot of negative reviews, I avoid it and search for a company that sells a similar product but that gets better reviews. Larry, Thank you. You are so very kind. If eating real bacon is a sin, I'm headed straight for a very bad place! I love bacon. I'd eat bacon ice cream if they made it. (And, yes, I bet somebody does make bacon ice cream) Keith, You are so, so bad! lol I bet Peg has her hands full trying to keep you in line. Busy1, You win the "First BLT" prize! I can imagine it took a bunch of Tiny Tims to make one sandwich. Wasn't it yummy? Nothing says "spring" like the first delicious BLT with your own home-grown tomatoes. I don't know how you'll ever get caught up on planting with all the moisture now in your ground, but I'm sure you'll find a way. It is still too wet to plant anything else here, but not too wet for the weeds to grow, so I'll spend my afternoon pulling weeds. Thank you for your kind words. I hope you know that I appreciate you so much. Diane, I wish you'd been here to have a sandwich with us. I'm excited you're getting ready to plant. You know, once the plants are in the ground, they will grow like weeds. Your plants will be catching up with ours in no time at all. I really believe that. Erod, If I can't eat tomatoes from April through December, then (alas! woe is me!) life just isn't worth living. Well, that's a slight exaggeration, but only a very slight one. Some people here call me the Tomato Queen, but really I am the Mulch Queen. I mulch, mulch, mulch, mulch, mulch. I add mulch to at least one raised bed every week, sometimes every day. I mulch my paths. I mulch my flower beds. I mulch the 'pathways' in my dogs' yard so that they are walking on mulch instead of mud, since three of them get to come inside and sleep in the house at night. (The other three sleep in the garage.) I mulch my the soil surface in all my containers of plants. (They get bark mulch for aesthetic reasons.) I mulch my fruit trees when I have enough mulch to do so, and I mulch my shrub beds. If a dog or cat lies down in a shrub bed or flower bed and doesn't move while I'm mulching, I mulch them. (That does tend to make them get up and move!) When I am able to do so, I mulch the ground outside the perimeter of my garden fence to help keep down the grass and weeds so they won't sneak through the fence and into my garden. Last year, I didn't do a very good job of mulching around the perimeter, so I'm going to try harder to do a better job of that this year. Usually I run out of mulch inside the garden and don't have any for the perimeter fence. However, thanks to the bales of hay that were a very lovely gift from our friends, Jesse and Joyce, I'll have plenty of mulch this year. Mulch keeps the soil cooler which is very important once the temperatures are cranking up high. I think mulch is one reason I get high yields from my peppers and tomatoes. Mulch conserves moisture which also helps the plants. Mulches reduces the number of weeds. Most important in terms of having healthy tomato plants and good yields, mulch reduces soil splash which reduces disease. I start out with 2" of mulch on my beds, then add more continually. My goal is to have mulch 4-6" deep on all my tomato beds by mid-June. You don't want to mulch too heavily when the soil is still cold or cool because you want the soil to warm up to a certain extent. That's why I start out with a little mulch and then keep adding more as the ground warms up more. Some beds don't get as much mulch as the tomatoes. Onions, for example, do better if they are able to sort of pop up out of the ground as they bulb up. If they are able to do that, they seem to produce better bulbs than those planted or mulched so deeply that they cannot "pop up". So, I have mulch in the two onion beds, but it is on the soil between the plants and not necessarily over the bulbing part of the plant, if that makes sense. I would never, ever attempt to grow without mulching. Mulch is helpful in so many ways. Best of all, as mulch decomposes it turns into compost. Compost enriches the soil. Enriched soil grows better, healthier plants that produce higher yields. I give compost and mulch a great deal of credit for the very high yields I get in my veggie garden. It may seem like I'm always weeding (it is a very large garden!), but without the mulch, I'd likely spend 10 times as much time weeding the garden as I do now. Mulch also reduces erosion which is ultra-important to me because my gardens slopes downhill from west to east and from south to north. When I first started gardening here, my local rancher friend, Fred, who is a rancher, farmer and gardener himself, gave me tons (I mean literally tons) of hay in big round bales. I mulched heavily with it and it helped get me off to a great start here. I also use chopped/shredded autumn leaves that I collect and bag up in the fall, grass clippings from our own property, and hay or straw but ONLY from safe sources and ONLY after I test it for herbicide residue. I currently have 197 bales of hay undergoing herbicide testing so I can be sure it is safe before I use it. I used to have a compost pile far from my garden (it is still there and I still use it to some extent) but that means continually hauling stuff out to the pile, then after it has decomposed, I have to haul the compost back to the garden. For me, it is so much easier to pile up organic matter as mulch in my garden beds, pathways, and around the edges of my garden and let it decompose right there. In the spring, the decomposed mulch from the previous season is mixed into the beds as I plant. Then, after a bed is planted, I scoop up all the decomposed mulch from the pathways adjacent to that bed, using a compost scoop and put it right there on the newly-planted beds, and that's the start of the new season's mulch. Then I lay down cardboard in the pathways, and start layering on mulch. Otherwise, my pathways are just beds of weeds. So, my recommendation is to mulch like crazy, but not just around the plants but also in your paths. In addition to doing some weeding, I have two rows of tomatoes that need more mulch today, and I have a big pile of grass clippings with which to mulch them. It seems like all I do in May and June is mulch and pull weeds, but both are important to getting good yields. Dawn

Your plants is in desperate need of light, that's why they are growing so tall and leggy. Try to introduce into a location with more natural light gradually, else you will burn them. Roots wise, they seem pitiful, but when they are still roots, the plant will make it if you do it right. What do mix do you use in your soil? Does your pots have drainage holes? Your second plant looks like a jade.

I feel your pain about your faux wood floors. Unfortunately, I don't have a choice, I am an apartment dweller. 🫤 When they first put them in, I was thrilled, they seemed so "cool," "modern," and neutral (yep, in that fugly "greige" that's so popular now for some strange reason). Shortly thereafter, I discovered the awful truth: they're cold... in look, feel, and insulating properties (I'm in the Midwest). They're very hard and uncomfortable to walk on without shoes or squishy slippers (did they even put an underlayment down first?), they make me sound like an elephant when I walk on them, they have a weird rough "grit" to them that I can't seem to get rid of (is it because they're new?); there's no shine, they always look dirty (probably because they ARE); and every drop of water leaves a mark. It seems I'm constantly sweeping, Swiffering, wiping, vacuuming...and my apartment always has that weird "new car" smell from either the glue or the plastic itself (yay, health hazards). Not only that, but the installers were very haphazard: there are many areas of the floor that sound literally hollow when I walk over them. I then made the mistake of seeing the type of flooring that my next door neighbor has. Because her apartment is older, she has the "older" style of faux flooring: warm, gorgeous, honey colored, and inviting. It was such a marked difference from what I have, I was shocked...and very jealous. 😭 Even my former apt in another state had darker "wood" floors, but they were fabulous: soft underfoot, didn't show water or stains, easy to clean. But not these. So I'm stuck with these until I happen to move again....and since I just moved in, that will be awhile. Sigh. REAL WOOD RULES!