Sf_rhino, just arrived to LA, with my plants! But let me tell you, it was painful! I arrived to the airport about 2 hours before the takeoff. Right outside there was a USDA station, where you submit your luggage for an X-Ray inspection. I had 6 plants all packed into a single box (3 feet miracle fruit, 3 feet Jamaican passion fruit, 1 foot curry plant, 2 unnamed passion fruits (they were called yellow and purple at the market). I went straight to the USDA officer and said I had plants for inspection. The lady was very nice, and helped me to unpack and pack the plants back. She was *very* carefull with them, and thanked me for my patience. The box got a yellow sticker "USDA inspected". She looked at all the roots, and took a couple of leafs off the miracle fruit that looked a bit eaten up. My box got a yellow sticker "USDA inpected", and off I went to the TSA checkpoint. Unpacking and packing took about 30 minutes. Once at the checkpoint, I realized I had to put my plants through an big X-ray all the luggage was going through. "No way" I thought, "they will be dead for sure". So I said to the TSA officer, I had live plants that were going to be potted, and I didn't want them to get irradiated. They tried to convince me it was 'ok' to put through the scanner, but I politely stood my ground. They offered hand inspection, I said 'great'. The TSA agent got a bit ticked off by this, and while my wife and son went through the metal detector, she invited me to go through their X-ray body scanner. I declined, saying that I don't like to be X-rayed. She said, "this is not an X-ray". I said "I know exactly what it is," and she offered a pat down. Once I went through the metal detector to the search area, my box with all my plants was also there. TSA officer searched me, then asked me to take the plants out of the box. He didn't unwrap them, but gently squeezed them individually, and looked inside the roots of the miracle fruit and a curry plant. He was very polite, but very slow. At this point we are getting sort of late, and my wife is getting nervous. Next, there is another USDA station right at the gate. Thank God there was the same lady there that inspected me at the first USDA station. She just nodded and smiled, and said "go ahead". At this point we were almost the last people to board the plane. They were about to shut the gate. Bottom line. It's possible, but arrive well ahead of your departure. TSA was respectful and pretty much doing their job. They had the new scanners and the new software that doesn't show the naked body, just a cartoon version. Everyone can see it. Myself, not going through any X-rays. I am a cancer researcher, so know exactly what it does to you. Tony.

You'll drive yourself crazzy trying to maintain any particular media pH. If you want to manage pH, manage the pH of your irrigation water, which is much more important than media pH, & forget the medium. You can use pH paper to measure pH and lower your irrigation water to any pH you think is favorable with white vinegar or citric acid. Actually, there are a number of acids (nitric, sulfuric, phosphoric, ...) that would work, but how they mesh with your fertilizer supplementation program would vary according to what you are using for fertilizer. I honestly don't worry much about pH. I grow lots of pines, junipers, azaleas, and other plants that prefer an acidic soil with no attention to pH other than being reasonable about how I choose my Ca source, and the pH of my irrigation water is always north of 8.5. About the only time I notice any issues is in the later part of winter on my indoor plants. I start to see some yellowing because I don't water as copiously indoors as out. This allows the Ca/Mg to build up in the soil & pH to climb a little. I'll often see some chlorosis that proves to be a pH induced Fe deficiency. All I need do to correct, is add a couple of tbsp of vinegar to each gallon of my fertigation solution (I fertilize every time I water in winter). If the bloom booster fertilizer you plan on using has more P than either N or K, I would skip it. There are no plants that use more P than either N or K, and the extra P tends to inhibit uptake of N, Fe, Mn, other micro-nutrients, and unnecessarily raises pH. You can use gypsum as your Ca source. It looks like a better choice based on the Mg content of the fertilizer you listed, but the Ca/Mg content/ratio of the other fertilizer could have an impact on the best choice. Al

Regular potting soil is a nono with Miracle fruit. Peat moss and perlite 50/50 is what I've seen. If you don't want to buy sulfur granules, coffee grounds can be a short term solution to acidify soil. Adding a tbsp of vinegar to 1 gal of water can be used for watering.

I've tried out the ballast method with my very first citrus and it worked very well last fall into winter then spring. Not sure if anyone remembers my Meyer's story but my Meyer came to me with a badly propagated root system from RBF and was always on the edge of declining health but it still managed to grow an impressive root system throughout winter with the ballast I provided in the pot. The tree only had 5 leaves provided with one LED grow light the whole winter season but still managed to grow nice roots in such poor health! I used a half quart plastic takeout container as my ballast. My poor tree is gone now but it serves as a wonderful reminder of what worked and didn't work (ie. ballast worked). Vlad it is possible the dust caused the bottom half to be too soaked for too long. I know you mentioned that Al's recipe uses the dust but I've looked into many different recipes and opinions on the 511 recipe on gardenweb to see how it fared with other growers. There was a very interesting thread where someone talked about a threshold for particle size and the maximum percentage allowed before becoming a real issue in container mixes. I've been trying to find if I saved or bookmarked it but haven't located it yet so I'll be looking through my phone photos for screenshots. I know for sure I saved it because I liked how he provided numbers for the quantities of each respective media and/or particle size. When I find it I'll make sure to post the photos or link. This year I've also noticed a huge difference in the way I water and how it effects the smaller particles like peat. Last year I had just started the gardening hobby so I didn't have any watering cans or wands. I just watered with a decades old leaking spray nozzle from the hose or using an empty water bottle as my watering device. I would drip water through the cap of the bottle very slowly and at the time with just 1 citrus tree, I had the patience for it. This spring I've added some blueberry plants, about 20 citrus seedlings from seed, and my 3 trees from Stan so I purchased a watering wand to make it quicker and easier. But! I stopped using it because I noticed that it provides such a large amount of water in such a short amount of time that it created a type of flash flood effect in my containers. So much water would pool and stay above the mix and pull alot of the peat down when it sank down leaving a layer of bare perlite on the surface. This was drastically different from my extremely slow water bottle method. My water bottle method acted more like drip irrigation and did very little to disturb the surface or stratify the container mix. I really feel that most people will have problems with peat or dust sized particles settling to the bottom of the container if your collection is large enough to require a watering wand or can. I think I'll be going back to poking holes into the caps of empty water bottles and letting that drip irrigate my citrus lol