milocrab, you have got me all over the globe - Hong Kong, Asia, Australia! About your seedlings; the growing medium appears too heavy for a tiny mustard seed and you may have compounded the problem by your watering program. A seed needs to be in a moist environment to imbibe moisture in its own sweet time. If the medium is too wet the seed will rot. As the seed germinates it uses up its stored energy to produce a root and shoot. These are necessarily small, definitely immature and very sensitive to the environment. Application of fertilizer and exposure to (sun)light must be done carefully and gradually or the seedling can easily die. All of the leaves in the photographs show a nutritional problem; either a shortage of elements or else a problem with uptake if the elements are present. Overwatering can prevent uptake by displacing oxygen at root level The bleached areas on some leaves can be caused by sudden and perhaps extreme exposure to (sun)light; or damage due to the activity of the "blotch" (as opposed to the "serpentine") leafminer. 91ðF "even for one hour" to us can mean "for an entire hour?" to a seedling as it pulls on all of its meagre reserves to cope with this environmental stress. Allow me to reproduce from memory, a poem by Kate Brown from my kindergarten school days. "In the heart of a seed, buried deep, so deep; A dear little plant lay fast asleep. "Wake!" said the sunshine, "and creep to the light". "Wake!" said the voice of the raindrops bright. The little plant heard it And rose to see. What the wonderful Outside world might be." We had to mime as we recited and it is a pleasamt memory.

Yes, it's acidic! Argh. My lawn (alone) is an acre--I am NOT looking forward to this.... Over the last four years, my husband was the main yard person. I just handled overseeding. I got tired of him killing the grass, so now I'm doing all the yard work, and he gets to dig stumps. :-P He *was fertilizing haphazardly about once a year. He'd mow, AT MOST, once every other week, but if it rained on the weekend, he'd skip that week. He managed to kill off big swaths of the backyard, and that's when I had enough. Now that I'm in control, I'm doing MAJOR rehabbing. He spread some Pre-emergent + Fertilizer in mid-March for me--and missed a huge section of lawn, which is now covered in crabgrass. So that was the last time he touched the yard. But most of the front yard wasn't part of what he missed, and we've never had much crabgrass there, anyway. (Actually, we have other annual weeds that had already reached seedheads by mid-March and the grass got its first mowing, so we really should have started March 1.) I fertilized again 4 weeks later with a weed & feed-type product. Normally, I'd wait at least 6 weeks, but there were stripes of missed areas everywhere, and the grass was still not as vigorous as I'd like to see given how long it had been growing. We had one brief dry spell, and I supplemented water in the front where there are so many tree roots because the grass was getting quite wilty. I really need to hit everything again with a weed-b-gone product (without fertilizer) this weekend. Then I'm going to wait until June 1st, which is the last time you can fertilize around here before summer, and use a final weed & feed-type application. Already, grass I didn't know I had is really spreading out. I think that poor mowing, fertilization, and watering practices were really making the grass struggle under there. So DH will be shifted to trimming dead branches and removing trees when the digging is done, and I'll stay on yard duty and get it done right. I think I have SOME perennial rye, but it's near the house, which gets more sun and stays pretty thick. I get good germination every year, and the grass makes it to winter fine but mostly disappears in spring. (Which was when DH took over...hmmmm....) When I overseeded in the past, I've used a deep shade mix from a big box store. I then applied Starter fertilizer. I keep everything very moist until first mow, then watered less frequently but still regularly. This year, I'm planning on using Outside Pride's Combat Extreme transition zone mix at 80% with poa supina at 20% in the shady areas and 50% Combat Extreme and 50% Supreme KBG. I want to stop overseeding EVERY YEAR. So I'm looking to add enough running grasses to self-repair small holes. I mulch everything right now.... My entire schedule looks like this: Mid-March: Pre-emergent + fert Early April: Realized husband missed neglected strip 10-30' wide and 250' long. Crabgrass already starting, so overseeded with cheapo seed and fertilized. Mid-April: Weed + Feed on main area End of April: Weed + Feed on neglected strip, Weed-b-gone main area Early May: Apply grub killer, because the grubs are terrible this year. After it's used up, I'm switching to Milky Spore. Mid-May: Lime the most acidic and unhappy sections. Weed-be-gone anything left standing. Early June: Last fertilizer--something like Scott's Summerguard. Mid-June: Try the baby soap trick. Early July: Check out for any need for weed-be-gone Early August: Check out any need for weed-be-gone Mid-August: Baby shampoo. Early Sept (earlier than before): Overseed. Apply starter fertilizer. Mid-October: Fertilize with something like Scott's Winterguard. I have to stop mulching around mid-October because of the leaves. From then through Thanksgiving, I mow and bag, then I compost the leaves to use in the gardens. Next year, I plan on only 4 fertilizations. I'll apply a stronger stand-along preemergent in late Feb, then fert in mid-March and mid-May, then early Sept and mid-to-late Oct. There is no way that I will ever apply organic compost instead of fertilizer to this size of yard. It's just not happening. EVER.

Thank you all for the advice and encouragement. It's nice to hear that I may not have screwed up after all, lol. I checked the bag of African Violet soil I bought at Giant and found that it wasn't the right blend… So I went to Lowes today and bought some different soil that was perlite and peat, and got some small pots for them. They've all been repotted in the correct soil and their new pots, and placed back in their bags. And that's where they're staying. No more potting for these guys! What I've decided to do is leave them in their bags for a week just to let them adjust to a new pot on the half wall in the living room (where they will get light without "cooking"). After a week, I will open their bags and let them readjust to the new room. and gradually remove them from the bags :) Hopefully they'll do much better now that they've got the right kind of soil and the right size pots! I've included a picture of my plants. The biggest ones have some really neat ceramic pots made for african violets. There are two parts to the pot: the outer round part and the pot part that settles inside. It supposedly self waters so I'm interested to see if they work well or not :) ---- @Karin: I found the commercial mix was also staying wet too long. The new perlite mix I bought today seems to be much lighter. As per your advice, I've put them in smaller, more suitably sized pots, so hopefully that helps :) And I'd seen someone do that with the cupcakes you can buy at the grocery store that come in the plastic boxes! It seems really convenient :O too bad my house is in diet mode, at the moment haha. Thank you for the support! @Diana: I haven't, mostly because I wasn't sure how much to give them, nor if the soil I was using already had fertilizer. I think once they're weaned off the bags, I might give them food. I'm certainly done potting them :P Thank you for the tips on the fertilizer :) And in response to your second post, I think that's what I meant? I took the plants off the mother leaves and found that it had split into multiple crowns in one pot, and repotted them. @Linda: I didn't realize that you had to let them get used to their new climate (though I should have, given that I own an aquarium). I'm more confident in them now that they're in a lighter mix. To answer your question, yes, they split into different crowns. After I cut the parent leaf off, I noticed they'd split into different crowns so I removed them from their pots with the intent of cutting them apart. For the first time since I've had AV's, the different crowns just… fell apart. I removed the plants from their first pot and all I had to do was tug on the crowns gently to get them to come apart. The second pot, well, they just kept coming off! I was almost starting to get annoyed by how many there were, haha. I suddenly went from (what I thought was) 2 big AV babies to 7 much smaller but very much independent babies. I'll give solo cups another try if I need another pot size for my tiniest ones and the local stores are out :) Thank you so much! Your advice has been really, really helpful and I'm gonna keep hanging in there! (PS I always want more more more, haha) @Irina: I don't know if there is a club in my area, but I'll consider looking into it. You all have been really pleasant so far and it's been really nice to meet such kind, knowledgable folks :)

That's a good point. Maybe I'll do half my plants in 111 and half in 511 if I can get my act together to go find other ingredients. I have several succulents, three sanseveiria, and a cactus (so all would like the 111 better I think), and then a bunch of other normal house plants - spider, pothos, and a bunch I don't actually know what they are. The reason I was thinking 111 for all of them is just remembering what happened last year... I'm in the VA/MD/DC area, so literally a swamp, and I killed two spider plants (spider plants!!!) with root rot, even watering it only once every couple of weeks. But it was so humid that the (terrible) soil never really dried out. The other I saved by watering only once every >1 month. I'm from CA originally and the humidity here is just unreal to me! Though I'm planting some hops rhizomes this year. Hops apparently suck up a LOT of water so 5:1:1 might be more appropriate for them? They will also be outside though and it rains a -lot- here in the summer. Part of me would rather err on the side of having to go water them more often... than standing helplessly while they drown from all the rain. Hm.