I wasn't able to add a reply from the county forester right before becoming laid up with some health issues so it's a couple of weeks stale. But in it he acknowledged also recent deaths of live and laurel oaks, red maple, long leaf and slash pines, and red cedar. Still, no specific information regarding an absolute cause. Since then, I've been out of the loop. I reject theories of products such as fertilizers or herbicides based on the distribution pattern. It's been small pockets of trees (commonly 2-6) and they tend to ignore property lines. Besides, most of the situations I've seen are where one can just tell that these are not yards where anyone is spending 10c on chemicals of any kind. For example, the yard with 4 large oaks dying looks like an abandoned rental property. There's been no attempts to eradicate weeds there. Maybe it gets 2 mowings a year at best. Salt water incursion I would rule out for many obvious reasons. It's not a possibility. And we would have hear about something like that long before it got here. I haven't postulated any theory or made assertions yet as to the cause. Nor have I heard anyone in a knowledgeable capacity state a definitive cause. I speculate a disease or insect infestation that may or may not be affected by the recent lack of winter (our normal dry season) rain. There is talk of a beetle but I don't have enough details... certainly no confirmation at this point.

I would have reacted the same way! This is beginning to sound like "The Pet Cemetery"! We have a few skeletons in our yard as well. One green heron: Just after I'd installed our pond, 11 years ago, we had a visit from a green heron. The day he appeared, we were installing the icemaker in our frig. I shoo'ed the bird away, as DH beckoned me for assistance. So, I asked my son (then 14 yrs. old) to keep an eye out for the fish monger and shoo him away should he return. The next thing I know, my son says he got a fish and I got him. The green heron had returned scooped up a fish and retreated for lunch on the fence. My son shot him with a pellet gun. I was shocked, and asked why he shot the bird; it was a protected species and I'd asked him to shoo the bird away. His answer was he'd misunderstood me to say shoot the bird. Anyone who knows me, knows I'm an animal lover who would never kill anything, unless it threatened human life. I was flabbergasted to say the least, but also concerned. The bird had fallen into my neighbor's yard; I didn't know if he'd wounded it or killed it, but knew we had to discretely check its status. Not wanting to draw attention to my son's mistake, he barreled over the fence w/the use of our ladder and recovered the evidence. The bird was dead, but the fish was alive (and continued to survive). "Jimmy Heron" is buried in our backyard..........along with about 10 rats (probably more), a couple of fish and one oppossum. The oppossum was dog kill. That about killed me! Our Samyoid has a thing for oppossums; I've taken 2 to the vet's for repair. Thank goodness the Samyoid has gone blind...........probably an oppossum curse put upon her rather than the diabetes. The rats.......one thing the Chamber of Commerce will never tell you about, is the rats in Tampa! When we moved here I was totally disgusted! The house had been empty for 6 months, the yard totally overgrown with vegetation. Our first night in the house, we heard a noise which sounded like a herd of buffalo crossing the roof. It was 4 days before we identified the culprits, and then I was ready to move! DH decided to put out rat traps. He was not discouraged by their numbers. I swore off any responsibilities w/traps. The first night of traps, we were sitting at the table having dinner. First, you could hear the snap of one trap, followed by many more. Sounded like the percussion section of an orchestra. I thought I'd lose my dinner. Believe me, it took only that one experience for DH to decide there had to be a better way to rid the homestead of rats. The better way, of course was to clear the property of hiding places, and at the time, it didn't seem we could move fast enough. We cleared out 4 trees (I still have 17 on the property) and all the undergrowth; then the house was tented. When I mentioned this to one of our neighbors, the neighbor's reation was, "Oh, yes, grove rats" like they were domestic pets! (Our neighborhood used to be an orange grove. Rats eat the fruit off of the trees. When they developed it, not all the rats ran away; they remained to prosper.) A few days after we'd cleared the landscaping, another neighbor was alarmed when she said she had NO idea why she suddenly had rats under her decking, but would have to deal with it. I stiffled a laugh. Another neighbor told me he and the previous owner of our home used to sit in the back yard with pellet guns and shoot rats as they ran along the fencetop. Since he lived directly behind us, they always made sure they hunted together to avoid injury or damaging the other's home. They buried a few rats in the yard as well. So, that's the buried treasures in our back yard....so far.

I see you're new here, welcome. Pls. do some reading around here on mixes. While it's good that you're already using Cactus & Succulent mix (C&S for short), you will quickly see that many if not most of us here have learned to amend our C&S mixes (w/perlite or pumice, at least 30% or 50% to be safest), 'cause these days, commercial mixes have too much peat in them (kills out plants) &/or include wetting agents to retain water (also kills our plants). Others of us on here use mixes you'll see mentioned as Gritty Mix or variations of 5:1:1, things like that, which over time folks have learned worked well for them. Also some of these pre-made mixes contain fertilizer as well, which many of us wish to control ourselves rather than someone unfamiliar w/ our growing conditions. There are lots of opinions on mixes, but key & accepted by all of us is that to grow C&S, we need fast draining mix & what you've pictured above doesn't look like that. So that's an improvement that could be made easily & help the plants more that almost anything else one could try.

So. 1 Year in. Where are we? I am actually moving out of my house into an apartment. The apartment will apparently have significantly less sunlight, although I am not sure. My roommate got a "Top Fin" 30 Gallon Aquarium Kit from the local Petsmart, apparently they have a smaller kit that's just a 30 Gallon Aquarium and the Light. It's a single light, about 2 feet long -- I have to wonder if a similar kit would make a serviceable terrarium in an emergency. I split apart my two White Trumpets. The drainless planter they are in was killing them, their media stunk to high heaven. I instead got a second drainless planter and put a plastic pot in each one. This lets me pick the plastic pot out and check the water levels -- in essence, the drainless planters are saucers in this setup. Still, it works, and they still look nice. I repotted my D. Adelae, my Cape Sundew 'Alba', and my D. spatulata in a 7" plastic terrarium bowl that I have had laying around for a long time. I put too much soil in it, so I'm hoping to dig a little out -- and with the help of a little water to make it a bit malleable -- lower the soil level tomorrow. As it stands they're all right at the rim, but... I'd like them to have a little room to grow. The D. Adelae had a stupidly huge root system. It was growing in pure LFS, never repotted from the Deathcube pot. It wasn't doing too great, it was growing great leaves but it's dew wouldn't stick around. I am hoping a better environment will work. The D. spatulata was actually a colony of about 6 plants, I put two back in it's original container and 4 in the terrarium. No sense not keeping a backup. ;) Decided to steal one of my Monkey Cup's guest plants, a Cape Sundew seedling. It's now in the Terrarium too. If my Pygmys do any gemmae, I may sprinkle some in the terrarium between the other plants. Heck, once I have a better idea of my new living situation, I might just move those plants out into individual plants or a more traditional great big 7.5 or 12" pot and fill the plastic fishbowl thing with Pygmy gemmae. Speaking of Pygmys, I repotted mine about a week ago. Took my 2 Butterworts (P. moranensis and P. grandiflora) and my 2 Pygmy Drosera (D. pulchella x nitidula and my lone surviving D. scorpioides) and put them all in a nice big mix of Sphagnum, Perlite, and White Horticultural sand in a huge 7.5" pot. It was kinda scary repotting the pygmys, but I just took them out soil and all and plopped them on top of the soil in the pot, and worked them in. They did not seem to have the huge roots I associate with pygmys, for some reason. The sickly butterwort (Grandiflora, I believe) had stinky media, I think it was approaching root rot. It's very tiny, has died back to just 2 leaves half an inch thick. The other Butterwort lost a leaf in the move, but seems to be ok. It's odd -- wherever the leaves actually touch the ground, they brown up and die. As long as they're not on the ground directly, they're fine. The scorpioides seems to be happier, it has put out 2 or 3 new branches. I was worried because it was doing what it's 4 brothers did -- the tips of it's branches turn crispy and brown and never do anything, then eventually it spreads to the main plant. Similarly, I had lost some of the p. x n. but the majority of them have perked right up since being moved to the bigger pot. About when should I start looking for the signs of Gemmae production? And what are those signs? The main part of the plant swells up a bit and then I see green "peas" in the middle?