I will plant my *rooted in water* coleus cuttings in potting soil with extra perlite mixed in. If the roots are longer than an inch, I will trim back with scissors. With the sweet spud vine, I would give it a dip in tepid water with dish soap added, swirl a bit, then do again in a couple of days. Take a magnifying glass to look for eggs or bugs under the leaves or in the axils, I found that that plant got buggy for me (eww) and it's easier to wash off when it's not planted in soil than when it is. Never had to be concerned about this with the coleus though. Also, my sweet potato vine (spv) grew a really large tuber, which I tried to overwinter like a spud, but our basement was too warm for it, and it shrivelled up to nothing by March. Have you considered trying to store the tuber? Then in the spring you can probably get it to grow several sprouts, which you can pinch off and root and have several plants from. What kind of begonias are you trying to root? Have fun ('cause it is such fun!)

I measured in my deck is 24 inches off the ground. First step up is 13 inches. The pot is 22 inches high. The green fine trails down to the tech which if I am OK get on the deck with the easy to get it to VINE. The purple VINE does not trail down the 13 inch pot. It looks like just sell used at the top of the plant I’ve been eaten. I thought possibly a deer because it would be the right height to eat the leaves on the top. It’s just that we seldom ever get deer in our backyard playing on the main road. Once this winter we saw their foot prints come in the back gate, and turned around When they saw there was no other way out and Went back down the driveway and down the main road (Warwick Avenue).

kendra2 I have just about conclued gophers are my problem. I realized that the plants were not just cut off, but the end was pulled down into the soil. Never had any real time with the critters and I could never find any kind of hole the stem was being pulled into and the roots were still completely intact. But I did find some rather large tunnels, much larger than mole tunnels, in my tomato bed and outside. I got some poison blocks, sort of parafin with seeds imbedded and some nast stuff, blue, and put some in the tunnels I could find outside the garden. Closed up the hole without filling up tunnel. I was gone on vacation for a week and havn't lost any more like that so maybe that was it. My Roma has lost all of its leaves, but I think that is something else. Early Girls are starting to produce. Thanks for you response, kendra2. Wish I could have been there while you and the critter were having a tug of war with your flower. Sounds like somthing out ot Lunny Tunes.

joy: I hardened off my tomato plants in a covered porch. If they stayed in a covered porch the whole time, they weren't really hardened off. Hardening off requires a gradual exposure to full sunlight, wind, etc., starting with a day in full shade outdoors (covered porch works well for this) but then progressing to exposure to direct sun, from an hour or so of morning light increasing over the course of about a week to spending all day out in the sun. At any rate, the marks on your leaves are classic for sunscald. Since the damage is not too extensive, they should recover OK. joy: I fed my tomato plants with worm castings, bone meal and epsom salts. None of these things are fertilizers, really. Bone meal is, sort of, if your soil lacks P, but if it doesn't, excessive P can cause problems. Epsom salts are a source of Mg, but, once again, if you don't have a deficiency in your soil, it can do more harm than good. It's easy to create an imbalance by using these nutrient-specific products without getting proper soil testing done and if you don't have a lot of experience with soil and plant nutrition. N, P, and K to a plant are like protein, fat, and carbohydrates for us--the basic building blocks of our nutritional requirements. What you're doing now is like feeding a kid only fat and vitamins and not providing any protein or carbohydrates. Obviously, that's not a recipe for thriving. Worm castings are terrific and contribute to good tilth, add good microorganisms, etc., so keep using it, but it's not really food. It's a common myth that using fertilizer is somehow "bad" and true organic gardening relies only on compost. That's probably why we see so many people who use compost and various home remedies then show up on here wondering why their plants look so poorly. To not use fertilizer at all, you have to put time and effort into a long-term and constant soil-building program that has been going on for many years. In the quantities that most people use compost, i.e., a few handfuls in the planting hole and then top- or side-dressed a few times over a season, certain greens and herbs may be happy, but it's not going to cut it for fruiting plants. Right now, your plants need N, so I would feed them a general plant fertilizer that will be relatively higher in N. Once they start flowering and fruiting, switch to a tomato-specific fertilizer, which will be lower in N than in P or K. I hope you didn't add large amounts of bone meal, as that would mean you'd have to customize your fertilizer application more instead of being able to rely on commonly available pre-mixed products.