MaryAnn, I happened to hear a man on TV talking about diets for being fit and healthy. He said when a person is carrying their extra weight in the belly, it is usally from sweets. Too much sugar, and that is my problem. I'm now into the start of my third week of cutting down drasticly on my sugar intake. I haven't left it out completely, but I can tell you if you try to make a batch of homemade brownies with half the sugar - don't bother wasteing the ingredients! LOL! Yuck! To still indulge myself in chocolate, I eat about 6 - 8 semi sweet chocolate chips. I have always prefered dark chocolate over milk choco. No deserts around here! I have to watch out for beverages with corn syrup in them too. I drink a lot of water. The first week w/o sugar I thought I was going to have to give up, but I hung in there and wrung my hands a lot, and paced the floor often. It is diffinately an addiction! I have finally lost 3 pounds and my belly is a bit improved. This is tough, and I am sticking with the biking, but "I WILL do this!" Hayjud

I feel so bad for you. There is nothing worse than a thief. I am glad the locksmith showed up when he did. Otherwise he would have gotten by with it. That cellphone has sealed his fate, I assume. Hang in there. I am sure the sellers had insurance and will fix it. Also, remember construction always comes in over budget. I have a hunch that it will cost more than 4K. Maybe let the sellers fix it and give them a bid contingent on the repairs being properly done. That way you can have it inspected before you bite the bullet. If you aren't satisfied, no deal. You must be so emotional. You will be ok. This just gives you more time to plan, pack, and save some money. (:

Hi Linda! The main contributing factor is the size of the grow tent, its not an actual greenhouse its the shiny on the inside 'boxes' used for more popular *cough* herb growing and I have about 10 plants in it already, so having a number of plants each growing at different stages isn't practical only because of space. In a perfect world I would like 2-3 plants, each standing maybe a metre high, all producing fruit at their own pace. There isn't any huge pressure to have them generating boxes of tomatoes, just a bunch every now and then. I guess my question is if its possible, I would have no choice but to just keep recycling them from small to grown but this sounds like a lot of work. My common sense thought was once you top it (as I said this is a limitation on the actual size of the growing tent, it only stands about a metre tall from floor to roof so the plant is going to have to stay inside that space!) thats it. Top it and it doesn't make any more fruit. From what you say, while it will not be as pronounced as the first crop, with light and warmth and food it will continue to make fruit? I have a friend who has had a cherry tomato plant on his kitchen windowsill for about 5 years and it quietly just keeps making them, so theres something out there like it! I'll look at the dwarf suggestions though, see what there is available locally. Thank you for your reply. Neo.

Ficus benjamina - root mass highly congested: Here ^^^ the rootwork is completed. The roots were kept wet during the entire repotting session right up to the point in time when I actually established (planted) the plant in its new pot, planting the tree with a dripping wet root system into a dry gritty mix. As soon as the soil was worked into the meager remaining fraction of the pruned root system with a root pick (same as the wooden dowel used as a tell, the plant was watered until water ran clear from the drain holes. A key consideration: given that I removed >95% of the plant's viable root mass, I was concerned that collapse of the organism might occur due to the volume of leaves in the canopy demanding a volume of moisture the roots were incapable of. To prevent that from occurring, I removed about 90-95% of the foliage as soon as the tree was situated in it's new training pot. from this: to this It appears that you have 50 or more very thin branches along the trunks. As 'sacrifice branches', they help to thicken branches and the trunk proximal to their attachment point, but they also offer you the ability to reduce their volume/numbers to reduce o/a demand for the amount of water the tree is calling for to satisfy moisture to the current volume of the canopy. I would still do some heavy pruning. When I repot tropicals (including Ficus), I typically cut all branches with lanky winter growth back to the point on branches where last summer's growth was starting to stretch out as a result of fall's shorter days and lower light intensity. Surprisingly, If you do cut it back harder now, by summer's end the tree will have grown to a mass larger than it would have grown to had you only left the tree to sort out its difficulties with root congestion (it can't - not even if you could plant it out in the landscape) or potted up instead of doing a full repot. While I try not to rely on chance, if you don't prune further the tree will probably be ok eventually. The tree I provided images of was pushing lots of new growth within 2 weeks, even in consideration of the fact it was an extremely hard root pruning (almost turned it into an unrooted cutting). The typical response of pushing new growth within 2 weeks will likely be stretched to 4-6 weeks given the rootwork you did and the volume of foliage remaining on the tree; i.e., unless you top prune more. When you do a really hard root-pruning ....... especially if some of the roots dry out and die during the repotting session, expect a high % of leaves to fall if you don't prune shoots and leaves to balance the root:shoot ratio. If your tree was repotted 2 years prior and this was a following repot, it would be much easier. It's allowing a tree to remain in the same pot w/o rootwork or being potted up for many years before undertaking a full repot that rightly causes concern. You'll develop a sense of how much work a tree can tolerate just by the visual clues it provides. Generally, the worst that can happen if you remove too much foliage is, a commensurate volume of random roots will die, which can cause wholesale loss of random branches, something we have little control over. If you partially defoliate the top 1/3 of the canopy. It will put the buds in a state of suspension as in suspended animation. As the root mass increases in size and is able to provide for the moisture needs of an increasing volume of foliage, the buds forced into a torpid state by root pruning will be reactivated as roots become increasingly capable of efficient water/nutrient movement to the plants energy sinks. Questions? Al