Actually, I use something that is totally safe and (to me...economical) and so good for my DL's that I call it the 'plant bomb'! When I was originally told about alfalfa tea, I used alfalfa meal. Big mistake...it is full of weed seed which will sprout profusely and TAKE over your gardens!!! Now I go to Walmart and buy the large bottle of alfalfa tablets which have been finely milled for human consumption...hence no seeds. I started out using a 1 gal. milk jug and about 10 tabs. Of course, upon seeing the stupendous results, I quickly graduated to a 30 gallon trash can. Use the whole bottle of 300 tabs for the trash can size....methodology....place container in the sun, fill can with water, add alfalfa tabs, (I also add about 1-2 cups fish emulsion) stir once a day for 4-5 days and pour on/around plants. When using for roses, add epsom salts....I cannot say enough good things about this mixture...I use it on Everything!!! Here another forum on it: http://forums.gardenweb.com/forums/load/rosesorg/msg0623323517083.html Be forewarned: If you let it sit too long....it will STINK! It will smell just like a dairy barnyard and I am not kidding...but if you use it right away you only get a faint odor of the fish emulsion. And yes, you can still use it if it is stinky...just clothespin your nose before doing so.

Thank you kindly for your input Karyn. That's too bad that your seedling didn't make it. Would be interesting to see if your seedling would have kept the cup shaped leaves ultimately. I was at Kimi's Plumeria here in SoCal talking to Beverly and she mentioned that she had a friend who had a tree that had "cobra head" shaped leaves. Apparently he had the tree for about 20 years before it finally bloomed. Hopefully I can keep this seedling alive long enough to see if it keeps the strange leaf trend and if it blooms. As for the cuttings, I bought them from a newer ebay vendor that I had previously purchased 2 Puu Kahea cuttings. Those cuttings were cleanly cut. I have to say that I was a bit surprised to see how ragged the recent ones were. I supposed I can try growing them as is and if that doesn't work, cut them again? I really don't know how important it is to have them cleanly cut. Karen R

My girl (born in 93) has always loved anything technology related. The key chain pets were big when she was born - she had no clue what to do but had to have it (2 years old), and some how figured it out. Over the years she didn't outgrow it; the smaller the tech toy, the better. Everything from PDA's, hand held dictionary, digital camera, cell phones, MP3 players. Was never into computers. One year she realized she could listen to music on the puter & that was what got her interested in computers. She's always wanted a laptop; back then they were too expensive, and I wasn't buying one since she didn't need it. I can build a desktop for a few hundred; why would I pay a thousand for something not as good as I could build? lol She has one of the newer computers (quad core) in her room; bought a net book with her Christmas money & hardly uses the big puter now; so I guess she's showing me. lol If I had a kid in today's world; I would probably set aside one of the older computers when I upgraded myself; would find a smaller tower for it; something with front ports so they could plug what needed to be plugged in. I'd also pass down my digital camera & anything else electronic so they could learn. I would never allow them to use my own - heck, I've had my hubby click wrong and screw stuff up. He's been bugging me to adjust the settings on the router for one game; finally told him to do it; brought the router up on his computer; logged in it, and guess what? Last night we had no net. Some how he must have clicked wrong & wiped the router out - my user name & password were gone.. talk about almost freaking out when it wouldn't accept my password. If you're going to allow a child to use your computer, make sure you make them a guest user account. Also make sure you have stuff you value backed up.

I have found that all my tomatoes do better in richer soil than in poorer soil as long as the soil isn't too rich in nitrogen. When there is too much nitrogen, you still get gorgeous plants but they just don't produce as many fruit per plant. For all of its shortcomings, clay soil is very high in most nutrients and only needs compost and other organic matter added to it in order for it to have the sort of tilth needed to keep plants happy, and for that I'm grateful. It is also why I continue planting almost all of my tomato crop in the front garden instead of the back garden. (I wish I could take a gigantic mixer and mix together all my dense clay with all my sandy-silty soil as I think it would give us almost perfect soil, but that's just a pipe dream.) When I plant tomato plants out back in the newer garden plot that has a sandy-silty soil base in most of it, the plants do not grow as lush nor do they produce as well as the tomato plants out front in the amended clay. The advantage the back garden does have is that it drains better and it is set so far back from the roadway that it never has been affected by herbicide drift. The front garden gets hit by herbicide drift every year, often multiple times, from nearby ranches, county road crews spraying herbicide on difficult-to-mow areas sloping areas along parts of nearby county roadways or from herbicides sprayed beneath utility lines and along the railroad tracks. I wish I could have the richer soil from the front garden out in the back where it is, so far, a herbicide drift-free zone, but life seldom works out that perfectly. Instead I use the thinner, less rich soil out back for plants that don't mind it: okra, southern peas, cucumbers (their growing area does at least get compost), summer and winter squash, ground cherries, beans, sometimes sweet corn (if I grow it out back, I do have to add lots of nitrogen to the soil in advance of planting) and lots of herbs. Oddly, bell peppers do great out in the back garden even though the soil there is not as rich as what they usually like, but I tend to put them in the front garden in the richer soil. Sweet corn also does pretty well out back but does better out front, which is fine with me because I like to use it as a barrier planting between the road and the tomato/pepper plants. Generally, in a normal year when rain doesn't keep me from getting the back garden planted, I'll grow early and late corn in the front garden and mid-season corn in the back. When I lived in Texas, which is where I was born, grew up and lived the first 39 years of my life before moving to Oklahoma, I could grow any tomato variety I chose, heirloom or hybrid, and they all grew well and produced great every year. It probably helped that my dad grew tomatoes all my life, so I knew that we had to plant very early to beat the heat and to choose plants with the right DTMs in order to get a crop before the usual insane summer heat set in. The heat is the biggest challenge in Texas because it often gets very hot there very early, which shuts down production of fruit even earlier there than here. To some extent you can work around that by planting fruit that produce smaller to medium fruit (Early Girl, Champion, Celebrity, Mule Team, Ace, Porter) or that produce medium-sized fruit (Fantastic, Super Fantastic, Carmello, Mule Team, Sioux, Super Sioux, Marglobe, Better Boy, Jubilee, Box Car Willie, Homestead, Livingston's Golden Queen, Lemon Boy, Sunray and Roma). Most of the varieties that produce big tomatoes for me here in Oklahoma never produced very many fruit down in Texas as the heat arrived so early that it shut them down before they'd had time to flower and set much fruit. I think the fact that our nights stay cooler well into May here in OK and, in a rainy/cool year, even into early June, gives enough time for the larger-fruited plants to produce great fruitset here, and I mean varieties like Big Boy, Dr. Wyche's Yellow, Big Rainbow, Aunt Ruby's German Green, Persimmon, Lillian's Yellow and virtually all the blacks and purples we've already discussed, and all the big pinks (Pruden's Purple, Stump of the World, Soldacki, German Johnson, German Pink, German Head, Mortgage Lifter, Polish, Greek Rose and Pink Brandywine) and lots of the other big reds like Neve's Azorean Red, OTV Brandywine, Cuostralee, Beefsteak. It was wonderful to learn I could grow the bigger fruited varieties here and get much better fruitset than they can produce in Texas most years. My dad grew some big ones (like Spring Giant and Big Boy) in Texas, but was very careful to match the varieties he planted with the sort of rainfall year that was expected. He grew all kinds of big fruited varieties in much of the 1960s and 1970s, but then had to switch to more of the smaller-fruited varieties in the 1980s and 1990s which were not nearly as rainy as the 1960s and 1970s, except for an occasional El Nino year like 1997-98 when rainfall was off-the-charts wonderful. He had rich, black, gumbo clay which is even better for growing tomatoes than sandy loam (as long as you add organic matter to the black gumbo) or red clay and his tomatoes gave him high yields that were amazing. I doubt I've ever had as high of a yield from my plants as he got from his, but he did use synthetic fertilizers. I probably could get the higher yields he got if I would use synthetic fertilizers at regular intervals throughout the season as he did, but instead I just focus on building the soil, enriching and feeding the soil and letting the soil feed the plants. I'm stubborn that way. I still have to plant very, very early here to get large yields, which is why I risk the plants and try to get them in the ground sometime in March, but I do that with the knowledge that freezing nights and frosts still are possible and I keep the heavy duty frost blanket type row cover handy so I can throw it over the tomato plants on cold nights. Most of my best tomato years, in terms of yield, have come when I got the plants into the ground in early to mid-March. Even planting later than that, like in late March, cuts the yields I'll get significantly in all but the coolest, rainiest years. If I wait and plant in April, which is a much safer planting time in OK due to our cooler nights, I probably get only half the yield as I do if I plant a month earlier. The later in April I plant, the lower the yields. It took me a few years, of course, to figure all this out. I am obsessed with planting early to get great yields and also an earlier harvest. My first 4-8 tomato plants go into large pots in mid-February every year, and from those plants, which I can carry indoors on very cold nights, we get tomatoes around the end of April, sometimes as early as April 20-24, but more often, around April 25-30. When a person loves eating tomatoes as much as I do, that early effort to get ripe fruit 4-6 weeks earlier than usual is well worth it. It always freaks out people we know here in our area who put their tomato plants in the ground around April 10-20, to know we are harvesting our first ripe fruit from those plants in large pots about the same time they're finishing up their planting, but they are not die-hard, tomato-obsessed maniacs like Tim and I are. The only thing I've tried here and didn't think was worth the effort was growing tomatoes in winter. Before I had a greenhouse, I'd grow small to medium sized plants in pots and carry them into the well-insulated garage on cold nights or into the house. Then, I tried growing them in the greenhouse in winter, but without a heater because I just don't want to have to worry about keeping a greenhouse warm enough on all those cold autumn, winter and early spring nights. Whether grown in pots on the patio that were carried inside at night, or in the greenhouse all winter long, I found the fruit to remain very small, grow and ripen very slowly and have such poor flavor that it was no better than grocery store tomatoes, so I gave up bothering with winter tomatoes. Now I just preserve lots of tomatoes in summer so we have canned, frozen and sun-dried tomatoes (albeit, dried in my oven and not out in the sun) in winter, which aren't as good as fresh summer tomatoes, but still taste better than grocery store or home-grown winter tomatoes.