Hey there. Those UT mountains in the background are killing me! Don't get a view like that in NC, but it's lush and green here. Usually yellowing is due to nitrogen deficiency or overwatering. Since it seems like you had plenty of nitrogen, I'm going to guess overwatering as well. Also plants dropping flowers can be due to overheating, and I heard it got pretty hot in your area this year. My parents live in UT, and they only water 2 to 3 times a week during ave summer weather -- more when it's over 95. I have the overwatering disease so I finally bought a cheap moisture meter at Lowes and my garden is doing great, whereas before everything was yellow. Best of luck to you!

All my toys officially came in. I got the grow tent, a secret jarden DR120 (48"x48"x78"), a no-name brand vortex type fan @ 424cfm, with the 6" aircooled hood and ducting. Here she is on a couple dry runs. The 600 puts off an insane amount of heat compared to the 400 I had used before. Holy sh$t! As of now I have it vented into the same room its in. After 4 hours though that rooms ambient temp shot up to 98 degrees! No joke ... the inside tent temp was also 98 deg so that tells me that my vortex is more then adequate since its enough to keep the tent at ambient temps. The next step is to vent out the window that is located behind the tent. Either that, or vent into the heat duct that is right above it. After all winter is coming, Im only in a 1200 sq foot apartment and if that freaking light can push a 14'x15' room to 98 degs (from 72) inside of 5 hours... possibly it could heat the entire apartment to 68 deg or so?? Who knows... but Im gonna give it a shot! lol ... only question is if the 424 cfm vortex is powerfull enough to push heat throughout the place. I wonder how powerful typical furnace fans are... anyone know?? Anyway here she is ;) Uploaded with ImageShack.us Uploaded with ImageShack.us Uploaded with ImageShack.us Uploaded with ImageShack.us Uploaded with ImageShack.us The seedlings are coming along .... about time to give them some week ferts though. Uploaded with ImageShack.us

Are you planning to buy plants rather than start seed? What size plants? SmallÂ2-4" pots or bigÂgallon size? You should be able to put most things in now, but it will be harder on themÂand probably you too! If you do, find some way to shade them for the first few days to a week, depending on how warm/hot it is. Water them daily for the first 4 or 5 days, and then start to stretch it out. DonÂt keep them wet all the time for more than a few daysÂeven if theyÂre wilting-----or theyÂll wilt permanently! ;-) The bigger the plant is, the harder it will be for it to get started. I know some will disagree with this, but if I were putting in gallon or bigger plants now, IÂd cut off all but a few of the smallest leaves to give the plant a chance to get its roots going before it needs to support much foliage again. I even do that with small plants sometimes. BUTÂyou might want to consider getting seed for some of the things you want and start it now in pots, planning to plant it in the ground in fall sometime. The warm weather would be great for that! And youÂd save a lot of money and still have decent small plants to put in the ground in 3 months. It also gives you something to be growing and watching over summer, rather than just sitting and waiting for fall. AND, starting from seed youÂll feel more like a "real parent!" If I raised more questions than I answered, let me know! :-) Skybird

Thanks for replying, kimmsr. This all seems more and more like a no-win situation this year. And yet someone on GardenWeb said that she produced one little bucket of weeds per summer out of a 3,550 or so square foot flower garden. Maybe she used four to six inches of mulch, I don't know, but I thought it was two or three. Also, I went on a garden tour recently, and four people had flower gardens about the size of mine, and they seemed to be using about one inch of Soil Pep. (Either they told me that's how much they used, or I dug a little back with my fingers to find out.) These gardens were being maintained by one person, and they were from 13 to 20 years old (the gardens, that is; the people were much older!). Possibly the explanation for this is that over the years they had depleted the seeds in the soil bank by sprouting and then killing them, obviously without letting any of them form more seeds. The real Catch-22 for me is that I actually want seeds to sprout in my mulch, but only my flower seeds, not the weed seeds. With an extremely thick, rough-textured mulch (say, six inches of arborist's wood chips), how on earth does anyone manage to have self-seeding flowers, or clumping shrubs and grasses, or spreading ground covers, or bulbs? How does anyone direct-sow seeds? It almost seems that you'd need to cover the native soil with thin layers of weed-free soil/compost/fine mulch repeatedly, and continually hand-weed, to get this to work. If the mulch, which is being used to cover the weed-seed-filled soil, accumulates weed seeds itself, it would make sense to me to add more mulch to cover the first mulch, maybe twice a year. So if I put down too much mulch at first, I wouldn't be able to add more until some of the first had decomposed (and then too many weed seeds would accumulate in it). There must be an optimal amount of mulch to add per year, after taking into account how much of it decomposes each year. This should lead to the level of mulch slowly increasing every year. I need to figure out what that amount should be when I'm using Soil Pep (or small bark chips on the paths and around trees). On the other hand, at the very beginning I need to add enough to somewhat effectively suppress weeds, not so little that it merely encourages them. Then there's the price. All total, including the vegetable garden, I actually have 5,715 square feet to cover with either mulch (Soil Pep in my case: 4,525 square feet) or wood chips (for paths and around trees: 1,190 square feet). They're both $4.49 for a two-cubic-foot bag. (I'm actually leaving out the cost of compost, sphagnum moss, rock phosphate, greensand, and elemental sulfur, because I consider those as more conditioners or fertilizers than mulches and they have very little bulk. But they still cost a lot of money.) At one inch I'd need 189 bags of mulch and 50 bags of chips, for a total of $1,073. At two inches I'd need 377 bags of mulch and 99 bags of chips, for a total of $2,137. And so on: three inches would cost $3,210, and four inches would cost $4,279. Five or six inches is out of the question for physical reasons. The beds and paths aren't raised, contained, edged, or separated, so the material would just spill over at the edges. I have many flowers, including tall ones like hollyhocks and delphiniums, that only get five or six inches tall the first and even second year. (Weird, I know.) I can't completely bury my flowers; that would defeat the whole purpose. I guess two to three inches per year is all I can handle, both money-wise and time-wise. Our car can hold 12 bags, so each inch takes 20 trips. It takes a lot of time just to buy, load, haul around, and distribute all of that material. I guess what I want to know is: If I add one inch of Soil Pep twice a year, and less than that decomposes each year, so that eventually I have an ongoing level of three inches on average, will that make much difference in the amount of time I have to spend weeding? Should I leave my dead lupine vegetation lying around to add to the mulch and not worry about the powdery mildew?