This is going to be an odd question, but I told my sister in law about this. She said she would like to get in on it, too. HOWEVER, she does not have access to the internet & unable to have an account here. I told her I could just request to have a little extra seed thrown in for her. Does this seem alright with y'all?

Randy I have very similar tree, even lopsided like yours. The tree was getting too tall to keep inside, but luckily was not infested. I was looking for info how to prune it & that is how I found this forum. I have followed Al's recommendations to a letter (and I have never even read about root pruning/proper repotting): 1. 'inspection' of roots/flushing thoroughly/proper watering & fertilizing - all few months ahead of proper repotting; 2. then at proper time (July), root pruning (the root ball was a mess)-repotting into brand new soil mix (5-1-1); 3. continue proper watering/fertilizing as recommended 4. pruning branches approx. month later I am very satisfied with results, the tree looks much better and has lots of new leaves growing. An it is few inches shorter (more pruning next year). It took some effort, but if you really want your plant to grow well, it is worth it. I am following similar routine with all my potted plants - it will take some time since I have 'few', but by same time next year all of them will be in new soil mix, root pruned/repotted/branches pruned and I am sure growing much healtier. The info you'll find on this forum is very helpful. Al has many extremely informative threads, and I have save them for reference. Much easier for me to get infor-he does all the hard work of writing it all... Many other members have very good posts and photos too - sorry I can't think of all the names right now. Good luck with your tree. Rina

i live near the gulf coast, south of houston, i garden in raised beds, we have a lot of humidity, drought then torrential downpours and high temps 10 months out of the year plus it's frequently very windy....our soil is gumbo (dense clay) anyway my best herbs are thyme, the oreganos are probably the best and parsley in cooler weather (before it's 90 degrees practically around the clock) rosemary does great too and has lived for years for me, fennel will thrive for a couple of years... sage, bay tree, chives and basil (in the hot months) i also have a three year old dill, planted in dappled shade-i thought it was dead, but it came back drainage is the key to raising herbs, mine grow in rose soil over raised bed materials i've never been successful with growing them in pots, except for oregano and mint.... i have also kept lavender for a few months at a time, never for the entire year so loose, well draining soil, don't water them on a regular basis and just let them go..... as long as roots are don't stay too wet, they should all be ok and they love our cooler months

Jennifer, I would not really describe the smell of a copperhead as being similar to a cucumber. It smells like a.....copperhead. It is sort of a musky smell, not as bad as the odor of a skunk, but not pleasant. Maybe it smells a little like a cucumber to some folks, but not necessarily to me. I have some friends who say it smells like copper to them. It doesn't to me. You won't always smell it. I usually smell it when I have walked by one and startled it. Copperheads don't want to tangle with us and usually will slip away if they can, but if they are startled or surprised and can't slip away because maybe a person is between them and their best escape route so that they feel trapped, they'll release that scent. I try to freeze in place when I smell it, first checking the ground near my feet to make sure I'm not about to step on one. Sometimes I can find them after I smell them, but sometimes I cannot. Brandywines do seem a bit more prone to have fused blossoms (aka megablooms) than many other varieties, especially from blooms formed when the nights still were cool. Usually as the season goes on, the megablooms become more and more rare. The fused blossoms do tend to produce very large fruit, but because of the way the skin of the different fruits fold together as the fruit enlarges, you often end up cutting away and tossing a significant portion of the ripe fruit, so lots of people just toss those flowers before they form fruit. I never do, merely because blossom drop happens so much here once we get hot that I hate to waste a single tomato blossom. Nancy, If you plant milkweed, you're just going to have milkweed pests. Insects cannot afford to be picky---if they have to eat milkweed to survive, they're going to eat any and all milkweed. I've never noticed that any particular type of milkweed is less susceptible to the specific pests than others are. Like everything else, the milkweed plants and their pests are natural parts of our ecosystem. If the pests are doing too much damage, just destroy them. I leave them alone if I can and wait for the birds or beneficial insects to take care of them. I've never had the tussock moth caterpillars here and do believe I'd kill those things in a heartbeat. Whether you appreciate it or not, the ecosystem is functioning properly. While we plant milkweeds for the monarchs, we also have to expect that anything else and everything else that feeds on them might show up too. I usually don't see milkweed pests until the fields turn brown and the milkweeds go to seed and, in dry weather, began to fade and dry and die back to the ground. Guess what? We're already that dry here. The milkweed plants in the fields look sad and pathetic and the pests are moving to the milkweeds in irrigated green gardens. It happens every year---if you are hungry, you go to where the food is found. Pest-free gardening is a myth perpetrated by chemical companies. A healthy garden is full of insects, both good and bad. Milkweeds existed on this land before we bought it. They are still here. They'll be here long after we are gone unless someone scrapes the ground bare and pours concrete on it. (What a horrible thought!) Nothing kills them, though excessively dry weather can make the ones in the fields die back to the ground. They often green up and grow again when rainfall returns in autumn. The milkweed in our flower border never dies back to the ground (I hope I didn't jinx them by saying that) but can look ratty if drought gets too extreme and I stop watering because I cannot water enough to help the plants stay in good shape. Sometimes I just give up in the heat and close the garden gate and tell the plants I'll be back in the fall, or after we get decent rainfall, and the milkweeds survive, so if they can take a couple of drought months with no water, they can handle feeding by most pests. Probably not the tussock moth caterpillars, but pretty much everything else. As for being a Monarch Waystation....don't think of it that way. That's a sort of gimmicky way to make people feel good about growing plants for the monarchs. I want to grow plants for the monarchs to help them, not so I can display a Monarch Waystation sign. (sigh) You aren't trying to have a monarch waystation for its own sake, right? Instead, you are trying to fix a broken (by others) ecosystem by providing habitat. Approach it with the attitude that you are restoring the ecosystem to what it once was and needs to be again and remember that doing so provides a habitat for everything and that will have everything inhabiting it....those insects and creatures we would choose to see and those that we'd rather not see around. It is the way of the world, and they all have their place somewhere in the food chain. Everything in any ecosystem eats something and everything gets eaten by something. Accepting that and not going overboard trying to micromanage the garden 'pests' is so much less stressful, and it is natural. God made the world and everything in it and I trust that he created those darn milkweed pests for some reason that he understands, even if we do not. My goal never has been to have an insect-free garden or landscape, nor is it to have pest-free plants, because such a thing isn't possible unless you use synthetic chemicals strong enough to kill everything. My goal is to have an ecosystem that is healthy, strong and balanced, where I interfere in the food web as little as humanly possible. Make peace with the pests and only destroy those that truly destroy plants, not those that just damage them. Look at it this way: plant asparagus and eventually asparagus beetles show up (and harlequin bugs). Plant brassicas and cabbage loopers, imported cabbage worms and diamondback moth worms will show up. Plant potatoes and Colorado potato beetles will show up. Plant okra and sharpshooters and aphids are likely to show up. Plant squash and you-know =-whos will show up. Plant sweet potatoes and morning glories and tortoise beetles show up. Plant milkweed and milkweed assassin bugs, milkweed leaf beetles, oleander aphids and tussock moth cats show up. It is the way things are. The older I get, the more I have learned to chill, relax and let the garden ecosystem just be an ecosystem. I have learned I can ignore most pests and the plants will outlast them, so I don't worry about anything except the ones experience has taught me do extreme damage to the plants we grow for a food harvest.. Blister beetles are an example of one you can ignore most of the time. After all, blister beetles are beneficial because they devour grasshopper eggs. However, on some plants (cucumbers and sweet autumn clematis, for example) they can eat the foliage down to nothing, so if they're doing that, a gardener really cannot ignore them. What matters the most, though, is how many blister beetles show up. If I see an occasional handful of them in the garden, I just ignore them. However if they show up by the hundreds or thousands, a gardener cannot ignore them. Rebecca, It is just one of those years with the Septoria Leaf Spot. It was really hit and miss in my garden, but definitely more widespread than usual (some years I don't see it at all) and, in a most interesting way, I saw very little Early Blight, which is more common in my garden. It is almost like the Septoria Leaf Spot outcompeted the Early Blight for the right to hit tomato plants randomly. Sorry about the squirrels. I was hoping those squirrel treats would work. I've always found it interesting that most tomato varieties that produce bite-sized fruit just do not seem to suffer from common fungal and bacterial foliar diseases like the varieties that produce larger fruit do. I've never seen this addressed in technical literature, but have observed it in my garden. These diseases may hit the plants, but the plants outgrow them and never stop producing either. I watered twice this week and probably will have to do the same next week. It just depends on how much the soil dries out. Tim is already fretting over the coming July water bill (which will arrive here in the first week of August) because, he says, the water bills haven't been at all bad this year and he dreads getting a high one. I laughingly told him to adjust his attitude and just be grateful that the water bills for January through June were not bad and to remind himself that a high water bill in July and August is normal and expected. lol. I also still don't think the July water bill will be that bad--I certainly am watering the remaining veggies and herbs, and all the flowers, much less than I water when I'm trying to keep a ton of tomato, cucumber and melon plants happy in the heat. I think he just needs something to fret about. It hasn't really felt hot here since that day our heat index hit 116. Of course, the obvious explanation is that after that miserable day, any other day will feel cool by comparison. (grin) Tim wasn't here that day though and was in his air-conditioned office at work, so he missed the worst of it. I think our heat index had dropped into the 70s or 80s by the time he got home because of all the rain storms around us that basically missed us but gave us rain-cooled air. (And, I believe, a measly 4/100s of an inch of rain.) I do think the heat returns at the middle of next week. Since that hot, miserable day, I've felt like our weather has been only warm, not hot, but by mid-week, we'll be hot again. We need to mow and edge everything tomorrow, and especially all the fence lines and such where the fields really are drying out now. Keeping as much vegetation as possible cut short reduces the fire danger, and we are starting to have fires. By the way, while typing this I have heard some fireworks going off in our neighborhood. Really, people? I think that by now people should have all that out of their system. Apparently they don't. Dawn