For what it's worth here is what I do. I buy an organic alfalfa based pellet fertilizer made locally in Kansas City called Bradfield. I put one or two cups to the dripline of each rose and just lightly scratch it into the mulch. I don't pull the mulch back at all, just scratch the pellets lightly into it all the way to the dripline. Then immediately, I use my EZ-Flo Fertilizer Injector filled with my John's Jungle Juice recipe and hook it up to the drip irrigation system I have installed in each bed. When I turn on water it goes into the bottle of the injector and dilutes and mixes the Jungle Juice and sends it down the drip irrigation to each roses own watering shrubbler. There the water/fertilizer mix begins wetting down and mixing with the alfalfa pellet fert and it all eventually makes it's way down in the soil to the roots. The fertilizer in the injector is usually completely out in about 2 hours or so and I just leave it going with just straight water for another hour or so to soak the fertilizers in and water the roses at the same time. I do all this about 3 times per growing season April-September/October depending on the weather forecast. I don't fertilize at all after October so the plants aren't encouraged to add new green growth that will get killed by the impending freezing temps that start in December. My roses love this technique and are as healthy and vigorous growing and blooming as they can be. Going into wintertime it is very important that your roses be as healthy as possible and have no disease issues as well. I rarely ever lose any roses to winter and I don't winter protect very much or many roses at all. I just rely on the natural leaf fall from two large oak trees to gather in the rose beds in the Fall. In Spring I use my leaf blower and blow out the leaves. Then I gather them and put them in a large metal barrel and use my weed whacker to chop them up fine and then spread some of it all over my rose beds as mulch. It makes an excellent mulch and it only costs me a few hours work rather than real money that way. This system works for me quite well. A master rosarian visiting my roses this past Fall accused me of using steroids on my roses because they were all so large, vigorous, and healthy, so I was quite pleased and feel I am on the right track taking care of my roses and making them the best that they can be. Just my two cents..... John

After researching, I find that alfalfa meal decomposes fast and gives off quick heat, more so than alfalfa pellets. I cooked a geranium to death by planting in a clay mixed with alfalfa meal. I did the same with 2 rhododendrons in hot and dry summer. Years ago we detached our lawn in late fall and stored bags of grass clippings in the garage .. the entire garage was heat up, despite 40 degrees outside. NPK of alfalfa pellets is 2-1-2 ($17.99 for 50 lbs. bag), NPK of soy bean meal is 7-2-1 ($20 for 50 lbs. bag), and NPK of crack corn is 1.65 / 0.65 / 0.4 ($2.69 for 10 lbs. bag) at feed store. NPK of alfalfa hay is 2.45 - 0.5 - 2.1, sold for $8 per bale at the feed store. Corn is alkaline, has anti-fungal property. Soybean meal is also alkaline. Alfalfa meal is slightly acidic and naturally high in sugar, great for fungal germination. See below discussion "Afalfa Meal Heating Up Soil" in Organic Gardening Forum: â¢Posted by mprevost 7 (My Page) on Sun, Jan 13, 08 Throughout that time I've used only bagged composted chicken manure, alfalfa meal, soybean meal, and various mulches (leaves, grass clippings) to fertilize my soil. I have not seen this heating up occur without significant concentrations of alfalfa meal. Without a lot of alfalfa meal, it does not heat up. But if you put a lot of alfalfa meal under mulch or in a hole, it gets REAL hot in a couple of days. Like as hot as a very hot compost pile. 150 deg F or so. " **** From Straw: I haven't tested soy bean meal, so I won't recommend that. I tested cracked corn (grinded smaller with NutriMill flour grinder) ... awesome result, shiny leaves & many buds. Birds like to eat that stuff. The growth can't compare to alfalfa meal, but I'm aiming for buds and health in hot summer, and not top growth. Alfalfa hay is $8 per bale, best to mix that in with dirt, since the hay is hard to decompose, plus matting-up, blocking water. Some info. from the lawn forum: â¢Posted by lee_in_iowa 4 to 5 on the lin (My Page) on Thu, Apr 14, 11 at 11:35 Boy, I can't recommend the soybean meal. Never again! I tilled it into the top 4-6 inches of my raised beds one year and it grew me a bumper crop of cutworms and armyworms. It attracted pests I had never had before. For myself, I like to ask for bales of alfalfa hay." Here is a link that might be useful: Reference link on Organic Fertilizers This post was edited by Strawberryhill on Mon, Sep 2, 13 at 10:02

I mill my own flour from a wide variety of grains/seeds/beans, so I've also learned gluten levels and how they work in baked goods. Although the 10-grain flour contains wheat flour, it's not clear how much is used in the mixture. Probably a large portion is wheat because it's much less expensive than the other grains/seeds in the mix. It's also not clear what kind of wheat - soft or hard wheat - is in the mixture, which will make a lot of difference for making bread dough. I like to mill my own mixtures so I can be sure what I'm using, and to assure I have the freshest flour possible for the highest amount of nutrition possible. Fresh is best..... You need a high portion of flour from wheat (bread flour or all-purpose flour, or whole wheat milled from hard wheat varieties), in order to have enough gluten to make a yeast-risen bread. It's also preferable to have a high-gluten flour for making pizza dough. Wheat has the highest amount of gluten of all grains. Any other grain/seed will be either low-gluten or gluten-free. Spelt is the only other grain with enough gluten to make a nice loaf of yeast bread, but even the gluten type in spelt is much different, and much lower than the gluten in wheat. The gluten level in spelt is about 5,000 parts per million. Compare that to wheat which begins at 50,000 parts per million and goes up from there. For your pizza dough you will probably be fine using 1/2 bread flour and 1/2 10-grain flour. As Teresa pointed out, you may need to add a little extra flour to get the right "feel". The low-gluten and gluten-free flour doesn't absorb as much hydration as high-gluten flour (bread flour). If you don't like the results, use a different ratio of bread flour to 10-grain flour (75% bread flour to 25% 10-grain), or add some vital wheat gluten (1 T. per cup of 10-grain flour) to make up for the low-gluten flour. If the 10-grain mixture has a lot of rye flour in it, rye flour characteristically makes dough rather sticky to work with - even with the correct hydration. People often add too much flour to compensate for the stickiness, which will make the dough too dry. There are other methods to use when working with a sticky dough, such as kneading it with wet hands (dip your hands in a small bowl of water periodically), oil your hands with vegetable oil, or placing the dough in a gallon-size freezer zip lock bag, pushing out as much air as possible before closing it, and kneading it from outside the bag (you can alter the hydration if necessary). There are also kneading gloves available that work for kneading sticky doughs. -Grainlady

jemdandy - You're right, sorta.... It's a huge mistake trying to convert dry volume cup measurements to an exact weight, especially when people confuse liquid measurements and dry measurements, and dry measurements with scale measurements. But there are other reasons. There are NO standards for the actual size of a "cup" to manufacture a dry 1-cup measuring cup in the United States. You will find they vary in size if you were to test enough varieties of them - especially when you get into novelty shapes (such as a heart-shaped dry measuring cup made with ceramics - and you discover your recipe was altered/failed because that "cup" was bigger/smaller than your usual measuring cup). Take a 1-cup dry measuring cup (one that has a flat rim and you can level off the contents) and fill it by dipping it in the flour and dragging it up the side of the bag/container (a common method) and weigh that amount on a scale. Now, aerate/fluff the flour and spoon it into the cup and level (the preferred method) - and measure that amount. Years ago it was recommended you sift the flour before measuring it, so try that method and measure it. Some people bang the cup of flour to settle it, then add more flour before leveling it off, or tap it with the leveling devise to settle the flour and add more - and both are incorrect methods which will add anywhere from 10-20% more flour per cup. Some people don't bother leveling - just give it a shake and eyeball it.... Every cup of flour measured by each and every person weighs something different and can be as much as 1-2 ounces of weight different. This is why when you give 10 people the same brownie recipe to make for a bake sale, the finished brownies will vary greatly due to the use of volume measuring tools and the way people use them, and don't even get me started with the inaccuracy of baking pan sizes..... ***The reason recipes work using this highly inaccurate method of measurements (cups and spoons) is because it's a ratio of one ingredient to another more than the exact measure. So you can make a cake, as an example, using a professional-grade stainless steel dry measuring cup, a coffee or tea cup out of your cabinet, a canning jar (an old favorite before measuring cups were readily available), or any other container you like, as your dry measuring devise as long as you keep to the standard ratio of ingredients using the same measuring devise, and don't fill the baking pan more than 3/4 full of batter. So you can make one cake or a hundred cakes by sticking to the ratio of ingredients. A standard plain cake has, by measure (whether by dry measure or scaled measure), one-third as much fat as sugar; two-thirds as much milk as sugar; and about three times as much flour as liquid (bakers ratios or percentages). This is why you might not get the same results using grandma's recipe. She may have used a large coffee cup or a mason jar for measuring, while you are using a cheap set made in China from the Dollar Store that are much smaller than what grandma used. Your "let's say the weight of one cup of flour was 6 oz." is off already because there are no standards for the weight of a cup of flour, just some "suggested" amounts. King Arthur Flour used a 4.5 oz. (weighed on a scale) measure for a cup of flour in their first cookbook and changed their mind in another to 5 oz., while other "experts" use a 5 or 5.5 oz. measure for a cup of flour. And now your 6 oz. arbitrary measurement.... Who's "right"? The weight per cup of different kinds of flour vary as well.... A cup of whole wheat flour weighs more than a cup of National brand of bleached all-purpose flour, which weighs more than a cup of Southern All-Purpose flour, which weighs more than cake flour. This brings us to the moisture content of flour, which is unstable and will contribute to the weight - or lack of it - of a "cup" of flour. This is why we give a generalization of 18-20 cups of flour for 5-pounds. Even if you use a scale weight as the "exact measurement for a cup of flour", it too will be flawed due to the amount of moisture in the flour, which varies from brand-to-brand, bag-to-bag and home-to-home. And for this exact reason, amounts of flour in a recipe are just a good (or bad) guess. When you make yeast bread and the flour is really dry in the winter, you may need more flour than the recipe calls for, while during months with high humidity, you may need a lot less flour, because we add flour to yeast bread according to the "feel" of the dough, not the stated amount in the recipe. Add to that, the amount of protein in flour, which also varies from brand-to-brand and bag-to-bag. The higher the amount of protein in flour, the more moisture it will absorb. So if you happen to normally use Pillsbury All-Purpose Flour in a recipe and you switch to King Arthur All-Purpose, you will need less King Arthur because it has a much higher protein content than Pillsbury. If you substitute whole wheat flour for all-purpose flour in a recipe, you may need to take 1 T. of flour from each cup.