Wow. It is almost the end of August !! Time is really flying !! Thanks again for all the advice and for the seed offer. I would love to see your gardens someday and get very jealous... Hope you all had a great summer ! We are still stuck in the apartment and can not get the house yet since we still own our Florida house. With all the economy problems, we are just scared to make another purchase at this point. With all the real estate changes our Florida house really dropped in price and we can not sell it now without loosing a lot of money...Ah..hh. My garden had grown sooo much and we are not there to eat the goodies and trim the trees the "right" way. With all the tropical rain that Florida gets in the summer, my garden became a jungle... I am worried about the garden more then a house I guess...isn't that weird ? We have a nice lady renting it for now, but I wish I could just swap my house in Florida with a similar one here. Is that possible at all ? Did anybody hear anything like that being done ? Or is it just one of my silly dreams? Any of you gardeners want to relocate to Florida to my Eden garden and let me happily take over yours? :) I catch my self day dreaming more about my lush green garden there while it is so hot here in Arizona. I started to propagate my Chaya plants (perennial Spinach bush) that my friend sent me from my garden. So far it made tru the summer and got bigger. I will get another package of Chaya cuttings and Lemon grass suckling from Florida in the fall. If anybody wants to have a Chaya cutting, I might have some to spare. I can ask my friend to send extra if needed. It is a very rare and wonderful plant to have in the garden. It is also very delicious when cooked, very nutritional and healthy. It supposed to grow here very well because it is not picky at all. I looked at many nurseries here and could not find these plants, which were my favorite in the garden. Hope everybody's gardens made it well thru this very hot summer, which is not over yet as I understand. My patio garden is not happy at all and many plants burned. I can not really move my heavy boxes much and some of the plants got too much sun and decided that they did not want to live any more. I planted my favorite jujube from the seed and it is doing well. It is about 1 foot now and I have good hopes for it. It is a very tasty variety from my garden and I hope it will come true to the seed. We will see. I could not find any of the Indian jujubees here either. They are very hardy and can stand sun and poor soil and very fast growing. Talk to you later my fellow gardeners :)

I was guessing around casually. I know what my latin name is for the Mountain Ruellia. It's Ruellia Nudiflora. It took me awhile to find it and now it's doing badly :^(. It was said to be less invasive. What they are showing in the origional post as R.Brittonia obviously isn't. Brittonia has long,narrow leaves. I think it looks more like pensisularis than nudiflora myself. Pensisularis is native to the Sonoran Desert mexico,california,arizona Nudiflora is native to Texas Ruellia brittonia is native to Mexico but is naturalized here. It is considered a weed in Florida. Dwarf "Katies"Brittonia is native to Mexico it is not as aggressive as the tall brittonia. I grow the non native Mexican varieties because Nudiflora wont grow for me. It's gotten thrips or lace bugs again and looks awful. It doesn't die or thrive and I'm thinking about digging it up and tossing it.I'm using the Dwarf form of Katie's Ruellia in bog areas. I'm using the tall Mex. Ruellia in a flower bed someone put under a downspout. It floods occassionally before emptying into the french drain. Both tolerate wet feet well. If I lived in a plant friendlier area I wouldn't grow the Mexican varieties. It's Mexican Ruellia or nada! PJ Here is a link that might be useful: ruellia nudiflora

Hey Lazygardens, For a couple weeks I've been contemplating just growing cherries out here next year. They seem better suited to the conditions, and being new to heirlooms, there's plenty of variety for me to try. My Porter's Dark Cherry is a good sized cherry and the only plant setting fruit in this 110+ degree weather. Pretty amazing if you ask me, and pretty fruit with excellent taste. 2nd only to Traveler among my 25 varieties. The picture doesn't do the deep pink color justice. It's the blocky one in the center below, a few more top right There's a little mystery over this plant, btw. But if I can grow it than any of you desert dwellers can. I got it from Home Depot/Bonnie labeled Porter's Dark Cherry Hybrid. Tomatofest has an OP version, and pictures of simply Porter look like possibly the same plant. I have saved seed and I halfway suspect it's open pollinated and just good old Porter renamed for marketing purposes. I do have seeds for over 20+ slicers I really want to try. I dunno. It sure is different in this weather. I actually hate going into my Celebrity/Ace patch and digging out the blushed, badly cracked, often insect munched fruit every day. I've turned off their water supply, and just want to clean out that garden. Yet, I rather enjoy perusing the cherry plants that are still producing nice looking fruit (but except for Porter's not setting new at this point). I know if I'd put in 60 cherries (instead of 18) I would have had great production and not so much fruit set frustration, insect damage, cracking, BER, etc. I have a pack of Jellybeans, btw. I'll avoid them. Send them to someone up north who's interested.

Sure! I can certainly post back once I have some results to report. I have a tendency to dive much deeper than necessary into details of any hobby I take on...in the end I'm sure a lot of these details aren't critical. I'm in a detail-oriented profession so I think it's just a natural mindset for me to fall into. In this case though, the more I think about the whole coco media buffering, the more I realize that most people who have to worry about it are growing in 100% coco-based media or are utilizing hydroponics. Any of the negative effects I would experience from unbuffered coco (if there would actually be any such negative effect in practice) should be largely offset by the fact that the coco is only 1/3 of my mix. Also I'm applying a fertilizer with every watering that has calcium and magnesium in it so the cation exchange issue should theoretically only be temporary as the media should balance over time. Some of the research I've read indicates that it is more important for the coco to be properly washed to a low electrical conductivity than it is for the cation exchange complex to be buffered. This is because seedlings and young plants are substantially more sensitive to the negative effects of high sodium exposure than they are to a temporary deficient quantity of available calcium/magnesium. The good news is that most of the high quality sources of coco products are washed to a very low electrical conductivity, it's just hit or miss whether a particular manufacturer buffers or not. Since I'm going to be growing a few plants each of some of my aji limon peppers and purple jalapenos, I think I might try buffering some coco and not buffering the other coco and see if there is a noticeable performance difference between the two if the rest of the mix is the same. It would obviously only be anecdotal, but it would still be an interesting thing to see!