Thank you! I was coming back to apologize for not reading the FAQ first, and your helpful reply was already here :) I'm hopeful for my orchid -- I found out it's probably a "Yellow Beauty" -- because it has a tiny baby leaf and a new root bud. The withered leaf was in the middle tier of 3 sets of adult leaves, so not exactly the bottom but also not the new baby leaf. I bagged-and-sphagged it for now -- by a less retentive medium do you mean I should use orchid bark? I have a bag on hand, because although this is my first orchid, I mix the coarse orchid bark into potting mediums for my other houseplants. I have a wooden party pick inserted into the sphag to monitor the moisture levels. Right now I have problems with my dryer not venting properly and my laundry room is always very warm and humid when I dry clothes. It's horrible and needs to be fixed, but I was thinking I could take advantage of it by putting the orchid in there in the evenings -- it's usually in my bedroom, which is warm and gets all that morning light but isn't very humid. Would this be a good plan or would moving it back and forth between environments do more harm than good?

That location will provide a great deal of reflected heat and light, something that the osmanthus may find difficult to tolerate in your climate. Osmanthus prefers a fair amount of protection from the full sun, especially during the hottest part of the day...which just happens to be when your plant is getting irradiated and baked! ;-) I agree that you should know, with some accuracy, the pH of your soil. As a matter of fact, a soil test might not be a bad idea. You may find out that fertilization is required for all your plants....or not. Home pH meters can be incredibly bad, as can moisture meters. As can home soil testing kits! I always recommend springing for a soil test. I disagree that you plant looks fine. The leaves should be uniformly dark green, and the shrub should be full. Does your twenty minute watering session do the job? Have you dug around in the soil (not right at the root system, please) about 30 minutes afterwards to see how moist the soil is? In the southeast, where this plant flourishes in some locations, you'll find the healthiest plants under the high shade of tall pines (for example), or in locations that receive full sun in the morning but some shade all afternoon. My Osmanthus, planted in hard, red Alabama clay with no irrigation, is in the sunlight until about 11 ish, when the shadow from the house begins to protect it. NOW! About your use of the imidicloprid. You might not know that this systemic pesticide translocates throughout the vascular system and can be found, subsequently, in the POLLEN and NECTAR of the flowers. Every single insect that visits your osmanthus will be exposed. I even have hummingbirds all over mine! Imidicloprid is banned in some countries because of this. Bees carry the tainted goods back to the hive where it is distributed to all inhabitants. This is not a good thing. There are also some worrisome studies out that appear to point the finger at this chemical for INCREASING thrip populations, rather than decreasing it. It is well documented that spider mite numbers soar with the use of Imidicloprid. Maybe something to think about? Here is a link that might be useful: Soil testing labs

They grow fine from "Root Division" and of course seed. We grow all ours from seed and now found a hybird of yellow flowers on some that we've marked for future collection. Once these are established (and it sounds like yours is) it will come back, if its large enough you might consider digging it up and dividing it into sections then re-planting each section.

I've tried out the ballast method with my very first citrus and it worked very well last fall into winter then spring. Not sure if anyone remembers my Meyer's story but my Meyer came to me with a badly propagated root system from RBF and was always on the edge of declining health but it still managed to grow an impressive root system throughout winter with the ballast I provided in the pot. The tree only had 5 leaves provided with one LED grow light the whole winter season but still managed to grow nice roots in such poor health! I used a half quart plastic takeout container as my ballast. My poor tree is gone now but it serves as a wonderful reminder of what worked and didn't work (ie. ballast worked). Vlad it is possible the dust caused the bottom half to be too soaked for too long. I know you mentioned that Al's recipe uses the dust but I've looked into many different recipes and opinions on the 511 recipe on gardenweb to see how it fared with other growers. There was a very interesting thread where someone talked about a threshold for particle size and the maximum percentage allowed before becoming a real issue in container mixes. I've been trying to find if I saved or bookmarked it but haven't located it yet so I'll be looking through my phone photos for screenshots. I know for sure I saved it because I liked how he provided numbers for the quantities of each respective media and/or particle size. When I find it I'll make sure to post the photos or link. This year I've also noticed a huge difference in the way I water and how it effects the smaller particles like peat. Last year I had just started the gardening hobby so I didn't have any watering cans or wands. I just watered with a decades old leaking spray nozzle from the hose or using an empty water bottle as my watering device. I would drip water through the cap of the bottle very slowly and at the time with just 1 citrus tree, I had the patience for it. This spring I've added some blueberry plants, about 20 citrus seedlings from seed, and my 3 trees from Stan so I purchased a watering wand to make it quicker and easier. But! I stopped using it because I noticed that it provides such a large amount of water in such a short amount of time that it created a type of flash flood effect in my containers. So much water would pool and stay above the mix and pull alot of the peat down when it sank down leaving a layer of bare perlite on the surface. This was drastically different from my extremely slow water bottle method. My water bottle method acted more like drip irrigation and did very little to disturb the surface or stratify the container mix. I really feel that most people will have problems with peat or dust sized particles settling to the bottom of the container if your collection is large enough to require a watering wand or can. I think I'll be going back to poking holes into the caps of empty water bottles and letting that drip irrigate my citrus lol