Curtis - you are GREAT. You nailed your problem - and you are fixing it. Just add a teaspoon of dolomite per quart of your regular wet mix, let it sit for some time, test. You need more - add more. There is more into it than just adding and subtracting - and the water is very important too, and some fertilizers are acid or alkaline etc. When you get your mix right - you need to maintain your soil in the same Ph range - and it will be getting acid just because a peat moss is breaking apart. So - the next thing you do - you leach your plants once a month with a lukewarm water, or even with distilled water if you wish. It takes some of the acid out. But still since you are a perfectionist ;-)) - you can right a date of repotting on your name tags - and as soon as 6 months are out (4 moths for minis and semi-minis)- you repot the plants into the fresh mix. And as I mentioned earlier - it is good idea to have some of the coarse dolomite added to the soil to work slowly. Powder dolomite works fast - and then it is gone, coarse will continue fighting with the humic acid as soon as it comes from the breaking peat moss. You can purchase some soil from specialized places - Cape Cod was mentioned before - just for comparison. Couple of ladies from our club were running an experiment - they ordered small packages of AV soil mix from different places - and tried to grow starters in it. Guess what - Optimaras grow better in Optimara mix and so on and so forth. So there is no such thing that the perfect mix. basic Cornell mix 1:1:1 works very much OK - but depending on the conditions - some put put more vermiculite and less perlite. I started putting just a bit of worm castings in the mix, bone meal and tomato fertilizer - and you know - doesn't hurt. They love it - provided that I put just a bit - and keep my fertilizer in the wicking water on the 1/8 of the teaspoon per gallon. If you give them a drink of a weak fish emulsion every so often - also works. I read people tried foliar feeding for AVs - and the results are inconclusive. Not that it gives them a huge boost. My best Irina

The best medium to plant newly rooted figs in is one that provides the greatest amount of aeration and ensures that aeration for the expected interval between repots but is still something you can deal with as far as the intervals between watering. IOW, you'll get the best growth from a soil you need to water daily or even twice a day, but if that is too inconvenient, you'll need to adjust to something more tolerable. How much vitality you sacrifice for convenience depends almost entirely on how far you go in the other direction and how fast air returns to the soil after a thorough watering. E.g., if you were using a soil/plant combination that required daily watering and could magically change the soil to one that only required watering every two days, there would be some degree of sacrifice in potential growth and vitality. If though, you could magically change to a soil that required watering only every 5 days, there would be a considerable sacrifice in growth potential and vitality. Soils that remain waterlogged for extended periods kill roots, and the plant pays to regenerate those roots by spending energy it would normally have put toward increasing mass, more blooms or fruit, extending branches ...... You may be referring to something I wrote about roots: While fig cuttings may root readily in water, the roots produced this way are quite different from those produced in a solid, soil-like or highly aerated medium (perlite, screened Turface, very coarse sand, e.g.). Physiologically, you will find these roots to be much more brittle than normal roots due to a much higher % of aerenchyma (a tissue with a greater percentage of inter-cellular air spaces than normal parenchyma). If you want to eventually plant your rooted cuttings in soil, it is probably not best to root them in water because of the frequent difficulty in transplanting them to soil. The "water roots" often break during transplanting & those that don't break are very poor at water absorption and often die. The practical effect is nearly equivalent to starting the cutting process over again with a cutting having diminished energy reserves. If you do a side by side comparison of cuttings rooted in water & cuttings rooted in a solid well-aerated medium, the cuttings in a solid well-aerated medium will always (for an extremely high % of plants) have a leg up in development on those moved from water to a solid medium for the reasons outlined above. Al

Hello Lucas, Thank you for your input and questions :o) I will now try to answer some of them here : So let me ask by paraphrasing: you say that the only difference between Distilled ad RO-water is no ions at all compared to some ions, right? - Yes effectively this is the most important difference, since the reverse osmosis procedure is not 100% efficient, a lof more ions are left inside the water when compared to distillation. That in fact is more like basic - but is there a difference between RO- and distilled water in terms of susceptibility for drastic PH changes with the add of (as you call it) "a very very slight amount of acid"? And, what about other actual and pragmatical differences between RO-water and distilled water and their affinity for carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere? Is the difference notable, drastic or does it depend on how much and what kind of ions some specific RO-water still has? - Of course, as RO water has some ions it can have some added buffer ability. Depending on the nature of these ions the interaction with carbon dioxide might be very different. For example, if some carbonates are left within the water this will tend to creat a carbonate-bicarbonate buffer with time as carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is introduced. However some RO systems include ion-exchange columns that may in fact make the output water acidic. The final ionic composition of your RO water varies depending on the initial water source and the actual purification system. Let's say RO-water has between 15 and 50 ppm, just to have some workable figures handy. Is there a real difference with a highly purified (10-15 ppm) RO-water and distilled water in this context, and will a content of let's say 40-60 ppm of "impurities" change anything? - Yes, of course. distilled water has a conductivity that is for most practical purposes very close to 0 ppm. Just having and additional 1 ppm changes the buffer and pH responses of the water significantly. The more impurities you have, the lower the response will be to atmospheric carbon dioxide. However, this difference is not extremely important when using the water for hydroponics since the amount of salts is in either case small and the actual pH will be set by the hydroponic nutrients. What is the "final" conclusion, do you recommend RO-water for the use with nutrient solutions, either for commercial nutrients or for adequate "self-made" nutrients? - I would recommend RO water because distillation is a much more energy intensive process that yields water quality which is simply "unecessarily pure" for hydroponics. The additional 40-60 ppm of salts dissolved in RO water will most probably not make any noticeable difference while the process to obtain RO water is much less energy intensive. And finally, if using your recommended "Ion-exchange resin pH regulation" what would be the outcome if using them with RO-versus distilled water (without the add of any nutrients) - from a purely theoretical point of view of course, because it's not an actual practice nor procedure? Would there be ions to exchange at all with distilled water, when there are no ions...? I am not rhetorical with anything I am asking, - just interested in conclusion I can put into or transfer to actual practice. ;-) - The outcome with both wouldn't be very different after the solutions are prepared. Certainly if you use an ion exchange resin with RO water before preparing the solutions the water will be further purified to eliminate ions in exchange for acidic protons of the resin but in the end, after the addition of nutrients both RO and distilled water sources will have the same response. I hope this answers your questions :o) Thank you very much for your comment, Best Regards, Daniel

We've had our 36" 5-burner GE Profile induction cooktop for about 2 months now, and I LOVE it for all of the reasons mentioned above. Two things anyone might want to consider when deciding on which induction to buy: 1. SERVICE--DH didn't get around to installing the hood until AFTER the cooktop had been installed. He dropped his hammer on it from a height of 2' and cracked the glass. Yes, I was angry, especially since I knew he was tired and I'd tried to get him to stop before he made any mistakes! But he called GE, the repair guy called us immediately, and ordered any parts he thought might have been damaged (the control panel was right under the glass where the hammer hit). He had them FedEx/UPSed to us, and told us to call him when they arrived. We did, and he came the SAME day and did the repair. The control box had not been damaged, so he returned it. 2. SS RIM--If you've ever had something boil over, having the stainless steel rim instead of only the smooth black surface will keep most things from overflowing onto the counter or floor. I can't count the number of times I've cooked rice and had a considerable amount of water boil over--including yesterday. :o) I'd forgotten I'd put it on power boost (do NOT leave the cooktop while this is on), and walked to the other side of the kitchen to get something. Over it went out of the pot, but it stayed within the boundaries of the cooktop because of the SS rim, although the mess spread over three burners. Easy to fix. Turned it down so it stopped overflowing immediately, picked up the pans on the three burners and wiped them and the cooktop off, and was back in business in a couple of minutes with the rice simmering away at the perfect temperature. No matter what I've cooked, there's been a perfect simmer point. The placement of the different sized burners also works well for me. Soon the real test will come, when DH and DS both stir fry on the two front burners. There's room for the 14" stir fry pan, the 12" extra deep 6 qt saute pan, and the 13" French skillet in the back on Low to keep things warm. I LOVE this cooktop!!! I also love my new pots and pans. Up until we got the induction cooktop, I'd cooked for decades using a few not-so-good ones. While researching pans, I ran across explanations of what each kind of pan can be used for, which were helpful in making choices from the many AllClad options. I ended up getting the Kitchen Aid pans recommended by Consumers Report (partly because I like glass lids), and several larger AllClad pieces from Williams-Sonoma that were a lower price in their catalog as well as some that went on sale in their store after Christmas. I also got some from the AllClad outlet in PA via the internet. Several of the W-S prices were cheaper than the outlet! I'd looked over the pans in the reduced price collections of the various stores, but had determined that most of the ones I wanted were not included in those offers. Although the AllClad is expensive, I especially love cooking with their large pans. Anne