yes, it's a self watering ceramic pot, but no spout. you just keep water in the larger bowl and plant is in the smaller bowl which sits inside the larger bowl. yes, I've got new leaves, just lots of bare stems. the leaves are only being added to top of the stem.

Ah.....the mark of an intellegent person. May I suggest dropping the teaching language down to third or fourth grade level to achieve a much larger following. Therefore a much better understanding of your words. Those who understand and follow any principal are attracted to those principles. I read several issues of Acres and Organic Gardening a year. If I want tech talk and fine details they are usually available but not desired by most readers. Fifty years ago I enjoyed free lance opportunities with the Organic Gardening folks from Emaus, Pa. My first submission was rejected for being to technical and written to high for their publication at that time. My all time great garden book is: "The No Work Garden Book" Ruth was very well educated and knew how to write better.

$13 dollars is a bit steep for what I would find it for in my area. I would expect more like $6-$8, but prices may vary by locale. This feed, like all grains, will be mostly nitrogen. While not precisely accurate, divide the protein % by 6 to get the percent nitrogen by weight. Protein is 28% so 28/6= 4.6% nitrogen. Turf generally wants around 1 lb of nitrogen per feeding with 3-4 feedings per year, most of it in the fall. If you have 50lbs of feed and 4.6% is nitrogen then you have about 2.2 lbs of nitrogen in the 50lb bag. This will cover 2200 sq. ft of lawn for a single application. For a garden it depends on the plant. Many plants do best with no added nitrogen, others (like corn) need as much as grass (corn is a grass) to do well. The thing is the feed is organic so don't sweat it too much, you can't burn the lawn by an over application. You would smother it under grain products first ;-)

I really disagree with Ken on this. In the typical urban landscape, the trees and shrubs DO need to be fertilized. Unless, of course, all planting areas get some benefit from the lawn fertilization. Urban homes are often built on constructed soils, the entire organic layer (the '0' layer in soil science terms) is long gone. The nutrient cycle is utterly broken as over story trees and other plants are removed and replaced with grass and tidy landscapes. Our plants require a pretty specific list of elements that they must gain from the soil and only from the soil. As those elements are depleted, they need to be replaced. If we are good caregivers of the soil, we can use generous amounts of compost and/or organic mulch to help replace these elements. But, make no mistake, our growing plants DO NEED a supply of dissolved nutrients in order to sustain their varied and complex physiology and to build and support a strong storage system. In a woodland, the existing natural cycles are present....in the landscape they are not. Plants that are nutrient deficient are fragile in many ways. The only good way to avoid under OR over fertilization is to have the soil tested occasionally. But, Tracy, to answer your question directly about fall fertilization. I NEVER recommend it, root growth or not. As mentioned by Jay, fertilization may stimulate top growth, which is the last thing you wish to happen in the fall. If the top continues to push out new growth, two main things happen: The plant doesn't get a chance to harden off before freezing temperatures AND the roots don't get an opportunity to store energy. It is those stored carbon resources that enable all of our woody plants to burst with new growth, buds, and flowers in the spring. The reason that fertilization is not recommended for new plantings is because we want the roots to get a chance to develop, to establish into the new environment BEFORE new growth commences. If we artificially stimulate new growth, it will be at the sacrifice of root development. Plants can't do everything at once.