Thanks everyone for such great tips! Hi JoJo, Josh and Mike! Hugs to all of you!!!! :) Coffee sounds great right now! Haha! Hopefully I'll get more time and can post more often. As for the brugmansia...ahem I uh....already trimmed off all horrible looking leaves and gave them an early prune. I did this to two of them last week and already have new growth. So last night I trimmed all of mine back. They look like sticks in the pots haha! I did a good search through the pots and found two HUGE snails and 4 small slugs. I got them!!!!!!! Hhehe Now to keep a watchful eye. I want to go the natural route, so beer is a good possibility. I don't like cheap beer, kind of a beer snob, so I have some Coors that have been sitting in my fridge my friends brought over a while back. I'll try those! If that fails...sluggo! Haha Mike! Enema oil! I laughed at that and then though...well...maybe?! I've also heard of neem oil...maybe all oil works! Haha Then I saw your correction post! Too funny Mike! I needed the laugh, thanks! :) I'll keep everyone posted on the pests! Thanks so much! I miss you guys! Ashley

Hi reptile girl: Let me say that I understand your feelings of being critizied and your question ignored. I read your original post then everyone thereafter, then back to yours. I'm hoping I can help you feel less attacked and perhaps give you a better understanding of how this site works. I also had an experience of feeling attacked and I barked back, then several people jumped on me etc. This is what I hear in your original posting: you are very proud of the hard work you have put into your garden of choice, SYG. You continue to give info about your efforts to provide the best growing mixture and fertilizers that have worked for you. You were not looking for any additional information about soil structure, how you should change the way you garden, etc. you are a happy camper with what you have accomplished and should be. The one question that you asked was what organic fertilizer could you add to your garden to insure the best possible crops. Instead you got bombarded with advice, corrections, suggestions, critisims etc. These are my thoughts that I hope help you; first it is helpful to understand that the people who hang out on the Garden Web are extremely knowledgable gardening people either through university or years of experience or both. These people can help you with virtually any question or problem that you may have. Also just by reading in several different areas you will learn so much more than you can imagine. Now all these experts are great resources but just like a professor, they are quite willing to share their ideas, thoughts, tried experiments and so on. And just as professors in the same subject area, they do not all agree with each others view point or practices. Often many of the postings are the experts discussing between themselves the positive & negatives of what has been written. One thing can be said about this site, there are many generous people who are willing to share their views and that's great. What you probably should do in the future is ask your question, that's it. By putting down so much info, everyone got on board with their ideas, stuff went back and forth and you ultimately felt attacked. They really are not attacking, they are very eager to share their knowledge to be a benefit to you. If you visit again and have a concern or question, I'd suggest giving only pertainent info that would help the other readers to give you exactly what your looking for, no more, no less. Those of us who reply to a post should probably take an extra minute to understand exactly what info is needed and offer only that unless the poster comes back to ask for more info. Efforts to help all who post are truly generous with their time and talent but I can see the flip side, so much response with so much advice and/or critiques can be overwhelming to the newbies. I hate to see & read the sniping back and forth that escalates to a point where some really nasty things are said. I think that before we offer so much advice, we may need to realize that not everyone wants or needs all of the knowledge that we are so eager to share and are then offended "after all we've done" when the writer says "enough." I hope reptile girl that you can see this site in a new positive way. My one big piece of advice comes from a Russian grandma that lived next door years ago. She had several potted rose bushes that produced gorgeous roses and all she did was throw left over vegetables, fruit skins, virtually anything into a pot, covered it with water and left it heat for many hours. What was left she poured on the roses. It sure worked. Last year I had quite a science experiment in my frig. plus stuff to go out to the compost pile. I gathered it all together and decided to put some of the scraps into my blender w/some water and spin for awhile. When I was done I had two big bowls of gunk that I poured on my two Deodor cedars. Within days those trees were sprouting all kinds of new growth on all the branches and both trees became substantially fuller and taller. I thought it was hilarious. Maybe I should repeat that routine and try it diluted much more in several other areas of the garden. I may be on to something. Good luck with your crops, it is fun and rewarding when you can actually feed yourself from your own garden, plus I'm sure the nutrition levels are so much greater than the average found in stores.

I read this forum quite regularly, but rarely post here...But sometimes.... I just gotta say it..... You people are nuts...... I am quite used to people telling me I am nuts and have no idea what I am talking about when it comes to such matters, BUT since I am never, make that NEVER the one who has neither virus/malware issues and problems and NEVER have spent even a dime nor any time on such matters, the reality of the situation is that I and the few other Linux users here are really the only ones who have any idea what they are talking about when it comes to PC Operating Systems and PC "security".... A whole forum of "what should I get","what's wrong" "I bought/installed and/but" "what should I do". Soon many reading this will be thinking "Oh he's just one of those Linux nutscases" But, ask yourself, does he "Buy this", "get this", "do this"......Oh yeah, and then ask yourself if your system can match mine on safety, security, performance. I have yet to have either of these boxes contract a virus or a worm or a root-kit nor any other form of malware, not bad for systems running zero AV/security software..... I very rarely ever disconnect from the W3 and rarely ever even turn either of these things off. I have 4 browsers running right now and my email account has been open for days. Other than an outgoing firewall, I am currently running absolutely zero "security" software of any kind. And no reformatting, no scans, no defrags, no registry anythings. I watch videos, play music, redo photo's, make phone calls and do all sorts of other sometimes fun stuff with neither and never a worry nor a care. And my total investment in Operating Systems and software on both boxes equals zero dollars and zero cents. And all my upgrades/dates are free too..... Do yourselves a big favor and go to distrowatch.com, read about the different flavors of Linux and pick yourself out a few LiveCD versions to trial. Or you can always just wait for MSWin7 to be released and start buying all sorts of new software to go along with your already penetrated and compromised, outdated and obsolete brand new high dollar Operating System. Some of the new Linus distro's are so simple to install and use that my best friends 59 y.o.wife has installed several different versions on the same hard-drive and has figured out how to use them all with little more than dang near no assistance from any body. She has even figured out how to use Knoppix6 full time and save everything she does/wants to a persistant image. Oh yeah, she is really good at kids and cooking and sewing and fishing and growing things and all sorts of DIY stuff, but, when it comes to computers, she has the techno-savvy and training of your average box of rocks..... Dang folks....even my daughter, whose "technotude" is somewhat close to absolutely zero has installed and has everything running and learned the ins and outs of both SimplyMepis and VectorLinux on her PC all by her little ol' self. And while her friends are having regular issues after frequenting such mandatory malware magnet sites as YouTube, and MySpace she has nothing of the sort, ever.... But, if you wanna believe that you must MUST have MSWin-something, feel free to spend way too much for way too little, and want to keep spending and installing/scanning/removing/etc for no other reason than you insist on running something as shaky and insecure as Vista1, hurry up and buy the fix for Vista1, Vista2, otherwise known as MSWin7, that's certainly your right.... Well, let's see...I may have exaggerated things a bit by stating the "free" thing........Getting Linux will cost you somewhere around $.125 for a blank CD-R, or the current cost of a blank DVD-R.... HAGD Here is a link that might be useful: better than MSWindows, IMHO it is anyway

first.. remove dead leaves ... if they were in the ground.. i would suggest that is where early slugs are hiding ... second ... you should be able to tell from the weight of the bag... how much water is in there ... if you had a grow bag of dry media ... im just making up numbers.. maybe it would weigh one pound ... if you can barely lift a bag .. and it feels like ten pounds.. well ... you have 9 pounds of water in there... just a little more than a gallon.. if that old 7 pound thing is correct ... what you should do over the summer.. is water a bag ... mark the date.. and not water it again.. until you see the plant wilting a bit ... then see how many days to took to dry ... and then water accordingly ... i think you ought to cut way back.. until you figure out some facts to work with ... until the high heat of summer hits.. i cant really think they need water every day .. especially when they havent spread out their water losing leaves to the atmosphere ... and keep track of spring rain amounts... to use in your equation ... my bottom line.. as usual ... try not to kill them with too much love.. and watering every day in march.. might just be that ... ken