When you re-pot, you need to keep the root-mass moist - a spray-bottle is handy, as well as a helper. Don't prune the roots, if you can help it. I removed very little root when I re-potted, and yet my plant seemed sulky for a while because of it. Of course, I re-potted during the dormant season...now it's leafing finally! Your recipe for soil sounds fine. Turface is great, as is bark....those are two of Tapla's main ingredients. I wish I had Turface. I used small gravel, bark, and Perlite in my mix, with just a touch of yard-dirt (Yes, my inclusion of yard-dirt was roundly denounced and soundly condemned). A six-inch pot will be a good size. Just remember: if you re-pot, keep the roots moist! Perform the re-potting in the shade. Do not let the roots dry out. Then, put the plant in a protected area to recuperate for about a week's time. This will help it keep its leaves. Josh

Hi greenthumbnick, I'm in the situation of gardening on sand as well. I decided not to bother too much with digging and batteling the sand/nematodes so I have been gathering as much organic matter as I can find. This includes cardboard boxes, newspapers, lawn clippings, leaves, any wood chips that the tree services want to dump at my place. I have paid a little money to have mushroom compost delivered (like $20 for a huge trailer load.) I get the free compost from our county whenever they have it available. My first season I didn't have much time to get a "garden" ready so I simply took cardboard produce boxes, plunked them down on a bed of wood chips, filled em with compost from the county, and planted in them. It worked in a pinch. That was this past spring. This fall's garden has several different types of beds going but I think my favorite was simply laying down some cardboard, piling fresh mushroom compost on it (mushroom compost here is horse manure mixed with straw that has been used to grow mushrooms but now they are done with it, it is usually still quite hot), covering the compost with wood chips and planting. The cucurbits planted that way are doing very well so far. Now I'm starting to think about prepping beds for the cooler weather crops and realizing I'm running out of compost so I may have to do lasagna beds with a variety of materials for layers, I'm hoping it isn't a problem that they won't get to sit long before I plant in them. I definitely think gardening with materials you can find rater than paying for dirt is the way to go. Does your local have yard waste pick up? If so you can just go around the evening before they collect the bags of grass clippings ad leaves and get lots of great stuff. Also, if they do collect such things, they probably compost them. Check with your county to see if they offer free compost to residents. Check to see if there are any mushroom farms in the area, they might give away or sell for cheep their compost. We get sawdust pretty cheep from a sawmill in the area. I also tell any tree services I see working in our neighborhood that they can dump the chips in front of my house if the need. They are usually happy to leave the chips unless the person paying for the work wants them. I've gotten three big piles this way. This last time there were lots of palm fronds in one of the loads and that stuff is making great cover material for the compost bin. More, more, I need more organic material!!!! : ) One thing I did learn about making raised beds. Extend the weed barrier (cardboard or newspaper layers) beyond the actual planting area and cover with mulch. This gives nice walkways that help keep the weeds further from the planting beds. I've found it is difficult to mow right up to the beds and can wind up just flinging the weed seeds right into the planting area!

Pudge, Actually, it's kind of a funny but it's unlikely that most of the rocks you're seeing are really "from" your area. Most of the rocks we see at surface on the prairies were actually transported from large distances away by the movements of the glaciers... (Same where I grew up in central Sask... strange that one would become a geologist in the relative absence of rocks! Or of outcrops, at least!) I believe the nearest outcrops of in-situ bedrock (i.e. older than glacial age; exposed at the surface) would be up along the Hanson Lake Road area, approaching The Pas, and in the Shield area to the east and southeast, and in the Cypress Hills to the west...(I'll have to check this, against a map of Saskatchewan geology, though, to be sure that there isn't some pre-glacial strata outcropping in the river valleys in the area.) So, anyway, the rocks you see in the fields, and in the young glacial deposits that are dug up as gravel pits (after being eroded/transported and weathered down into gravel), were generally transported by glacial action, generally from the Shield area. So, the rocks you see are likely to be a mix of sedimentary, volcanic and metamorphic, since they were picked up across the vast terrain along which the glaciers moved. Yes, it's very likely that some of your rocks are granite or other volcanics, others are metamorphic (schist, gneiss), some are sedimentary (limestone, sandstone); the quartz cobbles or boulders could have had a variety of origins (may have been weathered out of very-coarsely crystalline volcanic rock, or from fracture-filling; or sedimentary from fillings of cavities, or metamorphic from recrystallization of sandstone). The sparkly ones may be schist, a metamorphic rock containing abundant flat, shiny crystals (biotite and muscovite) that are all aligned by heat and pressure and folding. Anyway, that may be a little more than you wanted to know, LOL! Sorry, I can't think of a good website offhand for rock ID but I'll think about it and ask at work...

Karyn, The expanded clay I tried was Schultz Aquatic Soil. It just made the soil too heavy and for some reason caused it to hold too much moisture. Now, this expanded slate (I said shale above and I'm correcting it) seems to be nearly as light weight as lava rock and has lots of little holes in it that will hold oxygen. It's fairly cheap too. But I'm not advocating it yet, just trying it out. It is being used for 'green roofs' and as a medium for orchids. Read more below: Here is a link that might be useful: Permatill