Copy/pasted from what a good friend from CA said, "Wonder Bark--for orchids. Fir bark - Fine. Clear plastic bag with pink printing on it. I think. Two size bags--I think the small one is ?12 liters?. The large one is 1 cubic foot. It also comes in Medium grade. One cubic foot is approx 9-10 dollars at OSH--Orchard Supply Hardware. Most have them in Bay Area, I don't know about southern Cal." So if you have OSH near you, it's a good place to start looking for this sub. Al

Oh I did not realize that fresh bark can be used. I always use composted/ aged bark. I have a huge operation close to me that have got mountains of all sorts and sizes. They wet it and turn it regularly so it don't combust and set the mountain behind them alight they say. I once got 5 bags from them that wasn't completely composted/aged. It was black on the outside but still red on the inside. Smelt strongly of pine. I didn't like it so I kept it under cover for 3 months and it turned out well. The red centres were all black again. From then on I only went for the well composted/aged ones. They cautiously scrape the top layers for me when they bag it. They know I don't want the fines. I don't have to screen and my chip size is exactly how I want it. They actually do screen it in bulk but it still contains fines. When walking past a massive mountain of fresh bark it makes your eyes water and the pine smell is overwhelming. I just figure that my plants can do better in a more stable environment like the composted ones. It doesn't smell of pine at all. In fact it smells like loam soil. The bark nuggets lasts 2 years without breaking down (that's how long I've been mixing with bark). I emptied some containers at the beginning of the season and the 5-1-1 and gritty mixes were looking the same as when I made it. I almost used it again....But I didn't :-) This post was edited by fredman on Thu, Dec 12, 13 at 21:53

Hello Patty, my mangoes are doing pretty good and I have never sprayed them with any fungicide or insecticides. My backyard is extremely humid( I'm about 5-10 miles from the ocean, as the crow flies)and we get frequent thick fog that makes my backyard look like it just rained. Ong's nursery does sell a lot of these varieties and if you buy several plants from him at one time, he(or his mom) may give you a discount. If Quang is there, tell him I recommended you to see him and he may give you an additional discount. Mickey from Plantogram is also a great person to order plants from and he will sometimes send you pictures of the trees before you purchase them. If you calculate in the shipping and phyto cert, its is still cheaper to get the plants from Ong's nursery. I have seen only a few larger specimens of mango trees in my area and many of them are seedling mango trees. Leo Manuel of CRFG had many grafted varieties of Mangoes in his backyard but he only had a few larger trees and they were still much smaller than an avocado tree. Mango trees in SoCal get killed back every several years when we get a hard frost. You will be lucky to get a mango tree to grow very large here. If you check out Exotica, they have some mangoes planted in the ground that are pretty old but I wouldn't say they are large. I'm actually trying to get my mango trees to grow very large by planting seeds directly into the ground so that their taproot will go deep. I will then graft a named cultivar onto the seedling in hopes of producing a grafted mango that will actually grow large here. I even grafted an additional rootstock onto my Maha Chanook Mango tree in the hopes that having two rootstocks will make the tree more vigorous. I will try to upload some pictures when I get some time. Simon

I think soaking is personal preference, it's to get the bark saturated since it's naturally hydrophobic. Some people soak it for a couple hours, some overnight, some not at all. I usually soak it for a couple hours. When I'm making gritty mix I just pour it through a strainer to drain it, but for 5-1-1 I find it's easier to mix all the ingredients when the bark is dry, so I just wet it down and let it soak together, then drain from the pot. I doubt it makes much difference, I just try to keep the mess to a minimum! You can tell when it needs to be watered by sticking a wooden chopstick into the mix, let it sit for a few, then pull it out and see if it's wet. As soon as it comes out dry it's time to water again. Ideally, you would flush the soil with each watering, which means watering just enough to wet the soil, waiting 10 min or so, and then watering through again until you've seen at least ~10% of the water (more is ok) exiting the drainage hole. That will prevent excess salts from building up in the soil over time. As long as the drainage holes are in the bottom of the pot, you're good, you don't need one right in the center. If they are on the sides of the pot such that there will be soil in the pot below the level of the holes, I'd drill another one in the bottom. You don't need super thrive. Once you've planted, water with just plain water initially, then as soon as you see new growth on the plant, start using the foliage pro. i just saw you were going to plant today so maybe I'm too late with this response, but I bet you did just fine!