deep_woods, Thanks for your tips....I have become moss obsessed and have found very little info on the web for growing it in containers. I hope to eventually take it outside, but for now, I am focusing on growing it indoors in several types of containers including: under a cloche, in a hanging terrarium (with a hole in the front), in a jar, and in a small bowl with no covering. I have harvested moss in my area (Philadelphia), where it grows all over the rocks and in cracked pavement (almost no soil at all), and even on debris-filled pot holes. From your previous conversations, I gather that taking some of the native soil/debri for the containers would be a good idea. Just as brendainva, I am growing in containers that have no drainage holes. I also gather that you would not suggest pebbles, clay balls, or charcoal at the bottom? These are suggestions I have heard from other sites. As I mentioned, most of the moss here, which is short, bold green, and clumpy, grows on extremely nutrient poor areas such as rocks and walls. Which makes me think it might do well on some rocks/pebbles. Although I cannot tell you what species it is, what are your thoughts on this? You said, "Shallow containers with fertilizer and warm weather and regular misting or watering from above with some mosses can lead to doubling the moss in a month." What type of fertilizer are you referring to? Eventually I would like to add some ferns or other native plants to my moss terrariums. For now, however, I am focusing on the moss. Thanks so much!! We need a MOSS FORUM QUICK! If you have any other sites or articles that you would recommend, pleeease send them my way.

keen101, > Make sure all chance of frost has passed and that the soil has warmed to around 65 degrees. If the soil is cooler than that, it will affect the germination rate of the seeds. I noticed that if it's too cool when they're planted, fewer (if any) seeds sprout, even when it warms up afterward (although somehow seeds can overwinter and still sprout), when it comes to direct-seeding anyhow. Germination in my unheated greenhouse is great for most varieties, as long as it's not too low below freezing outside for the nightly lows. Watermelon generally germinates better than just about anything in the greenhouse (same for okra). I don't start my seeds indoors anymore. I start them in a 6'x5'x3' Strong Camel greenhouse and then transplant them in the spring. My area isn't as cold as most parts of Idaho in the growing season. We get about four months of hot weather (the last part of May, all of June, July, and August, and maybe half of September are generally quite hot and very dry, especially from late June to mid August, sans when we have thunderstorms in early August or so; early May and late September or onward are generally cooler, and sometimes rainy, though; the frost-free growing season is generally from about May 10th to October 10th, but it varies, of course). Things like Armenian cucumbers, and muskmelons, which love the heat do very well here. I don't have problems germinating watermelons, as long as it's warm enough when I direct-seed them. Direct-seeding can work, here, but I seem to get much better results (as in larger fruit) if the plants are a certain maturity before I transplant them (even if I have to transplant them late). The plants get plenty of light in the greenhouse. We get a lot of sun in my region, if there's no shade. Cold and other outdoor conditions can indeed damage young watermelons. I do believe they should probably be transplanted later than tomatoes (although I need to test that in more contexts). I think it's more due to the fact that they're young than that it's cold, though, but cold seems like it's probably a factor, if not a big factor. Watermelon leaves seem to prefer the kind of light they grew with. If you change that light, it seems to stunt the plant to a degree. This probably isn't going to be a noticeable issue with young plants, since I think young leaves are adaptable, but once they get to a certain size, it seems to be a major issue. I have a hypothesis that removing old leaves (not on young seedlings, but on older plants) can help them quite a bit (and can get around the issues people have with starting watermelons too early, wherein they think it's a taproot issue instead). I plan to test that, this year. I probably won't transplant any watermelons until the end of May or so, this year (in previous years, I tried to do it as soon as possible under milk jugs—I think it's probably a better idea just to wait until milk jugs aren't necessary, even though it seems like you're losing time. Fortunately, we have lots of pollinators here. Our neighbors have beehives. I don't see many at all on the tomatoes, but they seem to like the Russian Sage, cantaloupes, sunflowers, squash, and stuff. They're often on the watermelon, too. I don't know that we have issues with few fruits getting pollinated (although we could probably get more), but some watermelons seem to have incomplete pollination, especially if they're first-year watermelons. I mean, the seeds on the blossom end are often not developed. This can result in smaller, less tasty, fruits. Acclimatization seems to help avoid this, whether or not fruits get larger in following years. I'm not sure that it's the fault of the pollinators; it might be something about the climate. With the exception of Red-seeded Citron and maybe Sugar Baby, I've actually had *much* better results if I water watermelons with an oscillating sprinkler or a shower nozzle than if I just water at the base of the plant. It's interesting how results differ. My main challenges with watermelon have been these: * Fruit size tends to be smaller more often * Spider mites (they're everywhere, I've pretty much resigned myself to adapting the plants to deal with them) * Foliar anthracnose and/or alternaria (theseseem to go hand in hand with the spider mites) * Weeds (particularly tall, weedy grasses) I didn't know you were in more similar circumstances, living in the city limits. I guess I assumed there! Sorry. That's cool. I planted the tomatoes about a foot apart when I did about 105 varieties in 2017. I didn't cage any of them. I made sure to separate the smaller plants I knew about from those that would smother them (due to lots of smothering experience in 2015 and 2016). I had them in a long strip of land instead of something closer to a square-shaped piece of land as I had done with about a hundred varieties in 2016 spaced somewhat further apart (and the long strip made for a better and easier harvest, I think, since more plants were on the border, without tomatoes on all sides). I had watermelons, muskmelons, okra, and a few other things in the square-shaped piece of land in 2017. I'll probably put at least tomatoes and other stuff there, this year, and watermelons in a new spot that hasn't been gardened on much, if at all, before. I'm pretty good at making things fit (not just with plants), if I'm allowed to do it. If it were up to me, I'd want to line the western fence in the backyard with 18-gallon moving totes for plant containers, since mostly just weeds grow there anyway. Stuff I've tried growing in the ground directly next to the fence tends to be smaller than usual. I could probably fit 50-60 of them there, all in a line, and lay a drip irrigation hose over them or something. I could grow a lot of peppers. But, that's me dreaming. I'm not the only one who lives here, and I'm not allowed to do whatever I want, even though I've managed to do some pretty interesting (IMO) things. If I had a big field, and could manage to water it, I'd probably grow tens of thousands of watermelon/muskmelon plants and literally every tomato variety I could find, at least three times (including F2+ hybrids). I'd probably let all the tomatoes reseed, too, as well as plant more, both saved and otherwise, the next year. I really wonder what would have happened had I encouraged all the volunteers these last two years instead of trying to pull them up. They were growing like weeds. I was pulling them up most of the season, last year. They were pretty easy to pull up, but there were lots of them, and they kept coming. I eventually stopped, and some of them set fruit. Letting loads of varieties reseed sounds like it could make for some interesting breeding over time. If I were just breeding, rather than trying to get a harvest, I'd probably direct-seed a lot of them, too, for some reasons.

I was thinking of getting a weeping white spruce (picea glauca) to put in the place of the hemlock but after seeing what they cost, it was hard to convince DW to fork out another $300-500 to get one of any size and I'm not patient enough to start with a very small one. My next thought was picea abies would look nice there but for some reason, nobody seemed to carry the smaller potted trees anymore around my area. All types of spruces were high priced and seemed to be hard to find this year, for some reason. Finally, I found a tree grower who was gracious enough to sell me a potted P. Abies from his stock he'll be planting soon. I waited over an hour at his fields while he tended to customers, but it was worth the wait. I was expecting a seedling in a half gallon pot, but was happy to see it was a 30" tree in a 3 gal. pot. :-) He explained to me how to slit the sides of the root ball before planting, which I did but when I tried to find the root flare, the red flags went off. I took off over 1-1/2" of extra soil from the top layer in the pot before finding the root flare. In turn found a couple of good-sized roots growing up from the top of the root flare and were circling around the trunk area in that top layer of soil. (You can see the white spots of the snipped roots just right of trunk (next pic) and the soil line (dark part of trunk) where the original soil line was in the pot). I've read that P. Abies isn't as fussy as most trees are about getting planted too deep but didn't want to take chances and circling roots are never a good idea to leave without fixing. So anyways, got the P. Abies species tree planted, and it shouldn't be long for it to start looking nice. The buds were just breaking when I was planting today. 77df. When clearing the old mulch for planting, I found at least 3" deep of composted wood mulch under the top layer of mulch, I suppose from the last 7 years of applying mulch around the hemlock. Now you know 'The rest of the story'. ;-)

Hi, finally catching up on all these great responses. It is a gorgeous flower and worthy of much conversation. I discovered it only insofar as it was a component of a wildflower seed mix from American Meadows that I sowed on a late afternoon just before a snowstorm in December 2016. By Spring 2018 many gorgeous perennials and biennials had grown from that seed packet, including our beloved blue flax. On the American Meadows page, it calls it "Linum perenne" but elsewhere says "This species is named "lewisii" in honor of Meriwether Lewis..." so I'm not sure if it's L. perenne, the old world native, or L. lewisii, the American native. But apparently sometimes L. lewisii is called L. perenne var. lewisii just to make things interesting. Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if it was a drainage issue, though many plants right next door to it made it through the winter just fine. (A notable exception was a Penstemon 'Prairie Dusk', and of course all penstemon need really good drainage.) Katob, good eye with noticing the Siberian Wallflower growing right next to it, and it came in the same seed mix. Apparently depends on the growing conditions it can act either as a biennial or a perennial, and sadly for me it was a biennial, just blooming in 2018, then, along with its neighbor the Blue Flax, returned to the dust from whence it came. That gorgeous blue and stunning orange were the highlights of my spring garden last year. I don't know yet if I have seedlings to carry on the tradition.