You don't have to worry about stealing my thunder Al. Foliage Pro has an NPK label indicating 9-3-6. This is a 3:1:2 ratio. 18-6-12 is as well. 10-10-10 is a 1:1:1 ratio as is 20-20-20. The ratio says nothing about the 'strength' or 'potency' of the fertilizer, just how much of one nutrient is present in relation to another. Since Foliage Pro is 9-3-6 and ProTekt is 0-0-3 assuming they are both mixed at the same dilution (full, half, quarter etc) then the resulting ratio is 3-1-3. Mixed full strength the percentage is 9-3-9. One tip with the PT is do not mix it directly into the FP. It will turn into a milky goop (the label instructions indicate not to mix the two directly, but I had to try it to find out why :) Does this answer your question? Your other question is whether it would make sense to boost the potassium (K) higher. Well, it might in select cases, but for tomatos, according to the tissue analysis I have seen, the plant isn't likely to need or benefit from the extra except in a short window around the time the first fruit is ripening. After that the need for K actually drops slightly. Here is a link to a lengthy study on veggies and the macro/micro nutrients they use at different stages. I think you will find that virtually everything is suited to a 3:1:2 or 3:1:3 ratio fertilizer. Foliage Pro and Protekt fit this need nicely which makes it a very simple one (two actually) stop shop for container plant fertilization.

I was going to put all of the pots at the bottoms of the barrels and use small stock tank heaters in each barrel. Although maybe the papyrus should be brought inside? Do you think this will work? I've searched the forum, and the web and can't find an answer.

Tox I would like to know just what you consider clay. If I have a wet spot and till it, clay acts just like the stuff you used to by as a kid, gummy sticky and impossible to work as all you get a large balls of wet muddy clay. If you wait till spring and turn it over wet, when it drys you are fighting the equivalent of large dryed bricks that breaking to small dried bricka and turn a two hour job into a four hour job. I have dealt with this stuff since I was a kid and my father said I could help him in the garden. I made the mistake of turning the leaves into the wet garden one spring, as my dad said never to do(I actually did it again twenty years later, and by golly same misery) and spent the rest of the summer dealing with chunks of wet leaves and dirt instead of crumbly soil. I don't think you have ever dealth with heavy clay or black gumbo as it is called here and when you get below the black gumbo there is yellow clay that is twice as bad. I have the advantage that in the veg. garden I have worked in so many yards cubed of leaves, straw and weed piles three feet high and sheep manure that it is now the same dark brown color of my hair when dry, but in the rose garden all that has been added is left over leaves, Eucalytus mulch and now cocoa beans that the stuff is black as the ace of spades (when a chunk dries and breaks open it is actually a dark gunmetal grey-black, and when I roto-tilled between the rose bushes because I was annoyed that when I stuck a three sixteenth inch diameter weeder into the soil to get a big dandelion it would bend the weeder) I now have a weed free rose garden with ground that consists of thousands of inch to half inch diameter balls, for lack of a better description, but the roses are damned healthy.

You'll probably hate me too. I've had great success starting and growing Jolokias. Your container size, half barrels, is fine. I grow mine in 5 gallon pots. I understand that soil/growing medium can help achieve optimum results but I'm lazy. I do just fine using ProMix BX which is mostly peat. Not sure where you heard they don't like peat? As for fertilizer, farmer friends turned me onto a commercial 20-8-20 mix. It's primarily used in forestry but it works really well for peppers. FWIW, Bill