Good Afternoon, Ladies and Gents! Josh, thank you. Will your Jades keep color over winter? Your Skinny Fingers is extremely red. Btw, is Skinny Fingers, Hobbit or Gollum? I still get the two mixed-up. :) A few posts below, you posted a photo of your Hobbit. You wrote 'mother and daugher.' Is daugher attached to mother? If so, will they be together, or removed to form a tree-shape standard/solo trunk? You also wrote, 'another beautiful day in northern CA.' What were temps that morning? One more question. :) You said, 'Hobbit in the light of the rising sun.' Are Crassulas in an east window? No more questions...Not at the moment anyway. lol Rob... I had no choice but to leave Jades outside when temps dipped below 32F. So far so good, however, during the day, temps are between 40-50F, nights 29-34. They're predicting 60F from Tues-Fri, although like you said, weather doesn't listen to the forecast. lol. Think I'm going to place a small table on the front porch, set Jades out during the day, then bring in at night. Today, the third of Nov is the first day we've had actual sun! If you've ever seen The Wizard of Oz, picture the twister scene. Remember the sky and wind? That's what the last 5 days resembled. :) Kuroc. Patience is the key..it seems some Jades grow faster than others. Your Jades will soon be tall and wide, then you will not know where to set them come winter. Mike, thank you..Tidy? You should see the mess after a windy day/night.. Or when I'm cleaning, and plants do the domino thing. lol. Toni

It's so hard when we lose one. I lost 2 in 2 yrs. Such a rough time. I used to live where we often had deer cross our land - and tons of snow. Somewhere I have pics of a maybe '78 major snow storm. It was half way up our patio door (that was up 3 steps from the ground). But now I'm in the SW - I won't post a pic. I do look out at some mountains in the distance. I don't mind seeing snow in pics tho!

I appreciate the kudos, but the recipes I posted in that linked thread are no longer what I use. Also, "Peters top soil" was really "Scotts top soil" -- I remembered the name wrong. While I did get great growth from that recipe, all those roses were planted in the ground just a few months later. Keeping roses in pots longer required a "fluffier" mix. I came to find that I get more growth from a modified "Mel's Mix" from Square Foot Gardening. My formula for potting up bands now is: 3 gallons peat moss 1 gallon perlite 1 gallon vermiculite 1 gallon Bovung dehydrated manure 3 cups Espoma Garden Tone (or any other similar organic dry fertilizer) This year, I couldn't find Bovung and substituted Black Kow composted manure. But since that has half the N-P-K as Bovung, I doubled the quantity of it, and reduced the peat moss component to 2 gallons. The goal was maintaining a 1/3 inorganic "fluffy yet moisture-retentive" base, made up by the perlite and vermiculite, respectively. This is all mixed in a wheelbarrow. Before adding to a container, I line the bottom with a used coffee filter or two from my Starbucks coffee grounds hauls. This slows the drainage for a while, until the filters break down. And that allows for the containers to stay a bit extra moist in the beginning as the bands grow more roots. I pot the bands in 1- or 2-gal nursery liners, about an inch or two deeper than they were in their original containers. I finish with a 1/2" or so of used coffee grounds, still leaving an inch of space from the rim to allow room for watering and rainfall. The coffee grounds were the most recent addition. If anything, I think they help to keep the earthworms happy -- they always seem to find their way into my pots sitting on the ground. And I happily recommend hitting up your local Starbucks for coffee grounds. While I've been on hiatus from my pickups since I started a different job and have been working a lot, I had a regular system going for quite a while. I bought two heavy duty indoor garbage cans, left one there, and returned the next day to swap them out. I'd dump the cans into a leaky wheelbarrow, which allowed any liquid to drain out. Coffee filters were in there as well, so I started by pulling them out as I found them, reserving them for composting or whatever else I could do with them. The grounds I'd scoop into a bucket, then carry to where I wanted a fresh layer. Even if you go once or twice a week, you'll still get a lot for your garden. Start out spreading it thinly and see what happens as you gradually increase the depth. Or just fling it by the trowel-full into your beds. It's free nutrient-rich organic matter that would otherwise end up in a landfill -- and it already looks rather like soil, so it blends in. :-) ~Christopher P.S. I found some links mentioning my "magic mix". http://forums2.gardenweb.com/discussions/3426379/keep-weak-roses-potted-longer?n=21 http://forums.gardenweb.com/discussions/4005123/salet-is-in-bud http://forums.gardenweb.com/discussions/3533090/bands-doing-great-irish-cream-has-a-bud

I have hesitated to join this discussion, as I have shovel pruned so many. I shamefacedly realise just how many, when I come across (often) photos of roses in other's gardens that I used to have. Last year I cut back an enormous Mme Isaac Pereire to a stump, and poisoned it. The blooms were way more sparse than they were, she has every disease known to man and she takes up a lot of real estate. And I get cut to pieces trying to get at other plants. I must be a bad poisoner, as nearly all I have poisoned regrow. Come Spring, so did MIP. But as there were buds, I thought I'd just enjoy them before I had a second go. She started to grow like topsy, and I thought I'll enjoy a few more blooms before I have another go at her. Big mistake. She never had another bloom, but has, in one year, reached her former monstrous size, and I now face the whole prospect again. I'm still thinking I'll wait and see if there's a Spring flush!