Up, up and not away!

Jodik says: The coir might look dry on top, but down in the center of the pot, it could be quite moisture-laden! I have found it helpful to insert little wooden skewers carefully into the soil to about root level, and leave them there... I take them out and press them against my cheek to test for dampness... if they feel at all damp, I wait to water... but if the skewer comes out dry, it's time to water. My coir is 4" deep in a closed pot. I put the skewer to the bottom of the pot. When I take it out how many inches of bone dry top "soil" should there be before it's time to water again? Is it 1", 2" or 4"? I just went 10 days without water and only 1" of the top was dry so am I supposed to water this direct sun pot once every two weeks or so to avoid over watering, really? And how much water for my 6" closed pot? I had been watering 1 1/2 cup or so once a week and my plant was fine but I'm now worried that was too much so I'm re-evaluating. I know what conventional wisdom says (water deep, not shallow) but that advice doesn't seem to apply to my situation. Also how long should it be before I see new leaf growth in the summer time (first season outside)? My 18 month old Red Lion so far has only grown new leaves once a year. At potting and at dormancy end.

So I seem to have been able to do all that I wanted to know how to do. Now for some comments... I like knowing how to change the font, but I agree, I would use it rarely. What I find myself wishing I could do on a fairly regular basis, is putting something in italics, underlining a book title, putting a word in bold. As for the color, something else I would rarely go to the trouble of using, but again, I would like to know how to for that rare occasion when I might. Such as in a Christmas greetings thread or something like that. Most of the time I would not take the time to do that. As a matter of fact, I use the firefox browser and if you notice when I tried to use the color tags, I thought it didn't work. That is because firefox limits html commands when using their browser and I didn't see any red words. I realized that you did and I went and used Internet Explorer and sure enough, I saw the word red in red ink. Strangely, I didn't see the other effects. That was confusing and I have no idea why. BUT, in the browser that I use every day, the commands I wanted to use work fine with the directions you gave me. So I am all set. The thing I wanted most to do and will probably use more frequently than the others, is posting a photo inside the post. I used to use Tinypic, but at some point something changed and I was pasting the command they were providing and it still wasn't working. So these directions worked for me. I compared the command you were suggesting to the command Tinypic provided and they were different. But I think I would still use the Tinypic site to upload the photo and then just change the command where needed. Finally, on Nan's concern about resizing the photos. I assume that the concern is the time it takes to open a thread for someone on dial up when one of the photos is oversized. So the photo I posted above, is oversized? If that is a problem, I will go back and review the directions for resizing. Hope that helps. :-)

Well, after much discussion, debate, and numerous proposals on the subject, we now have a new Laundry Forum on THS! Hopefully this will indeed help relieve some of the burden in the original Appliances Forum, where the 300 thread limit was starting to burst at the seams in a somewhat desperate effort to contain lengthy conversations about *all* appliances... thanks, Spike, for making this upgrade happen! Anyway, in order to further improve access to information on laundry-specific topics, Spike and the THS staff have created another new FAQ section, specific to the Laundry Forum. I, "hardwarehack" Tom, am now working as the Editor of both FAQ sections, and will be re-posting the various laundry-related FAQ articles from the Appliances FAQ here... as well as starting into the large pending queue of FAQ files submitted to me by helpful THS participants. As Spike noted, the transition to the new split Forum system will take a little while, so for now, I'll leave the original Appliance FAQ article URLs intact, for handy reference. If anyone has additional suggestions for this new FAQ section, I'm about to create another FAQ thread in the main Forum - please post ideas, comments, and formal proposed FAQ textfiles there. Note that outside links (e.g. company sites, etc) are *not* permitted in the THS FAQs, partly to avoid advertising, and partly to avoid the looming specter of linkrot in countless "permanent" files (remember that unlike the main Forum threads, FAQ articles are here to stay!). I will also continue to monitor the "main" Forum threads, for possible interesting and helpful data, that can be immortalized in the FAQ. :) In short, if anyone wishes to contribute here, there's no need to email me - just post your thoughts in the main Forum, either in the FAQ thread or other threads, and I'll then compile and re-post them here. Thanks everyone!! --Tom. [added to Laundry FAQ: 21 May 2003]