Hey Dob- Great post! Just wanted to express my support for you as we are obviously in very similar places!! Best of luck!

I'm new to this too. I tried a few different recipes, colours and molds before making a large trough. The large one is till curing, but here are the others I made. All this plus a trough twice the size of these from one bag of cement. The two bigger ones in the picture were made outside a cardboard box covered in plastic. That worked well, but might have worked better if I'd filled the box with sand since the sides tended to push in. The other three were built outside bricks coated in plastic. They proved very difficult to release and one of them cracked in half (the one at the front, mortared back together). The bricks have no give and so any slight irregularity binds tight. I made the large trough inside a wooden former, again coated in plastic. Forming inside gives a slightly different look to forming outside and you might want to roughen the exterior after you release. I have tried these recipes: Cement:Peat:Sand:Vermiculite 1:1:1:1 This is my favourite recipe. It is strong, light enough for my needs, and I like the appearance. The trough on the right. Cement:Peat:Sand:Perlite 1:1:1:1 Not so good. A little lighter but probably not as strong. The appearance is too smooth for my taste. The trough on the left, stained. Cement:Sand:Vermiculite 1:2:3 This really is a lightweight concrete, not hypertufa. The proportions should be OK, but it is either curing very slowly or is very weak. Very pale colour, like regular concrete, might be good with a stain or dye. The small trough at the back with a little ferrous sulphate in the mix to give a slight pink blush. All these recipes include sand because I want enough strength to survive the wet and freeze/thaw conditions here. The sand adds quite a bit to weight. You might choose to use a mesh inserr of glass fibres instead to get flex strength and resistance to cracking with less weight.

I'm a newbie too T-bird, and I know how you feel. It seems all a bit odd. There's so much time to wait from now until germ time. But from others here, they say its a success, and what a space saver, and I can earn a buck while I'm at it, so I'm in. I've really run out of garden space, since i only rent, but what I do is dig up something I've had for awhile and give it away or well it. I am trying to start a little business but for the most part I just give it away, especially to a certain fellow who donates it to his church. Just have faith T-bird and bank on the experience of these knowledgable gardeners. Find someone who will adopt you, then you'll be off and running. I believe there is a site for getting adopted. Can someone help me out here? I'll see if I can find a link. Are you interested in sowing other seeds? If you ask people will send you seeds, they love to help out us newbies. Trudi also gives out free seeds at Wintersown.org. If you go there you take a little fun quiz and at the end of it you get a paper verifying you went through the process, and in so doing you learn about WSing. Trudi is our greatest help, I guess she got this all started. her site is amazing, Check it out. Micki

I live in the same zone, more or less, as you. Late blooming sasanquas will bloom during warm spells through December here. If it begins dropping well below freezing every night (Jan. & Feb.) there usually isn't enough warmth during the day to get the buds to open and they will eventually drop off. The shrub itself will live down to -10 but not the blooms. It would be very unusual for there to be three separate plants in a three gallon container. Are you sure it's not multiple stems from one plant (which would also be unusual)? If it truly is three separate plants I would divide them now and plant them but you're going to have to wait years and I'm talking at least 10-15 years for the plants to get anywhere near the sizes they describe. Our climatic zone just doesn't have a long enough growing season for camellias to put on a lot of growth per year. In the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, etc. they grow much faster and larger. Good luck, I have about 10 camellias in my garden and I love them all.