Friday night I ordered ladybugs from growquest.com. They advertise a good price. However, on Sat, I get an email saying the guy can't ship the order. He said it's hot there and he's taking a break from small orders. (What, so he can fill large orders?) I wrote back to ask what size order he can fill and got no reply to that question. I also suggested he change the website to reflect current ordering status. He replied and said he didn't need to change anything, though he won't be shipping any small orders until September.

In short, if ordering from growquest.com, be sure to email first and ask if they are actually shipping the size of your order and when.

Any way, I went ahead aand checked on Amazon for live ladybugs. Wound up finding a better deal. With free shipping, I'm getting 9000 ladybugs for about the same price as I was going to get 4500. So it all worked out for the best. And with local prices, to get that many ladybugs, it would cost nearly $100.

Still having problems with too much sodium in the soil. Tonight, I dissolved some calcium tablets in water and bought some more Epsom salt (magnesium sulfate). Put those and some ammonia in the garden sprayer and treated heavily. Treated more heavily with ammonia for the pumpkin and corn plants than the tomatoes.

The PVC wasn't working very well, so I got a bunch of tomato cages today.

A lot of corn has died off. Decided to try a short, cold tolerant variety, since weather should be cooling down by the time it would be harvested. It's supposed to be an early variety which died off earlier this year because of heat. Figured it's worth a try. Not enough time for a longer cycle variety.

Most of the sunflowers are dying off now. Cutting the flowers off and letting them dry to save seeds for next year. If nothing else, should have loads of huge sunflowers next year!

I'm suspecting the sodium problem may be why most of the other flowers haven't grown. Sunflowers have a really high sodium tolerance. Can't see any other reason they shouldn't have grown. Since I've heard various forms of livestock and poultry were raised here, it may take so much calcium and magnesium that it would be considered toxic under other conditions. Animal feed frequently has high levels of sodium, while pigs and chickens are fed kitchen scraps with salt in it. That just gets passed along in the manure into the soil. Not going to apply it all at once but keep applying occasionally until I get the desired result.

Ordered some Phos for the soil to push the Amazon order over the limit for free shipping. Soil is lacking Phos. So I should be getting several shipments this week. All needed items which I'm happy to be able to afford.

Getting to bed.