Hi everybody, thanks again for all of the WOWS and other forms of apreciation. Very few people untill now have seen my ponds. I've been basicly the only one apreciating them for 8 years now so it's nice to be able to share the wealth with others who feel like I do about lilys and nice ponds. The lilys in the first pic on this thread are seedlings of mine being evaluated before being selected to be breeders or contenders or culls. Even the run of the mill plants are beautyfull with slight variations on the color theme and petal shape. I hate to have to kill any of them, except for a few. I'll post pics of some of my contenders and breeders and a few r.o.t.m. , run of the mill plants on another thread. My big pond is very low fertility and I have very few plants in pots. In the spring every thing is dark green and growing and blooming good but eventualy all of the spike rushes amd mints and water chestnuts, waterlilys etc. ect. use up any available nutrients from last year and start to get light green . At this point I take about 10 lbs. of three parts amonium nitrate and one part triple super phosphate which I brodcast UNDER the leaves. I say that about half gets disolved and half settles around the roots and penetrates the soil. This causes a slight greening of the water and all of the lilys green up even if I didnt spread any around them. After a week or 2 the water clears and all's well for the rest of the year. No surface water ,or any water flows into these ponds, only rain. O yea tinkster I'm between charlston and huntington wv near hamlin. Mike. O yea again, there are more of my pics on the "do snails harm baby waterlilies" thread in case you mised them. Mike again.