You don't say how you prepared your planting area. Did you just work the
potting soil in or are you working with containers. Depending on where you
are in San Antonio, you probably don't have very good soil to begin with
unless you are on the South side of town. Any other area will need a whole
lot more than a couple bags of potting soil. Again depending on your
particular area you may need to resort to raised beds to be successful.
Building a bed and then bringing in prepared soil from one of the commercial
companies like Gardenville or Fertile Gardens. If you don't want to do that
then you need to use a lot of compost in your planting area, work it in and
repeat every year for a couple of years. The more the better, you can't
have too much compost. I would also recommend the use of Medina's Soil
Activator, Texas green sand-it is an iron supplement, a good organic
fertilizer, Medina has one, Texas Tea, Greensense (if you shop the military
stores). Regular use of Hasta Grow. No Miracle grow. Lots of mulch and a
lot of water. Maybe you have not given your plants enough water. If you
dig down a bit you may find that the soil is powder dry, that's what I find
and I own about 90% of SAWS. We have only had 6" of rain in the last 6
months the sub soil is dry. I have some fire bush the have been in the
ground several years that in a "normal" year would get 6-7 feet tall are
only 3 feet tall this year because of the lack of water.

If you are interested in learning more about the local area and it's
gardening problems and solutions check out
http://www.gardeningvolunteers.org/ and give a listen to Bob Webster on AM
550 every Sat and Sun.

Good Luck

Cliff


"Linda" wrote in message
...
Planted several things in Miracle potting soil. My sunflowers got a
whopping 18". My indian corn got maybe 24". My squash got 10". My
Four O'Clocks are about 8 or 10". Bought a start of Sea Holly - it's
about 5". Most had a sickly pale green/yellowish color. What is going
on? In Oregon I just planted those things in the sandy soil, never
fertilized, just watered. The sunflowers were 6 or 7 feet tall, the
indian corn got about the same, my Four O'Clocks were about 3' and
bushy....well, you get the idea. Why is nothing growing well here? Is
there something I should have been doing? Oh, and the poor tomato
plant...too sad to tell! I thought the store-bought potting soil would
be the right thing to use. Advice?