I used them a couple of years ago but didn't find that they helped much. They seemed to work their way to the top of the container and i was left with a globby gel on the soil! Yuck!

I buy the cat litter gel crystals in the cat litter section of the grocery store. I mix a handful or two into the soil...no particular amount. I mix it right into all the soil...not just into the middle section of the pot. I did not find that mine made their way to the top at all.

Wonder why Marcia's did. hmmm...

Brenda

I recently learned something interesting about these crystals...I was at the Washington potato conference with many exhibitors of fertilizers, etc...and one of the exhibitors told me they are a petroleum by-product. There is a new crystal on the market made from corn and is granular. Not sure of the mfg. but should be easy to find on google...
N.

I find mulching the soil in pots with spagnum moss cuts down on watering because the water doesn't evaporate. I can usually get 2 years out of it it makes the pot look good and it's readily available because it's sold for those wire hanging baskets

Speaking of mulching the pots...I tuck flax shives around the plants in my pots also and it works just like the spagnum moss does for 'oilpainter'.

It makes a big difference in how much I also have to water the pots each summer. Then when I want to remove it, it just peels back easily off the soil.

Brenda

Oh Brenda I even found your post on the subject of crystals in the Far North Gardening Forum
of 2006 in the thread-"Need some help planning containers"

More exploration brought me to a thread called

"Diaper Experiment" in the 2003 Gardening Experiment Forum

"What's your water retention trick" thread in 2002 Drought Forum

"Polymer water retention crystals" thread in 2003 South Western Gardening Forum

"Watering Crystals" thread in 2008 Oklahoma Gardening Forum

"Anyone use the gel watering Crystals in the soil this year " thread in the Gardening in Candada Forum.

Talk about creative, inventive knowledgeable people we gardeners are, especially the diapers in the bottoms of containers. I really want to try this polymer stuff, but I am afraid to take the leap. I need my green thumb pals for support. Rita

I got these crystals and had the same experience as marciaz3. It could have been the rainy weather though. Maybe they'd work in a drought, but I don't want to contaminate too many planters as I like to compost my soil and don't want petroleum byproducts in my veggie dirt.

The exhibitor's comment about the crystals being a petroleum by-product....I found it interesting so, this morning when I went googling ... petroleum by-product....

If you go to the Household Products Database at...

http://hpd.nlm.nih.gov/cgi-bin/household/list?tbl=TblChemicals&alpha=P

and scroll down to petroleum and click on any of the different kinds of petroleum you will find all kinds of products that you never imagined that would contain petroleum.

Petrolatum is a petroleum based grease that is used industrially as a grease component.

Try Petrolatum in the list and you will be amazed at how many of the products we use in our makeup is based with petrolatum. Baby products like diaper rash ointment, Oil of Olay, Cover Girl lipsticks, Revlon, Noxzema, Ponds, Vaseline and Avon products to name a few. And, we use them without thinking of the products in them.

Silica gel is not thought to biodegrade in either water or soil and is not a by-product of petroleum. Rather, it is made synthetically from sodium silicate which is used in petroleum refining and lots of other uses such as egg preserving and cardboard manufacturing. Very interesting info when you start to search in google.

Silica gel is in different forms and in all kinds of toothpaste (Colgate, Aquafresh, Crest) as well as paint and Monsanto herbicides. As granuals it is the cat litter crystals.

Here is an interesting thread I found...

http://www2b.abc.net.au/tmb/Client/Message.aspx?b=29&m=2323&ps=20&dm=2

Brenda