Thank you!!!

Be careful with alum sulfate! I learned a hard lesson this year. I have always used it for my established, mature plants in the ground. No adverse effects. However this year I finally was able to replace several rare or harder to find varieties in my area and put alum sulfate around them per package instructions. I have lost one altogether. Loaded with blooms, it's now fried crispy brown, top to bottom. By all appearances it looked sun scorched and parched. But I knew lack of water was not the case, we've had excessive rains. And not excessive sun as I planted it in nearly all day dappled shade. Then one of the blooms had some petals show color that was the funkiest shade of aqua I've ever seen. That's when I knew the alum sulfate was the culprit (and it only took a little over a week to produce that funky color and burn, when usually it takes several months for soil to be fully amended). The others I flushed well with water, dug up and repotted/replanted with all new fresh soil and flushed again. Looks like they'll be OK, thank goodness! So I learned (and since have read) that young plant roots do have the potential to succumb to burn.