Hi, gang. I guess I should make a couple of comments about what works for me... --First, background on my climate. I live at the southern end of San Francisco Bay, in a small canyon that faces away from the bay (to the south). As a result, we get warmer summers and colder winters than the folks right along the coast, but the nearness of the ocean still prevents the sort of extended heat waves you get in a really warm area like LA, or further inland in California. The humidity here is also a lot higher than in LA, where the Santa Ana winds dry everything to a crisp in the fall (not that we're humid compared to anyplace else on the planet, mind you). Typical daytime temperatures in mid-summer will usually be in the low 90s F (32C), only occasionally up to 100F (38C). Temperatures almost always drop substantially at night. In winter, night-time lows usually get down to about 20F (-6C), low enough to produce frost but not a really hard freeze. --My apologies to those who have heard this before, but my biggest discovery in the last couple of years had been that a lot of bulbs do extremely well in the ground in an area that gets some water during the summer (it's the base of a Japanese maple tree, and you know how they demand water). The bulbs are on top of very heavy and sticky clay soil, buried under several inches of redwood compost. They sit on top of the clay, rather than being buried in it. This arrangement works extremely well for a number of Medit-climate bulbs -- Moraea aristata (about 50 flowers in bloom at the moment), several types of winter-growing glads, various Narcissus, Lachenalias, and several types of Ixia. This year, I have also had great success with Spiloxene. Ironically, Lycoris radiata also seems very happy here (the first time I've gotten it happy anywhere.) What's not happy? Ferraria crispa. It's a snail magnet. --New information: This last year I also accidentally ran an experiment with water for potted bulbs. A leak in my watering system put a small amount of water every five days on about 50 pots of bulbs. These are in my south-facing back yard, in an area that gets a lot of sun and air circulation. The pots stayed damp (not wet) all summer, whereas my other pots went bone dry. You know what's coming, right? I'm getting very nice bloom from the summer-watered pots this winter -- at least twenty stems of flowers on one pot of Gladiolus tristis, plus a couple of different types of Watsonias, Babianas, Moraeas, and Calochortus tolmiei (usually died out for me in the past). And as other people have noted, a little summer water does a lot of good for amaryllids in pots. My Nerines did a lot better this year after I watered them 1-2 times a month during the summer. Am I saying we should all start watering our pots in summer? Absolutely not! I grow in a very lean mixture of sand and peat moss, so it's hard to make anything rot even with water. Also, because of all the air circulation around here, even a damp pot isn't all that wet. I do, though, think that in my particular climate, where I can't move the pots into shade and the pots can get very dry in summer for a very long time, some summer water seems to help at least some of the species retain vigor. The lesson to others could be that if you have some varieties that tend to dwindle away over the years (the way Moraeas tend to do for me), one thing to experiment with might be a little summer water. Hope this is useful. Mike