Pamela, There some great advantages to using regular beach vs. any specialized commercial products. Bleach is such a common household that it is easily obtainable for many people. If you need do do a quick sterilization, you can reach into the cupboard and pull out a bottle of bleach. The other thing is that it is very cheap and usually a dilution of 1:9 bleach:///water/ works very well. There are of course the few things that you mentioned like the noxious vapors and the limited half-life. Bleach is light sensitive so if you want to keep it from going bad, use a bucket that is not clear and keep it from direct sunlight (preferably in the dark). I find that this way, things will continue to be bleached clean even after a week. As to your question about not reusing clay pots only applies when you try to bleach them. The fact that it is porous is the issue. The porosity allows the bleach to enter the clay and unless you have lots of time to soak and resoak your pots for over a week, the bleach remains and any plants you pot into that clay pot will suffer from the bleach that slowly leaches out. As afar as I know, aphids only serve as mechanical vectors. The virus does not go systemic in the virus so offsprings should be clean, but as soon as the offsprings feed on an infected plant, they too have become vectors. Perhaps Janos can comment more on this. Nhu On Fri, Aug 12, 2011 at 8:24 AM, Pamela Harlow <pamela@polson.com> wrote: > Thanks for the new photos; this is a good service. > > Further, the advice to discard clay (and, presumably, concrete) pots > doesn't > make sense to me. Is this supported by research? Clay is very porous to > fluids. > > Finally, I've often wondered if infected aphids transmit viruses to their > clonal offspring. Does anyone know? >