Hello littleminnie, Im intersted in trading Anchusa Dropmore some me 2011 baptisia australis some me 2011 Chinese Wisteria 50 local 2012 Only need a handfull of wisteria and baptisia. Let me know if i have anything you need. Thanks, Billy http://members.gardenweb.com/members/exch/youngent

Bump. I still have not been able to locate sweet meat squash or hybrid brussel sprouts in trade. I don't want to have to place another seed order.

The neighbor ... told me that the previous homeowner never watered the grass. Never. 5 years. This is important information (you were holding out on us ;-). This hints strongly that he let nature takeover in the back, too. The gray grass in the front is dead. That's what dead grass looks like. You don't need to remove it. If you can find a garden center with some Floratam St Augustine, you could put a couple pieces of that in come spring time (Lou can you post a picture or two showing the Floratam coloration so he/we can recognize it when we see it?). You could remove the grass where you place the flats only if you aren't going to completely cover the area. If you 'checkerboard' the grass in, you'll have high and low spots which make mowing a spectator sport. If you only put in a few flats, then hoe out the areas where the new grass goes to lower it about 3/4 inch to the depth of the soil that comes with the new grass. When I said St Aug would spread 10 feet in all directions, I'm talking about runners, not thick, dense turf. But in 2 years you should have pretty nice turf. I easily get 10 feet of runners into my wife's flower beds every year (snicker). Water is the important thing to us. Rain is 10x better for our grass than tap water. Of course mine gets fertilizer on the national holidays. Liquid molasses is much cheaper by any measure. To make 50 pounds of dry molasses they spray 5 pounds of molasses over 45 pounds of fluff. Five pounds of molasses costs them about $0.50 and the fluff costs nothing. The application rate for liquid is 3 ounces per 1,000 square feet. At the garden centers it's about $15 per gallon. At a farm co-op it could be as little as $1.00 per gallon if you bring your own bottle (I use a laundry soap bottle). Yes fireants do not like sugar so spraying sugar over the entire lawn will keep them away. If you are going for the neighborhood gold you can easily do that with an organic plan. Your neighbor may not believe that, but I've seen it done and you will have spent only a fraction of what he spends to make his look that good. Water deeply and infrequently to keep weeds away and develop a deep root system; mulch mow at the mower's highest setting to keep weeds away and to develop a very deep root system; (am I sounding redundant?); and fertilize on the national holidays.

I'm going to assume rutgers is happy with the initial replies on this and forget about the question. In other words, I consider this thread to be officially hijacked. If I am incorrect, please, rutgers, reply now or forever hold your peace. If you look around the Internet at other gardening forums, too many refuse to acknowledge organic gardening as a program that can work. Of those few that do acknowledge it, those associated with Rodale are pretty much stuck on compost being the only "approved" (by Rodale) material to use; and tilling being the best preparation for the soil. Some other forums are beyond any hope of science providing answers. They want to contradict anything scientific unless it specifically agrees with they they have been saying. I have played in both those arenas. Too often there are dips into pure fiction and just plain hope. I'm going to ignore the followers of Jerry Baker because they are usually not hurting anyone with their approach. In my previous message I was just comparing the GardenWeb forums with the other organic forums I have seen. I was not comparing with an ideal perfect universe. In my perfect universe, the universities would have equal amounts of organic certified soil and un-certifiable soil (never any DDT for example) for research. There would also be equal amounts of funding and knowledgeable researchers ready, willing, and able to get going. And there would at least be someone in academia listening to the masses to see what they have tried and are claiming to be working. The research on corn meal against crop (and lawn) fungal disease ceased when the lead guy died in the 90s. I'd like to know why greensand greens up St Aug turf on alkaline soil after a rainstorm and nothing else works. I'd like to know more about why a surface dusting of baking soda seems to kill crabgrass in 4 days (in southern lawns). I'd like to know more about why vinegar sprays kill plants but a soil drench seems to feed them. I'd like to know if/how plants can control and change the sugar chemistry they send to the soil in response to environmental stresses they receive. I'd like to know more about foliar feeding of proteins on plants and the plants' response to that. I'd like to see someone take a nutrition approach to soil microbes and the food they eat (deerslayer probably saw that one coming and is groaning right now). Another thing I've seen is unhealthy competition among organic academes. "My organic is better than your organic." We've had people here who play that game and we have all lost as the GardenWeb masters kicked them off the forums. I'm not just talking about one person, either. Some of us are too easily offended by different approaches. Deerslayer, I'm not taking your organic approach to task. I'm just trying to keep you honest. I apologize for the language I used where you thought I was denigrating your message. I can see that, but it wasn't meant that way. I'm a work in progress in many ways. Regarding hit-and-run posters: I've been accused of that, too. Sometimes our time budgets allow frequent visits here and suddenly we can be called away in the middle of one or more threads. That's just the way it is. I wish they had a way for us to subscribe to threads so we could see what's happening.