Shawnee, It may depend somewhat on what part of KS you are in. As you know KS has very diverse weather, some parts (east) getting abundant (even excessive) rain throughout the summer, and some parts (west) are the equivalent of a desert (tumbleweeds and all). It's the same way with soil. Although all the soils in the state are neutral to alkaline, the soil makeup can vary considerably. I'm near the Kansas City area. Our soil is very heavy here. As you move west or south the soil becomes lighter (with more sand). Some places have fairly sandy soil. This has a direct bearing on nematode pressure. Nematodes prefer lighter soils. Nematodes are not likely to be a problem in heavy KS clay soils, but if your soils are lighter that might be something to be concerned about. My guess is you'll be fine replanting apples. Peter's orchard (in Waverly MO) has planted the same ground to apples and peaches for about 80 years. I spoke with the owner once about it and (as I recall) he indicated he didn't have any replant issues with apples, but did have some with peaches. He said it didn't matter if he replanted the peaches in the same rows or planted new trees in the row middles, he still had replant issues, but I don't think they were huge. They are up near the MO river where the soil is sandier, so that probably hurts their replanting. One of the biggest problems with rejuvenating an existing orchard is the trees are the wrong varieties. A lot of the older apple orchards in KS were planted to Red and Golden Delicious. Today, these are low value apples. I noticed Pome on the Range orchard (near Wellsville) is selling Delicious apples for 50 cents/lb. (Upick). That's pretty cheap. Maybe you could replant slowly so you still have some (older) production while you wait for the new trees to kick in?

Hi Gene :My Opinion is that fig popularity was growing in the last five years because of the computer becoming afordable and popular all over the world. In this context i think Fig forum and Garden Web was the principal information source.Fig was all the time a special fruit but only for a few people that knew it.Internet made it known as it deserve to be. I for example had a fig tree from when i started knowing who i am(about six years old).I used to hide under the tree and eat all the ripe figs.The tree was not ours but my father's sister and it was white and very good flavor. The yards were adiacent so it was not a problem for me to get there.But i can't say anything wrong about that women because she never obiected to it. And this was in zone 6a,44 Degree northen latitude back in Europe.She use to cover it with corn stocks over the winter.Very few people had one but like i say we did. Back here in New Jersey i tried to duplicate my homeland backyard and grew peach,pears,plums,cherry,apricot,grapes,etc. I had so little success,and so many deaseses that by now i cut off most of them. By contrast except to be protected from cold and have cultivars resistant to rain FIG will grow best comparing with the other fruit trees. So it deserves to be planted more. GO FIG GO

Edzard, re: your comment... "Simultaneously the representations of cultivation often are used as design tools that reference scale and perspective (as BoTann mentions) for the incoming viewer and also providing comfort to a 'wild' garden, answering perhaps "where is Man??" in all of this. (noting the need for people to always 'know where they are', rather than being happily lost...)" I have a few random thoughts... This brings to mind a lot of material from my Ritual Studies days in college, particularly the things people did to designate a sacred space in order to say "this is special/apart from the world/different in some way. The normal rules don't apply here, the ritual rules do." The word used in anthropology is "liminal." All kinds of parallels to be drawn there, and probably a quagmire of controversy as I dance brazenly on the edge of the "religion in gardens" topic again. :) And slightly related: I'm dredging up faded memories on too little sleep, but I seem to recall that some see ancient Shinto shrines (on the lines of a rope around a rock) as the earliest Japanese gardens. That is a perfect case of bringing "cultivation" (the rope) to a "wild space" (a boulder in the woods). [Caveat: I haven't troubled to research this in my limited library or on the internet, so be gentle when you correct me.] :) As far as evidence of cultivation in gardens: even those that try to be as "natural" as possible usually have boundaries, be they walls or hedges or fences or whatever. Again, marking the boundary between "here" and "everywhere else." And I wonder if that is why humans need the answer to Edzard's question, "Where is man in all this?" In a garden that you know is a garden (based on clues either subtle or bold), you can "pretend" that you are in some kind of idealized natural setting, but not have to worry about any of the hazards, and can therefore surrender yourself to enjoyment of your surroundings. Ah, semantics. After typing all this, my brain woke up long enough to mention that perhaps we are talking about a certain meaning of "cultivation," e.g., agriculture. Yes? No? So many things to think about. Sorry about lurking for so long... Susan

James, The Pat Lanza lasagna gardening books are good. I have two of them right here on my bookshelf: the original one called simply "Lasagna Gardening" which was published in 1998 and then Pat Lanza's follow-up book "Lasagna Gardening for Small Spaces", which was published in 2002. I haven't read the third one, which is about "Lasagna Gardening with Herbs". One thing to remember when you read about the lovely layering method of building beds, which closely resembles sheet composting except you're layering purchased 'finished' ingredients instead of raw compost ingredients, is that you have to remove or otherwise deal with the bermuda grass first because you can't just build a bed on top of bermuda grass. So, even though the book is very good and quite inspriring, you have to know it doesn't work equally well in every geographic region of the country and building a lasagna bed in our part of the country requires you to remove drought-tolerant, aggressive grasses like bermuda which makes the method more difficult and more time-consuming than it sounds when you read the book. In the book, the author suggests you just lay several thicknesses of newspaper on top of the sod and build a lasagna bed right there on top of it, and you know that will never work with bermuda grass. Another thing to remember is that lasagna gardening is just a new name given to an old method. Ruth Stout was using a method that she called the no-work mulch gardening method decades before Pat Lanza wrote the lasagna gardening books, and I'm not saying that to dispect Pat Lanza, but merely to point out that there really isn't anything new under the sun. I consider lasagna gardening just a fancier, more modern form of no-till, mulch gardening and probably found Ruth Stout's book "The No-Work Garden Book" just as helpful in its own way as Pat Lanza's books. I think you'd enjoy Pay Lanza's "Lasagna Gardening" book as long as you remember that her easy method just isn't as easy for those of us with bermuda grass, but think you'd find Ruth Stout's book just as helpful. The best two gardening books of this century, in my opinion, are relatively new ones. "Edible Landscaping" by Rosalind Creasy, which was published in Nov. 2011, is simply amazing. I've read many of Ms. Creasy's other books, and have been waiting years for her to write this one. She covers everything you'd ever want to know about creating a landscape that blends edibles with ornamentals and she knows what she's talking about because she's been doing this kind of gardening for several decades. The book is big, full of photos and is very detailed. It also is very inspiring. The second book I'd recommend to anyone and everyone who wants edible gardening to be a part of their life was written by Barbara Pleasant and is, hands down, the best book on getting started in vegetable gardening I've ever seen, even if you've never gardened before. It is called "Starter Gardens: 24 No-Fail Plans for Small Organic Vegetable Gardens". It has specific plans and designs for specific gardens, and shows how garden designs progress from the first year to the second and so on. It is wonderful and is great not only for new gardeners but for experienced ones as well as the author provides so much info that is so helpful. An older book that is highly revered by many gardeners is Dick Raymond's "Joy of Gardening". Sometimes we get so wrapped up in the newer books that we forget the older ones. Another book that's been around a decade or so is Ed Smith's "The Vegetable Gardener's Bible". Although he is more of a traditional row gardener, the book is outstanding. If you want to grow as much of your own food as you possibly can on the amount of space you have available, I highly recommend John Jeavon's book "How To Grow More Vegetables: And Fruits, Nuts, Berries, Grains and Other Crops Than You Ever Thought Possible On Less Land Than You Can Imagine". This is a very complex book, full of charts with all kinds of data and statistics, but it does a great job of teaching people how to use biointensive techniques to grow huge yields. It is not, however, about no-till style gardening. It is sort of the opposite as one of its basic tenets is that you use double digging and adding lots of amendments to build each bed. I use his plant spacing techniques, but don't do the double digging, choosing instead to build raised beds above ground and leave the big task of double-digging to people who are younger and more ambitious than I. A more simplified form of biointensive gardening is Mel Bartholomew's "Square Foot Gardening". This book and technique have been around for a long time now....long enough that there has been a revised edition of the book published in the last few years. If you want to use a greenhouse, cold frame, high tunnel or low tunnel to raise cool-season crops in the winter, you can't go wrong with "Four Season Harvest" by Eliot Coleman or by his newer book, "Winter Harvest Handbook". Those are some of my ideas about books that you might find helpful. The style of gardening I engage in now is a blend of several different techniques and the books I listed above all contributed a lot to the way that I do things. As with all gardening techniques, you have to experiment to find what works best for you in your soil and your climate. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: Four Season Harvest