Fruitnut: I applaud your efforts, at worst you may be eccentric, who cares, at best, ahead of the curve. All of us should be aiming for what works best in our area as you well know. Speaking from experience, greenhouse and high tunnel culture are worlds vastly apart from outdoor culture, each have their own set of challenges and benefits. Probably the biggest set of challenges, depending on the regional climate, for the beginner is the relative lack of information on growing under cover when it comes to fruits. Being an atypical beginner to outdoor fruit culture, it is wonderful to have access to so much information ranging from published refereed journal research to gardening magazine articles. Though the learning curve is steep, at least there are many good footholds to use to climb the hill and many hands held out to help. I suspect trying to find labeled pesticides for fruit crops under plastic is pretty challenging also. Just curious what your water quality is like and soils as the 2 can lead to problems with salt accumulations over time depending on the water quality, soil type and irrigation practices. Like many, our little postage stamp sized horticultural enterprise could definitely use more land, there is none available. Both my wife and I would love to put up a high tunnel for extended vegetable production but we lack the means. It is quite unfortunate as I easily have the expertise to erect and maintain a high tunnel and farm under plastic. I just remembered a benefit you may not have ever mentioned to growing under plastic, you don't have to wear sunscreen to avoid sunburn! Darned it, now I really wish I had a high tunnel!

I would be inclined to use it; especially if you need compost in bulk and in a hurry. However, there is some element of risk since even your county does not know exactly what is in their compost. Your biggest risk with yard waste compost is residual herbicides and persistent weeds. The bits of plastic, etc. are annoying but are the "price" of free compost. It would be nice to know if your county hot composts, cold composts or if their stuff is more akin to leaf mold (which is also good stuff). If you are worried enough you can skip it or you can go look at it and also test it out on a small plot. The ultimate safetfy precaution is to have it tested by a lab but if you are worried enough to have it tested by a lab it probably does not make sense to bother with the stuff in the first place. You can also let the compost cure for a long time before using it for your garden if you have a place to store it. That would mitigate some of the potential problems. Sludge compost is more complicated and I know even less about that. Some people worry about heavy metals and other undesirable things in compost made from sludge. If the sludge is treated correctly there should be very little risk of disease pathogens but removal of heavy metals is more difficult. I am attaching a link for a magazine whose archives you can search for free for more info on various waste management issues. Here is a link that might be useful: Municipal Solid Waste magazine

PUDDING CUPS: I buy these from time to time for my kids, and the plastic is recycleable in my area, but before I toss in the bin I use them several times each in the summer to make bigger ice cubes for packing coolers or filling the big water jug on outings (or cooling the water for when I am freezing beans/corn), or cut holes in the bottoms and use as little planting pots for some of the seeds I start for my garden. Since they are clear I can tell when cuttings have rooted well. Thanks for coming forward, all of you, and pointing out that although many are striving to be energy wise and cutting back on waste, it is difficult to do it all and still live our lifestyle the way we've been used to. Just today dh took kids into the bigger city close by to buy them shoes, and I asked him to pick up milk on the way home. Pick up milk he did, and he let the clerk bag both jugs! I will speak to him later on this, I don't think he is aware he can ask for his items to NOT be bagged (I do 99% of the shopping in this household, and just assumed he knew how I felt about those plastic bags). Or that anything that size WITH a handle needs no bag! Oh well. I'm still trying to influence change within my own little world (family). kioni

Chicken moats are real and legitimate and people who use them swear by them. : ) I even saw a photo once where someone put a tunnel underneath their driveway as part of their chicken moat so the chickens could travel safely beneath the driveway to reach the part of the garden on the other side of the driveway. Now I'll have to find and link an example of a chicken moat. I'd like to put a chicken moat around my garden, but our old, spoiled rotten chickens are used to free-ranging and wouldn't take kindly to being confined within a moat. If I ever do it, I'll have to use a new flock of young chickens who've never known the joy of free-ranging. Charles, Are you rural? You need guineas. I had them for a long time (more about them in the grasshopper thread) but after the year in which I had two cougar encounters on our property and we, and everyone in our very rural neighborhood lost all our poultry (and many lost cats and dogs)...and I'm talking in excess of 120 birds....I've never bought another flock of guineas. I was really attached to them and losing them one by one over the course of the summer was really painful. I haven't found any kind of shrub that grasshoppers won't eat. In our worst year here, they ate the young fruit trees, including the bark, the leaves, and the fruit (but left the pits hanging from the stems), and they even ate holes in our fiberglass window screens, the cotton rag rugs on the wraparound porch, etc. When they are hungry, grasshoppers will eat anything and everything. The dog we had when we first moved here would eat a grasshopper now and then, but none of our current dogs do....and he didn't eat enough to make a dent in their population either. Our chickens control them well outside the garden, but I don't like to let the chickens free range in the garden in spring through fall because they'll peck at fruit like tomatoes, which doesn't make me very happy. I will turn them loose in the garden in the fall after the garden is pretty much frozen and dead so they can dig and scratch and eat insects to their heart's content. When I have winter crops, they don't bother them much once they are no longer tiny new plants. Any task on our property that involves sticking an arm, hand or foot into a place where a snake might be lurking just doesn't get done at this time of the year. I do those tasks in winter. If I have to lift something, like a board or piece of sheet metal on the ground, I lift it with a stick because it is just about guaranteed a snake will be underneath it in the summer months. When you live around lots of venomous snakes, you learn to be careful. The closest I have had a venomous snake would be about 3" from my hand. It was in early March about a decade ago and it scared the fool out of me. If you don't start out being careful enough, you quickly learn to be more careful around places where snakes live. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: Chicken Moats