How to apply, combine, and balance the principles can be the subject of lifelong study (or, in my case, constant trial and error!), but what the principles are can be fairly easily be divined. I've posted the link below a few times as it is succinct and fairly clear. One book I enjoyed was by Joe Eck, where he makes it clear - if you can get through the fawning introduction written by his partner - that the first thing to do is establish an objective. "What are you trying to accomplish?" I think is his question. It is quite legitimate to have an objective like "create a place to grow lots of plants" or "house my fuschia collection" but it helps to name it. The most important thing for making the change in style you are trying to make is that landscape design is not all about the plants. What plant combinations to use is the last question, after you have laid out paths and sight lines and beds. And you design with plant shapes, not plant names, when you do get to that point. Remember it is LANDscaping, where what you are doing now (and I've been there, done that) is mostly PLANTscaping. Read a bit of Melle Sacto's recent threads (the cottage garden one) to get a flavour of someone else's journey in the same direction. Karin L Here is a link that might be useful: principles

Ok, again, you've said the literature should reflect what 'certified organic gardening' really is. 'certified organic gardening' DOES NOT EXIST. No such thing. Organic certification is a standardization of many organic farming concepts (that were around long before certification) towards a goal of consumer protection - truth in labeling. This is only relevant to companies producing products for sale to consumers. This does not apply to me as an organic gardener, nor to all those poor authors you feel are being hypocritical at you by writing books for organic gardeners. Even so, I do not believe organic certification requires using organic stuff to make organic compost - correct me if I'm wrong. If you'd like to write your congressman and ask his permission to use conventional feedstocks in your compost, go ahead.

Hats off to you, Ladybarber! I'll just confirm the previous posts: START SMALL. Our school developed an extremely large habitat for wildlife, complete with native plants for butterflies and birds. While it's worth every smile on a child's face, it's a huge time commitment to keep more aggressive plants from running amok, weeding, watering, etc. I will second that you'll be surprised at the grants and donations that are available. I donated several native plants from my garden, including all the milkweed, so you may want to tap into the parents. You may also want to see if any scout troops are willing to take on the garden for a service project. Our school even ventured into seed starting. I still help with our habitat, even though my kids are now in highschool. One teacher takes the kids into the garden to help. Wow! That's a lot of energy. While some plants may get smashed or mistakenly pulled to see their excitement and interest is well worth the effort. Three last things. 1. Our teacher created an observation book so that visitors or children can write about their visit and what they saw. There are some priceless notes about worms. 2. We sold stone paver kits to raise money. The kids/family could then make the stone with their own decorations to be used for a memory path in the school garden. 3. Our school also built a shed to house all of the tools, etc. with a combination lock. Good luck! Cathy in SWPA

I thought my place was small - we have total land area of 285 square metres - that includes our little 2 bed home - - here's a list of what I've got in that bit of dirt: She Who Must Be Obeyed and I are happy to try and grow anything we can get our hands on, though she is starting to wane in her enthusiasm: silly girl thinks we have too much planted already...LOL cyprus pines - x 2 - they provide privacy from two neighbours and have a love seat and fish pond underneath them. There's a black elephants ear in the fishpond along with some twisted bamboo and a couple of other plant gifts that I can't name. The pines have two baby stag horns, mini split leaf philodendron, a lime leaf philodendron and some old mans whiskers growing on them Boston ferns, king ferns, a couple of different coloured periwinkles, vietnamese mint, taro, cardamom, five spice plant, coleus, ivy, argaves, hoya, more black elephants ear, cycad and some mosquito breeders (bromeliads). There are a couple of "invaders" - again unknown - that provide some blue and purple flowers during the summer. They seem to like it there, so they stay. This is the boggiest part of the garden - we get a lot of run off from the neighbours and the upper part of the hill our street is on. Next to the bog we have a gardenia, snow bush, lemon grass, yesterday today and tomorrow and a little buddha garden - - A ceramic smiling buddah, some gypsophila, pansies, petunias, gailardia, a camelia behind and some wormwood. We have a little concrete patio with a pergola over the top - about 5mX2m - strawberries planted outside and nasturtiums, lemonbalm and apple mint growing where it can. There's a jasmine growing up some of the trellis. Inside the pergola we have three bird cages - - a pair of green peach faces without the peach colour, their mum and a new chick (dad was escaped by a cat) and a pair of bengal finches. Half a dozen hanging baskets with a mixture of ferns, tahitian bridal veil, a New Guinea flat tassel fern, zygocactus and variegated philidendron/spear leaf thingy; pots and pots of lilipili, cane palms, scarlet croton, cardboard cycad, small tree ferns, pony tail palm, birdsnest fern, calla lillies, cordyline, diffenbachia, an orchid and half a dozen others that were given by friends - they look good but I don't know what they are. At one end of the pergola is an eight month old clumping palm and at the other a 4 metre tall tree fern - probably cunninghamii - it has three or four orchids growing on the trunk and day lillies, asiatic lillies and a pink and white leafed thingy that pops up every year. The next structure is the grave - it was a large pile of compost that is now planted with rosemary, beans, silverbeet, soursop, gerberas, sweetsop, surinam cherry, petunias, african daisies, gotu kola and a beatiful little red climbing rose grows along the fence. Then comes the guinea pig hutch - it follows the side fence for about four metres and has beans growing along the outside - bit of tucker for the animals and strawberries surrounding the first of the lady finger bananas. There's five bananas in total, four of them flowering/fruiting, the first hand is ripe now. In and around the bananas are strawberries a small purpley/red coloured bush that was an indoor plant but which thrives since it was taken out of the pot and given the option to live or die. There's a couple of sorghum plants growing to give the birds a bit of variety. Between the grave/bananas and pergola is a small bit of earth with these growing: In pots - bok choi, choy sum, pak choy, silverbeet, english spinach and anenomes. and hollyhock seedlings. In the ground - a mock orange, midyim berry, jabacotiba, silver beet, california asters, nicotinia, day lillies, chocolate pudding fruit, pansies, some flower seedlings that I forgot to learn the name of, horseradish and a calemondin (star fruit) . Behind the calemondin are some more gerberas, licorice basil and oregano. In behind the bananas - between them and the guineapig hutch is another bad piece of soil - sand on top of clay - that's where the cane toad trap is and where the cat trap will go. Theres also my experiment with theobroma cacao - the plant used to make chocolate. There's more silver beet, some sweet potato, some scotch bonnet chilli, a small native daisy - that has yellow or red or white flowers and is starting to sprad like a ground cover, a lychee, a dizzygothica that was also given the option of grow or die after surviving my pathetic attempts at keeping plants indoors, a candy striped hippeastrum, a custard apple (methinks) that grew from a seedling, another red climbing rose, a cutting of a plant that She Who Must Be Obeyed found on a walk and which is now growing quite well in the back corner, more sweet potato and pumpkin, the worm farm and the compost heap. This brings us to the other plant that was there before we started planting - the 10 metre tall fish tail palm. About half a dozen canes a foot across play host to a very large stag horn, a couple of philidendrons and a couple of monsterias, a dozen or so bromeliads, more old mas whiskers and something that SWMBO insists is a native orchid - about half a dozen different colours and they are thriving there - so who am I to argue. Another unnamed varigated little shrub with pretty white flowers and more strawberries. In front of the palm is a mulberry seedling - it was sprouted in March or April 2004 and is now 5-6 metres tall. Then come two roses - Angel Face (named after She Who Must Be Obeyed) and our prized Blue Moon. Some more california asters, strawberries, day lillies, crinum, hippeastrum, tansy, blue boy, a wisteria which I have the job of trying to make into a standard, goji berry, a rather permanent capsicum - it fruits so it stays, a camelai - again no name, some gerberas in pots, a cumquat seedling, a mangosteen seedling,beans, jap pumpkin, a potted philidendron - large palmate leaves, nother gift - blue and white flowers with a miniature orange fruit, more hippies a naked lady, mondo grass, as a bit of a border, some basil, marguerite daisies, some green and white thingies that I forgot to keep the name tag from, a little purple puffball of a flower - again the name escapes me, a sub-tropical nectarine and some snowdrops coming up - they've apparently naturalised to this sub-tropical environment. In amongst all of that are strawberries (did I mention them before??), some more periwikles - escaped seeds - dozens of orange and yellow cosmos (whichthe pale faced rosellas love) an orange -washington navel I think, a seedling each of sweet and soursop, moon flowers where-ever they can find something to grow up, more agaves, strawberries, lemon eureka??, another type of custard apple seedling or a longan - I must remember to use and keep name tags. A globe grape seedling growing up one of the stumps from some more cyprus pines that we got rid of. A red grapefruit - again a seedling, an ice cream bean tree, some walking lillies, surinam cherries, mango- another seedling, and in the far back corner - a Norfolk Pine - we got a pot with three of them in it a couple of years back, two were given away and SWMBO couldn't bear jsut dumping number three - so she was planted in the back corner and given the opportunity to live or die - it was nearly two metres tall and had less than two litres of root ball when the other two were cut out of the pot. There.s a lot of baby red egg plant, chives, parsley, another crinum, a kaffir lime, a cassabanana, a pineaple - which the guineapigs discovered when they escaped and is now struggling to get any growth on it at all, some yarrow, tansy and wormwood, mint - half a dozen varieties surviving, a feijoa, tomatoes,ceylon spinach, paw paw,fennel, basil, kangaroo paw,pansies, dill, curry plant, frangipani, lemon myrtle,day lillies, more chillis, more strawberries, more mondo grass, nasturtiums, coriline australia, basil, another grape - pinot moir, naturalised fressias, 2 X prince of orange,passionfruit,. Along the southside of the house - with no sun - grows a camelia, gardenia, coleus, croton, golden cane palm, ponytail palm, blueboy, nodding violets, jade plant. Out the front is an olive, more ceylon spinach, nasturtiums, hippie seedlings, loquat. longan, frangipani, bush lemon, passionfruit, cosmos, a couple of types of self seeded marigolds, spinach and I think that's about it. Frightening isn't it. The whole block - including our little home is about 285 square metres. Maybe I should go and see a doctor??