Here are my thoughts on planning: while I agree that planning is important, I feel none of what I'm doing right now precludes any plants unless they are extremely acid-loving. My pH is 4.8 and the recommended ph ranges from 5.5 for acid loving to 6.5 for flowers. Changing the ph takes a long time and so far I've added 40lbs of limestone when I need 225 - 400 lbs! I also agree that using native plants is preferable, but that is limited by availability and cost. It's going to be hard to justify buying native if he cost difference is substantial. I have bought a few so far, listed below, from big box stores New plants: Gaura lindheimeri Salvia nemorosa Boneset chocolate eupatorium rugosum Salix integra brocade willow Pieris japonica If anyone has recommendations or websites to learn about native plants, please share. I feel like the far bigger limiting factor is the relatively small amount of sun I get, not my soil. Also, for any new subject, by definition my tastes are going to evolve, so I don't see much value in creating a plan upfront, when it's almost guaranteed that my tastes will change as I learn more about gardening. One example: I just learned about Swales and berms - something I'd never remotely heard of before. Now I want to learn how I can incorporate that in my garden!

"(driving sedately, getting passed on both sides by locals...)" Yeah it would be interesting to do some kind of scientific survey/testing of this, but the windy mountain roads of northern California must be some of the fastest and presumably most dangerous such roads in the country. In 2016, coming back from Mendocino to the Bay Area, I was going at a good clip on a curvy road...definitely at the speed limit or slightly above...and a DELIVERY VAN was still trying to pass me ON A DOUBLE LINE! Insane! Of course, I pulled over for him as soon as it was possible. It's actually interesting to compare how various parts of the country drive...I noticed this on my trip across the country in 2011. They are slow and sedate in the PNW. There was a lot of traffic in the Bay Area, so it's hard to make a conclusive statement...but they are certainly faster than the PNW. Faster the further away from the central urban areas. Same with SoCal...if there's an opening in the traffic, they move along. The road from LA to Vegas is going pretty fast. The SW has some high speed limits, which is good because there's a lot of ground to cover. I think I-10 in Texas had the highest speed limits on my trip. The southeast is, like the PNW, slow. Remarkably, the great state of Virginia had more speed traps than the ENTIRE rest of the drive from Seattle, combined! Gotta catch them yankees headed north while you can LOL. The NYC metro, NJ & Philly, and coastal New England are fast and aggressive of course. The typical Portland driver must have a nervous breakdown the first time they take the New Jersey turnpike. (a Portandia episode that never was) Interior New England is slower and more laid back. Aussie drivers are generally laid back - how could they be anything else, really - and only go a little over the speed limit. NSW has a reputation for more speed enforcement and I only saw obvious speed traps there. (maybe the ones in Victoria are less obvious) At this point, another divarication on this thread can't matter, right?

Update: June 17th, woke up to heavy, pouring rain in the night, wouldn't have been so bad if it hadn't came down at a 45d angle perfectly from the NE. Found the covering on my totes compromised. They were in a corner, up against the north side of the house and east side of cement front steps with a 2 foot overhang on the single story roof and a 6 ft. tall, fully branched/leafed sand cherry shrub protecting them on the North side. Nice bright area with a little evening sunset hitting the north wall of the house just above the totes. So there I was at @ 2:00 in the morning putting things back to normal. The pail with the Thuja was half full of water. Brought things into the garage. The cups were floating around at different angles with media mostly outside the cups. Checked for roots and found no sign of anything happening there so decided to discard the Thuja so that is finished. Tsuga wasn't hit as hard, water was plenty high and a few of the cups partially tipped. They were tighter grouped and only one or two had the media partially disturbed. All of them were thoroughly soaked from the rain. The Tsuga looked reasonably good, some have a few dead needles but there are a few, if not several, that are entirely green and some of them show what appears to be a small amount of new growth along the stem and branch tips. I can see no signs of mold or fungus. There is some algae evident but I assume this is because of the small amount of diffused sunlight the tote receives now that it is outside? We'll know more in another month or so. I don't plan to do anything with them until at least the first week in August. Picture of what things looked like before the storm: We (almost) never get rain at that angle. I had rubber binders around the top, holding the plastic on but the rain came so hard and fast that it stretched the plastic downward and filled up the sag in the plastic until it was so heavy that it pulled the plastic out from the binders allowing the water to pour in. Murphy's law?

Typical for hemlocks and other conifers as fall approaches, the trees are dropping old branchlets and foliage that's no longer needed. Some years are more noticeable than others, stress can exacerbate the phenomenon.