I have not heard that rule of thumb about 25+ year old trees. Here is a quote from an elm researcher: ============================= ""We would get numerous cuttings from people who believed they had an ancient survivor growing in their yard," says Schreiber. "But we soon discovered that most of those trees were just lucky. They had simply not been attacked by the elm bark beetle that spreads the disease." Adds Townsend, "It is not uncommon to find a single elm surviving by chance where others have died." He estimates that only 1 in 100,000 American elm trees is DED-tolerant. "Most of the thousands we tested turned out simply to have escaped exposure." ============================ I would guess that your elms have simply not been exposed. If there was really some resistance genetics there, I would expect some trees that are much larger than the one in the picture. The beetles probably have a hard time finding a few scattered middle aged elms in a mixed species forest. Also, since the beetles don't feed on elms until they are several years old, it may be that, when all the big elms in the area got wiped out, the beetles moved on, leaving a few young trees that grew into the specimens you see now. Alex Here is a link that might be useful: source for quote

The property that used to be my Grandfather's place has some 100 year old plus elms, all americanas. We are in the Gulf of St Lawrence, so get LOTS of wind and freezing rain. They have stood up well. Some have died of the DED, but two are thought to be resistant. Since the current owner is injecting them with fungicide and has used Dutch trig, it's not known for sure if they are resistant, but their buddies started dying off fast and these two appeared to wall off small amounts in the crown. I have some of their seedlings, but suspect they are pollinated by their non resistant buddies that survive with treatments. A kind soul on this board has sent me seeds from his resistant trees, and two have made strong seedlings. It will be fun to plant them next to the Elmwood 18 seedlings and see what pops out. I still have my grandfather's woods, and there are elms there, so I am hoping to introgress resistance genes into the population in the woods. I haven't actually seen a Valley Forge, only its seedlings, so can't comment.

Bon, I just cannot imagine the elm roots are alleopathic enough to cause your plants harm. I use elm leaves in my compost all the time, and have elm, pecan, hackberry and oak trees growing just outside my garden's north fence. They are so close that I can just about touch the tree limbs if I am standing inside the garden's north fence...except the fence is taller than me so I can't reach them because of the fence. I have all manner of tree roots underground and they continually move into the garden. Where they are in the top few inches of soil, I rototill and dig out what I can in the winter, but they're back again by the next winter. We have 14.4 acres but almost all of it is heavily forested, so there is nowhere I can plant far enough from trees that tree roots won't come into my garden. Might the elm tree roots outcompete your plants for water and nutrients? Sure. But will they have a serious and adverse effect on their growth? I don't really think so. If elms and hackberries were highly alleopathic, nothing would grow underneath them in the woods....and every inch of ground beneath them in the woods has smaller trees like black cherry or redbud, and all kinds of groundcover plants. By contrast, wherever we have black walnuts in the woods, there is not much of anything growing under their canopy as far out as their drip line. From observing them in the woodland together, you can see how black walnut's alleopathy is so much stronger. For the compost pile, just put down a couple of layers of very heavy black plastic---4 mm or 6 mm would be ideal, and put your compost on top of it. That largely will keep root intrusion from being a problem. You can get a thick row of black plastic someplace like Lowe's or Home Depot. Cardboard will decompose in a few months, so it wouldn't keep out the intrusive tree roots that keep invading your compost pile. It takes a very long time to build healthy soil in which tomato plants will thrive. This is my 14th year with this garden and my soil isn't even close to where I want it to be. Clearly, it is a lot better that it was 14 years ago, but I didn't even see much improvement in plant performance until I'd already been improving the soil heavily every year for 4 or 5 years. You just have to work at it on a continual basis. Because heat eats compost, no matter how much compost you add one year, it will be almost gone before the next growing season. I add all the compost I can in the off season when there's no plants in the bed, then I mulch, mulch, mulch heavily. As the mulch breaks down, it further enriches the soil. I add more mulch to some bed in my garden every week. It is a process that never ends. Good soil isn't something you just whip up out of thin air by adding some organic matter to your natural dirt. It takes years of constant improvement for it to develop and evolve. It is easy for us to blame the weather, the lack of rain, the heat, etc., when plants don't perform the way we want, but I think much of the time, the truth is that our soil just is not yet where it needs to be. The amount of improvement needed will vary depending on what kind of soil you start with, but the need for constant improvement, especially in terms of adding organic matter, never ceases. Dawn

Josephine, my Maytag (Bravo X, 700XL2) knows what to do with wet clothes. I use the rinse and spin cycle on DH's jeans most weeks, he can really get muddy. When that cycle is over (20 min) and the rinse water has spun out, I wash them using the 'bulky' setting with deeper water or it may not get residual mud from the inside of the pants legs bottoms. I would not put partially washed clothes dirty into my dryer to only have to clean the dryer. I freely admit he can get much dirtier than average laundry. (I've insisted he stand in the garage and strip more than once. No sympathy from me when he tells me he's worked all day and he's tired, he is not coming inside like that ;)) He's hiking off trail 4 days a week for his work in all kinds of weather through all kinds of terrain. Going through beaver ponds and falling off logs. My issue isn't dirty clothes not coming clean like I said above, it's only the amount of time laundry takes. We were at his sisters weekend house a while back and I put a load of towels in the older Maytag there, got to listen to the familiar sounds of laundry, big grin on my face. And 25 minutes later I was putting the washed things into the dryer, it was the first time laundry has been fun in a few years.