I'm sorry for not having posted anything recently. The alyssums are busy growing and I've been busy digging out the rock chips our previous home owners left behind on our front yard! I will talk about that in another post soon! Ginny, I bought the Burpee's Royal Carpet Alyssum seeds that have purple blooms. I've read now that the white ones are the hardiest ones, so I am waiting to see how they do. Thanks for mentioning the Bog garden, je148! If alyssum fails on me, then that is the route I will have to take. And that boat looks amazing. With the lighthouse, I can only imagine how good it would look. Ginny, love the wheelbarrow. I just may steal that idea of yours!

Adding your USDA zone would help posters offer help. Where I am in Southern New England, marigolds are annuals, not perennials. I mulch my perennial beds with recycled corrugated cardboard topped with several inches of plain, brown shredded bark mulch. Worms love cardboard, so they're attracted to the garden beds. Worms = worm poop which = free organic fertilizer which = healthy perennials. Landscape fabric benefits only the factories that produce it. It does nothing to impede or control weeds. Most simply grow through it. Brick is brick and soil is soil. Plants may grow ON brick but they typically grow IN soil. To grow healthy plants, you need healthy soil which isn't always easy in an urban garden. Gardening, for those of us who've done it most of our lives, is a journey rather than a hobby. To succeed, we've all learned valuable lessons about soil, moisture, sun exposure and plant hardiness. For example, your marigolds are annuals that need full sun. Your plants are dying slowly because they don't have what they need to survive and thrive. A watering can or hose may not serve your plants. Give some thought to thinking outside the box. I use recycled plastic containers with a pinhole punched (with an ice pick) opposite the handle an inch from the bottom, filled with water and set up against the base of the newly-planted perennials. Water gently exits the pinhole at the base of the plant. Water remaining in the container prevents it blowing away in the wind. This may sound radical to you as a newbie but plants KNOW how much water they need (isn't THAT a concept!!) so unless you drown/flood them, they won't take in more than they need. Yes, some plants don't do well when things flood (read: everything in moderation). Borrow some books from your local library and read.

Question 1 - I was really blown away by how deep and big the taproot is growing on these trees. It's like most of the energy is going to create this big root. It's thicker than the trunks in every case, and the roots are easily twice to sometimes 3x as long as the seedling itself. So on on of them, I cut back the taproot a little bit... I took about a half an inch. I had read Al mentioning that slowly cutting back a taproot over time can help spur the tree to grow more roots higher up. I hope I didn't take it out of context. The first day the lowest leaf of that seedling, which has started to go brown on the rim, became pale and collapsed on one side of the leaf. Then yesterday it went dry. Today there has been no further progress of the leaf's collapse and no further signs of stress. The seedling seems strong... Was I wrong to try and trim it back just a little bit? Or did I do alright? Is this seedling out of the woods for now do you think? Young plants are nearly all dynamic mass, and as such, have a very strong "will to live". If your plant is currently doing well, there is no reason it will take a turn unless something cultural forces a change in course. Bonsai practitioners have learned that lifting seedlings as soon as the first set of true leaves emerge and removing the seed radicle immediately below the root to shoot transition zone and treating the top as a cutting eliminated taproot issues entirely in most plants. In stubborn plants with a hard tendency toward vertical roots, you'll need to regularly remove all first order roots (attached to main stem) growing downward from the root to shoot transition zone as well as all second order roots growing up or down off the first order roots. Question 2 - related to question 1, regarding the other seedling I root pruned a little. This one I took a little more off of because of root rot. I know I had to take it off, and I also took off a bit of taproot for this one too. The seedling itself seems fine. The uppermost leaf - which is fairly new and thin yet - went limp the first day, but has become stronger and greener these last two days. I know I had to take off the bad roots, but I was worried I went too far. I'm hoping I'm seeing indications that I didn't? Only way to tell is by putting a waiting period behind you during which the plant retains its turgidity throughout the daylight hours. Stomata close at night and slow water loss, so unhealthy plants have opportunity to recover from low internal water pressure and wilting. No wilt during the day is a good indication to bet on full recovery. Question 3 - When I was done, I investigated the 5 'dead' seedlings. Two of them looked like some of Al's bare-root pictures. The main part of the taproot was healthy, seemed alive, and had small alive roots still growing from it. but the end of the root was truncated in mush, much of which fell off into the soil. I washed them as clean as I could in a mist spray and cut off the mushy end to clean root. Then I potted those in 5:1:1 too. I'm hoping against hope that I might be able to save them. The top id dead back to the twiggy stump... Any thoughts if they might come back? Anything special I might do for them to give them the best shot - for instance a special fertilizer or watering strategy? Withhold fertilizer until the plant recovers. DAMP or MOIST are the operative words. If the fungal infection has gummed up the plumbing such that a vascular connection between roots and shoots isn't in the offing, it's a goner. If the infection isn't systemic, the possibility of retaining viability is still on the table. What kills cuttings is the inability to make that plumbing connection due to rot, or the cutting having an inadequate energy reserve. If the plant/cutting/seedling runs out of reserve energy while it still a net user of energy instead of a net producer of energy, it's over. 4: I have 5 I have not yet repotted. They seem to be okay... though 3 aren't doing much of anything, they're just existing and may have some first sign of browning on lowest leaves, but I might be looking too hard too... One is finishing it's fall flush of leaves, and one is start starting it's fall flush... I'm not sure if I should repot them so close to winter or if I should let them be until spring, since they seem okay right now. I especially am not sure I should mess with the one putting out new leaves. But on the other hand, what if I really am seeing some warning signs and some suddenly start taking a down turn in the next week or month? Wouldn't it be better to do it early, now, rather than later? The only reason I re-potted the ones I did was because I was sure they wouldn't make it through winter... I am not sure on these ones. If they were your plants, what would you do? A dearth of mobile nutrients, over-watering, root congestion, soil compaction, can all lead to loss of lower leaves. I'll ask you to spare me from having to do the research by telling me if these plants would normally enter a predictive dormancy during the fall to winter transition? If yes, then waiot until spring but guard against over-watering. If no, repot only if you suspect strongly that the plants will no longer be viable come late spring (June). 5: Fungus gnats. =( I manage to get rid of them for a while, but they always come back. Of course, I was always using compost mixes, particularly organic ones, and they're usually lousy with them no matter how much a brand claims they pasteurize/sterilize for pests. Do non-mineral soil media mixes have the same ability to attract and support these and other soil-borne pests? If yes, which ones to watch for? If you don't already have a good understanding of what constitutes the comparative degrees of container media (as in unusable, practically unusable, just plain poor, ok, better, and the variations of better from 'sort of better' to 'really a whole lot better'), making that a priority will almost certainly propel your advancement farther/faster than anything else you might apply yourself to in the near term. If you need the info that can tie soils up into a neat little conceptualization, I'll be really glad to help, but I think trying to do it in a thread that covers so many topics isn't the best format. Are you familiar with and understand the concept discussed here? Which brings my follow-up: If it can support pests that spent part or all of their life cycle in soil, then it should be able to support their predators too, right? I prefer to combat pests with their predators, like nematodes, predatory mites, aphid lions, etc. Would this be doable if needed? How about we work toward providing a home for roots that doesn't provide creature comforts? In the immediate, mosquito dunks and a restrained hand on the watering can are potential remedies. 6: For the future of these little babies of mine, what would a good strategy be for keeping them happy growing in a container? You'll find an outline here that will provide a plan for maintaining woody material in containers and in good health indefinitely. I know I need to keep them smaller than if they were in the landscape, and that means eventually removing the taproot. I also understand that taproot removal usually starts after a year. But these trees don't actually seem to have much besides taproot... smaller roots branch off of it, and a few have some smaller roots that come from the trunk matrix but not most from what I've seen. Would the best bet be to gradually prune the tap root back over a few years in an attempt to get the trees to put out more roots higher up? Or should I go for broke and just cut it way back and defoliate? Or is it possible that the poor media I have been growing in so far as not encouraged growth at the higher and mid root range and drove the roots downwards looking for air? I'm sorry I haven't taken any pictures to share to give you a better idea. If I end up re-potting any of the others, I will take some. I think I covered these questions above, but if not, ask again. Al

"About the pictures I think you could just ask for a panoramic picture." Sometimes, that works and it might in your case. But in the majority of cases it doesn't. Keep in mind that with individual pictures creating the panorama from not too far away, I'm seeing a lot of detail -- usually 3, 4, or 5 pictures worth of it. If a person makes their own panorama, by the time their camera and Houzz each shrink it in to a single picture, I'm seeing a third, fourth or fifth of the detail, which often is not enough. On top of that, a panorama often comes looking radically distorted and seriously throws off a viewer's perception of the space that's there. In the individual photographs, I can gauge that much more accurately. Of course, after I draw on the panorama which I make and submit it to the thread, it will be reduced to a single, Houzz-sized picture. But the viewer is just looking at it and accepting what is -- not trying to figure out spatially how things must fit together in reality. All I am trying to say about the plant shape is that a dome is good and a ball is bad. It's indirectly a comment about pruning. Don't undercut the bottom of the plant to create a ball. The underside would obviously be in shade and that would cause it to lose foliage. A boxwood could be trimmed in dome, pyramid, cube, etc. But trimming into a ball shape means it will not hold up over time. (Yes, since boxwood is shade tolerant, it will hold up for some time. But why press it in a known bad direction?) The tree at the right was a vague suggestion, since we can't see over there. But the need is definitely there. You're there, so you can see if the tree could move to some nearby area where it still serves a purpose and doesn't get in the way of something else. I don't have to make every decision. the homeowner can make some of them. " Husband ask me to trust him." Is that really sensible? Walk that path very carefully. :-)