Drive to a nice wooded area where there are lots of leaves, you may have to dig through the snow for them, or maybe even a field full of tall grass, then cut it down and up into little pieces leaving out the seeded tops, pile them as high as you can on the entire garden area. Leaves are kind of big and fly away with the wind, so mowing over them will keep them in place and it will be easier to break them down. You can also drive by local restaurants looking for coffee and tea grounds, salad scraps from the salad bars, pick through their garbage if you're allowed to, the scraps are considered green and so is manure. You can even compost in between the rows as the garden grows, but you will waste lots of space that way. Compost is the cheapest method and most accurate to revive bad soil, but then you can plant green manure. Green manure is living plants that give nutrients to the soil like clover, rye grass seed, yellow dock, etc.. At the end of the year you can plant them in your plot and more than likely they will stay alive until you dig them up at the beginning of your garden season. You can also plant these plants around or near your other plants to make them grow better while your garden is growing. A book I have says for every 5 to 6 foot area, put 3 inches of course composting material down like twigs, brush, corn stalks, etc, layered on top of each other for ventilation underneath, 6 inch layer of greens (grass, coffee grounds, clippings), 2 inches of manure ( from rabbit cages, guinea pig cages, or any animal that does not eat meat like cows, goats, sheep, etc), add one inch of soil, then repeat until the pile is about 5 feet high, making sure you water each layer to keep it moist, but not muddy, punch holes in the top of the pile reaching the very bottom 2 or 3 feet apart, keep watered if it dries out, and turn it at 3 to 4 week intervals until it's finished. Manure does not have to be used, but it's got lots of nutrients, you can just use brown dead animal plant matter like leaves, and then green layers in between. If you want to add soil in the mix like I described, maybe dig the soil up in that 5 to 6 foot area to remove the first 1 foot of soil, then add it slowly as you build you pile. You don't need anything but leaves if you want to keep it simple. Cover the entire area with mowed leaves 2 feet high, mowed so they will keep the bulk down, then water them, they will break down.

Hi Prairie_north: Very pretty bloom on your mini-rose. Thank you for the l info. that cracked corn changed from pink (acidic) to purple (neutral) fast. I'm happy with cracked corn in the planting hole (did that last year), so is Momscottagegarden (clay soil). I like what you wrote: "The bed around it was originally amended with peat moss, and has cedar shavings on top. Today I pushed the shavings away, dug up the soil around it, put down some sheep manure, and red lava rock." Peat moss mixed with clay becomes hardened a year later. Cedar shavings is acidic (pH 4) that would leak acid down when it rains (pH of rain is 5.6). Since mini-rose is own-root, the roots are nearer the surface, and is sensitive to acid leaching down. Own-roots do best with organic fertilizer, since it's nearer the surface ... some are wimpy like alfalfa sprouts, versus big-woody-bush-trunk Dr. Huey. Red lava rock is a strong buffer at pH 8. I mulched roses with that during our wet months .. kept roses clean. Blooming takes up lots of potassium & calcium to make those firm petals. After blooming, potassium and calcium are both depleted, plus rain leaches out potassium & calcium & trace elements. Red-lava rock in the planting hole, plus on top provide a continuous supply of potassium to prevent diseases, plus more blooms. Calcium is a strong buffer: I use that in many ways: as granular gypsum (calcium sulfate) to break up clay. If it rains a lot, I put gypsum on top of red-lava-rock. But for Dr. Huey-rootstock, I put dolomitic lime on top, since Dr. Huey likes it alkaline. Best ratio in hydroponics setting is equal nitrogen to potassium, 1/2 phosphorus, and 1/2 calcium. I burnt a few own-roots with either salty manure in hot weather, or high-phosphorus fertilizer like bone meal. My best result in hot weather is alfalfa hay for nitrogen. Timothy hay is much softer, easier to mulch .. that's what I plan to test next. I got amazing result mulching with alfalfa hay in hot weather, best nitrogen-source ever, which beat anything I tested: blood meal, compost, Milorganite, alfalfa pellets, alfalfa meal, corn meal. The problem with alfalfa in smaller particles: they gunk up on top, either souring, or hardening clay further. Alfalfa hay is fluffy, which cools and shade the roots in hot sun, plus it's a strong buffer: neutralize both acidic rain, and alkaline tap water.

My scanner is an HP Scanjet 5370Cse. I either bought the model with a top light, or purchased one as an accessory. The sensors are under the glass plate (on the moving head). Therefore, light must be passed from the top down through transparent photo media. The top light accessory provides this illumination and holds the negative masks. B/W negatives, color negatives, and color transparencies all use the top light. The bottom light is turned off when using the top light. (I had an all-in-one printer that had a top light built into the lid and that was much more convenient. Unfortunately, that printer began to fail last year and has been replaced.) The use of the top light is a bit awkward and not conducive to high production. It is best for a session of not more than 20, maybe 50, images per sitting. The negatives must be carefully positioned in the mask. Care must be exercised to keep finger prints off the image portion of the media. Slides and negatives should be handled by the edges only. Dirt and finger prints can be a problem. A spec of dirt on a 35 mm negative will make a magnified black dot on the copy. The most difficult negative to handle is a strip of 35 mm film that has been wrapped around a cardboard oblong and stored for several years. The film will have a permanent bends and is difficult to get it to lay flat. However, I did like the results and the degree of color balance adjustment control. The software was included with either the top light accessory or was on the printer driver disk. There is a learning curve until you understand how each feature works, and then after that, it is quite enjoyable. There is another option for 35 mm format: Use your digital camera. Nikon and possibly other makes offer a copy accessory with illumination. Getting even illumination across the entire film, and having a proper color content, is critical for copy work. Hobbyist do make their own fixtures, but this is ok for the experimenter. If you wish to get the job done in a reasonable amount of time, stick with the manufacturers fixture. An advantage of using your camera is that the image is already stored as a digital file. Also, the cost is very low. Blown shots cost nothing. Merely erase these, adjust, and shoot again. The camera's screen can be used to make a cursory check on the image quality captured. I have a relative who copied 3000 frames and photos using his digital camera as a copy machine. These were professional shots made in exoitic locations for magazines, ads, and catalogs.

Embothrium -- There are many published studies about the benefits of triacontanol on plant growth. You can find them in the google search I posted above. But since I suspect you haven't clicked that link, I'll post a few other links to individual articles below. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3730380/ http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10412905.1996.9700645 http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/JARS/v36n3/v36n3-hinerman.htm http://link.springer.com/article/10.1023%2FA%3A1023321024040 http://www.plantphysiol.org/content/95/4/986.short http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00024071 http://science.sciencemag.org/content/195/4284/1339.short Something to keep in mind, however, about information not backed up by scientific studies -- if there are no studies done, the claim can be neither confirmed nor denied on the basis of studies. If the information turns out to be correct after scientific studies deem it to be so, that information was also correct before the studies were begun. To say something isn't true because a proper trial hasn't confirmed it is equally guilty of coming to a conclusion without a proper trial -- you're saying it doesn't work, yet you have no studies to confirm that conclusion. Unfortunately, this is a common error among those of us in the sciences -- assuming something is NOT true until it is demonstrated to be so via controlled studies. The CORRECT answer is to say we can neither confirm nor deny until studies are performed. But, in any case, there are studies examining how triacontanol positively affects plant growth, on a range of species. :-) ~Christopher