@sunnibel: Apologies! I think of the east as so crowded, I forget there ARE rural areas :). Re: Cardboard: I have had no quackgrass come up through it at all, for 5 years after cardboard + 4" compost was put down. At that point, I let my tenants have the bed and they allowed the quackgrass to come in from the side. Quackgrass is incredibly invasive, and I have found its runners in a dense layer 24" down. But it is very sensitive to shading. I have a bed, just north of my neighbors' two story house, which gets full sun at midsummer but only a couple hours the rest of the year. The amount of quackgrass it has, if it was in a sunny bed and let go, would take over and kill everything else in the bed within a month or two. But that bed, I don't even pull it. It's been at a steady state for 5 or 6 years, and it doesn't bother the potatoes. There is spearmint and bindweed in that bed, too -- same deal, though I do pull the aboveground growth off the bindweed. That bed is isolated from the rest of the garden by a driveway. If it wasn't, the quackgrass would use it as a base of operations to invade the rest of the garden (and the world!). Re: Water: Sunnibel asked about summer rain. We don't haz it. Lawns here are brown in summer and green in winter. Controlling water is a significant part of how I control weeds. I water the garden deeply once a month in summer, for established plants. Newer plants and water-lovers like beans and raspberries, every two weeks. This helps a lot :). If the plants I want have deep roots and the weeds don't get a chance to develop them, there is not much competition. Is this water thing related to why tilling doesn't seem to do much good, here?

I'm in Central MA, zone 6a but felt like 5a (or even 4 some nights) this past winter. It got down to -15 to -18 a few times and below zero many times. Very cold for a long time. The only fruit trees that suffered the most are peaches. Lost flower buds anywhere from 20--80% and some young shoot tips were dead, too. Well, I had kazake pomegranates in ground with protection but it looked like I did not protect them well enough. It looks quite dead. I forced the zone on them in the worst winter in years so.... All other fruit trees, apples, A. pears, E pears, A plum, cherries (sour and sweet) and blueberries showed little to no damage. Even my strawberries have survived well but it is next to the house so that helped. I just planted nectarine, A.persimmon, E plum this year so those do not count. I live in a suburb with houses close to one another and many tall trees all around. That probably help with wind protection and makes my micro climate not as cold and windy as those living in more open areas.

Not sure if you have a Sunset WG Book, but it says Syringa josikaea (Hungarian lilac) can be grown in your Sunset zone 15. It also says that most lilacs in general bloom best where there are "decidedly chilly winters, but some do well with only light winter chill. Give well-drained, neutral to slightly alkaline soil. If soil is strongly acid, dig lime into it before planting." It also says to watch out for leaf miner, scale and stem borer. Would love to see pics of them when they finally bloom! :) Brenda

Just to add my own experience: I am also in the SF Bay Area, and over the last few months (summer/early fall) two of my leucadendrons went from vibrant to dead in the course of a few days. One was a leucadendron Safari Goldstrike. We had a heat spell in the middle of the summer, and I noticed one afternoon during that heat spell that the plant was suddenly looking noticeably wilted, so I doused it with a good amount of water in the middle of the afternoon. Over the next few days it went from wilted to totally dead. The other sudden death was a leucadendron Jester. Again, it died the week after a late summer heat spell. I didn't water it during the middle of the day like I had with the Safari Goldstrike, but I did turn the drip watering up to 120% that week. When a plant pro looked at the Jester after it died, she noted it had black spots on its leaves, suggesting some type of mold/mildew infection. Meanwhile, in another part of the yard, due to an irrigation problem that we didn't find out about until just a few weeks ago, a leucadendron Safari Sunset continues to thrive despite receiving NO irrigation for all of August and September. In summary I think it is highly likely that what killed my two leucadendrons this summer was indeed Phytopthera exacerbated by heat/excessive watering. Hope this can serve as a cautionary tale for others in the future.