I had to scroll up to see where i was. Is trex considered organic? Are they still playing that card? What percentage of the factory misc ingredients is actually recycled. What is the long term breakdown? I'm asking because i don't really know. I've not really followed but it seems most are not happy with it and now replacing it? It looks fake. Right behind the plastic tool shed, next to the plastic turtle sand box. And little tykes plastic jungle gym, behind the vinyl siding on the house with a plastic bubbly mailbox. Above ground plastic pool behind a chain-link with plastic strips in green and white with plastic adirondack chairs blown by the wind in a heap stuck in a corner...a storm last year. (an unfortunate driving direction landmark for visitors... just pass the elementary school, pass the 'plastic house', "its for sale!", on the left....) Plastics are difficult to avoid. Recycling is certainly the way to look at things available for free. Not sure if i would support purchasing such a thing. It would give me a bit of a shudder having a plastic or composite man-made material in my garden. If heading for a land-fill i might consider a compost bin. Maybe a flower bed edging somewhere. Base for a potting bench? I do have a compost bin made out of cinder blocks that were piled in the field when i bought the farm. Its the bin i don't really use. Just a place to stack all the big stuff i have no place for. Next to a big rusty vintage manure spreader that gets the really big stuff.

I sent the link to some fellow Arizona gardeners and one replied that it isn't as important here to have mature compost... supposedly the desert makes things different? Here is what he said exactly: eh, i disagree, if you are putting the right things into your compost, ie, not cistrus in this climate, you can use non mature compost no problem in az, if you burry it under your soil, it will decompose quickly and helps growth! this is supposing of course you are not box gardening, which is less than ideal here anyway, ive also heard this can be good way to revitalize "bad soil" in less than a year.

I have been trying out the cedar chips that was for dog bedding... it is a nice smell and seems to settle down to a nice base to walk on... not sure of the wheelchair.. but it is a thought to consider... seems to be better than the mulch I had down earlier in the season...

andrea81, I'm surprised no one's responded to your post yet. I learned a lot from gardening magazines for about the first ten years of my gardening life. They're not as useful to me these days, since I've been reading them so long that an article is more likley to give me a sense of deja vu than new information. The only magazine I regularly read is The American Gardener, which is the magazine of the American Horticultural Society. This one's great for its coverage of a wide range of topics and its consistent delivery of articles that are a bit more scientific than those in other magazines while offering very expert practical advice on plant culture and garden design. The photographs are gorgeous, too. I used to see American Gardener at a local Borders Bookstore but haven't seen it there for years. But annual membership to the AHS ($35.00)gets you a subsciption plus other benefits like discounts and an opportunity to select ten varieties of seeds from their annual seed exchange inventory (you don't have to submit your own seeds to get this benefit). Otherwise, I've gotten kind of jaded with the others like Horticulture, Organic Gardening, Fine Gardening, and Garden Design. Horticulture and OG are still good sources of basic information on varieties and have good how-to articles, but it seems to me they've both dumbed-down quite a bit over the years in an effort to get a bigger market share of readers. For a while it seemed that Horticulture was starting to roll up its genteel shirtsleeves, while OG was pulling on kidskin gardening gloves, in apparent efforts to appeal to wider audiences. This didn't work for me, as I missed the distinctive style that each magazine had had before. But it was the dumbing-down that really bugged me. I have to say though that the last time I looked at an OG issue, it seemed they had stopped trying to make organic gardening look like a tea party at the Rosarians Club and were back on track with no-nonsense articles. Horticulture has never fully regained its authority with me, however, and I find that a lot of the hooks on their front covers turn out to be teasers (like a paragraph embedded somewhere instead of the full article that the cover suggests you'll find). For me, Fine Gardening has taken up the slack. It's more like the solid horticultural stuff Horticulture used to publish, but with some added design pizzazz. Not too much pizzazz, though - I get enough of that through my occasional impulse purchases of Garden Design, which occur when I have to stare too long at one of their outrageous cover illustrations while I'm stuck in the check-out line at the grocery store. Garden Design's always a fun - if sometimes way out there - read. Being new to gardening, I would think that any of these would be useful and interesting. But I do think that American Gardener is the one that would best keep pace with your growing expertise and changing interests. So, what are you reading? Did you subscribe to anything yet? Regards, cranebill