Crystalshoe- Hydrology, not the size of the bed or container, determines whether you're growing in a raised bed (RB) or a container, and by extension, what type of soil you can/should use. A planting of daisies in a plastic or clay pot resting on your deck or patio is a container planting. Bury that pot an inch or two into the ground so there is continuity between the medium in the pot and the soil the pot is partially buried in, and it becomes a RB - no matter what size the pot is. The difference is, the earth will act as a giant wick, and remove water that would normally perch in a conventional container planting, but water movement within the partially buried container would closely mimic water movement in the earth or in the soil below. There is a caveat, however. The area where the pot is buried or partially buried would need to drain properly for things to work. If you were to bury the pot in clay soil that allowed essentially no percolation, the pot would simply fill up with water at every rainfall or irrigating. If you're building a RB over a clay soil that drains poorly - don't amend the clay unless you can drain the area. If you do, water will percolate or run into the area you amended, leaving it saturated for extended periods (the bathtub effect). You can remedy this problem if you are able to cut trenches or use a French drain cut into the clay to drain excess water to a lower area away from where you're growing. Not amending the clay below your beds also allows any excess water in the RB soil to move laterally over the surface of the clay where it can evaporate. If you amend, the water won't move laterally until the amended depression is entirely saturated with water. No matter how you look at it, you're eventually going to have problems with a RB over clay unless you can figure a way to use gravity or a pump to move water from the area. As soil life moves through the clay and increases the OM content of the clay below the RBs, that soil will become more porous than the surrounding clay. The pores will quickly fill with water when it rains or when you irrigate unless you have a plan to remove the water. The end game is, the water that collects below your RBs has to have a place to go. It has to drain naturally in a reasonable time, or be directed downhill or to a sump where it can be mechanically removed. Amending the soil beneath RBs just forces you to face the brunt of the problem sooner (in heavy clay soils). BTW - you don't need to use a highly aerated soil like that you referred to in your OP in RBs. In fact, the highly aerated soils that perform so well in containers are probably not a particularly good choice for RBs because they have a steep water retention curve that will have you watering more than you'd prefer. Keep in mind that the time you spend now, properly preparing, will save a lot of time and frustration later. How many beds? Size/depth? Budget constraints high, low, medium? Ready access to materials you think might work? Al

I am not positive about peat being renewable or not. I do know that it is dug up and processed and wrapped in plastic and shipped hundreds if not thousands of miles to garden centers around the planet. I see no reason for buying such a product when I can make compost and use leaves and horse manure and all sorts of other items to hold water and provide a good environment for my plants. The only having to water every other day with peat line was funny to me, I don't even water my container plants every other day. I put compost, leaves, and/or old horse manure in with the soil in my outdoor containers. Holds water really well, helps that I have a clay soil to start with. When there is an option, I go for locally available and free garden ingredients instead of buying stuff at the store. Not everyone has the time or inclination for that, but it is undeniably 1) cheaper, and 2) better for the planet to use the local organic material instead of the processed, transported, plastic wrapped stuff. Marcia, who rarely hugs trees, but did dance around one with a lot of friends and ribbons on Saturday (Maypole)

Sammy, TOMATOES: With tomato diseases and soil, there are so many variables that your questions are a little hard to answer, but I'll do my best. I grow my tomatoes in the same beds (and also in the same containers) every year, and have for the 11 years we've been here. I do enrich the soil by adding compost and other organic matter as needed, and I always mulch heavily with various products, including grass clippings, hay, straw and chopped/shredded leaves. The mulch adds more organic matter to the soil as it breaks down, so that organic matter is being added year-round as the mulch decomposes. I put some organic Espoma Tomato Tone fertilizer in each planting hole as I set out tomato plants, and usually a handful of bone meal too. How much do my plants struggle with foliar disease given that I grow tomatoes in the same soil every year? Well, first of all not as much as you might expect, and it seems almost entirely dependent on the weather conditions. In a wet and rainy year where humidity levels stay high and the plants have dew on them virtually every day, I'll usually see early blight beginning in late June or early July. If the rain is really heavy in April or May, I may or may not see some bacterial speck or bacterial spot although they're usually a minor issue if they are an issue at all. About 1 in 4 or 5 years (and 2009 was one of them) my plants will have issues with Septoria Leaf Spot. In a dry and droughty year, which is probably at least 2 out of 3 years here in southcentral OK, I might or might not see a little Early Blight in June or July, but that's about it as long as I keep the plants mulched well (including mulched pathways) and water only with soaker hoses or drip irrigation. For what it is worth, none of the other gardeners who live and garden near me in Love County rotate their tomato plantings either, and most of them don't add organic matter to the soil or mulch like I do, relying on chemical fertilizers instead. They seem to get enough tomatoes to make them happy, although I rarely see any of them getting the higher production that I get from my plants. Because they don't mulch and most of them water using sprinklers, those plantings usually exhaust themselves or become diseased and are pretty much done by August, although some of their plants remained productive into the fall this year. If you have other types of disease issues like some of the wilt diseases or Tomato Yellow Leaf Curl or Tomato Spotted Wilt Virus, then crop rotation might be more important, but I rarely see those here so it is hard for me to comment. It is my opinion, Sammy, that you could continue to use the soil in your containers and just keep adding amendments, particularly compost and perhaps also one of the rock powders and perhaps some bone meal. Mulching the containers with 2-4" of organic matter will help reduce soil splash which often transfers diseases. Mulching the ground around the containers also helps reduce soil splash. Water with a hand-held hose or a drip irrigation line to keep water off your plant foliage. For people who grow in the ground, the Earl's Hole method (linked below) of soil replenishment works just fine. As far as I know, Earl continues to grow his plants in the same area every year and gets some of the highest yields of fruit per plant that I've ever heard of, and I think that is due to his use of the Earl's Hole Method. You could adapt portions of his method and just add the needed ingredients to the existing soil in your containers. Some people who grow in containers like to spread out a tarp or a piece of heavy duty plastic, pour all their soil onto it, and add their amendements to that soil and then refill the pots. That is a lot of work, and I usually don't do it that way. I just add my amendments to my containers and stir them in by hand a week or two before I transplant the tomatoes into them. To tell you the truth, I ignore those people on other forums who insist you must put all-new soil in containers or rotate your in-ground plantings every year. I haven't found that to be true at all in our climate here in southern OK nor in northcentral Texas when I lived there. Perhaps in some parts of the country, the soil replacement or rotation are absolutely essential, but not here for me. People in every region have different gardening issues and much of it is related to their soil or climate conditions, so what some people find necessary in some places are not necessary in other places. COMPOST: One way to compost leaves is to just poke a lot of holes in the bags to facilitate air flow, wet down the leaves good before you close up the bag, and then seal the bags of shredded leaves using twist ties or twine or whatever. Pile the bags in an out-of-the-way place like behind a garage or shed or someplace else where they won't be an eyesore, and leave them there. By spring, the leaves will be partially decompsed and can be mixed into the soil or used as mulch on top of the soil. You can make an attractive compost bin for your compost pile in many ways, using wood, lattice, etc. If you use lattice and want to keep squirrels out of it, line the lattice compost bin with 1/4" hardware cloth. Out here in the country on larger parcels of property, it is easier to place compost piles and bins in out-of-the-way locations where you don't see them from the house. So, a lot of people here pick up old pallets and build compost bins from them and that works fine. I use round woven-wire fencing formed into cylinders 4 or 5' across and just fill them up over the growing season. If you use this method, you can plant morning glories, hyacinth beans, black-eyed susan vines or moon flower seeds in the spring and they grow all over the cage and hide it during the growing season. It is easy to use a large trash container or extra-large rubber storage container as a compost bin. Just drill lots and lots of air holes in whichever container you use, and leave the lid off when it rains so that the contents of the container receive adequate moisture. You don't have to leave the lids off all the time but they need moisture from rainfall or the waterhose from time to time. If you're concerned small rodents will get into the containers, line them with hardware cloth. I'd drill holes (and lots of them) in the bottom and sides of the containers to facilitate air flow and also good drainage so excess moisture doesn't remain in the container. APHIDS: I'm clueless on this one. I don't know enough about how they overwinter to help you on this one. Have you seen lady bugs eating the aphids? In general, lady bugs feast on aphids and I have a healthy population of lady bugs so I rarely see aphids at all. Sometimes aphids appear on container plants I overwinter in the garage, but if I am patient, lady bugs show up 7-10 days later and take care of them. If the aphids are in your compost pile, it ought to get hot enough to kill them, but I can't quote any research that says that it will. We have hackberry trees in our woodland but the wooly hackberry aphids haven't made it here yet, so I have absolutely no experience with them and don't know how similar or different their behavior is compare to that of more common aphids. Good luck and keep asking questions. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: Earl's Hole Method of Tomato Bed Soil Replenishment

The best thing you could do you already did, you put rich compost on top of the exposed hard soil. This will allow it to stay moist and in time the humic acids from the compost will leach into the hard native soil. The next best thing you can do is grow stuff on top of it, since the subsoil will remain moist it will get softer and all crops you grow over it will penetrate it with roots that will create tunnels for aeration and organic matter. If you have heard of a lasagna beds they are a raised bed with no tilling or breaking up of the soil underneath it. Eventually the original soil becomes richer and deeper and the demarcation between native and amended disappears. You should think about using strong tap rooted plants in your off seasons or in unused space, successive crops of radishes grown to the point of bolting should do much to break up the native soil beneath the raised bed. Good luck and enjoy your gardening.