You have to keep reminding yourself that this won't be a quick project. Since you're starting from scratch on a difficult area, I'd guess this will take several years of trial and error to get a look you're happy with. The stepping areas and feeders/birdbath are great ideas. There isn't much point in adding a lot of mulch to an area that you're not ready to plant yet - certainly add an inch or two, if you think it'll stay there. It will break down and the soil will be better when you get to planting the area, but until you get some rooted plants into that area the new soil and the mulch will erode a bit. I wouldn't pull up the weeds - their roots will help stabilize the area until you're ready to tackle it. You can dump some mulch on them and it'll help kill off the bits growing above ground without removing the roots. If you spray with Round Up (might not be allowed anymore in Halifax area?) that will kill off the weeds without removing the roots, but... Round Up takes a few days to a few weeks to break down, and you've got a slope where the rain will run down and wash that stuff onto your lawn or other plants. Might not be a wise idea :-) I would just dump mulch onto them a couple of times a year and gently pull out what is really loose. It takes longer, but you are solving the poor soil problem that way too. In general I am not a fan of herbicides and pesticides since almost all problems they are used for can be sloved with better cultural practices or gardening techniques. I don't know if this would work for you, but if you want to add a lot of mulch right now, and have it stay put, you could place chicken wire or hardware cloth over the mulch (pin the chicken wire to the ground with stakes). A heavy rain might erode some of it, especially in the steeper parts, but it would help a bit at least. About your seeds you plan to use next spring - a word of caution. Seeds are a great way to fill up the slope quickly and without breaking the bank, but stay away from the generic 'wildflower' mixes you can get in Canadian Tire and places like that. They contain a lot of weedy seeds and very few seeds of plants you actually want to have growing there. Buy a good quality wildflower mix - it won't be that much more expensive and it'll be a major improvement over the cheaper stuff. Seeds can wash away fairly easily, so you might want to consider laying down some thin jute or burlap to sow them in or under (that protective burlap you get to wrap shrubs in the winter would work). Sow then as soon as the snow melts. Or you could wintersow them (or some of them) in containers and plant the resulting seedlings in your nooks and crannies. The Japanese Maple being shallow rooted might be a problem if you were planting it directly on the slope. Shallow rooted plants will have a harder time staying put on a slope, but if you build it a nice sized terrace, then it might be perfect. Select one that is hardier than would normally be necessary for your area because of the cold flowing downhill problem. You have a swampy lawn huh? That's a drainage problem. You have neighbours higher up the hill than you do? That's almost certainly where your water is coming from. Peat moss might mop up a bit of water, but I doubt it'd solve your problem. A permanent fix would be to regrade your lawn, but that's not cheap (or have your neighbour regrade his, but that's a lot to ask from a neighbour). You could also install a French drain type of thing to drain the water to a lower lying area or drain - that's cheaper, and a do-it-yourself project if you want, but still a lot of work. You could decide to grow a bog garden in that spot - irises, cannas, lots of neat grasses... I think your slope provides you with some really neat garden terrain - my 'fantasy garden' always has a nice terraced slope full of plants, but it is going to be more challenging than building 'ye olde generic bed'. BP

Oh boy, we could swap failure stories forever, could we not? But that is part of the game of plant love. We try to grow the impossible, and even the nominally easy and things don't go as planned. We learn something each time but that school of hard knocks sure has steep tuition fees. Take heart though that many of us just have an irrational impulse to persevere through drought and flood, cold and heat waves, plagues and bad soil. And over time we (mostly) get something we enjoy. It took many tries to get my patch of lenten roses going for example. Now they are happily expanding on their own. I have never been able to get cyclamen to expand. But others have, including trilliums. And the stories go on and on. These failures and successes are one of the key reasons to have lots of gardening friends and to be generous giving away plants. Friends can give you lots of advice that cost them plenty to obtain and when your beloved plants die, you may (hopefully) be able to get them back if one of your friends has a propagated piece of it around. But enough philosophizing. To your question: the container gardening forum at gardenweb is full of recipes for good soil. I have found most of them work fine as long as you keep organic content below 40 per cent. More than that and the soil will literally disappear in front of you with age (it compacts to nothing as the plants and microbial life use it up). You need some of the soil to be inorganic so it will keep it's tilth/structure. Good loam is equal parts sand, silt and clay with 20 to 30 per cent organic content *which includes the worms, insects, roots and other microbes themselves*. All these measures are by volume. For your specific situation, I would use 30 per cent permatill, 30 per cent whatever organic material you have (manure, compost, humus or a combo of all 3), and 40 per cent of your native soil or if it is too clay-heavy then purchase a couple of yards from a local landscape supply store. I use the one near us on Norwood or Triangle Landscape supplies or whoever is selling good grade stuff. Watch out for reclaimed materials from human waste sludge that some people add to raise organic content - it is glue like in behavior and I suspect it carries some pathogens. Buying stuff in bags is too expensive - you can get 27 cu ft in 1 cu yd - at 24 dollars/yd for good soil (no.3 landscape soil fines in my supplier's parlance) or less than 1 dollar a cu ft and it's already 1/3 inorganic (sand mostly.) It makes sense to buy in bulk. Plus you can get it delivered. The down side is you have to shovel it to where you need it. I have had good luck using used up soil from repotting my containers, and from using old already-amended soil from my existing beds for the inorganic fraction. If I were pushed to buy stuff and I did not have anything handy near by, I'd probably use the "top soil" sold in bags at Lowe's and Home Depot for the inorganic component of my mix, with maybe 10 per cent sand added. You may be getting the impression that these proportions are somehow scientific. Nothing could be further from the truth. Plants are very adaptable as long as they have proper air and moisture levels at the roots. They'll even grow in completely inorganic mixes like pure turface if you can control the watering and feed them liquid micronutrients. That's the same as static hydroponics. My point is, don't worry too much about getting these mixes right. You are not baking a cake, more like seasoning a stew. Done to taste, with attention to what you are growing and how it responds, and then feeding compost and lime as needed. That is it. The rest is trial and error. If you have not gotten a hold of Elizabeth Lawrence's book "A Rock Garden in the South", go to your nearest library and borrow it. Also, the North American Rock Garden Society is a great resource as are the friendly folks at the local chapters. There's one here in the Triangle. A final note: all these info applies to open garden beds which have an underlying stratum. Gardening in containers is a whole different ball game. For those I use 60 per cent fine ground pine bark, 20 per cent vermiculite and the rest compost with some plants receiving a little sand and or granite dust. Because of the physics of small enclosed spaces, potting soil needs to be very loose and full of air pockets while containing billions of micro pores that hold moisture and air simultaneously. Once used up (after 1 to 2 years) these mixes are great added to your garden beds but even the best garden soil will water log your plants in a container because of the suspended water table dynamics even if you use a wick. More on this in the container and bonsai garden forums if you want to learn more about it. Part of the fun is figuring all the tricks out. I have been gardening since I was a boy with my grandma and I am still a newbie, learning stuff every day. Enjoy it. RJ

Compost would be the most suitable product to add on top of an established garden. That and/or a shredded mulch of some sort. The SOIL product would smother the root system your existing plants rather than enriching and improving the established soil.

If you build your beds on top of your existing soil, with landscape fabric covering the ground, the weeds should be less of an issue. Then build your mix on top of that. That's what I did, but added 3 inches of gravel over the fabric for better drainage and weed control. I'm lucky here that we've got a regional composter that uses no less than 5 types of plants for compost and thousands of different source plants, so it's as diverse as you can get. And I can get it in bulk from several sources and if I need more than 5 yards, they'll deliver. So I agree, it's much easier in the long run to replace or build over your existing soil. Here is a link that might be useful: Sinfonian's garden in progress...