I would remove all the wood chips since wood chips use nitrogen to decompose which is highly beneficial for a garden. Check with your county extension service for a soil test kit. In my area it cost nine dollars. Follow the instructions to the tee. Submit what you intend to grow usually general garden. Based on what type of soil is beneath the chips. Clay, loom, sand. I would definitely add compost, peat moss, some sand if clay soil and any elements indicated in the soil test. Lay your garden out on graph paper. Plant your short to tall starting south/southwest. You do not want to shade any plant. Do you have any varmints to look out for. ground hog, deer. skunk, raccoon. Have a heart trap. Happy Gardening!

Sisyrinchium is a nice little grassy plant whose foliage looks like a miniature iris. It is a native. (Blue Eyed Grass) Part shade. One of my favs for edging or filling in is Iberis (Candytuft). Nicer than alyssum, evergreen. Will grow in sun or part shade. Cardamon ginger is a nice small ginger for shade. I think it might be hardy in your area, it hardly died back at all for me. Doesn't bloom outside the tropics, but the foliage smells good. Nell

Nope...the terracotta still breathes. For example, if you were to convert a terracotta pot to a fountain or bird bath, you would need to paint the interior with oil-based poly-urethane and the exterior in order to water-proof it. That's the only thing that prevents the terracotta from 'breathing'. I've done this on fountain projects and bird baths in my yard. Also, if it's a plastic plant container, plastic does not 'breathe'. Spray paint is just such a nice way to coordinate your yard and to keep your planters from looking faded and ratty. Plus, it's a cheaper alternative to replacing a plastic planter. I also spray paint some of my plastic chairs to keep them looking nice. They fade in the sun so quickly. The new plastic spray paint works great - no scraping required either! Tom: I'm going to be spray painting the white buckets that you gave me to blend with my other containers. It should work out fine.

Do you know what sort of soil you have? The type of soil you have, how well it drains (or doesn't drain, as the case may be) and your annual average rainfall (20"? 30"? 40"? more than that?" all are factors that would help us recommend what would grow well for you. As for plants that can be grown safely around dogs, that's gonna be a huge challenge. First, you'll need to start out with a list of what you want to plant, and then you'll have to Google and do your research and try to figure out if the plants you want are known to harm dogs if eaten or chewed. The ASPCA maintains lists of plants that are known to be dangerous to dogs, but it is not an all-inclusive list. It merely is a list of plants that have been reported to them as being dangerous. Still, it is a good starting point. I've always gardened with dogs, but for the safety of our dogs, they have an enclosed dog yard that is fenced off from the rest of the yard and nothing grows inside their dog yard that would be considered harmful to them. If we are out in the yard, I occasionally let them out of the dog yard to roam the larger yard, but only because I am out there with them and can keep an eye on them. Some dogs are diggers and will dig up anything and everything you plant. Other dogs could care less and never dig. Some dogs chew. Some dogs try to chew but what they end up doing is pulling up everything you planted so they then can chew on it. At times, when I planted stuff in our yard before we had built the fenced-in dog yard, I would put cages of woven wire fencing around newly planted shrubs and trees to prevent the dogs from digging them up. Did I think it looked really lovely? No, of course not. What it did, though, was allow new trees and shrubs to become firmly rooted into the ground before the dogs could dig them up. After the first year, I removed the cages and the dogs never dug up any of those plants. Our dogs were pretty big-time into digging in their younger years, particularly from the puppy stage until they were 4 or 5 years old. Now that they're older and calmer, they don't dig as much as they used to. We had one dog, Mrs. Jeeves, who made it her personal mission to rip into and scatter every bag of anything (peat moss, pine bark fines, cow manure, mushroom compost, soil-less planting mix, etc.) she could find but she didn't bother plants. So, if your dogs are older and more settled down, they might not bother your plants much at all. Be advised that if you use organic fertilizers like blood meal and bone meal, your dogs will smell them and will dig up everything in sight looking for the source of that smell. I noticed that a lot of the plants on your list flower at various stages in their lives. I think you might want to consider vitex agnus-castus which blooms in summer and has lovely blue flowers. It is very drought tolerant and will grow in almost any soil, as will crape myrtles. If you have well-drained sandy or sandy loam soil, I think that everything on your list would grow well for you, but I haven't compared the plants you listed to lists of plants known to harm dogs. Lavender needs really well drained soil, so keep that in mind if you have soil that has a lot of clay in it. I'll link the ASPCA dog problem plant list. When you click on the link and go to that page, you'll notice you can ask for a 'toxic' list or a 'non-toxic' list, or you can search for individual plants using their search feature. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: ASPCA Toxic and Non-toxic Plants For Dogs