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Hello Nevermore, I'm interested in Digitalis hardy zone 5 and Echinacea's. Thank you for the generous offer! Where shall I send the postage?

I did a search on your name, and found your other posts. You offered these on Feb 11th in Heirlooms, then on Feb 21 you crossposted here in Beans, a few minutes later inVegetables, and a few minutes later in Homesteading. Here are the urls http://forums.gardenweb.com/forums/load/heirloom/msg0216275920164.html http://forums.gardenweb.com/forums/load/legumes/msg0215305926495.html http://forums2.gardenweb.com/forums/load/cornucop/msg021537461293.html http://forums.gardenweb.com/forums/load/homest/msg021543528306.html Gardenweb does not like crossposting. You could get your account suspended for that. Meanwhile in each post where you did get interested replies, everyone wanted to know what varieties. You did not answer any of these interested people. You could have had several trades by now if you had answered. You say you don't have time, well, if you don't have time to list the varieties once in any one of your four posts, or in your trade list, from which you could cut and paste in future, are we to believe that if we email you, you will have the time to type the varieties out individually in each email? Or should we just send you cash and take whatever we might get in the mail? Would you have the time to deal with the trade if you don't have time to list varieties? It does take some effort, you know. Answering emails, checking that everyone gets what they want, waterproof crushproof packaging, weighing, mailing, checking back later to make sure it arrived, followup thank you notes, etc. Will you have the time for all this if you don't have time to type out the varieties? Why should anyone send money if they don't know what they will get? Has anyone actually traded with you yet? If so, could they post how that went and what they got, since Farmfreedom will not list varieties? Could you identify any varieties once you got them? Did anything germinate? Farmfreedom, you say these are 4 years old. Did you conduct any germination tests? Do you still have the varieties separately stored and named, or do you have them all poured together into a jar, with no hope of naming them? Is that the problem, that you can't name them? Can you say at least that they have been stored in dry conditions? Even if that were the case, you might still get some adventurous traders, but I think you will not get any traders unless you are honest with them, and tell them what you have! Really looks to me as if you just let time and money get away from you, and now want others to spend time, money and effort to help you, with a minimum effort on your part, like in your posts where you were looking for cheap land. I'm not even saying that is wrong, just that if you made the effort to list varieties on your tradelist and reply to people, not to mention put your email into your profile instead of into your post where it can be harvested by spambots, you might have already made several trades by now. I really am just trying to help. Actions speak louder than words. Already I've typed and researched probably more than you would if you listed your varieties, and I get nothing from it. So, you do your part, too.

OK, y'all, this thread is so active I can hardy keep up, but I am going to try. Melissa, We are so glad you stumbled across this forum too. Containers are a great way to garden but they do require very careful attention to watering. Also, the soilless mix to fill them is expensive (often, when filling up my containers, I mix up my own soilless mix for far less than I'd spend buying a name brand soil-less mix/potting soil). The size/productivity of your plants is limited by the size of your container so for most things, the larger the container, the better. Also, during periods of hotter weather, containers may need to be watered daily and in the hottest 100-degree-plus weather, perhaps twice a day. The easiest way is to hook up a drip irrigation system and put it on a timer, especially if you are away from home a lot. Container gardening could be a whole thread in itself. I'll start a container gardening thread today or tomorrow and try to lay out some of the basics. Containers do not have to be fancy containers though....I use Tidy Cat litter buckets, which I have saved and used the whole decade-plus that we've lived here, and I spray paint them dark green using Fusion paint made especially for painting plastics. I also use Sunleaves grow bags. With clay soil, it takes years of constant amending to get it into really good shape. In the past I have only expanded my garden a little at a time....by adding an area maybe 40 to 60 feet long by 5 to 6 feet wide. Gumbo clay needs all the help it can get but it can be turned into great soil over a period of time. Our formerly red clay in the garden area is now a nice brown clayey loam because we've added organic matter to it for ten years, so I finally feel ready to start another garden spot....in three different places. However, they all will get fairly minimal improvement this winter (because I'm going to be working on 3 fairly large areas at once) and then every year I'll improve them more until they finally have pretty good soil. With clay the issue is that the particles of soil stick together and the prevents water from soaking in as well as it should, it also ensures that when the soil dries it is as hard and impenetrable as concrete so water just rolls off the surface and doesn't soak in, and it makes it hard for plant roots to grow. Technically, plant roots do not grow in soil. Rather, they grow in the air spaces between soil particles. Clay soil particles clump together so tightly that there are no air spaces for roots to grow in, and that's why we have to add tons of organic matter....to break up the particles of gumbo clay. The reason raised beds work so well with clay is that they put your plant roots in improved soil above the regular grade of the surrounding area. That allows water to drain down out of the beds to a certain extent. When 12.4 inches of rain fell here at our house in one day last year, I expected to lose my entire garden. You cannot expect ANY vegetable plant to survive that kind of flooding rainfall in clay soil. What did I lose? Only some onions and potatoes and a few corn plants that were not in a raised bed. Had I not had raised beds, I would have lost everything. George, We get more of the bermuda grass out by hand tools too, but in certain areas the ground is so clayey that we have to break it first with a tiller. When we do that, I rake out/remove by hand all the grass runners and stolons I can afterward, but it is hard to get a lot of it because it has been chopped into tiny pieces. Eventually, over several years time, I mostly win the bermuda war. Melissa, For hand tools, buy the absolute highest quality tools you can find and you'll never regret it. A high quality hand tool is a thing of beauty! Jay, I have bindweed in two places here and despite everything I do, it seems impossible to erradicate. Some years it isn't as bad, and this was one of those years....or maybe I am gradually winning the war. I hate bindweed as much as I hate bermuda grass and Johnson grass. Carol, I love containers and have found them to be lifesavers in very wet years like 2007. None of the plants I have in containers come close to approaching the size/productivity those same varieties achieve in the ground, but they do well enough to satisfy me. This year, there were several tomatoes that produced exceptionally well in feed tubs....including Chocolate Stripes, Momotaro and Scarlet Red. I wish I had 100 more feed tubs (I only have six). Y'all, I have to agree that no one looks the way I pictured them but.....I am going to stay on everybody's good side by saying that every person I met at the swap that I had not met before was younger, thinner and prettier than I had imagined. The one thing I already knew though was that every one one of them had a big heart of gold beating there in their chest and that was confirmed when I met them. Dawn