Wow - Willow what a great price for Vermiculite! And I've been buying the skimpy bags at the garden centers for the same price. Thanx for the tip! I love all my fresh compost too - Yesterday I turned 2 big piles and started a new one. The last 2 I dug in and spread around was a marvelous experience! I bet a health study would show positive benefit form inhaling fresh compost aroma. Preparing soil today - for planting my *first-ever* FOUR Dahlia beds - with Tubers sent by Poochella! This is so exciting. Quite a few are showing sprouts already - so I'm really eager to get 'em in the ground. I'm mixing soft crumbly peat (NO gukky clumps) into mixed sterile steer compost today - that looks and feels really good: dark with light texture, so I couldn't resist mulching a bunch of transplants with it - so i needed to make even more. Then will dig that in this week - to new lasagna beds that were turned under in last few weeks, after having been covered with cardboard, coffee-grounds & mounded leaves all winter. The lasagna soil gets broken up to a crumbly state, then a spade of fresh home-made compost goes in - with the steer-peat mix for each wide planting hole - mixed well into the origional average dirt that formerly hosted grass. Then planting time - will be irresistable - Should I wait for planting till I buy more Perlite - (or that vermiculite) or is the 1/3 peat, 1/3 dirt, with the 2 kinds of compost mix good enough to keep soil both light and free from baking/compacting in summer? I'm leaning toward adding perlite or vermiculite first - so tubers can form more easily for sharing. (In Oregon it gets VERY wet sometimes, and also so HOT that the ground can bake into near concrete...) Besides STAKES, Can you think of anything else that should be added for better bloom, stronger stems, disease resistance, etc? For Powdery Mildew prevention - I am considering using an early Comfrey foliar spray. And I've realized realize I've got borage in the garden - not comfrey - and I bet that would work *equally* well - but to my knowledge has not been thru the formal studies. Any opinion/experience? I'm SO ready to go on this! I sorted alot of tubers into groups today and added the individual markers to each set so none get lost once planted. I plan to add groups if some mystery glads, Lucifer Crocosmia, and Canary Yellow Crocosmia (also from Poochella), with Liatris (the spiky Purple GayFeather) to the beds for foliage contrast, near existing Roses and Peonies that have nice bronzy leaves. I expect to remove lower leaves from most Dahlias - and I don't really want their bare legs to show. So on borders I'll also plant some smaller flowers and add contrasting foliage plants. Who needs grass in the Front yard anyway?! Mine will be reduced nearly to just a wide path for flower-bed access. I'm mulling how to best do the watering - I think by hand, slow with an aerating wand on the hose, so I can watch everything develop and spot weeds before they compete. Another quick question - I have a free source for Hemlock Bark Dust, that I'm thinking of using it in front just as an edge between grass and the Flowers. Is this OK? I assume Hemlock is too acidic to use more widely as mulch. In back it's being used just for soft walking paths in full sun areas where grass does not do well and only weeds (and my cookng Amaranth) tend to flourish. I look forward to finished planting, & seeing pix of everyone's gardens! Thanx so much for sharing info - I've learned alot already.

Yep, that's the same info I have read before, celticgarden. Definitely going to try Hidcote this year in pots, and maybe even try to overwinter them indoors . I'm still working on incorporating more flowers into my potager plans--so far I've given up a few precious veggie square feet to Roman Chamomile (said to be a great pest deterrent, we'll see!), plenty of marigolds of course, and some nasturtiums. I think the rest of the space in my raised beds will be used for true edibles though, from herbs to veg, asparagus (own bed) and strawberries (own bed). The rest of my flowers are going to end up going directly in-ground in several places, with a few in pots for some height and added interest. I kind of feel like I need more color, but then again I am planting a bunch of interestingly colored edibles...purple queen bush beans, a few different peppers, 4 types of heirloom tomatoes of different colors, both red and green cabbages in a checkerboard, several colored mesclun green mixes including an all-red one I'm really excited about (Valentine), and of course the lovely textures and colors of an all-herb bed.

What else... Rainfall. How much over the whole of the year, and when in the year. How much mist? How high are you above sea level? Does your property face the sun (South, for you) or are you shaded by hills, buildings, whatever, and don't see the sun until later in the day? Does the frost take it's time about melting, even when it's sunny? When is your first/last frost of significance (the one that terminates the tomatoes or mushies the young bean plants)? Is your soil acid, or alkaline or neutral? 6,5,4 is tending acid. 8,9 is tending alkaline. 6.5-7.5 is around the neutral range. You can buy a home test kit from your garden centre or farmers' supply depot. With maples and cherries, I'd guess at moderately acid - especially if you have pines and native rhododendrons in your woods/bush. How deep is the topsoil, and does it dry out over the summer? Do you have boggy patches in the woods, or is it mostly well-drained after the heavy rains? How dense are the roots in the area where you might want to have planting pockets for treasures? And what sort of shade??? Do the trees cast shadows sprinkled with patches of light on a sunny day? (Dappled light.) Or does it look as gloomy as a winter day when you go in on a summer's day? (Dense shade) Dry shade is the sort of thing you get on the north side of the house under the eaves. Rarely gets natural moisture. A useful zone for drying out bulbs over summer, but can be a gardening challenge. Hope that's helped a bit.

Thanks for the tips. I thought it was going to be a bigger chore, but it turned out not to be too bad. We had a warm week last week so I decided to try and tackle it early. At first it was tough to empty the bags until I realized the soil was still mostly frozen. Waited a few more days for the warm temps to do their thing and gave it another try, then it was pretty easy. Dumped 2-3 at a time into a trash can, broke it all up with a pitchfork, moistened with water, added some amendments, picked out the biggest chunks of stems/roots, and it looked like new. Still a lot of fine roots (they were tomato and pepper plants) but I assume those are OK. My mix was 4-4-1 peat-compost-perlite. Still reasonably fluffy once I got it all refreshed. The compost was good quality variety in bulk from a local landscape yard. Much cheaper that way. I don't have a truck, but I have an SUV that fits 32 gallon trash cans which is a great way to buy bulk if you don't have a truck. Fortunately no gophers around here. Rabbits though. But I do have the grow area fences off with rabbit fencing.