The reason(s) amending of soils in small areas is counterproductive do not vary with the type of soil. Sandy, silty or clay-like, it makes no difference. You do not want to install plants in pockets, strips or zones of one soil texture surrounded by soil of a different texture, as this sets them up for likely problems with how water moves into and out of the soil around their roots. In the case of plants to be left in place for many years (or indefinitely) without lifting and re-planting there is no point in incorporating organic soil texture modification materials (bark, compost, peat...) even if the bed is large enough to minimize or eliminate water movement problems for most of the plants - once the amendments decompose the effects they produce will be lost. Inorganic amendments like perlite and sand do not decompose but enormous amounts of these have to be added to change a heavy soil into a light one. And if too much is added then a droughty and infertile (leaching) situation may be produced, that may be more limiting than a heavy clay-like soil. The most straightforward approach is to choose plants adapted to the existing soil type and plant these in wide, shallow holes dug out of that, loosening it over a wide area beforehand and mulching well afterward. The most satisfactory mulch for woody plants appears to be clean wood chips. If arborist wood chips available nearby tend to have bramble stem sections or other undesirable material mixed in then play chips from a local dealer may be the best bet. Ones we obtain here as cedar play chips are very nice but have become quite pricey, as far as it goes.

Thankyou... I actually care for my neighbors home too...And because I don't always have the time like my yard, God these vines are every where. They are choking their bushes, crawling up their foundation, overtaking their grass, crawling up the fence, and now spreading into my gardens. If you pull up a baby, no roots come up..I will take a pic of them. They grow these weird looking bean pods and they tangle and choke everything they climb on. Now they are mixing in with my honeysuckel vines..ARG

Wild grape and Chinese wisteria growing like MORE than just weeds. Sometimes I think Monmouth County is just one big Chinese Wisteria farm run amok. I hack at them every week or so pulling up underground vines as far back as I can get them up out of the ground but it's a losing battle. Maybe it's because this is my first year gardening so I'm actually noticing but there seems to be more pests of every kind this year...flying, crawling, burrowing, slithering and walking on 4 legs eating everything in their path above and below ground. I even had a Peahen who just began making a weekly appearance start eating my Alyssum which took forever to bloom from seedlings! My own fault because I felt sorry for her and thought she might be hungry. I threw a tiny bit of cracked corn on the ground for her to eat. The way her head whipped around when she heard that corn hit the driveway and how close she let me get to her tells me she belongs at a farm on the other side of a county road outside my father's neighborhood...not a starving wild foundling I need to help survive! She had her corn and my flowers. Didn't respond to yelling and clapping so I had to shoo her away until next time. This is a not-so-funny newbie weed example. My father found some Chinese Forget-Me-Not seeds in his car which were within package date. I sowed them in bare spot at top of driveway just for a little throwaway color. Green starts sprouting and I keep watering seedlings for a few weeks. As I'm cutting back baby vine foliage around seedlings one evening my father tells me they look like weeds. I say, couldn't be...denial. Finally I take a stem and compare it to the weeds I've been pulling out of the Bearded Iris for weeks. Yup...same weeds instead of Chinese-Forget-Me-Nots. It's combination Quack grass & "Nimblewill" far as I can tell. Yank some more and still a bare spot at top of driveway since 4 legged critters ate every single Cosmos seedling I planted there three times. Direct sowed some seeds but birds got them. I have tons of mulch on everything but I have the sinking feeling I'm not going to fully understand the meaning of rampant selfseeding and weed seeds breaking dormancy until NEXT year...LOL. Those cute little kidney shaped leaves I thought were some kind of wild ginger were correctly identified for me by someone on a forum as Garlic Mustard. In Spring I hand pulled them from one side of the house for 7 hours. They'd overwintered as cute little "ginger leaves" and grew into upright weeds with white flowers but I never made the connection. Have to pull and put in garbage because seeds still viable if just dumped in woods or composted. Now it's all over the place moving further and further along although Rutgers Extension weed ID site says it's "not yet a problem in cropping areas." The seed cycle is 5-7 years for eradication! How about the way all these aggressive weeds have destroyed the understory of woods and allowed other weeds to take their place instead of natives? The side of house where I pulled all upright Garlic Mustard is now covered in some other upright weed that's not Pokeweed but I can't identify it. Some other Jersey girl asked for identification on another forum but I don't think it's been identfied yet. Well, since I've been checking forums I've delayed by well over an hour watering all those darn containers that were my alternative to making any more new beds in cement clay and seedlings still needing attention. Besides, I think I've used up my "whoa is me" whining quotient for the day! :)

borderokie, It is my understanding that 2, 4 d is not very effective on trumpet creeper, but I wanted to go and see if I could find some research that supported that belief. I found research that does, indeed, support it and have linked that research below. Unfortunately in the study referenced in this report, there is no data available on whether or not Tordon killed trumpet creeper, so I guess they didn't test that herbicide on that plant. One problem with 2, 4 d is that it has been around a long time and research has shown that many plant species develop a resistance to, or tolerance of, specific herbicides when they are used in a widespread manner over a period of many years. The chemical industry keeps coming up with new herbicides or they tweak the formulas of the existing ones because of the way plants become almost immune to the older ones. Another issue with some herbicides in recent years is that some newer forumulations have esters that are more volatile and therefore travel more readily through the air when sprayed and kill plants far from their intended target plants. The formulations that have amines instead of esters are not as volatile in the air and do not cause such severe issues with herbicide drift. However, the amine formulations are less effective than the ester formulations. I have had trouble in some years with herbicide drift damaging and killing vegetable garden plants when nearby pastures are sprayed with a herbicide. That is frustrating, but I don't say anything to the ranchers whose herbicides likely harmed my plants. I just cringe when I see them spraying and I then cross my fingers and hope the wind is carrying the herbicide in some other direction and not towards my garden. It hasn't happened in several years now, so maybe they have switched from an ester product to an amine one. Jenny, I am glad I am not the only one who loves these invasive plants. If I lived in some places, like in the southeastern USA where they are horribly invasive on a scale we likely cannot imagine here, I likely wouldn't love them and grow them. However, we have enough recurring drought, normally dry summers and enough cold winter temperatures that I think they are somewhat less invasive here. My trumpet creepers that grow on the driveway arbor down by the mail box almost died in 2011 and I wasn't sure if they'd survive, but they did. I adore jasmine, lilacs and honeysuckle too, but of those three, I only have coral honeysuckle at this time. Jasmine tends to freeze out here in an extra-cold winter and the lilacs are fine until we have a long, cold winter/spring and then they die in perpetually wet clay soil. Now that I have a garden plot out back of the barn that has well-drained sandy soil, I may plant lilac again. I agree about using planting as a way to reduce mowing. After we first moved here, we had to mow about 4 acres of open land in order to keep the grassland areas short for both fire protection and to keep the snake population down. We are in our 15th year here, and every year we have less and less to mow. We now mow about an acre less than we did back then. I hope to just keep planting and planting until we have even less to mow. My other strategy was to get rid of bermuda grass by shading it out. Our trees and shrubs have gotten big enough now that we are seeing the bermuda grass start to recede in the increasingly shady yard. As an area gets too shady for bermuda, I am replacing grass with low-growing shrubs, shade-loving perennials and ground covers. My hope is that by the time Tim retires in a few more years, he'll have something to look forward to beyond mowing a huge lawn and pasture area twice a week. I guess I should stop calling it a pasture and start calling it a meadow because no domestic animals have been pastured on it since we moved here. Down south of Thackerville, there is a home where they have trumpet creeper growing on a barbed wire fence that separates their yard from the adjacent pasture. I 'd guess it is growing on a fence about 100' long. I think it looks pretty all the time, but when it is in bloom, it is truly spectacular. I've long thought about growing it on our barbed wire fence line that runs along our south property line, though I've never taken the plunge and planted it there. Most of the 'trash trees' I've planted, like the mimosa and chinaberry, were planted because (a) we had them in our yard when I was a kid so they are sentimental favorites, and (b) the wildlife love their flowers. Sometimes there are plants that you just have to grow because growing them makes you happy. At our house, the trash trees, wisteria and trumpet creeper plants are in that category for me. I even love pink evening primrose despite its invasiveness. It looks so pretty when it is in bloom,though I do try to keep it away from the vegetable garden. The challenge here is that most of our soil is dense, red clay and the plants that will tolerate wet, heavily-saturated clay in very wet years often won't survive hard-as-a-rock dry clay in very dry years, and vice versa. So, when I find a plant that tolerates the clay in both extremes, I grow it and I learn to love it. Trumpet creeper is one of a handful of really persistent plants in the category that I describe in this way: "it won't die and you can't kill it'. That's why I love it so here, on our property, where the wildly fluctuating moisure levels and temperatures can be so hard on wimpier plants. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: Herbicide Research on Specific Weeds