Lind, I'm pretty sensitive to drainage because I've lost so many trees to it. A few years ago I got tired of pulling out dead trees, so I installed a field tile in most of the orchard area. It drains a lot of sub-surface water into a neighbor's pond. The tile stopped trees from dying but many trees still weren't thriving, so I've been slowly converting more trees to mounds. It's just what I have to do here. When I pull one out, I build a mound if I plan to go back w/ a peach. In my area, which may be different from MD, the soil stays wet from about Nov. thru June of the following year. It's the months of April, May, and June that the soggy soil does the trees in. In the past I've made my mounds out of regular native soil because it's free. This has worked very well for me. Below is an old photo I took this Spring. The tree directly to the left of my son was just starting it's second leaf/year. The tree in the mound on the right was also starting it's second leaf. However, the one on the right was not in a mound the first year and suffered stunting. So last fall, I dug it out, built a mound, and replanted. This picture was taken before either tree had put on any appreciable second leaf shoot growth. Both trees were the same size at purchase (bout 3/4"). My other trees in mounds perform similarly. Lately, I'm running out of places to dig, so I've been experimenting using wood chips as a base and putting soil on top as the growing medium. By the textbooks, this is a no no. But like I say, this is an experiment. This week I just got through building 10 more mounds for more trees. Rented a Dingo to build the mounds. Have 18 peach trees coming for next season, and have a mound for every one.

To eliminate it your going to need to correctly identify it. Once you have a correct ID you'll be able to use/apply any of dozens of amendments to resolve your issue. You might be surprised at how easy this issue might be resolved, but first I'd suggest taking small soil samples over a grid of your area (about 18" deep), mixing them together and sending it to a lab for a breakdown. Then you'll "Know" whats in your soils and whats lacking or needed. Find some of your "white stuff" and send it to a lab for ID. Lab cost aren't that much and worth the expense, they cost around $50.00 to $60.00 here.

Hi Emily, Before I tell you how large our place is, I want you to promise me that you will stay calm and NOT hyperventilate. OK? It is going to sound like a 'gardener's dream' but most of the time it is a 'gardener's nightmare'! We are in a very, very rural area on a piece of land that was part of a farm until about the mid-70s. After that, the land was left fallow although it was leased out for cattle grazing. During that time, no one was keeping the land cleared out, so most of it reverted to cedar trees and obnoxious brush like greenbrier and poison ivy and 'trash trees' like hackberry, ash, elms, etc. I love all trees but the trash trees are weak and short-lived and are continually sick, sickly looking, rotting, dying and crashing down. Since purchasing this property we have spent thousands of hours and lots of $$$ on relatively inexpensive hand-held equipment like chain saws and multipurpose weedeaters that have steel cutting blades, trying to clear away the trash trees and brush. The greenbrier and poison ivy are still with us and always will be, although we work hard to keep it away from our cultivated areas and the pathways cut through the wild areas. If I had it to do over again, I would have bought a smaller piece of property. Actually, we were looking for a 3- to 5-acre plot of land, figuring that would give me more than enough room to play in the dirt. What we ended up with was 14.4 acres, which is enough to keep me constantly exhausted, and I don't even venture onto the 10 wooded acres that much. The land is beautiful. Our woods are gorgeous and remind my husband of Pennsylvania, where he grew up. We have ponds, springs, creeks and a swamp. The wildlife is amazingly abundant, which is good and bad. Our land is creek bottom land, so parts of it are lower lying than the land on two sides of us, which causes water to drain UNDERGROUND for weeks after a heavy rain and keeps us pretty wet and soggy for quite some time. Our house is on the highest part of the land, and we are not in an area prone to flooding, but my raised bed veggie garden some distance away from the house and on lower-lying land does have drainage issues. With this year's rain, those drainage issues have been quite apparent. Don't get me wrong. I love this place. I love every inch of the woods and all the beautiful native understory plants. I love the open pastures which, since they aren't used for cattle any more, aren't really pastures anymore. I guess I should call them meadows. I love the wildflowers and the wildlife. It is a maintenance nightmare though. Just mowing and weeedeating the approximate 4.4 acres that aren't wooded takes me a couple of days if the weather is dry and on my side. If it is continually wet, I often have to mow waist high grass with a wheeled weedeater (similar to a DR Field and Brush Mower) and then come back and redo it with the lawn tractor or a push mower. Weedeating takes forever. The bermuda grass we have was probably planted for haying many years before we bought the place. I know that I NEVER would have planted it. I spend untold hours trying to get rid of that bermuda grass because it is invasive and creeps into every cultivated bed we have. It is my dream to one day get rid of all the bermuda. Little by little, I am succeeding, but it will take me another decade at the rate I am going. We try to be good stewards of the land, removing overgrown invasive species and encouraging the good native ones. So far we have removed ALL the cedar from the 4.4 acres of open land, and now must start removing it from the wooded areas. We only work in the wooded areas in the winter when the copperheads, water moccasins and rattlesnakes are hibernating. I have learned so much about the soil, the plants and the wildlife since we moved here. I don't regret that we bought this place and I do, in fact, want for us to spend the rest of our lives here. However, I have had to accept that most of it will NEVER look the way I want it to, and instead focus on the land closest to the house and just try to keep it under control. Because it takes so long and is so hard to improve the soil on ever a very small piece of land, I have had to accept that most of what I grow will be plants that have to grow in red clay soil that is low in organic matter, holds tons of water when it does rain, and dries concrete-hard and cracks wide open when it doesn't rain. THAT is the reason I have had to learn so much about what does, does not, will or will not grow in clay soil. So, when looking for land, it is important to think about your life many years down the road. Do you still want to be mowing and maintaining several acres when you are 50, 60, 70 or 80 years old? Do you have to have everything look 'just so' or can you live with the overgrown woodland and wildflower-filled meadows that don't get mowed very often? Are you OK with tons of wildlife, including poisonous snakes and lots of predators like bobcats, foxes, raccoons, skunks, coyotes, panthers and cougars? If not, rural to semi-rural acreage might not be your best choice. I know I have sounded pretty negative, but I just want to give a realistic picture of what it is like to try to tame wild, relatively untamed land WITHOUT hiring someone with a bulldozer to come in and knock everything down, detroying decades-old trees and all the lovely wildlife habitat in the process. And, if hiring a bulldozer guy sounds easy and relatively cheap, think again. We have neighbors who hired a guy to clear and regrade their land and he spent most of TWO YEARS working on that, especially with regard to drainage issues. I know that I have made this whole thing much harder on myself than I had to because I have insisted on doing everything as organically as possible, so we don't use herbicides like Round-up or broadleaved weedkillers containing chemicals like atrazine or 2, 4 D. I simply refuse to poison the land. I work hard to save native plants, and work even harder to remove invasive ones, especially invasive grasses like Johnson Grass. It is worth it all to live here though. We have a beautiful place filled with all kinds of desirable wildlife like birds, butterflies, dragonflies, turtles, toads, frogs, skinks, lizards, salamanders, bunnies, etc., etc., etc. We have gorgeous sunrises and sunsets. We have a nice little 2-story Victorian house with wrap-around porches and a huge barn-style garage complete with a weather vane and cupola. We have the absolute best neighbors in the world on all sides of us and the people in our part of Love County are the nicest, kindest, most loving and giving people you will ever meet. I love it here. I suspect I would love it a lot more if we had only 4 acres, though, instead of 14. The moral of this story....be careful what you wish for! I truly love living here, but it ain't easy!!! Happy Growing!! Dawn

The best time to move a rosebush is in late winter or early spring, preferably while it is still dormant, but I think we're early enough in spring that you still can move it now. First, I'd take the cuttings and start rooting them so you have them for insurance in case it doesn't survive being transplanted. Then, prepare the hole ahead of time and have a 50/50 mix of soil and compost mixed up and ready to use to backfill the hole after you place the rose bush in it. Try to dig up the root ball as intact as possible. I wouldn't trim the roots as they are being disturbed enough already. However, after the bush is replanted in prepared ground, you need to prune off 50% of the topgrowth. This is done to reduce how much topgrowth the bush must support as it recovers from being transplanted. The failure to cut back the bush by half could result in a serious enough case of transplant shock that the plant might not survive, so please don't skip this step. If you had started several months ago, you could have done a form of room pruning monthly while the rose was still in the ground. (You would have done this by using a sharp spade to cut a circle in the ground around the root ball, thereby severing some far-reaching roots in the process.) This would have helped prepare the rose for transplanting, but now that the bush is putting out new growth, you really don't have the luxury of having enough time to do that now since the hot season is fast approaching. Have you ever transplanted an established rose bush before? In case you haven't, I will find a page that describes how to do it and will link it below. It really isn't hard at all. I brought three favorite rose bushes with me when we moved here in 1999 and they still are alive and doing just fine. They were between 10 and 15 years old when I dug them up and moved them here. Maryanne must have been very special to all of you and I hope your plan to save that special rosebush and to raise new plants from cuttings in order to share them with everyone works out. Do you happen to know the variety name of the rose or if it is either an own-root rose or a grafted type of rose? Here's a link where P. Allen Smith describes how to move a Knockout Rose. His method should work for any rose, though not all rose varieties are as tough as knockouts. P Allen Smith: Transplanting A Knockout Rose Be sure to keep the soil/compost around the transplanted rose moist (but never soggy) for the next few months. You might see some wilting to indicate transplant shock, but if you keep the soil moist, the transplant shock should not lead to plant death. Letting the rose get too dry on top of it having transplant shock could result in plant death. Good luck, Dawn