No, I don't do things the way everyone esle does. Everyone else buries their waterlines below the frost line. I run mine flush into the sod. This is easy to install, easy to modify, easy to fix. Most other people use PVC pipe. After looking at the environomental impact of PVC, I avoid it whenever possible. I use black poly pipe and by preference glass filled nylon joints. Most other nurseries keep bare earth. I keep mowed pasture. I use almost no herbicide, and zero pesticide, depending on the birds and predatory bugs to work for me. Most other nurseries put all of each kind of egg in one basket. E.g. a big one to the south of me has a quarter section of just shubert chokecherries. I try to have no more than a few hundred of anything together. This means that a bunch of mice who develop a taste for scots pine bark stop at the blue spruce boundary. As far as I know I'm the only guy in Alberta to raise trees entirely in containers. Means I can put a MUCH larger tree in a pot than the guys with field trees. (A 5 foot larch does quite well in a #2 pot.) I overwinter my pots above ground -- results are species dependent. Spruce do well if packed close together, willows are fine. White pine is unhappy. I'm moving to Pot in Pail. Rather than buy a socket pot -- with holes that line up with the liner pot, I salvage pails from the dump, clean them, and put holes in them that DONT line ukp with the liner pot. A #5 trade pot fits nicely inside. It takes me about 30 seconds each per pot to remove the lid, clean it, drill holes in it. So with farting around call it 30 pails an hour. Given that good #7 pots cost several dollars each this is good return on my time. (Right now the biggest issue is finding the pails) Rather than spend 30K per acre, putting in fancy drainage I chose a patch of land that has very sandy subsoil. A hole filled with water drains in 10 minutes. I mark the hole locations with survey paint, and hire a high school kid to auger holes in. He can set about 25 pails per hour. Works out to about 50 cents. So a row of 100 pots costs me 50 bucks of hired kid, 3 hours wear on my groundhog, 2 hours of my time processing the pots (also kid labour possible) and the time to scrounge 100 pails (typically an afternoon.) Every one else runs their greenhouse north-south. I plan to make mine east-west. Everyone else makes a separate head house. I plan to put an insulated wall 1/3 of the width from the north side. Paint it white. In spring here the sun is fairly low. (Its 36 degrees up at noon on spring solstice) So bedding plants tend to lean to the south. With a white north wall, I should be able to even out the illumination considerably, at the cost of 1/3 of the floor space. Insulate the north side too. Gives me a triangular space 1/3 W by L with a height ranging from 12 feet at the wall down to the bottom of the greenhouse wall. This space will be mostly filled with water barrels -- about 180 for a 60 x 30 house. 3 per foot of length The exhaust fans will pull air from the peak and run through the barrels, and exit the bottom of the triangular space. At night, the air goes back to the green house under the benches. I figure I can heat a greenhouse down to about -15 C in March for the price of running fans. Math: A double poly greenhouse averages R1 per square foot of floor space. If I want to maintain 50 F temps inside, I have roughly a 50 degree differential. So a 1 foot slice of greenhouse 20 feet wide has 20 square feet of floor space, which will take 20*50 = 1000 BTU/hour to heat. Or about 12000 btu for a night. For the sake of making numbers simple, increase that to 15000 3 barrels of water is 1500 lbs of water. So I have to raise the temp of the water by 10 F to have enough heat. Air has about the 40% thermal energy as water -- per pound. Air at the top of the peak is typically 20-30 degrees warmer than the ground level when the air doesn't circulate Daytime green house temps run about 70-75, so peak temps are about 100. To get 15000 btu, assuming only 30% efficiency in heating the barrels, I have to move 40000 lbs of 100 degree air to get a 10 degree rise. Air is about an ounce per cubic foot, so 40,000 lbs of air is about 640,000 cubic feet. At 8000 cfm that's about 80 minutes. Given that the bulk of the heating will happen in 3-5 hours in mid day, this is a comfortable margin.

Effectiveness of diatomaceous earth against earthworms, if any, is at best transient. Probably a waste of good money. Most earthworms prefer soils of neutral to slightly acidic pH (6.0-9.0), although some prefer more acidic conditions. As I understand it, mosses prefer growing on firmly packed acidic soils with a pH between 5.0 and 5.5. Perhaps you can make a moss garden less attractive by creating an "island" of more acidic soil, optimum for mosses but less so for earthworms. However, acidiying the soil for the mosses/earthworms may be detrimental to other plants in that spot (e.g., the tree your mosses are growing under). There are no magic bullets. Gathering earthworms by hand and removing them, poisoning them, etc., is going to be a lot of work/expensive with no result in the long run. If the environment is desirable for the worms, their population will grow to the sites carrying capacity. If you can modify the environment so it is less desirable for earthworms but good for what you are trying to grow, then you have a chance. If you are in the northeast, the worms you may be struggling with aren't the introduced european lumbricids, but asian earthworms. These are very different beasts. They overwinter in the northeast as eggs that hatch out in the spring, develop to maturity and die in the winter. You can recognize them by having the clitellum (the swollen ring of segments on adults) further forward than on lumbricids, and they are EXTREMELY active -- they can flip right out of your hand if you pick them up. They tend not to burrow into the mineral soil, but burrow through and decompose the organic/litter layer. In Pennsylvania, there are reports of them hurting nursery operations by getting into containers of perennial plants and literally eating up the soilless potting media. No know solution.

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