I can't say much about the long term since I've only been living in this house for a couple years but I'm strongly with the "the heck with em" camp about pests and diseases. I do try to rotate my gardens around (not planting the same thing in the same spot all the time with annuals.) I am very firmly against buying bagged dirt, Just costs way too much. I do get mushroom compost when I can and I have used the free compost from the county too (ya just gotta watch out for glass in it.) We collect most of the neighborhood bagged leaves and grass clippings for the gardens and compost. We ask tree services working in the area if they need a place to dump the chips they can do it at our house. We compost and have a worm farm. I figure the more biologically active I can make the soil, the less likely the negative stuff can out compete and proliferate. About the only things I've sprayed as pesticides or whatnot, were thruicide, organocide, and neem. My biggest problem seems to be potassium deficiency. I spray with maxicrop but that gets costly when I have most of my yard growing squash, pumpkins, zucchini and cucumbers that are all asking for more potassium (powdery mildew tends to attack those plants when they are weak on potassium.) Anyway, most of my gardens started as "lasagna gardens" with cardboard and mulch and mushroom compost. We don't till though occasionally we will for or spade through a bed after harvest to try to get rid of most of the annoying grasses. I can't really see replacing soil though if a particular bed or area seemed to get "toxic" I would probably knock it down and leave it fallow if I couldn't find something that wanted to grow there as a cover crop. I only add organic matter. I don't buy "top soil" or even "sand". I don't even buy bagged potting mix anymore. I just make a mix of old garden or potting soil mixed with new mushroom compost, other compost, some home mixed organic fertilizer and worm castings and call it new potting mix. I figure the more composted stuff around, the better everything will be inoculated to the possible diseases. I can't say for certain the long term effects of my methods as they have only been going on a couple years but I seem to be doing well so far. Here is a link that might be useful: TCLynx

it will redirect you and will take you to one of the sites that is auto installing the various versions of antivirus xp 2008/2009 or what ever they happen to be naming them, which are carrying many types of infections with it. This has gotten so prevalent now that the bad guys have discovered this method of taking over websites that everyone is trying to put out warnings to the community to try to make people aware if they see this suddenly happening to them NOT to click on any of the redirected pages, Not to buy any of the fake programs, but instead to immediately close out all instances of the browser, in some cases that will flush the urls out of the clipboard but not always in some it takes a reboot of the pc to clear the urls from the clipboard from what I have read. The best thing you can do is be very careful where you surf and where you click. If you use firefox you can use the no script add-on set as shown. The forums have been seeing many many cases of these exploits and several got them from very legit websites that had been hacked and a redirect put on the site. gillian don't panic about it but it is something we all need to be very aware of since it has been so on the increase. Hopefully adobe and the browsers can get some method out to help with this soon. It is better to be aware of this kind of thing so we know to come for help asap if we know we have been exposed to one of the redirects. If you see anything pop up saying it is scanning your pc and that you have infections or anything like that do NOT click anywhere on the page, close the browser or just go to start and reboot it. From what I have read the earlier versions of firefox are also affected. Also it is a good idea to go to your pc to your adobe and check for updates. You can also use the secunia inspector to see if it shows you have out of date programs. Updates should hopefully come out soon. The Secunia Online Software Inspector I just wanted to post so y'all would be aware of this stuff, don't freak out, just be alert. Always better to be prepared and educated than caught off guard.

~bump~ Hmmmm....the 156th post....did they remove the 150 limit??

bump! ready to post some pictures, woohoo!