Soil building is so simple from the stated facts of this basic perceived problem. Here are the steps to a beautiful garden while working with the soil you have in place. To go out and purchase soil is a craps shoot. You might be better off just working with what you have been given. When working the patch surely remove debris when you find it. I am still following this advise after thirty years of gardening in the same patch. The last treasure was a 1940's ink bottle that was a common school desk use item. Not to many years ago we found a glass insulator. Think in terms of adding lots of manure, three or four inches if possible, leaves and a cover crop every fall for the first three years. Think in terms of adding a bit more manure in the very early spring. The poorer your soil the better the use of Mycorrhizae will help you build the patch. Use low number organic fertilizer like 4-2-4. Add one of the trace mineral products: Green Sand, granite dust, lime or Ironite. Shoot for a PH of 6.5 to 7.0. Lots of good gardens grow nicely with a PH between 5.5 and 6.5. Don't get to wizzed up with numbers. You will get to the right place if you continue building as suggested. I cringe when I see compost advertised for sale. I feel it is better to go into soil building and avoid compost you do not know and can only know what someone tells you anyway. One exception......a local nursery well trusted can usually be trusted to have what they advertise. If there is a garden club in your village join it and ask for help and opinion on sources in your community. Mushroom waste is a good additive. It is often called compost which it certainly is not. It is most often over half rotted sawdust and half decomposed horse manure. Allmost anyone can be a soil builder supreme doing just these few simple steps. I started out thirty years ago on this property. At that time two five gallon buckets full of manure was all I could haul in the trunk of the car. We found plastic bag liners for the buckets. No car stinch! Then one day the lady with the horse stable sent her husband to my patch with a huge truck load. That was the begining of some serious soil building. What triggered that was an apple pie my wife made for them. It is important to work on realtionships. I hope this gives you a little different perspective. I have practiced what I preach. Lot of poopers. LOL

What most amateurs and seemingly all sales people fail to recognize is that in the built environment there is a dangerous accelerating convergence of decreased ventilation due to the rising cost of energy, increased use of composite materials due to the rising cost of natural materials (and their maintenance), and a staggering increase in DIY homeowners due to the ease of access to information over the internet and the traditional I-can-do-it attitude of Americans. The resulting profit opportunities for manufacturers is incredible. It is possible to find seemingly credible evidence to support any opinion you might wish to propose and there is always someone ready and willing to sell any material to you with the click of a link even if it's sale and use is restricted by law in your state. 50 years ago it was possible to ask the clerk at the local lumberyard for advice and build a house yourself without agonizing about the materials. Just as Thalidomide forever changed how we think about drugs, formaldehyde changed how we think about building materials although no one seems to be old enough to remember either of them anymore so we may be forced to learn the lesson all over again. The health risk of formaldehyde should not be dismissed with specious philosophical arguments. The environmental danger to your health that you face outside your home does not justify increasing the risk in your home where exposure is considerably longer and more intimate. And it is ridiculous to suggest the risks are similar. The concentration of formaldehyde in a typical home is about 5 times that of the outdoor air and in a home with elevated levels of formaldehyde it can be 20 to 60 times greater. My advice is if you have no long term and/or direct experience with these environmental health issues and/or feel confused by internet and retail sales hype, you should add a heat recovery ventilation system to your house for the protection of your current and future children as well as your grandchildren. I put one of them in every house I design and so far no one has deleted it. If you wish to play the priority game you should first not allow cigarette smoking in you home. Then avoid any baby crib that contains composite materials and check the formaldehyde content of any carpet in the nursery as well as toys, especially the stuffed ones. Cost should not be an issue for children. Next consider where older children sleep, and where they are subjected to poor ventilation especially near unvented gas appliances. Then apply this test to where adults sleep, then where they watch television or work at home. I wouldn't worry about plywood in kitchen cabinets but I would avoid too much particle board. However, it is considerably easier to ventilate a kitchen than a bedroom and it is unlikely to be occupied as much as a bedroom. Of course, lifestyles have also changed and kitchens are sometimes part of other living spaces so use your own judgment about time of exposure. Be especially careful about materials used in basement recreational areas because there is rarely enough ventilation in these spaces and the materials used to finish them are often the cheaper composite ones. Be careful about laminate and engineered flooring and avoid acid-catalyzed urea-formaldehyde factory coatings. Look for the higher European standard E0 stamp or the even higher E1 stamp. Buy particleboard or hardwood plywood stamped with the Composite Panel Association (CPA) or Hardwood Plywood and Veneer Association (HPVA) stamp. Look for PF and MDI resins instead of UF resins. The CPA standards are not as strict as the California standards which are not as strict as the Japanese and European standards which should be no surprise to anyone. Avoid the use of particle board as a flooring underlayment or subfloor. These issues are automatically dealt with in professionally designed homes through standardized written specifications. If you are selecting materials "by the seat of your pants" you're going to have to research each material, ask a lot of questions, and be prepared for evasive misleading answers. Good luck.

Bill you obviously haven't read anything I've posted in entirety. That's okay. We can agree to disagree. I'll go with the more gentle methods of heating food, not overcooking, eating some food raw, cooking from non GMO, organic, basic ingredients of home grown vegetables, herbs, fruit, our own henhouse eggs, raw cultured dairy, raw honey, and a bit of meat products, nothing in a box, seldom from a can, and nixing the micro. Just trying to share what I think is valuable information that I was blessed to receive 35 years ago. My family and I are blessed with no health conditions, my husband and I still have our natural hair colors at ages 55 and 59 and are told we look 10+ years younger than our ages. We never take prescription medications. These are our choices and it's working well for us so far. We consider food sacred and believe "you are what you eat". I practice energy healing and have helped many clients through hands on healing, effecting their biophotons if you will, through my energy field and intentions. I can, dry, freeze, pickle, bake and cook with joy.

I am new to it the same as everyone else here. I have been learning from some helpful rose growers in Florida and Texas who say that some years you get more damage and some years will be light. Keeping populations from building up is essential. Heavy pruning in the heat is asking for a Thrips battle. I saw that at nearby Fullerton Arboretum. The plant cannot keep up even if you cut every thrip damaged stem and flower off. The new growth is thin and weak. The canes grow stretched thin in an effort to outgrow the thrips rasping away at the tender tissue. At the end of the year, only thin canes remain and these will have few flowers. A few years like that and the rose fades away to nothing The antique roses at Fullerton were left alone after spring bloom and had little damage on the mature growth. So even though heavy damage was going on nearby, the roses that weren't making an abundance of soft growth seemed to get a break. There was some damage here and there which I would have sprayed. I did tell them about chilli thrips this time last year but how they responded to them seems to be by trying to prune off damaged canes and buds. I don't know for sure, that was just my guess by looking.