Lip balm I plan on putting a patch around my bog garden and growing a few around the gardens to deter critters. :) Isn't it though? They are so cool and I'd put them to great use!

How about doing nothing at all! Vernal pools are so unique that they often have plants that can only be found there and no where else. They are also unique in offering breeding sites for amphibians during this time of the year. It is my belief that if you were to modify the area around the pool that you may be endangering both the animals and some of the plants that grow there. Please reconsider. You may wnat to see if any local university have researchers who are into studying such pools and by giving them an opportunity to check yours out you might be able to learn alot about it and also find out if doing any landscaping around it would be advisable or not. Here is a link that might be useful: Vernal pools

They all died and I pretty much have given up on trying to grow more. I was actually thinking about this problem a couple of weeks ago though, and I think part of the issue might be the difference in redox conditions in my setup versus their natural habitat. For anyone without much of a chemistry background, my line of thought is that in their natural habitat (permanently saturated wetland), soil conditions are highly reducing--hence why that sort of habitat smells like rotten eggs (sulfate reduction to hydrogen sulfide gas). There would have been plenty of oxygen in my setup, even though parts of it were saturated most of the time, and certain oxidized ions (eg, iron) are significantly less soluble than their reduced counterparts. It's possible that differences in ion dissolution or precipitation could have led to nutrient deficiencies for my skunk cabbages. It's also possible that these differences could have changed pH enough to lead to nutrient deficiencies.

Well now, it isn't as tho' they are warm-blooded plants, or anything, right? So, it is just their environment of decaying plant material from the previous growing season, right? Interesting that the USDA, plant database shows separate genus and species for the eastern and western skunk cabbages. (Yes Holly, you can put a link in your message but it requires the "a href" code - like a webpage, I guess.) Anyway, perhaps just a compost bucket would also generate an equivalent amount of heat in a greenhouse or cold frame. I have thought about this but really would need to put it underground since I'm using all the greenhouse space during the springtime. Might get rather odoriferous in there with lots of compost or horse manure. Another idea was to have lots of chickens in the greenhouse. Of course, they'd have to be corralled and when I had 35 chicks in there once, they didn't seem to generate that much heat . . . Steve Here is a link that might be useful: Building and Using Hotbeds and Coldframes