Hi Natasha! I am WAY FAR from an expert, but... MULCH MULCH MULCH and AMEND AMEND AMEND! (Got that advice a few years ago from one of the regulars here... can't remember who at the moment!) My soil still isn't great, but I started by adding bags of topsoil and mushroom compost and mixing it up into my beds. I hear leaf mold mulch is great, but I haven't tried it yet. I have lots of deciduous trees in my yard, and I use the raked leaves to make my own mulch. Six years later, and I've turned what was nothing but a sand pile into something I can be proud of. Nothing like what the REAL experts and pros here have going on, but we plant and learn! ;-)) Plant acid-loving plants if your soil is acid (it probably is, but you may want to test it). My azaleas grow like crazy and they're beautiful every year. Crape Myrtle loves it here. Purple Heart grows well, as does lantana. If you've got shade and large containers or raised beds, impatiens will give you breathtaking color from April to November. My mom loves to say, "stick a dollar plant into a five-dollar hole." I do that whenever I plant a new shrub, tree or perennial! I've also discovered the joys of container gardening... I love to use huge to small sized containers of everything from annuals to evergreens. (There's a container gardening forum on GW, too.) In the winter I can move the evergreens around so there's always something going on in the garden. Containers can also be almost anything! I love to haunt thrift stores and yard sales for "finds". I've got some that I love and paid way too much for, and I have other that I love just as much and got - or made - for free. I work at USC in Columbia, and the campus has beautiful landscaping. If you have a chance, talk a stroll around it and take your camera. If you don't know what you're looking at, visit the Name that Plant forum here on GW and post a picture or link to a photo-sharing website. (I use PhotoBucket.) I don't know what those guys over there do, but I've never failed to get an answer almost immediately on anything I've posted... once someone in Australia identified my Cabbage Tree! Best advice of all - visit this forum often! There's are folks here who can answer any question you can possible dream up... even though I'm not one of them! Welcome to SC - smiles and hugs to you! Claudia

I don't know about forming a club, per se, but wouldn't mind getting together to meet sometime. I've been a member of the National Home Gardening Club for a long time and those of us in SC who use their bulletin board online try to meet at Park Seed in Greenwood in late June when they have the Festival of Flowers. We didn't meet last year because it was 100F that weekend. But we communicate online year round. There are 3 or 4 of us. Used to be 8 or 10. I'm not big into trading plants or saving seeds, but I don't mind sharing the end product if I have extra. Mostly veggies right now. Branching out into fruit trees. Will be a while before they start producing. I've got 8 acres, and a good bit of that is in fruit trees and/or veggie garden plots. I think around 100 fruit trees now and about 1/2 acre in veggie garden. I try to grow unusual veggies for a home gardener that you can't get at the grocery store or produce stand, but I do like the standards as well. I get 200 sweetpotato slips every year to plant and end up with closer to 300. I like yellow squash and zucchini. I've tried patty pan squash, but I don't care for them, so I'll not be doing them again. Green beans a couple times a year. Corn was spectacular last year, so I've expanded a plot so I can double what I had last summer. I have greens growing right now - collards, kale, rutabagas, turnips. I don't like them to get big like you find in late December. Mine are about as big as my hand spread out right now, so a little bigger and they'll be perfect. I'm trying to get back into canning. I used to can a lot in Salem, but I moved and lived in a cracker box for a while and didn't have room. Now I built a bigger house and use the cracker box as the summer kitchen and there's plenty of room to can out there and store things. The last year has been about jams and jellies and pickled things. Lots of peach and blueberry things last summer. Hopefully lots of veggies and cucumber pickles next summer. Chow chow in the fall. etc. Folks at work love fresh veggies and I bring things in to sell cheap. There is no profit overall, though individually, crop by crop, there are some obvious profits. 50 cents per pound for tomatoes and squash because they're easier to pick. $1 per pound for okra. $2 per pound for snow peas. $1 per grocery bag of greens. etc. There is another person at the office that also brings in veggies and we kind of work together to set prices so we don't disagree when we bring in different things on different days. Plus we trade things between ourselves as well as we have things that the other one wants. She has chickens, so lots of fresh eggs. I'm not crazy about them, but I won't turn them down. She has duck eggs occasionally. I really don't care for those, but they're not terrible. I've been collecting (I guess you could say) tractors since 1998 to help with my gardening/farming efforts. Ford Jubilee NAA was the first, and it doesn't run any more. Then came a Massey Ferguson Model 65 (1960, I was told it was 55 HP, but think it's really 45 HP) that works great to till and bush hog. Then came a 2005 Kubota B7500 (26 HP diesel) with a belly mower that I bought used. It's awesome. Last summer, I bought two used John Deere 870's (28HP) - one with turf tires and a belly mower, one with ag tires, both with hard canopies. I use the one with ag tires to do the cultivation of row crops and other utility tasks like scraping the driveway. I had been saving a while for a new mid size and found these on Craig's List and couldn't resist. Plus, I have a Craftsman 26HP GS6500(?) that I bought from someone with the sleeve hitch on the rear for plows and things. It's neat for pulling a 4x8 wagon around and mowing grass, but it doesn't run right now either. Tires are flat, won't crank. Just sad. :-) All in all, it's too much, but I like to have fun and also to have the right tool for the job, and I think I have them now. If I only understood more about engines and things, I'd be better off. That's why I have a real job at Clemson to support my hobby at home. :-) This post was edited by chrisb_sc_z7 on Tue, Dec 4, 12 at 8:57

Intex Surface Solutions - there are many different soapstones. Some are harder and less scratch-prone that others. It appears you haven't worked with soapstone very much as you are only familiar with the very soft soapstones. The amount of talc in the soapstone dictates how hard or soft it will be. Some soapstones are 50% talc which sounds like what you have worked with. Other soapstones have as little as 30% talc and are harder. Perhaps it would be helpful for you to do some research on the Internet to see the varieties of soapstone, and their different degrees of hardness. The soapstones called "Church Hill" and "Minas" come to mind as harder soapstones, but there are many others. Interesting that the topic of this thread is the ignorance of contractors about soapstone.

Think of it this way...Gap...Old Navy... and Banana Republic they are all owned by the same company...I would say there are plenty of people who shop at these stores who not aware of this fact, these three different clothing stores sell many of the same type of items and change things like thread count, buttons etc. and they sell to slightly different clientele....think Ford and Lincoln....Toyota to Lexus...or more so Carl's Jr Hamburgers vs Hardee's, it is along this same concept that these cabinet lines are made and 'branded'....I would suspect one other purpose is that it also allows different local cabinet sales companies to sell these cabinets in the same city and have less price matching comparison shopping from clients...the basic manufacturing is the same, the basic approach to building the cabinets are the same...the colors, hardware and maybe some door styles are often changed (or simply sold under different names.) These are all fine manufacturers - and all are made in the US. An affiliated company of our sells several of these lines made by some of the manufacturers mentioned above and the products are all great and the manufacturers back up their products. One of the biggest reasons they do not want their customer service information out there is that they want you to go to their local Sellers to deal with any issues rather than for them to handle customer follow up. All of these brands I would buy with confidence the part to be more mindful of would be which line within the brand to buy. Once you're comfortable with the 'Brand' my advice would be to focus on different features even within the same nameplate - and get educated on features of the various 'lines' - such as stapled drawer fronts vs dovetail, particle board vs plywood boxes, the limitations of paint colors, door styles and sizes, these are the items to watch out for more...I guess this would be kind of like the polo shirt I buy from Banana vs Gap vs Old Navy might wear differently over time depending on actual thread count and type of buttons used etc.