Anyone who's used Al's 5-1-1 or any of the other bark-heavy container mixes knows just how excellent pine bark fines are as both a container substrate and soil amendment. One of my garden beds is situated at the foot of a steep bank that I've been trying to stabilize for a number of years using annual additions of pine bark mulch. Every winter, a good deal of the mulch is blown and deposited in the garden - probably a good 1" of finely textured mulch each year. That bed is consistently my best performer - and, when I pull a soil sample for testing - it is as close to ideally balanced as any of my beds. Having said this, I wouldn't anticipate hardwood chips to perform nearly as well. As kimmr pointed out, there's no "secret" to the system. It's simply consistent addition of copious amount of organic matter. I would add two that, since the wood chips (and I'm assuming a preponderance of conifer wood chips in Gautschi's situation) are very slow to decompose, they provide a better source of OM than some other options. Also, I would guess that the lignins and other chemical components of conifer bark would result in a high level of pure humus once it's fully decomposed.

When we came to North Carolina many years ago, you would go down to the county office and declare your belongings for the personal property tax. At that time my Sailboat was about 15 years old and still worth about 3k. You would walking to the clerks office she would as if you had any of the following going room by room. When it came to the boat, she would say do you have a boat? ME Yes. SHE How much is it worth? ME: I dont know. SHE Will make a guess. ME Will what do you think a 15 year old sailboat without a motor is worth. It is in my garage at the house. SHE Will the last guy had a sailboat that was worth about $200 ME Will that probably is reasonable for a 15 year old sailboat with out a motor. Versions of this conversation were repeated every year until the state wised up and decided to tax personal property as a percentage of the house value.

Pam, I am working on my grow lists but, ironically, the garden is taking so much time lately that between it and VFD stuff, I haven't had time to finish my grow lists. I'll try to get them done sometime in the next few days if I can. In my garden Piricicaba has been very cold tolerant and very heat tolerant. The odd thing about it? Aphids just love, love, love it. I rarely have aphids at all, other than sometimes seeing them on sugar snap peas or southern peas, but Piricicaba is an aphid magnet. I watch carefully for them and as soon as they show up, I spray the plants with Neem. I can have four rows of broccoli, with each one being a different variety and with the rows right beside one another, and Piricicaba will get aphids and the others won't. However, if I don't control them on the Piricicaba, they'll disperse to the other varieties after several weeks. Our forecast for the next couple of days includes highs in the 80s and lows in the 60s. Then, a cold front hits and we'll have highs in the 50s or 60s and lows in the 30s or maybe even the 20s. Around here, the weather is yo-yoing like mad. At times like this, the floating row cover certainly is worth the time it takes to put it over the plants because it keeps everything producing. I feel for the folks in NY and NJ. From what I have seen on TV, some areas (if not all?) had a really wet snow and/or freezing rain and/or sleet that was coating trees and power lines, bringing more power outages. They just cannot catch a break. As for the blooms and green tomatoes.....as long as the plants get some heat and some light and do not freeze, they tend to sporadically set fruit here. For several years, I'd keep a tomato plant or two in a container and drag it into the garage on freezing nights or freezing days, and then drag it back outside as soon as the temperatures were above freezing. I did the same thing with peppers. Both continued to flower and set fruit all winter, or at least until the garage itself got down to 18 degrees inside and they froze. Then, almost immediately thereafter, the pepper plant (but not the tomato plant) that had frozen back to the soil began putting out new growth and was growing again right away and setting fruit about 6 weeks later. The only issue I have with winter peppers and winter tomatoes is that they grow very slowly, stay smaller than the same variety in hotter weather and have poor flavor. I think that even though it is hot enough at times for them to flower and form fruit, it isn't hot enough and there is not enough hours per day of sunlight to make them perform the same way as they do in the warm season. This year instead of having the plants in the garage, they're in the greenhouse and I expect they'll freeze to death soon---perhaps as early as next week. That's okay. I preserved so many tomatoes in so many ways this summer that I do not feel like going to a lot of trouble for winter tomatoes. We have at least a two-year supply of every tomato product you can imagine...canned, dried, frozen, etc. We like sun-dried tomatoes (actually dehydrator-dried, lol) so much that they keep us happy enough in winter that we don't miss fresh tomatoes as much as you'd think we would. I normally only put the winter row cover over winter veggies if I'd expecting the low temps to drop below about 25-26 degrees. I haven't covered up any winter veggies yet, except for the lettuce in the cattle trough, and that's because I am not sure how it will be affected by having cold air underneath it. This is one of those modern day cattle troughs with steel-tubing legs and frame and black plastic tub-like material that holds the cattle feed...or in my case, it holds the soil-less mix and plants. It sits a bit above the ground with about a foot of air space between the ground and the bottom of the trough. I ought to stick a soil thermometer in that soil and see how cold it is dropping on cold nights. The broccoli and cabbage have some freeze-burn on a few leaves from the night we went down to 26 degrees, so I guess I should have covered them that night--but the forecast was for 34 or 36, so I didn't. My experience with winter lettuce is about the same as yours. If I plant it early enough, it will produce from October through March. This year I sowed the seed in August, and we were harvesting by October. It was really hard to keep the tiny little lettuce plants happy (or even alive) in temperatures above 100 degrees, but I managed. We have two dozen chickens and I cut a couple of pounds of lettuce and other greens for them daily, and we still have oodles of it. If a tub of plants starts slowing down and I want to replace those with new plants in the winter, I start seeds inside on the light shelf in bathroom sized paper cups in a flat (not a real flat, I use those disposable aluminum lasagna pans that I buy at CostCo or Sam's in large packages) and get the plants a couple of inches tall indoors in the warmth and then transplant them into the tubs or into the ground. Since they get off to a good, warm start indoors, they tend to grow faster in winter than plants from seed direct-sowed in colder soil outdoors in fall through early spring. I harvest using the cut-and-come-again method and it amazes me how quickly the leaves regrow to a usable size---in mere days. The chickens love fresh greens so much and I was worried that I hadn't planted enough to keep them happy, but the plants regrow so fast that I think they'll have an endless supply of all-you-can-eat lettuce. With the heat we've had, I've been worried the lettuce will bolt. We've been in the upper 80s and low 90s a lot this fall, but the lettuce hasn't bolted like it does in spring once the hot days arrive. Maybe it is because most of the day's weather is mild and we only sit at that high temperature for a relatively brief time. I have lettuce in the ground, in the cattle feed trough, in an old rusty, leaky wheelbarrow, and in big plastic tubs in the greenhouse. I probably have enough lettuce and mesclun mix growing to feed all of southern OK. I planted in several different areas because it has been such a rough weather year and I was hedging my bets. Well, you know, all of it is doing great, and we have far too much. That's a great problem to have, though. The last couple of years, we have discussed "the new normal" here a lot. For me, the new normal began around 2005 or 2006 when we began having persistent late freezes the first week in May instead of the last week in April. When it happened once and froze my whole garden, I was flabbergasted. Then, it happened the next year and the next and the next. Sigh. This was the first year since then that we didn't have a freeze or frost in May, which is a good thing because I put tomato plants in the ground around the first week in March (it was hot, hot, hot). So, we had what I think of as fairly typical weather for this region from 1999-2005. Since then, a lot has changed and we seem to swing from one extreme to another consistently, much more since then than before then. I see it in fire weather too. Before 2005, we hardly had any grass fires or wildfires here. Since then? About every other year we have a horrific wildfire season. What can you do? You have to go with the flow, so I work a lot harder now at extending the season with row covers, etc., and grow in containers to get around the heavy rainfall periods (which are a lot more rare now than they were just a few years ago). I don't know what else we can do. We have to adapt to whatever weather we are getting in order to succeed as gardeners. For 2 or 3 years I kept waiting for the weather to go back to normal, and then I decided that this must be the new normal and I just have to deal with it. That doesn't mean I like it though. Dawn

Checking in late to this party. We are in NJ, directly west of NYC in southern Morris County. Here, we experienced brutal, 80+ mph winds Monday night. It was terrifying. Strange, colored "glow" lightening. Huge trees snapping in the woods like gunshots. Power is out. Generator is on. Spotty Internet access. Cell phones and landlines completely down, still. We lost power Monday afternoon at 5pm. We're expected to be without power for up to 3 weeks. Thank goodness for the generator, though! We have coffee, heat, water, and lights. Now the problem seems to be procuring gasoline - exactly zero gas stations are open because they're literally out of gas. We will siphon from our cars as needed to keep the generator running. But we are being super conservative. We haven't ventured out far, because 95% of the roads in my township are currently barricaded from downed trees and power lines. 100% of my town is without power. Compared to the destruction we saw in a 2-mile radius of my house yesterday, we are extremely lucky. We only lost 6 big trees, and thankfully none hit the house or any outbuildings. Our fence is destroyed in many places, but that's nothing. Many of my neighbors did not fare so well. The devastation is unbelievable, and pictures do not convey the sense of loss. I cried when we drove around town. I cannot imagine what those down the shore are feeling right now. Below are a few photos I took of my immediate surroundings and my neighbors. Not as bad as down the shore, but still the worst storm and destruction I have ever personally experienced. We're trying to help in the clean-up efforts around town. It's going to be a long road ahead. Surreal. Here is a link that might be useful: Hurricane Sandy photos - my town