I haven't paid any attention to the 5-leaflet rule for twenty years. It is OK (not necessarily optimal) if you have only hybrid tea roses, but harmful with some cluster-blooming roses, where it can lead you to discard half the plant unnecessarily. These are varieties that form large trusses and candelabra. Deadheading only helps the plant if that variety sets a lot of hips (fruit), and many varieties do not. Many roses do just fine without being deadheaded. If you want to fuss with your roses, just pop off the blooms as they fade. When the whole cluster is gone, you can either leave the branching stem tissue or cut it back some, but don't sacrifice a lot of cane unless the plant is getting too tall. The branching stem tissue is capable of producing shoots wherever there is any kind of leaf or leaflike bract. Once the rose produces new shoots, you can cut off the stem tissue above that if you want. The only rule I follow in deadheading is to remove the minimum stem tissue until the roses gets as big as I want it to be, and to take long stems if the rose is getting too tall or floppy.

Vera, you need a few huskies and a sled! :) That kind of round trip for supplies is a crazy one. I checked out the site and without registering might find some bargains without having to go to 3 different stores to find different sales. I always envy all the space and sun you have for gardening of all sorts. Never thought of the downside of living that far from conveniences others may take for granted. Thanks for doing the vetting of this site...I hate to give too much information with online sites like it. Just one word about tracking...do you think they watch for purchasing patterns and gear their offerings or coupons to different people's patterns or are all coupons generic to be used with any product purchased? I'm more than skeptical...LOL. Thanks again...I wouldn't have had the patience to go through the vetting and scoping out the site itself. Leslie PS...do you still want things on your trade list you haven't specifically requested in Exchange section? I have a few things you're looking for like Echinops ritro, New England Aster and Forget-Me-Not (annual & perennial) seeds. I was looking for divisions or 1 year seedlings of regular Chives (not Garlic) so I have a better chance of blooms during 2010.

Everyone who writes about how to make compost emphasizes the need for more browns than greens, and I've always just ignored that for the most part. The plain, basic truth is that whatever organic material you pile up on the ground eventually will decompose, so I just don't worry or fret about whether I had added enough browns or greens or whatever in any given week or month. Over time, it will average out and, even if it doesn't, I'm going to get compost anyway. With the thousand-and-one things that a gardener has to worry about in a year, the ratio of greens to browns just doesn't rank high on my list. One reason is that I watched my grandfather do sheet composting in the 1960s/70s and he mostly had greens so that is what he used. They decomposed just fine. My dad had a compost bin in the corner of our backyard in the 1970s/80s and it was pretty much the same way. He mostly had browns only in fall when leaves were falling or when he had cornstalks to add to his pile. The rest of the year he mostly had greens. He got compost too. I suppose it depends on how quickly a person wants compost, but mostly to me, it is a matter of doing what is the most easy and most simple. I stay really busy in the gardening season maintaining a garden that is far too large for a small family and then putting up the excess harvest via canning, freezing, dehydrating and an occasional batch of fermentation. I simply don't have time to worry about what percentage of browns went on the pile and what percentage of greens went on the pile. Heck, I'm just excited when something makes it out of the garden and onto the pile in summer. (More about that in a minute.) It is a moot point as far as I'm concerned because I will eventually get compost regardless. Throughout the growing season I generally (but not always) throw "stuff" on whichever of my five piles is closest to where I am working at the moment. Both of my big garden plots have smallish compost piles inside of them, but my biggest pile sits across the driveway from my big garden. That pile generally runs about 30-40' long, about 8' wide, and the height varies wildly from a foot or so tall in late winter when I am about to remove finished compost from it, to 6-8' tall in autumn when I am cleaning out the garden plots and piling spent plants on the pile. From that pile, I removed about 30 large wheelbarrow loads of compost in the late winter through early spring of 2014, adding several inches to most of my raised beds. Guess what? I got all of that from just throwing stuff on top of the pile, only watering it if a wildfire was approaching (so my compost pile wouldn't burn up if the fire got there), and never turning it. I never even once asked myself if I had enough browns or enough greens. So, clearly I am a very laid-back, casual compost maker who just ignores the rules and gets lots of compost anyhow. My method is not for everyone. If my Type A husband was a gardener, my "throw it on the pile and go work elsewhere" approach would make him crazy. He'd be out there carefully layering browns and greens in the right proportions so he could be in total control of everything that was happening. Luckily for me, he is not a gardener, so I can be a lazy compost maker without driving him up the wall. My advice is to just not worry and fret about browns and greens too much---it all evens out over time. That doesn't mean that I completely ignore the fact that a compost pile makes compost faster if it has both browns and greens---it just means that I accept that a more laid-back approach with less worrying about the browns/greens still gives me compost. Organic animal feeds exist, but are not necessarily easy to find and even if you find them, they are significantly more expensive. I do use the manure. I use it on a compost pile that is filling in an eroded gully that needed to be filled in. I just don't use it in the garden areas. I could use it in the garden merely by testing it, but I don't have to take that step because I make plenty of compost on the piles that don't get the manure. I'll link an article that tells you how to do the bioassay to determine if your compost is free and clear of herbicide residues or, at least, if they are at such a low level that they don't kill your plants. Clearly I am a rule breaker. Weeds go on and in all my compost piles despite all the garden writers who insist that a person shouldn't put them there. There is a very clear reason for that. Many of the plants we consider weeds are dynamic accumulators that accumulate certain minerals in them that may be lacking in your soil overall. Often they do this by sending roots down very deeply to reach those minerals far beneath the surface of the soil. It is one way that nature uses to pull those nutrients up to the upper layer of the ground (inside the weeds that accumulate them) so they can be recycled into the top soil for use. If I wasn't pulling those weeds and composting them, the accumulated minerals would just be released into the soil when the weed died and decomposed. It is smarter to only put weeds on the compost pile if they haven't gone to seed, but as long as your pile gets hot enough long enough, the heat will decompose most of the weed seeds. I mulch my garden heavily after the plants are up and growing, so I really don't get all that many weeds from compost anyhow. So, obviously I just go ahead and toss weeds on the compost pile even if they have gone to seed. In fact, when I am in the garden weeding and I pull weeds, I usually lay them down right on top of the mulch that covers all my raised beds and my garden paths. In our heat and sunlight, they are going to turn brown and dead in a day or so and they will decompose right there in place, feeding the plants and enriching the soil as they break down. To me, this is the easiest way to compost. Pull the weed, lay it on top of the ground, let it break down. That's 100 times more efficient than pulling the weed, putting it in a bucket, eventually filling a bucket, carrying it to the compost pile, dumping it on the pile, letting it decompose for a few months and then coming back to the pile, filling up buckets with compost, and carrying the compost to the garden to put it right back in the general area from which the weeds originally were removed. I just cut out a lot of that lugging of buckets of stuff out of the garden and to the pile and then back again. So, do you think I'm insane? I am doing what works for me in my garden, my soil, my weather and climate and my growing and composting conditions. When I do my main cleaning up of the garden in fall, all the spent plants do get hauled out to the big compost pile, but in the growing season, the weeds become instant mulch once they are pulled. My favorite way to make compost doesn't even involve a compost pile. It involves mulch. In the springtime, as I plant, I put about a 1/2-1" layer of finished compost on top of the beds once transplants have been planted or once seeds have sprouted and are growing. Then I add mulch, which early is the season normally is leaves I gathered in the fall by running over them with the lawnmower and chopping them up. As the season goes on and the weather warms and we are mowing the yard (2-3 acres but not all of it gets mowed every week because we wait for the seasonal wildflowers in the pasture to set seed before we mow them), I add layers of grass clippings to the top layer of mulch. I start out with 1/2-1" of mulch on beds with small plants in them, and keep adding more layers of mulch as the plants grow. My goal is to have 3-4" of mulch on top of all the growing beds before the real summer heat arrives. Of course, heat decomposes my mulch, and surprisingly fast some years, so every week when we mow, I add mulch to the beds. Now, here's where it gets fun. After all the plants are out of the beds in the fall, I can sit there with my trowel and work that compost into the garden bed. Or, I can just keep layering on more and more mulch and let it overwinter on top of the ground. (With this approach, the beds are very well mulched so that they don't sprout winter weeds. Some years I do this.) In the years where I work the mulch into the soil in the fall, I generally then sow a cold-hardy cover crop which will prevent erosion and which will fill up the space so there's nowhere for winter weeds to sprout. My pathways are mulched in the same manner. By late fall or early winter, all the pathway mulch has decomposed and is a lovely, rich, humusy compost. I can use my compost scoop to scoop up the compost from the paths and pour it onto the adjacent raised beds. Isn't that really efficient? I find it much more enjoyable to kneel on my kneeling pad with a compost scoop in my hand moving compost a couple of feet from the pathways to the beds than to haul big loads of compost one wheelbarrow load at a time from a more distant compost pile to the garden. To me, it is all about finding the most efficient way that works for a specific person in their garden with their conditions and their set-up. This is what works for me. Tree trimmings from trees are fine to use as long as the trees haven't been treated with anything that you wouldn't want to put into a compost pile or garden. Be sure you don't take any part of a tree that was treated with a stumpkiller because some of the stumpkiller herbicides contain picloram or other similar herbicides that can persist after composting. Plants destroyed by SVBs shouldn't be composted unless you've already gone through the stems and removed the grubs. This is because they may crawl into the soil beneath the compost pile and overwinter there. The last thing you want is for them to overwinter in or beneath your pile where they then can emerge and destroy your plants the following year. With most pests, though, I don't give it a second thought. It is not as if the pests in my garden do not exist everywhere else outside the garden. There are just as many pests in the fields, the forest, the pastures, the yard, the flower beds, etc. A hot compost pile will kill pretty much any pests in plants put onto the pile anyhow, and I can assure you that a fresh bunch of new pests will show up in and around your garden every year no matter what you do. Your garden is an ecosystem and every single thing in it either eats something or is eaten by something. You'll never have a pest-free garden. It simply isn't realistic. Many insects perform beneficial functions in a garden, and I'd say that maybe 1-3% of the insects I see in my garden cause all the trouble. The remaining 97-99% are beneficial. So, as you might guess, there's not many insects that I get very wound up about. My worst pests are grasshoppers, which are simply horrendous some years but then not a big problem at all most years. Their population cycles up and down naturally, and when we are at an "up" point in the cycle, it helps to remind myself that the up years are always followed by down years. Don't overthink composting and don't worry too much about what you do or don't put on your compost pile. In the plainest, simplest terms, anything and everything that was once living matter will indeed decompose, and it will decompose with no help from us. It just might decompose more slowly without human intervention, but it will decompose. Lots of people go to extreme lengths to create compost piles that are "just so" and that is fine if it is what they want to do. I just don't find myself wanting to put huge amounts of effort into creating a perfect compost pile when I know imperfect ones decompose just as well. : ) When we moved here, we bought a piece of land that was a little over 14 acres. About 3 or 4 acres were open grassland and about 10 - 11 acres were woodland. Guess where the best soil was? Our grassland was mostly red, dense, heavily-compacted clay. I mean flower pot clay. If I ever give up gardening, I could dig red clay from our land and make flower pots all day long. It is that dense and that bad. When we first moved here, there was no drainage and puddles could stand for weeks and weeks after a thunderstorm. However bad the soil was, there are prairie grasses and forbs (and even a few cacti) that are adapted to grow in this kind of soil and they grew in it just fine. However, in order to grow the edible plants and ornamental plants that I wanted to grow, it was essential that I improve the soil where they would grow, and adding organic matter, including compost, to that soil was the quickest way to improve it. Down in our woodland areas, by contrast, the soil was dark brown, rich, humusy, and composed of beautiful pieces (in all sizes) of materials that were decomposing on their own---autumn leaves, tree twigs, limbs, bark, and even trunks. There were decaying plants of all kinds, including vines, groundcovers, shade-tolerant gtasses and wildflowers, etc. and also the decomposing bodies of insects, reptiles, small animals, sometimes large animals, etc. No one goes into the woods and piles up greens and browns, so everything just lies there where it fell and it all decomposes. Every since we moved here, my goal has been to recreate that forest floor, with its rich, humusy soil in my garden plots. It is likely that I'll never have soil in my garden that is as good as the soil in my woodland, but that won't stop me from trying to improve that soil. I just try to do it in the easiest, simplest way possible. Making compost and amending soil isn't rocket science. If we stand still, look around us and observe nature in action, we'll see that Mother Nature functions just fine without our intervention. There are some gardening tasks I put tons of effort into, but composting isn't one of them. For me, it is about picking my battles and choosing to spend my gardening hours in ways I enjoy the most. When we moved here, I already was a lifelong gardener who was fortunate to grow up not only in a gardening family with a huge extended family of gardeners, but also in a neighborhood in the 1960s and 1970s where most of our neighbors had veggie gardens, fruit trees, berry brambles or bushes, herbs, flowers, etc. So, I grew up knowing all the gardening "rules", so to speak. By the time we moved here, I was about to turn 40 and I was tired of following all the rules, so I just threw away the rulebook and did what worked best for me. It is not a decision I regret. It is smart to read and research and see what works and why, what is recommended and what isn't, etc. but try to avoid worrying too much about what you can or can't do or should or shouldn't do. The fact is that no matter what you do, you're likely to have a beautiful and productive garden anyway. When you first start gardening, whether you're growing grass, ornamental plants, trees, shrubs, vines, ground covers, or edible plants, you wan to do everything just exactly right. The longer I garden, though, the more I understand that there is not just one way to do things---there are many ways. What works for one person might not work for another. What works for a person one year in certain weather conditions might not work nearly as well the next year with drastically different conditions. You can work really hard at making compost, or you can just pile stuff up and let it rot. However you choose to do it, don't box yourself in to a certain way and decide it is the only way---there are many ways. Happy Gardening, Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: How To Test For Herbicide Carryover

This is an old thread, but I thought I'd put in my 2 cents. IâÂÂve been using FoodSavers for years for both seed and food storage. I seldom use FoodSaver plastic bags because they are permeable and develop leaksâ¦and you just throw them away. If you have to use bags, mylar is a better choice, but you have to use the trick mentioned by an earlier poster. Look for the YouTube video by Offgridgeeks. It works. Glass jars are the best choice. They are reusable and arenâÂÂt permeable. Mason jars are available in sizes as small as 4 oz. and as large as ý gallon. FoodSaver makes separate adapters for regular and wide-mouth jars, so be careful when you buy your jars and order the attachment. You can also use almost any commercial jar with a platisol lid. Those are the jar lids with the inner silicon-type ring on the edge of the top. To seal them, you have to put them inside a mason jar or the canister attachment sold by FoodSaver. There are other workarounds, but I wonâÂÂt go into them here. If you really hate the 2-piece Mason jar lids, you can order 1-piece plastisol lids on-line. The regular-mouth jar lids are 70mm and wide-mouth are 86mm. In addition to seeds, many DRY food items can be vacuum-sealed and stored for years and even decades, depending on the food type. Items such and beans, legumes and whole grains are wonderful candidates. Pastas, chocolate, dried fruit with very low moisture content, freeze-dried or dehydrated fruits and vegetables store very well. You can double the shelf life of foods such as nuts with a higher oil content. My husband occasionally comes home with huge sale bags of blue corn chips. I divide them into quart jars and vacuum-seal them. I have kept them up to 18 months and they are still perfectly fresh. Very fine substances such as flour are poor candidates unless you go to great lengths to contain the fine powder. Unless they are contained, the powder is drawn out between the jar and lid, preventing the jar from sealing completely and the seal will fail. Worse yet, the powder is drawn into the machine which will eventually stop functioning.