Surprise,Surprise i'm back!!!!! It's been quite some time since i've posted here but I have been periodically checking in to see what's going on. This winter has been really bad for me so far. I'll start another thread with some details after responding to this one as I don't want to hijack this thread and it'll take some time to explain what's been going on in my life this winter. It's been VERY cold here this winter with many,many nights getting down into the teens and low twenties. I know a LOT of you had it much colder but you have to understand that I live in an area where typical winter temps are in the 30's and 40's. I doubled my gh length from 30ft long to 60 ft long and it's taken quite a bit more propane to keep it heated this winter. About $1400.00 so far and that's just since November and this is only for my gh. I have been able to maintain the temps at 50F which suited the majority of the hoyas but some have had a difficult time and are just barely hanging on. I have also lost some,probably 8 or 10 but they wee small not well established plants or newly rooted cuttings. Most of the stock plants have sprung to life now that the days are getting longer. Some grew all winter as I kept lights burning in the gh 24-7. I have noticed over the past few weeks a lot of them have already begun to develop buds on old peduncles and many are forming new peduncles. There may be flowers open today because I noticed some while watering yesterday that looked like they could pop open at any time. My H. heuschkelianas bloomed reliably all winter. Hopefully winter will be over VERY soon!!! This past week we have had temps in the 60's and 70's with nights on the 50's and 60's. Today is supposed to be close to 80 for us. So with temps like that of course I have had the gas turned off to the gh and it's been open now for just over a week which the hoyas have really enjoyed. david

They might have been in cold storage longer than your grapes. Some places keep dormant plants in cold storage until they get put out for sale. I've noticed that my new fruit trees I put in from Raintree are leafing out slower than the ones I bought from local nurseries. I think that might be due to having been kept in cold storage longer... so they seem to take longer to WAKE UP. A theory only, mind you. I also planted rasberries this year. Most are showing growth, but some are not. I don't give up on plants easy, so I will just leave them for a few months and see what happens. I'd rather wait and give them a chance. They are likely just being slow coming out of dormancy. Same thing with the bare root roses I bought this spring. My old roses are nearly in full leaf... while my new bare roots barely have any shoots at all yet. Just give them time.

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

Phoggie - we buried ours last night. We live on a main road with lots of traffic and our entire family is standing outside at dinnertime with a huge shovel and a prayer digging a hole next to the for sale sign in the front yard. We said the prayer and my husband put St. Joseph in right side up facing our home. (He didn't believe in putting him in upside down.) We have been saying the prayer at each meal and I starting reading the bible last night (have a lot of catching up to do). So I am trying to bring our Faith out more to make this work. I also followed another Sellers suggestion about the price you want on the floor (did that in a closet with pencil). So we'll see. I'll def post if we get an offer.