Good Morning! Two things: 1. Soil always needs to be amended with about 85-90% carbon compost (brown leaves, brown straw, wood chips and so on) along with about 10-15% nitrogen compost (kitchen scraps like banana peels, any peels, broccoli stems, uneaten vegetarian spoils, apple cores, coffee, and manure is nitrogen too). Egg shells should also be mixed in for calcium. This should be done in any vegetable and even flower bed at least six months prior to planting. If you haven't done this, you can go to Home Depot or your local garden shop and ask for balanced compost to mix into your soil (be careful not to damage roots) and layer on top so that it slowly goes into the earth with rain. Oh, and obviously it is cheaper to plan/more environmental too:-) 2. The person who mentioned weather is spot on too. Once you've given your plants food, wait for the sun, heat and rains. It's shocking how plants will all of a sudden just take off when everything is right for them! Hope this helps. p.s. numbers above can vary depending on what you are going to grow.

Fruitnut: I applaud your efforts, at worst you may be eccentric, who cares, at best, ahead of the curve. All of us should be aiming for what works best in our area as you well know. Speaking from experience, greenhouse and high tunnel culture are worlds vastly apart from outdoor culture, each have their own set of challenges and benefits. Probably the biggest set of challenges, depending on the regional climate, for the beginner is the relative lack of information on growing under cover when it comes to fruits. Being an atypical beginner to outdoor fruit culture, it is wonderful to have access to so much information ranging from published refereed journal research to gardening magazine articles. Though the learning curve is steep, at least there are many good footholds to use to climb the hill and many hands held out to help. I suspect trying to find labeled pesticides for fruit crops under plastic is pretty challenging also. Just curious what your water quality is like and soils as the 2 can lead to problems with salt accumulations over time depending on the water quality, soil type and irrigation practices. Like many, our little postage stamp sized horticultural enterprise could definitely use more land, there is none available. Both my wife and I would love to put up a high tunnel for extended vegetable production but we lack the means. It is quite unfortunate as I easily have the expertise to erect and maintain a high tunnel and farm under plastic. I just remembered a benefit you may not have ever mentioned to growing under plastic, you don't have to wear sunscreen to avoid sunburn! Darned it, now I really wish I had a high tunnel!

Thanks hcmcdole, See, they're out of style...You think so too... :] This one had leaves from the pot up, and flowers on the top half! It was in good light. There were several around. I will be willing to take the 8' cuttings when it's time to [cut into lengths]. I saw it out west, years ago, no camera unfortunately. Sigh. Thanks for the link. The Begonia Society,and Begonian, only have room for a few pictures of tall ones. The nomenclature lists don't have a diagram yet I've poked around a while, and googled a lot. What greenhouses/ suppliers, might carry tall canes? The part of the flower behind the blossom's petals, that looks like a long starfruit, is that an ovary? a calyx? In a whole lot of umbels it is a lovely effect. These extra long ridged thingies, are especially nice. There ought to be a way to talk about comparing the features, of flowers, from umbel to umbel. At least I know that a B.'s flatheaded bunches, are umbels. Is Lucerna the same as Coccinea, or are there various cultivars floating around? Hoping some folks will have more ideas. florey

Chicken moats are real and legitimate and people who use them swear by them. : ) I even saw a photo once where someone put a tunnel underneath their driveway as part of their chicken moat so the chickens could travel safely beneath the driveway to reach the part of the garden on the other side of the driveway. Now I'll have to find and link an example of a chicken moat. I'd like to put a chicken moat around my garden, but our old, spoiled rotten chickens are used to free-ranging and wouldn't take kindly to being confined within a moat. If I ever do it, I'll have to use a new flock of young chickens who've never known the joy of free-ranging. Charles, Are you rural? You need guineas. I had them for a long time (more about them in the grasshopper thread) but after the year in which I had two cougar encounters on our property and we, and everyone in our very rural neighborhood lost all our poultry (and many lost cats and dogs)...and I'm talking in excess of 120 birds....I've never bought another flock of guineas. I was really attached to them and losing them one by one over the course of the summer was really painful. I haven't found any kind of shrub that grasshoppers won't eat. In our worst year here, they ate the young fruit trees, including the bark, the leaves, and the fruit (but left the pits hanging from the stems), and they even ate holes in our fiberglass window screens, the cotton rag rugs on the wraparound porch, etc. When they are hungry, grasshoppers will eat anything and everything. The dog we had when we first moved here would eat a grasshopper now and then, but none of our current dogs do....and he didn't eat enough to make a dent in their population either. Our chickens control them well outside the garden, but I don't like to let the chickens free range in the garden in spring through fall because they'll peck at fruit like tomatoes, which doesn't make me very happy. I will turn them loose in the garden in the fall after the garden is pretty much frozen and dead so they can dig and scratch and eat insects to their heart's content. When I have winter crops, they don't bother them much once they are no longer tiny new plants. Any task on our property that involves sticking an arm, hand or foot into a place where a snake might be lurking just doesn't get done at this time of the year. I do those tasks in winter. If I have to lift something, like a board or piece of sheet metal on the ground, I lift it with a stick because it is just about guaranteed a snake will be underneath it in the summer months. When you live around lots of venomous snakes, you learn to be careful. The closest I have had a venomous snake would be about 3" from my hand. It was in early March about a decade ago and it scared the fool out of me. If you don't start out being careful enough, you quickly learn to be more careful around places where snakes live. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: Chicken Moats