Yes, I bought the book. Not worth buying. There's a forum on Garden Web---Soil, compost and mulch---where you can learn a lot more about sheet composting than you can from Lanza's fluffy book. Lanza irritates the heck out of me---copying Ruth Stout's gardening methods and never so much as a wink in her direction.

Oh Val, My intent is not to tease but to inspire. That area was lawn at the edge of the woods and one day DH's leg went through it. It had been 'infilled' with old logs underneath and 21 cinder brincks. In the spring of 2002, I began digging and found the logs and bricks and underneath was beautiful woodland soil nestled in the natural boulders of our area. I started acquiring hostas from family and friends and there they went. The hosta garden is actually about five times what's in the photo. Unless I can find something to deter the deers from the hostas, the looks of this garden will be changing in the next two years. I've successfully winter sown some Ariseama Consanguinium (Pitcher Plants), and this year am trying some Rodgersias. Monkshoods and Brunneras will also be added. Looking forward to something new but will surely miss the hostas. Want some??

The perched water table happens no matter what is in the soil mix unless all the particles are uniformly large I disagree. Watering most soil mixes when they are very dry results in only a limited amount of water being retained. With a second watering after a few minutes, more water will be retained. You can demonstrate this very easily by watering a completely dry pot of soil in a saucer until the saucer is full and then leaving it for an hour. Chance are the saucer will be partially or completely emptied when you come back. Exact results depend on your soil mix but it happens to some extent in any dry soil. What happens with that first watering is that some water is retained around some particles, saturated at the bottom by some definitions since water drains through, but that doesn't mean zero air. The water them migrates over the following minutes or maybe hours into small pores in the coarse material and into the layer structure of clay material, or into the internal structure of organic materials like peat and bark, even moves to higher levels in the soil as they suck in the water. All of the sudden there is no perched water table, you could add more water to the soil without it draining through. I have never seen any experimental work published on this but it certainly occurs and is easy to verify, I just don't know whether it means we usually do or usually don't have perched water tables in our succulent pots. In some summer-growing succulents which are heavily watered and not allowed to completely dry there almost certainly is a perched water table at some times, but again I don't agree that this means zero air in the soil mixes which are often used. Presumably this is part of the reason why we stick so much grit in our soils. Winter growing mesembs I almost never water to the point of runoff. Or maybe cacti don't mind a perched water table. Possible reasons would be that they area adapted to saturated soils for relatively short periods, some certainly experience periodic flooding in habitat. Or the structure of a "good" cactus mix may be such that sufficient air remains in the mix even in the area of the perched water table to prevent the kind of root rots which would occur in an anoxic soil. Or maybe we use watering practices which only create a perched water table when the plant is thirsty enough to drain it, or weather conditions will evaporate it. I absolutely use top dressings. I don't allow the bodies of succulents like Lithops to be in contact with the proper soil, that's death in my climate. Not being able to see the soil is something I just have to live with. But top dressings vary a lot. Some wick up water much more than others although obviously all retain a high proportion of air spaces. Some types of top dressing seem to increase evaporation. Experiment with fine clay granules on the surface of the soil, they continually wick up water and remain moist until the soil mix is completely dry. I also use loam based soils. They do degrade over time. The most obvious thing is that the initial fertiliser load runs out after a few months or maybe a couple of years depending on the plant and how you water it. The soils also do compact down over weeks or months. It is easy to see the soil level drop if you don't compact it down when you pot the plant, less obvious if you squashed it down to start with. Lastly, over a period of years the clay component of the soil washes out. Unpot a Lithops after ten or twenty years in the same pot and there will be just be sand and gravel, it won't be like soil at all. Although I use a loam-based soil, the make-up of that soil includes something like 20% organic material and in practice that is usually peat. Add in an equal amount of aggregate and I have a soil mix that is 10% peat. At these levels the soil does not behave like an organic soil but it does provide for better retention of nutrients, as if I needed it with the clay in the loam and the baked clay granules! Salt buildup can occur regardless of how you fertilise, simply from minerals in the water. For most of us, the vast majority of the water we put on our succulents simply evaporates, any fertiliser or minerals in hard water are just left in the soil. I have quite soft water and the soil I use has a decent initial fertiliser load so I don't fertilise much either. I have never experienced salt buildup, even with the non-flushing watering that I use on most mesembs most of them time. While completely dry soil may mean root death, after a sufficient length of time anyway, this is almost inevitable in my climate and just something I have to deal with. It is simply not practical to provide water every few weeks to most cacti over winter, and certainly not to Lithops. Lithops lose their fine roots and regrow them in the spring, they seem to be very good at it. Many cacti deal with it well, some don't. Some species don't seem to be adapted to going completely dry for months at a time. When people talk about cacti that "lost their roots" over winter, they are usually talking just about the ones which rotted because they didn't grow their roots back in spring :)

What is OG? Well it very controversal based on who you talk to. Some OG people are strictly conservative in their gardening methods, while others are more adventureous and experimental. Some OG ideas are classical, ancient, and mystical. Other ideas are more modern, scientific, state of the art. Well what is it then? This is not the best, but it is a good laymen definition of OG: "ORGANIC GARDENING - the science and art of gardening by incorporating the entire landscape design and environment to improve and maximize the garden soil's health, structure, texture, as well as maximize the production and health of developing plants without using synthethic commercial fertilizers, pesticides, or fungicides." One of our forum members, Organic_Johnny, used this statement also to help define organic gardening from an ecological point of view: 1. Choose your plants to fit your garden, rather than insisting on growing picky and tempermental plants that require constant fertilizing. 2. Amend your soil with organic materials, e.g, break up clay with compost, rather than reaching for the gypsum right away. 3. Plant things that will attract and maintain a population of beneficial insects, etc., and cultivate the soil in such a way as to encourage good fungi and bacteria that will fight off the bad guys. 4. Never throw organic material in the trash...re-introduce it to your local slice of the biosphere! Both organic and natural soil amendments are slow release, contain organic matter, and usually have a NPK ratio whose sum of the top 3 major nutrients is less than 20. They are usually designed from decomposed animal or vegetable remains or mineral rocks. They are designed to feed the soil microherd insoluble OM, not supply lots of available soluble plant nutrients. Synthetic fertilizers have higher NPK because they are designed to chemically build the soluble nutrients of the soil without any organic matter. They also are not designed to feed the soil microherd. Synthetics are normally made from petroleum products or mineral salts. There are actually 3 major classes of environmentally conscious gardeners today. (Note: none of these 3 classes believe in the use of synthetic fertilizers) They are all similar but also quite different: 1. Organic Gardening - these people don't use anything in their garden that has any potentially harmful chemicals, preservatives, colorings, etc. in their gardening strategies. The modern idealogies of this philosophy are based from men like Sir Albert Howard and J. I. Rodale and his family and company. They garden all year round regardless of weather or climate conditions. Economics, common sense, and environmental concerns drives the focus of this philosophy. All composting and green manuring techniques are key to this philosophy. Organic soil amendments are grass clippings, hay, straw, animal manures, human urine, leaves, dolomitic limestone, greensand, etc. 2. Biodynamic Gardening - these gardeners believe almost the same as the OG people, but they go to the next level. This philosophy was founded mainly by Rudolph Steiner. They believe strongly in gardening during appropriate astrological signs, religion, critical seasons of the year, etc. They are even very adamant about what organic materials goes into their compost at certain specifc times. (i.e. Special uses of comfrey and stinging nettle in compost piles during special times of the year) Their focus is not maximizing crop production like the OG people, but maximizing the physical and spiritual needs of nature. They use special soil amendments like stinging nettle, comfrey, yarrow, and dandelions in many of their gardening functions. 3. Natural Gardening - these gardeners are similar in the basic philosophy of the OG people, but not as strict in their choice of soil amendments. They will use a safe natural product that has good organic matter in it, even if it contains a minimum use of preservatives, colorings, etc. Natural soil amendments are blood meal, bone meal, fish emulsion, kelp spray, cottonseed meal, cattle feeds, etc. 4. Permaculture and other forms of sustainable farming - Permaculture in laymen terms is basically an extreme form of organic gardening where the farmer can only use materials on his/her farm to recycle to make compost, soil amendments, fertilizers, etc. for his farm. No buying or getting of organic material or natural fertilizers from outside or commercial sources. To make things even more complicated, the USDA has redefined certain guidelines and regulations for any farners who want to be classified as "USDA certified organic"! The truth is, almost all environmentally conscious gardeners cross over back and forth between these 4 major classes. You as a gardener have to decide for yourself which philosophy style best fits your needs. Happy Gardening!