Let your own thoughts and ideas be your guide. Who knows you may start a new style. Whatever you like is what is important. Most of what you see in public is just what landscaping designers have developed. It can be fun to come up with your own design. Just try it, if you do not like it you can always change it. Engi

The heat won't hurt the plants. Several of mine are sitting on concrete pavers in the full sun (under my clothes-line, actually). Heat helps the plant to produce the essential oils which give them their particular perfume and taste. The soil will never get to anything like the same heat as the concrete, or even the air around it. A bit of mulch (straw, pet hair, dead leaves, whatever) on top of the soil will protect the top of the soil and also help to prevent water evaporation if you feel it's needed. You can always put the pots up on little feet, available at your garden centre, or just on a couple of bricks or blocks of wood of the same thickness, suitably spaced so that the pots are off the ground and air can circulate underneath - this will also help the drainage. I've never found it necessary, even though it's possible to fry an egg on the pavers here in summer! Peppermint and spearmint, and most other mints have the same requirements. Check the plant labels for botanical names - Spearmint is Mentha spicata, and Peppermint is Mentha piperita. Spearmint is often called the Common or Garden mint (it's the one usually sold in the produce section of supermarkets) and has much paler and somewhat more rounded leaves than peppermint, and they are usually more dentated (more indentations around the rims of the leaves). Peppermint has quite dark green leaves and they are more pointed and thinner. The taste is a dead give-away - check after trying some spearmint and peppermint-flavoured toothpaste! The Finger Test is a rule-of-thumb method. Judge it by practice and experience. It's quite OK to leave your mint out in the rain (they'll love it! when I'm well and able to do such things, I rush outside to put all my pots in the rain if they aren't already there - some I have under cover) and even to flood them to overflowing when hand-watering, as long as you've got good drainage, so that the excess water can get away quickly. The larger the pot, the more soil you have in it, and the less frequently you'll need to water. A good, thorough watering once or twice a week is far better for your plants than frequent mouthfuls anyway. Just make sure, when doing the Finger Test, that it never feels dry at finger tip. It should feel cool and moist at all times under the surface of the soil (ie around the roots). Terracotta pots will need a lot more water than plastic pots because the water evaporates through the pot. I have mainly plastic pots, but a couple of heavy concrete ones. I just rely on my trusty finger for all of them! If you use a good quality potting mix, you don't need perlite or anything else added to it. Just never let it dry out, and when the plant gets potbound, and the level of the soil shrinks, just repot with fresh soil, or top up the level with more potting mix, or better still a mixture of potting mix plus compost (you should be able to buy compost in bags - get general purpose compost, not mushroom compost). This will replace the nutrients that leach out from pots. You can use just compost if you want. Proportions of soil/compost for pot topping up isn't important. Water it in and Bob's your uncle.

http://www.stepables.com/store/scripts/prodView.asp?idproduct=78 found this one time and was interested in it myself- don't know if they sell it right now though, probebly in the spring would be better. I have noticed my local nurseries have been getting a lot of the steppables in thier supplies come spring lately and it is very popular. Good luck! Tami

Dorothy, It does sound like Johnsongrass, which is the bane of my existence here.....second only to bermuda. I try to keep it mowed down short because that seems to more or less control it, but those large, finger-sized rhizomes (yours might be wrist-sized since you get so much more moisture, LOL) creep into the edges of the veggie garden and flower beds and drive me bonkers. To make it worse (just the name association) our land was once part of the Johnson family farm, we live next door to the Johnson son and his family, we bought our land from one of the Johnson daughters, and our road is known locally as Johnson Road. So, when I am digging out Johnson grass, I am always wryly amused and ask myself if the road was named for the Johnson Family or the Johnson Grass! (And I love every member of the human Johnson family I've ever met, including in-laws and nieces and nephews, but the grass is a different story!!!) I used to have a lovely bed of daylilies that I put in the first year we moved here, but the Johnson grass kept infiltrating that bed over and over during our hot, droughty summers and I finally gave up and abandoned it and the Johnson grass choked out almost all the daylilies. One day, I will have a daylily bed closer to the house, but only after I have removed ALL the grass and taken measures to keep it from ever invading again. That first year, I was naive in thinking that if I removed all the rhizomes and enriched the hard, clay soil, the Johnson Grass would be manageable. It might have worked closer to the house...but this bed was about 200' from the house, down by the driveway/roadway, and it doesn't get any supplemental irrigation, so the Johnson grass, being more drought-tolerant, "won". I have planted a lot of trees around the house because we built in the only open area (not wanting to bulldoze huge trees in the woods) so we had no shade. I didn't do as good of a job as I should have at keeping the grass away from the roots of the young trees back then, but I'm doing better now and I think it does make a tremendous difference in how quickly they grow and also it makes a difference in how well they tolerate drought. I planted mint in clay soil in several areas and it lived for several years but it eventually died out during drought in 2003, a year in which we only had 18" of rainfall here (our worst year here by far, and that was the year the grasshoppers ate everything in sight, including fruit on the trees, the cotton rag rug on the porch, and our fiberglass window screens). I would never plant mint in the "good soil" in my flower beds or veggie garden for fear it would outcompete everything else, but I am going to plant it near the chicken coop and guinea coop where the combination of the hens "digging and scratching" and the increasing amount of shade have left a lot of bare soil in an area that used to have bermuda grass. (Yeah! Some of the trees are finally getting large enough to shade out bermuda.) When our fruit trees were younger I planted nasturtiums and garlic underneath them (nasturtiums to attract beneficial insects and garlic to repel borers), but the chickens liked the nasturtiums a little too much and the garlic merely disappeared. Dawn